Two Birds of the Weather: Alkyone/Keux Allusions in the Speeches of Phoenix and Eumaios

Katherine L. Kretler (University of Chicago)

The figure of Eumaios in the Odyssey has attracted attention recently, usually with reference to the poem’s  politics (e.g., Thalmann 1998).  Scholars have not brought the Iliad to bear on the poet’s conception of this figure and in particular his autobiography (Od. 15.403-484).   The figure of Phoenix in the Iliad suffers from an analogous neglect.  His speech in Book 9 has been compared (notably, Lohmann 1970) to the speeches of his age-mate Nestor.  But there are systematic similarities between the speeches of Phoenix in the Iliad and Eumaios in the Odyssey which extend beyond characterization into what at first seems like offhand mythical allusion.

First the correspondences shall be briefly laid out: e.g., both speeches are addressed to the major hero of their poem; they include autobiographies detailing how the speaker came to live in the hero’s house; Phoenix serves as foster-father for Achilles; Eumaios, for Telemakhos.  Both include a female who is or risks being abducted by an enemy character (Kleopatra along with her mother Marpessa; the Phoenician slave [‘Phoenissa’]).  This character has a strange quality of counteracting the rhetoric of the person telling the story, yet being ultimately sympathetic (Kleopatra catalogues the horrors of a sacked city in her plea to Meleager, but Phoenix is pleading with Achilles to sack a city; Phoenissa treacherously abducts the toddler Eumaios, but she is only trying to reverse her own abduction).  Further, a correspondence between Phoenix, the speaker in the Iliad, and Phoenissa, the minor character in the Odyssey, begins with their names but extends to surprising details:  e.g., Ajax nods secretly to Phoenix as the Phoenician sailor does to Phoenissa.  Finally Phoenix alludes to Alkyone, while Eumaios alludes to Alkyone’s husband Keux--the loving couple transformed into birds.  Kleopatra is nicknamed Alkyone (9.562), while Phoenissa is compared to a kh/c at her death (15.479, another form for keux).  Most commentaries say her fall into the hold of the ship resembles the sea-bird’s drop into the sea and leave it at that.  But this correspondence of allusion makes for a genuine puzzle.

I shall sketch two approaches to the speeches’ strange, almost symbolon-esque quality.  First, the allusion’s place in the structure of the speech and the poem:  the story of Alkyone and Keux involves the 14 days called alkyonides, the calm at the winter solstice.  A solstice story fits snugly as the navel of a ring-composition, where it is placed by Phoenix (e.g. Gaisser 1969).  Thus in terms of structure, Phoenix might seem to integrate the myth more thoroughly.  Yet Eumaios sets his homeland, whence his story, at the solstice point (404) and tells his story in a refuge in the dead of winter (392), and puts the kex allusion at the end of his story.  Thus both men revolve their stories around the solstice myth, Eumaios in the inner and outer frame, Phoenix at the center.  In terms of theme, Keux, who dies in a shipwreck, more transparently maps onto the death of the slave woman at sea than Alkyone does onto Kleopatra and Marpessa.  Further, both uses of the solstice material resonate with broader rhythms at work in the story of Eumaios’s interlocutor Odysseus (e.g. Austin 1975).  Second, closer analysis of the stories’ narrative impetus: Phoenix wants to get Achilles out of his tent and onto the battlefield; Eumaios is responding (perhaps unknowingly) to a ‘test’ by Odysseus on his way back into the bedroom, so to speak.  They occupy converse positions in the poems’ plots.  To these positions correspond details of each story:  Phoenix relates his own breaking free of his home, while Eumaios speaks of his own abduction from it; each deploys female subordinate characters who mirror their own experiences yet critique their rhetoric.  These two approaches uncover even more resonances which raise the question of intertextuality:  do we here have a Pucci-esque (1987) situation of competition between the two poems?