Achilles and the Caucasus - Université de Montréal

Achilles and the Caucasus (K. Tuite) — août 17, 2007 — pg. 22
mediated, one would expect elements of a culturally-important
symbolic cluster to crystallize onto more than one personage, and
— as noted by Dumézil in the case of the Romans — for symbolic
material pertaining to social ideology to be projected onto
supernatural actors in a text framed as ‘myth’ in one region or
period, and onto human actors in a text framed as ‘history’ or
‘epic’ in another. 24
3. ACHILLES AND THE CAUCASUS. In the following sections
we will consider the representations in west-central Caucasian
mythology of the principal elements of the Achilles story. In
addition to the Svanetian Amiran cycle, the texts to be analyzed
here are the descriptions of Batradz in the Ossetic Nart epics, and
of Tswitsw in the Abkhazian legends of the Ats’an dwarves. The
following groups of motifs will be compared:
(1) parentage
(2) threat to celestial sovereignty, interrupted incubation and
near-invulnerability
(3) warrior exploits, sojourn in the wild, and destruction by
indirect action of God
24 The motif complex discussed here may well haved surfaced, at least in
fragmentary form, elsewhere in Greek mythology. The legend of Caeneus,
likewise recounted by Apollodorus, is a case in point. Caeneus “was originally a
woman, but when Poseidon made love with her, she asked to be made a man and
invulnerable. And so in the battle with the Centaurs he was scornful of being
wounded and killed many of them. But others stood around him beating him
with fir trees and buried him in the ground” (Library III.xxvi.22, tr. Simpson).
The scholia to the Iliad and the Argonautica, as noted by Sergent (1996: 286),
contain a different and more detailed account of the fate of Caeneus: He plants
his spear in the middle of the agora, and demands that the people worship it as a
god. Zeus is infuriated by this insult to the Olympian gods, and sends the
Centaurs to punish Caeneus. The parallels to the Amiran complex include (i)
near invulnerability, (ii) challenge to divine sovereignty, (iii) the motif of a polelike
object thrust into the ground (although its function in the Caeneus story is
quite different), and (iv) punishment by proxies sent by the supreme god. Note
as well that Caeneus is buried by the Centaurs, a theme recalling the
entombment of Prometheus and Amiran inside of a mountain.