Achilles and the Caucasus - Université de Montréal

Achilles and the Caucasus (K. Tuite) — août 17, 2007 — pg. 6
Achilles is born from this union.
In order to make her half-mortal son fully divine, Thetis “hid
him in the fire (eis tò pûr egkrúbousa) by night in order to destroy
the mortal element which the child had inherited from his father”
(Library III.xiii.6). 8 While Achilles was in the process of being
immortalized over the fire by Thetis, Peleus snatched him out of
her hands, at which point Thetis abandoned child and husband, and
returned to her home in the sea (Scholion to Aristophanes Clouds,
him, and who bore him a son, Phocus” (Library III.xii.6). Lesky considers it
“eine sekundäre Doublette zu dem Liebesringkampf zwischen Peleus und
Thetis” (1937: 274). The power of metamorphosis is not only shared by Thetis
and her sister Psamathe, but as well by their father Nereus (Library II.v.11;
Bader 1986), Metis the first wife of Zeus, and several other aquatic divinities.
The numerous correspondences between Metis and Thetis are discussed at
length by Detienne & Vernant (1974: 127-164). Both were destined to bear a
son that would usurp the sovereignty of his father (which outcome, in the case of
Metis, Zeus averted by swallowing her whole), and both, surprising as it may
seem, appear as the creators of the universe in ancient Greek cosmogonies. A
poorly-preserved commentary on the Spartan poet Alcman (7th c. BCE) refers to
an otherwise unknown cosmogony by the latter in which Thetis fulfills the
demiurgic role of separating light from darkness and establishing the beginnings
of order in primordial chaos (West 1963, 1967). Her work is described with
terms appropriated from the vocabulary of metal-working (the hulē ‘raw
material’ from which the cosmos is formed is compared to khalkós ‘bronze’, and
Thetis is the tekhnítēs ‘artisan’), which betokens for Burkert (1963) the coming
together in the figure of Thetis of two master tropes for creation: the primal
ocean, as in the Book of Genesis, and the activity of a blacksmith. (I would add
that Thetis’s fire-treatment of the infant Achilles may be yet another offshoot of
the second trope, especially in the light of the Caucasian evidence to be
presented further on). According to Detienne & Vernant (1974: 138) “une des
raisons pour lesquelles ces divinités marines étaient aptes à jouer, à l’origine du
monde, ce rôle cosmogonique, c’était leur pouvoir de métamorphose. Elles
contenaient en quelque sorte par avance à l’intérieur d’elles-mêmes, les
dissimulant puis les révélant tour à tour à la lumière, toutes les formes
susceptibles d’apparaître dans le cours du devenir.”
8 This may not have been her first attempt at such an operation. A scholiast
commenting on a passage in Lycophron’s Alexandra (ll. 177-179: “… the
Pelasgian Typhon, out of seven sons consumed in the flame, alone escaping the
fiery ashes”) asserted that Achilles was the seventh child of Thetis and Peleus.
The earlier ones perished during attempts at immortalization by fire.