Penelope: Princess of Lakonia

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Contents

1. Iphthimë?.............................................................................................12. George Thomson: About Ikarios' First Family in Aetolia.....................................................113. About our Other Arnëa.................................................................................164. About the Leleges' Pasts...................................................................................245. Further to Arnëa's Story..............................................................................356. The Maw From Before Arnëa Lived Upon it...............................................................417. About Lëda:...........................................................................................458. Ikarios' immediate forbears................................................................................569. Suddenly Arriving Hostilities..............................................................................6210. Ikarios & Hippoköon..................................................................................7111. In Finalé, Arnëa of Aetolia.....................................................................7512. Theseus & The First Abduction of Helen....................................................................7813. The Mating of Lëda & Zeus as a Swan..................................................................8114. Pharis-on-Eurotas?........................................................................................9015. Therapnë as Sparta & Her Later Recreation............................................................92On the Menu of the Hearth & Home Serialization: where we've been & where we're next going.....................99ENDNOTES......................................................................................................109

Chapter One

There's another version of Ikarios' personal biography that excludes Iphthimë from his lifetime and Penelopë's. It draws its content from the copious Early Greek Mythology that played upon the isolation of each region as though a distinct ethnic territory, remote from any other - even when seemingly near neighboring. The lore of each region also evolved as distinctly sui generis although inclusive the Great Oral Tradition, a prehistorical period spanning from 1640 to 1220 BC. What we've exposed here so far through this volume of Penelopë's first homeland and hearth embraces a much briefer era, wherein the separate regions came to melds with each other, thus capable at least of formal and regular bilateral relations.

As defined for "the GOT," while its prolonged duration without amplification by writ, we're just now immersed in between the Last Patriarchs of 1475 to 1375 BC and the Trojan War Heroes. The latter were the grandchildren or great grandchildren of those patriarchs over a span, or an eon as the Greeks would call it, from 1305 to 1270 BC. We shall dub it instead an epoch of culmination, a nearing zenith of multilateral relations as between regions near and far from each other. It aptly relates to royal families, the last dynasties at their respective zeniths of temporal power before the Trojan War. Their combinations appealed to each other's sense of a common self-interest in "the Great Land," by which the conjunction of all realms by mutually acknowledged felt needs of their subjects. The Greek Peninsula developed multilaterally over a yet greater span, from 1525 to 1225 BC, whereafter their royal regimes have been expunged or they're barely surviving refugees active at relocating themselves.

We've found from multiple inferences throughout Mentor's Archival Chronicles that the Last Age of the Patriarchs began with strictly oral transmission of a region's surviving "record." He corroborates much if not most of what's still surviving from Early Greek Mythology by consequence of ancient mythography. That prehistory of the earliest Greeks took on another strong body of prehistory as a next phase of oral tradition, which was mostly brought into writ via a syllabary brought to elegance upon Crete, by invaders of that island who are subsumed under an imperial ethnicity called the Mycenaeans. An enormous body of such lost rendered scripture, mostly by incised entablature, offers us a brief period of literacy reflective of a period's formal and recitative literature put to portable media. That literacy not only captured long past oral tradition, it was meant to prompt readings out loud to large audiences – as might be contrived, say, within a daily and highly elaborated courtly setting.

The Last Era ended with a lapse of literature, even by writ via common syllabary. Whatever was able to survive from the earliest period compositions could endure until Homer's models or sources, from which he composed as knowledgeable of earliest alphabetic writ. Accordingly such opera of writ, even as ultimately lost as clay materia, passed largely intact despite a long and dark era of regressive and obsolescent literacy. That's likewise to say that all capacity for literature was foregone by the intervening dark period, even as out-migration of fallen peoples off illustrious regions retained much of the lore, legend and robust recitative media "as still lively" throughout an ill-defined continuum of over four centuries.

Here we assert with some audacity that Mentor passed on coherent digests of ancient record; and most alien sources became corroborative of his writ, or of whatever there was "digestible" of his surviving recitative tradition.

The version of Ikarios' early lifetime, which we posit hereon as exclusionary of Iphthimë, is mostly by composition just afterwards the Late Aegean Bronze Age. Over the early epochs of the Greek Dark Age (1200 to 800 BC) there occurred a fullest re-appreciation of his worthy life, not only by Lakonians but also by the Aetolians into whom he married as a mid-adolescent teenager. That this version next examined did survive, somehow and howsoever, we must address with keenest intellectual interest and curiosity.

What we have of Ikarios from the years before his greater lifetime, while the beloved yet sometimes difficult father over two illustrious daughters, has him a man married into the Aetolians. His bride was by the lesser phratries [tribal coalitions which consolidated hunting grounds of mutual harvest or cull] that dwelled upon the Great Gulf of Korinth. Their coastal populace, a minority of Aetolians called the Arakyndians, were by a smaller indigenous tribe, because the greater Aetolian Brotherhood of Highlanders firmly settled mostly deep interior, by far setbacks from two gulfs – The Great and the Small (the later Gulf of Ambrakia).

Particular to those earlier years of Ikarios' youth, again said, is that they exclude any possibility of Iphthimë. Peculiar, too, is the way they set on a firm and insistent track an only daughter's childhood, and maidenhood, until her early betrothal and ultimate marriage within her proper race and/ or ethnicity. Those phases carry that sole daughter along upon a radically different course from what epic literature has brought to masterpiece rendition, in part, through Homer's most splendid evocation of Penelopë. Before tackling the alternate version and track of life on its existential premises, allow here a few literary, somewhat overly studious preambles. They'll prove happily prerequisite to the discussion of Ikarios and a single daughter by his youthful first marriage.

So far as we've taken Penelopë's lifetime, our most delving archeologists and puzzle-minded philologists have to feel a bit unsettled by a firm agreement, of Mentor with Homer, about her homeland setting. It's absolutely Lakonia: Our authors, archivists and bards insist that region her birthplace; and it's a setting that's entirely permissive of a sister Iphthimë. There are, however, different premises behind their respective character compositions of the sisters. Homer does not admit of Penelopë's granted name at birth as Arnëa, although there's sound mythography after him that says that true. That the mother attempted murder upon the daughter is also irrefutable, even if Homer does not ever mention the misdeed. Secondly, until Mentor, Iphthimë has seemed apocryphal or utterly minor personage by epic literature – even as Homer's one time only, walk-on personage by a masterpiece epic fantasy. By that single passage she's a specter within a dream, itself a divine solace sent to Penelopë whereby to soothe her deepest misery over an epoch of absence of her husband.

Thirdly, she's not much of a consolation as Homer's apparition: She simply says that Odysseus is alive; he's fit to return home, that his time of absence draws to a culmination. It befits his fates said, to have acquitted many ordeals, and, by inference, to face ahead any more that might remain for him. She doesn't or won't say where he is (Odysseus is already upon Ithaca yet she does not say so). Nor does she say how he'll restore himself and his high royal marriage to the sovereignty owed to the absolute primacy of the House of Cephalos over the Cephallenes.

Fourthly, once the phantom Iphthimë has acquitted her disclosures by a mantic dream, she exits ominously yet most credibly through a special door. It suddenly appears inside her sister's bed chamber. Its constructed of crude hewn jams by some shipwright artisan skill. But in that crudity it denotes the dream has really been mantic, intended as completely authentic for its prophetic content. Had the dream been false – as most dreams about the future are, a fey Penelopë observes – the door her sister passed through would have been framed in ivory. A door of such obvious opulence, all audiences of ancient epic knew or should have known, renders always as fallacious whomever walks through it. That makes whatever said intentionally delusional, even evanescent of any reality supposed by the spokesman phantom. Iphthimë, accordingly, says for truth. Like Mentor, she is as she was once as a girl, utterly incapable of refusing her sister her own knowledge about anything.

This observation attests that Homer was himself insistent upon a real enough Iphthimë from the past, at over four centuries before his own lifetime.

[Homer proves less knowledgeable of the Aeolian Greeks, however, than he was of the Ionian Greeks by their respective refugee cultures of the brief Greek Renaissance from 780 BC and into a few next decades that included writing via alphabet.]

Penelopë recognizes Iphthimë as a real mantic phantom because the dream itself asserts exactly for what then and there is presently factual – no more, no less. What it is not, we must notice of these verses, is prophetic content so fully assuring of what shall happen in epic outcome, while granting to every contemporary audience's foreknowledge what the heroine herself cannot yet know of particulars. What matters greatly, moreover, is that she's exactly whom she's supposed to be, even to her stated husband, Eumelos of Pherai, to whom she's a treated bride who must make his marriage in his homeland, not hers.

But at that Homer is also vague. Pherai by the high kingdom of Aeoleis, and in accordance with Eumelos' much higher royalty than petty king, adopted Iphthimë as his queen consort. But she was also the heiress to the legacy of his matrilineage, to which the Aeolians attached sanctity. Mentor learns from Penelopë through further colloquy that his subjects took her to their hearts after the royal couple's marriage vows taken together in Lakonia amidst an outpouring of grief for the loss of an inestimable princess. We know independently that the Pherëans, as all Aeolians their like, had long mourned by then the passing of Alkestis, a most revered matriarch of their race. She was not, however, the mother of Eumelos, being of a great grandmother's age when married to Admetos. Contrary to Classical Greek Mythology, she had lived long before the intervening lapse of two generations, by which the patriarchal House of Admetos had become venerable even if subject to a great king by the imperial House of Aiakos.

Iphthimë attested, therefore, the revival of the matriarch as firmly co-regent with her husband, by which they advanced their House to status of high kingdom. So Mentor acclaims, but not Homer; and also that she was the answer to many prayers for a co-regent queen exactly alike to whomever Alkestis had been. Later Greeks did not acclaim her as such, slighting Iphthimë as too minor because a woman living so long ago, by the times of matriarchy either sacral or royal, thus unlikely of any credible great remembrance.

What's lost in this befuddlement of regard by earliest Greeks and Greeks of ancient history toward any matriarchate is, simply stated, the importance of both sisters in their own times: They ranked within the few princesses eminently eligible for an imperial marriage, as measured by husbands that were either to become great kings, such as Aiakos & Sons, or high kings as Eumelos became upon the marriage and co-regent accession. That should never have been forgotten but it was. Add that contrary to Penelopë's stature as a high queen, a wanassa, there's no belief by scholars except for George Thomson that she was such—despite ample inference from Homer that she was a queen far more exalted than any in evidence during his own time of the 8th Century BC.

There's in consequence of such manifest failed remembrance full unanimity among scholars that Homer's ancient audience would have deemed any sister of Penelopë fictional, a too sudden surprise by a story of epic rendition. To have her a phantom as foisted upon a greatest heroine of western literature seems itself incredulous. Besides, for the later Greeks to believe in the story of Penelopë's matchless marital fidelity was for too many in antiquity a hoax, even if artfully asserted to the necessary and sufficient amazement of all audiences soon delighted with her by the grand denouement of Homer's masterpiece epic.

Consider, though: To have another woman of comparable exaltation, within a context of truly alleged prehistory, was likely much too much to believe in from the common lore and legend that transmuted variously into epic literature. Consider, too, that the ancient Greeks believed in epic as real history, even as it allowed fictional devices of contemporarily accepted convention. They found in Homer's masterpieces the foundational cognizance of a orthodox belief system in the Olympian Pantheon. Based in a polytheism determinate by Homer, that "religion" in only very few ways obtained in the Late Aegean Bronze Age.

Let's leave the real belief system in abeyance, therefore. Let's acknowledge here instead, both objectively and simply, that Iphthimë was deemed, and remains among our literati, apocryphal. There's more here yet to say of Penelopë as Ikarios' sole daughter. That biographical version, or digression, restates her family background as entirely different from what we've brought to exposition through her first colloquy. There's also a lot to say about the setting and culture of that other daughter's homeland domain, its culture, its affiliations, and the presumed lifetime formed from those dimensions of her reality.

Chapter Two

George Thomson remains a greatest scholar of the pre-historical Late Aegean Bronze Age. He's especially acclaimed for his theories that expound the deeply matriarchal and sometimes communistic elements of an oldest culture of Greece, that fully evolved within most of the LABA's span. That he's credible even when he recites from mythography of especially difficult source validation may be observed over the discussion that follows. Not that his is a perfect scholarship: I'll be careful to note, therefore, where he seems to have gone astray.

Professor Thomson has Ikarios a young Lakonian prince in exile with his brother Tyndareos. Just why that status as refugee is a difficult determination. But even as the younger of two brothers, and barely attained to his manhood, Ikarios became the foreign husband of köra-Polykastë of Aetolia by a carefully arranged marriage. There's also a plain possibility that Ikarios came to Aetolia without any exigency of exile status. Between which two parties, therefore, was there an arranged betrothal that led into a matrilocal marriage befitting a consort or husband to live in his princess' homeland?

They're the Leleges of coastal Aetolia and by the two southern gulfs, the Lakonian and the Andanian [later the Messenian]. So he posits, and the greater clan phratries within the larger brotherhood of Leleges had counterpart social structure within the coastal indigenes of the Aetolian Outback Highlanders. The bride Polykastë was a royal maiden of Lelegan maritime ethnicity and by mixed heritage as entangled in her sacral matrilineage as an Aetolian royal princess [a köra] by highly distinguished matriarchal forbears. She deserved a special husband, and such a marriage was arranged.

So we have doubts about an eligible consort coming to Aetolia as an exiled prince.

For the Gulf of Lakonia had its own large coastal population of Leleges, or Lelegans. In fact, the Lakonians of the LABA were responsible for spawning the eponym Lelex as an eponym for the very ethnicity itself; by declension off the nominative single person by its pluralization as Leleges(eis).

The proposed royal couple, accordingly, were of a same antecedent race, in part, albeit by distances between settled progeny become exceedingly far dispersed. Their clan forbears, Thomson posits, must have often intermarried as sons unto daughters descendant, as princesses unto princes as succeeding. All husbands of such bridals took new homeland in the coastal region that was native to their arranged wives. So Ikarios became the foreign husband of high royalty; he was adopted into Polykastë's homeland accordingly.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Penelope: Princess of Lakoniaby S(altonstall) W(eld) Bardot Copyright © 2011 by S(altonstall) W(eld) Bardot. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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