Achilles and the Caucasus - Université de Montréal

Achilles and the Caucasus (K. Tuite) — août 17, 2007 — pg. 20
dog Q’ursha, hatched from an eagle’s egg, who keeps company
with Amiran in his mountain prison (detailed description in
Nizharadze 1962). Of greater importance for our investigation into
Achilles’ Caucasian parallels is Charachidzé’s reconstruction of
the ideological background of the Prometheus-Amiran myth,
which is one of the major contributions of his book. The principal
elements of the complex are:
(i) The male fantasy world. Prometheus and Amiran are
associated with an imaginary world-order of abundance and
unconstraint, in which one could live off the riches of nature
without having to engage in labor or exchange. The confrontation
between Prometheus and Zeus “marque une coupure décisive dans
l’histoire de l’humanité” (Charachidzé 1986: 233). In the bygone
age when his fellow Titan Cronos ruled upon the earth, and before
his brother Epimetheus took the fatal step of opening Pandora’s
box, mortals “lived like gods without sorrow of heart, remote and
free from toil and grief: miserable age rested not on them ... and
they had all good things; for the fruitful earth unforced bare them
fruit abundantly and without stint” (Hesiod Works and Days 112-
119; tr. Evelyn-White). As for Amiran, his is a world in which men
lived by hunting and fighting, taking what they needed without
having to give anything back. Food came from the hunt rather than
the drudgery of agriculture. The only woman Amiran is said to
have obtained was a battle prize, won by the annihilation of her
father and his army, rather than by the long sequence of
negotiation, gift and counter-gift, that Caucasian society demands.
In sum, the worlds of Prometheus and Amiran are a projection of
the misogynistic and anti-social fantasies of the Greek or
Caucasian male, marked by the absence of the principal constraints
imposed by civilization: settled life, marriage through alliance and
exchange, the toil and risk of agriculture. 22
22 In a recent study of the traditional beliefs of the Khevsurs and Pshavs of
northeast Georgia, K’ik’nadze (1996: x) astutely observes that the Amiran cycle
never achieved the level of popularity there that it has in the western Caucasus,
because of subtle differences in the structure of their respective religious
systems. In the andrezebi, or myths of foundation, of local cults, the divine and