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Achilles and the Caucasus (K. Tuite) — août 17, 2007 — pg. 46 Spercheios on the occasion of his safe return from Troy. (By this point in the narrative, of course, Achilles knows he will not return alive from the war). In view of the abundant initiatory symbolism in the stories of Achilles and his Caucasian counterparts, one wonders if this rite of tonsure is yet another mark of the transition from childhood to adulthood. The adolescent cuts his or her long hair, a symbol in many cultures of youth and unconstrained liberty, and sacrifices it to the waters as a sign of separation from nature and acceptance of the strictures of adult status. (iv) A Caucasian ‘Trojan-horse’ motif? Several myths and legends from separate regions of the Caucasus employ the motif of a divine, or at least superhuman, hero wrapping himself in the carcass of a cow or horse in order to enter the otherwise impregnable fortress of a redoubtable enemy. The Ossetic and Abkhazian corpora of Nart legends include the story of a hero, either Soslan (in the Ossetic version) or Patraz (= Batradz, in the Abkhazian recension), laying siege to the fortress of an adversary who refused to deliver a woman he had promised to give in marriage. After all attempts to enter the castle fail, the hero resorts to a ruse which requires him to slip inside a dead cow: Soslan does this in order to feign death and putrefaction, thus luring his enemies into a trap; Patraz wraps himself in a cow skin and then has his men launch him like a projectile behind the walls, the skin presumably cushioning the impact. In both cases the trick works, and the Narts take the fortress. The Georgian mountaineers of Khevsureti work the motif into a rather different context. In an important myth relating to the establishment of religious practices and the institution of marriage, an army of deities led by Giorgi (St. George) lays siege to the fortress of the Kadzhis in the subterranean land of the dead. Their attempts to break through are in vain, until Giorgi “slips into the cadaver” of a dead horse, and thus succeeds in entering the fortress. The deities sack and burn the castle of the Kadzhis, returning to the surface with cups and plates of silver, metal-working tools, and the three Kadzhi princesses Ashekala, Mzekala and Samdzimari, the last of whom becomes the divine partner of Giorgi (Charachidzé 1968: 520-530).
Achilles and the Caucasus (K. Tuite) — août 17, 2007 — pg. 47 Abaev (1963) was struck by the resemblances between these legends and the Homeric account of the Trojan War: the besieging of an impregnable fortress in order to recover a woman; the use of a trick involving entering an animal cadaver (of which the artificial Trojan Horse is a distinctly Greek, and perhaps literary, transformation) in order to break through; and even the death of a Patroclus-like companion of the hero. 47 He traced both the Homeric and Caucasian traditions to an ideologically-charged ancestral myth affirming the preeminence of shaman-priests over warriors. (Abaev relates the animal-carcass motif to legends recorded in Central Asia of shamans doing battle in the shape of animals). Dumézil (1978: 273-282) remained unconvinced by Abaev’s arguments; I find them sufficiently interesting, especially in the context of the parallels presented here, to merit reconsideration. 48 5. CONCLUSION. In view of the strong similarities among the attributes and motifs attaching to Achilles, Amiran, Batradz and Tswitsw, as well as the evidence amassed by Charachidzé in his comparison of the Prometheus and Amiran myths, I hypothesize that the traditions preserved in ancient Greece and early 20thcentury Georgia, Abkhazia and Ossetia are derived from a common source, a mythic framework centered upon a character I will call ‘Proto-Achilles’. The principal elements of the Proto- Achilles symbolic cluster, as I have reconstructed it, are as follows: 47 In the Nart versions a young man is fatally wounded while trying to throw rocks down from a mountain overhanging the fortress, and Soslan’s attempt to resuscitate him is foiled (Dumézil 1978: 273). In the Khevsurian myth of the campaign against the Kadzhis, Giorgi is accompanied by a human shaman, who must undergo a temporary physical death so that his soul can descend to the underworld (Charachidzé 1968: 525). 48 One potentially fruitful approach to exploring the role of the Trojan-Horse motif in earlier forms of the myth is to set it in juxtaposition to the accounts of the birth of the semi-divine hero: his conception by a theriomorphic goddess, and, in the Georgian Amiran cycle, the completion of his gestation in an animalskin incubator. I hope to return to this matter in later work.
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