Achilles and the Caucasus - Université de Montréal

Achilles and the Caucasus (K. Tuite) — août 17, 2007 — pg. 30
angry at the Ats’ans because of their haughtiness, and wishes to
find out how they can be destroyed. God sends a boy from the sky
to be raised by the Ats’ans. He learns that the Ats’ans are
vulnerable to fire, and that they can be annihilated only by
covering the earth with cotton and setting it ablaze (Inal-ipa 1977:
164-8).
3.3. WARRIOR EXPLOITS, SOJOURN IN THE WILD, AND
DESTRUCTION BY INDIRECT ACTION OF SUPREME DEITY. Achilles
spends his childhood in the mountains, under the care and tutelage
of the centaur Cheiron. After Odysseus finds him disguised as a
girl at the court of Lycomedes, he joins the expedition against
Troy, where he leads the Greeks to victory. He is killed, directly or
indirectly, by Apollo, the son and agent of Zeus. There is nothing
to compare to the (literally) titanic struggles for Olympian
sovereignty marking the preceding generations of gods as
recounted in Hesiod’s Theogony : Cronus castrating his father
Uranus, and in turn being overthrown by his son Zeus. Indeed
there is no confrontation at all, a fact all the more curious in the
context of the violence marking almost every page of Greek
mythology.
3.3.1. AMIRAN. Amiran enjoys nothing more than hunting and
fighting, and refuses to leave the wild to return to human society.
“Sans maison, sans foyer, il vit dehors, parmi les démons, les
fauves, le gibier” (Charachidzé 1986: 29, 202). His avoidance of
the give-and-take of social life is especially marked in his attitude
toward marital alliance. 32 The Svan and Georgian texts refer to
32 In his study of traditional Caucasian social thought as reflected in the
character of Amiran, Charachidzé (1986: 203) emphasizes the symbolic
opposition between, on the one hand, the hunter-to-excess (maybe one could call
him the ‘hunter-who-never-grows-up’), imagined as one who practices his
livelihood beyond the limits of human society, taking what he needs from nature
without giving in return, and, on the other hand, the peasant bound by a web of
reciprocal obligations to wife, hearth, clan and village. “L’idéologie géorgienne
conçoit le chasseur excessif comme un anti-gendre … La libre activité du
prédateur absolu … implique la destruction du foyer et du mariage, la vanité de
tous les travaux quotidiens, la négation du groupe social tel qu’il est, dans sa
structure et ses enterprises”. Perhaps the closest Greek parallel to this facet of