A Voyage to Nowhere?
The Teuthranian Debacle.
The Teuthranian Expedition, referred to by Martin West as the “Teuthranian Debacle” is an important, but odd, episode in the overall Trojan War legend. This essay briefly reviews the purpose of the episode and two suggestions for its origin, reflecting how analyst’s backgrounds direct our interpretations of literature.
Keywords: Homer, the Trojan War, the Iliad, the Teuthranian expedition, the Homeric poems, the Cyclic poems, Achilles.
Acknowledgements: I am deeply indebted to Cynthia Gralla of Royal Roads University for her kind assistance and support in the creation of this work, including help with research, excellent editorial suggestions and many insightful comments. Without her encouragement, these essays could not have been written.
Introduction
This is another essay that may be seen as an interlude while I (as always!) get my ducks in a row for the next one. While not exactly digressions (a practice I love to indulge in), these essays deal with topics that are a bit peripheral to my main thesis – the sort of things an editor would probably direct me to take out, especially in view of word limits. I offer them in the spirit of general inquiry and fun, and hope readers will enjoy them, along with whatever additional light they may shed on the overall Trojan War legend. With that apologia (for lack of a better word), I’ll begin…
The Teuthranian Expedition, which Martin West called the “Teuthranian Debacle” – a characterization I support – is a brief but important episode in the story of the Trojan War. It also struck me as a quite strange one when I first read about it, making me wonder what inspired it. I reacted to it based on my career as an intel analyst, particularly as it related to maritime conflict and asymmetric warfare. Martin West considered the episode based on being a preeminent classicist, and I’ll present both of our hypotheses, which I feel aren’t mutually exclusive. I’ll also explain why and how this episode is important to the legend. First, however, it might be beneficial to review the expedition itself, for those who may not be familiar.
It began this way: as we know, Helen and Paris absconded and kings Menelaus (her husband) and Agamemnon (his brother) assemble a great army to go after the couple. The Greeks then gather at Aulis, a port in Boeotia (central Greece) across from the island of Euboea. They sacrifice to the gods, and receive an omen in the form of a snake that suddenly appears and climbs a tree to devour a sparrow and her eight chicks. The Greek’s preeminent seer, Calchas, an expert on reading bird auguries and divination, interprets this to mean that the Greeks will have to fight for nine years before being victorious. This is good enough for the Greek leaders and they set sail.
However, the Greeks are unclear on where Troy is and rely on Calchas to guide them. Unfortunately, Calchas, the best of augers, does not know the way to Troy; despite being near omniscient in other ways, Calchas is no navigator. As a result of his ineptitude, the Greeks don’t make landfall at Troy but some 75 miles down the coast at Teuthrania, the capital of the kingdom of Mysia (Strauss 2006, 53). Thinking they’re at Troy, they attack the city and fight what seems to have been a hard battle with the forces of Mysian king, Telephus (who, by the way, is the father of Eurypylus, who will later be killed by Achilles’ son). The battle initially goes poorly for the Greeks, but Achilles succeeds in wounding Telephus, leading to the Mysians retreating. Although the Greeks can claim a victory, they still don’t know where Troy is and, disheartened, they decide to return home. There is a storm that scatters the fleet (a motif also used in the Nostoi and may be borrowed from it) and serves to blow Achilles to Scyros so he can meet a princess, Deidamia, and fathers a son (Pyrrhus, later Neoptolemus), who will presently become important in the legend.
The Greeks cool their heels for eight years until Telephus suddenly appears. His wound has never healed and finally an oracle told him that it could only be treated by a splinter from Achilles’ ash-wood spear. (Strauss [2006, 54-5] observes that boiled ash bark makes a good wound poultice, a fascinating detail possibly relating to Bronze Age medicine.) So Telephus travels to Greece to find Achilles. He offers to show the Greeks the way to Troy, if Achilles will heal him. Calchas vouches for him, Telephus is healed and makes good on his word.
The Greeks gather again at Aulis, there is the unpleasantness with Iphigenia, and they set off for Troy, arriving this time after pausing to ravage some islands and take a break on Lemnos, which makes sense for establishing a logistical base. The Cypria makes it sound like they treated it as a vacation spot. They may well have, or this could be poetic exaggeration: the behavior expected of heroes on the road, as it were. Then it’s on to Troy and the start of the war.
Analysis
What’s the purpose of this episode, which inserts a delay of over eight years into the Trojan War narrative? That is especially interesting in view of the fact this was not the only way the story was told. The version I just related is found in the Cypria, but there is an alternate version that leaves out the eight-year delay: the Greeks make only one voyage, compressing all the events in the Cypria into one trip, and after the battle at Teuthrania, they continue to Troy after a brief interval (possibly with a stop at Lemnos to regroup, but this is conjecture).1 Therefore, the eight-year delay was not always considered necessary, but became canonical when the Cypria won out (as it were). What does it accomplish?
First, it solves an issue with Achilles fathering Pyrrhus/Neoptolemus with Deidamia. He may have married her or he may have sacked her city and raped her (perhaps splitting hairs here). The Cypria is often said to imply the former but that’s questionable: the Greek word used, γαμει, may mean “no more than had intercourse with” (West 2013, 107);2 the sans delay version may have said the latter as Achilles appears to have sacked Scyros in that version. This agrees with the Iliad: Scyros is the island from which Achilles took “fair-belted” Iphis, whom he gave to Patroclus as a companion.3 In addition, there is an alternate tradition, first found in Euripides, that Achilles seduced Deidamia while hidden among her father’s women in his parents’ attempt to prevent him from going to war. So we have multiple versions that conflict on important facets of the story.
What matters is, without the delay, Neoptolemus would be about nine years old when he’s recruited. So the first reason for the hiatus is clear-cut: it lets Neoptolemus grow up before he’s called on to take his part in the war. As a rule, legends are not fussy about such details, so it seems notable that it was considered important enough to be accounted for in this case.
Thus, I think we can assume, without going far astray, that Achilles had a son in the pre-Iliadic legends, presumably named Pyrrhus, but who his mother may have been or what the circumstances of his birth were can only be guessed at. The Iliad’s passage about Achilles having a son on Scyros (Book 19.326-37) is suspect; as mentioned elsewhere, West judged it to be an interpolation (West 2011: 41, 231, 359, 421). I might add the contrary position is that Achilles brought back a favored female captive from Scyros while leaving behind a princess who would bear his son; is that significant? Perhaps, but regardless, it seems what Homer knew, if anything, about Achilles’ possible son, he did not care to share.
I believe there is another, more important, reason why the eight-year delay was inserted into the legend. In discussing it, I must always remind myself to not give the impression this is a situation in which poets took a blockbuster and turned it into a series to capitalize on it, making changes to fix the plot issues like HBO showrunners. Although it might be argued there is a shade of truth to the capitalizing part, it’s good to bear in mind these changes evolved over decades, even centuries, and what we see is the end result of that process.
With that caveat, what I see happening here is the inevitable consequence of merging disparate traditions, which results in an inextricably tangled timeline. The Iliad’s timeline is entirely internal; the references to past events are relative and have no bearing on the narrative itself. When the epic starts, we are given no indication of how long the war has been going on, when it began or why. It is not until Book 2 (134) that we’re told it’s lasted for nine years; this is reiterated in line 339 which mentions Calchas’ prophecy that the Greeks will fight for nine years and take Troy in the tenth. Homer doesn’t help things out by inserting episodes into this last year of the war that logically belong at the beginning: the duel between Paris and Menelaus and the building of the wall protecting the Greek’s camp. Then, near the very end of the epic, Helen states she’s been in Troy for 20 years. This inconvenient comment upsets the apple cart (yet, again) and has caused no end of trouble for Homeric scholars.
The problem is that in trying to integrate the Iliad with the mythopoetic tradition, the cause of the war and backstories of the main characters, Helen and Achilles, have to be accounted for. The incident that unites the timelines of the two traditions is Eris tossing the Apple of Discord into the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. Yes, the Apple of Discord did more than set the war in motion, it’s been causing discord among those telling, retelling, or analyzing the Trojan War legend ever since.4
Tying the wedding, and thus Achilles’ birth, to the Judgement of Paris – therefore to Paris and Helen’s elopement and the start of the war – creates a conundrum. How could Achilles be old enough to participate in the war if the Judgement of Paris occurred before he was born? When was Helen born in relationship to the Judgement of Paris? Did Paris have to wait almost twenty years or so before she became marriageable (or elope-able), making him middle-aged? Worse, Helen being in Troy for twenty years must be added to that, so Paris could be pushing 60 by the war’s end. There’s no sense that Paris is an aging bachelor in the Iliad or in the rest of the legend, and while divine or semidivine children can grow rapidly, there is no indication of this either; on the contrary, what we’re told of Helen’s and Achilles’ childhoods suggests they took the normal amount of time. So the ages of Paris, Helen and Achilles can’t be easily reconciled in the legend, if at all.
Those details have been glossed over (not unusual for a legend), but however the situation is approached, the Iliad being unequivocal about Helen’s tenure in Troy couldn’t be overlooked or explained away, and eventually something had to be – and was – done about it. That is why the eight-year delay was inserted into the story: it was a way to square Helen being in Troy that long with the Greeks responding promptly to her running off with Paris. Nor was this a singular occurrence: as I alluded to elsewhere, a seven year delay was inserted in the story of Menelaus’ return and Odysseus was stuck with Calypso for seven years.5 What this demonstrates is not that my showrunner analogy is a good one, but that modifying timelines to make poems coincide better did happen more than once. Exactly when and how that happened is an interesting detail, but secondary.6
This all became apparent to me over time. What first struck me is how odd it is to say the Greeks lost their way. That is hardly plausible. The Mycenaeans were seafaring traders, Troy was the major trading port in the north-eastern Aegean, they had had connections with the region going back hundreds of years; it seems inconceivable they would get lost and mistake another city for it.
How did I react to that and to what did I attribute the story of the Teuthranian expedition in the first place? I reasoned this way: the Mycenaeans were experienced soldiers. Mysia was an ally of Troy and no pushover. Undoubtedly they could appreciate the disaster that would likely befall if a Mysian force came down on their flank or rear while they were trying to establish a beachhead. This is the interval when an amphibious force is most vulnerable, so the Greeks would take no chances. They subdued the Mysians to secure their southern flank before moving on to Troy.
To me, this was a simple, practical explanation for the episode. Homer does not mention it, as being outside the ambit of his poem, but some tradition of it remained. That begs the question of its later treatment, which suggests the compilers/composers of the Cyclic poems did not know what to make of it and not appreciating the military situation, fell back on the simple, but implausible, explanation that the Greeks got lost. Why the Greeks of the 7th century and later, themselves a maritime culture that spread Greek colonies throughout the Mediterranean, would accord such navigational ineptitude to their exalted forbearers is a question I have no answer for.
What did Martin West conclude? His answer is simpler than mine. He asserts that the raid on Teuthrania was part of Achilles’ original legend that was carried into the new tradition and seized on to fix the timeline issue. His hypothesis is consistent with Achilles’ exploits as recorded in the Iliad, and makes good sense. He does reflect that an attack on Teuthrania is outside the theater of raids mentioned in the Iliad (being farther south), but I might see that as supporting my hypothesis that the Teuthranian assault was in an earlier stage of the war; the later raids were on Trojan dependencies that took place once the beachhead at Troy was firmly established.
So perhaps in this case, my perspective and Martin West’s are in concert. Like me, he offers no explanation for the Cyclic poets resorting to the “got lost” motif beyond stating it’s a “silly story” and the whole thing was a debacle (West 2013, 106). Some questions are beyond our reach. But by expanding our perspectives, and thus broadening our horizons, we enrich our understanding which is a wonderful thing even though some answers will always elude us.
Why else would we have a reason to keep exploring?
Works Cited
Lambrou, Ioannis. Homer and the Trojan Cycle: dialogue and challenge. Ph.D. Thesis, Department of Greek and Latin, University College London, 2015.
Strauss, Barry. The Trojan War. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2006.
West, Martin. The Epic Cycle: A Commentary on the Lost Troy Epics. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
West, Martin. The Making of the Iliad. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Strauss mentions this version. (Strauss 2006: 53.)
Google Translate renders “γαμει” as “fuck.” I’ll forgive West his circumspection.
The same line mentions a woman Achilles captured on Lesbos, Diomede, daughter of Phorbas, who becomes a substitute for Briseis (Book 9, 660-70). Overall it’s hard to blame Helen for preferring the Trojans.
I personally prefer to consider Eris as the Goddess of Creative Destruction.
If you ask me, Odysseus got the better deal here.
Secondary though it is, we have hints. As pointed out before, poetic competitions were well-known in ancient Greece and afforded opportunities for poets to hear each other’s work and modify their own accordingly. I might suggest – per the work of scholars like Ioannis Lambrou – that such contests and festival performances were a vehicle by which this evolution could take place.