Achilles and the Caucasus - Université de Montréal

Achilles and the Caucasus (K. Tuite) — août 17, 2007 — pg. 9
Achilles’ childhood below, but at this juncture I will point out that
the image of the young hero, half-god and half-human, living first
in the wild, then dressed as a girl, is very much that of “a marginal
figure ... suspended between two worlds”, as Redfield put it in
describing the adult Achilles (1984: 126). The liminality of nineyear-old
Achilles anticipates, on the one hand, that of the warriors
before Troy: men in a marginal space, neither inhabited nor fertile,
engaged in a predatory enterprise that assimilates them to
carnivorous animals, as underscored by the numerous comparisons
to lions, wolves or dogs in the Iliad and culminating in the outrage
committed by Achilles on the corpse of Hector (Redfield 1984:
235; see also Hellwig 1964). On the other hand, one can see
similarities between Apollodorus’s Achilles and the éphēboi,
young men in transition between childhood and adulthood, sent to
do military service in the frontier-lands outside the city, and whose
festivities include such images of inversion as transvestitism
(Vidal-Naquet 1981, 1992). 13
Being the son of a water goddess and a hunter, Achilles
occupies not only an intermediate status between the divine and the
human, but also between human society and the savage spaces
outside of the settlement (the village or oikos). 14 Both of
13 “C’est par ailleurs un fait bien connu que le travesti féminin ... a été pour les
sociétés grecques archaïques ... un moyen de dramatiser l’accès du jeune homme
à la virilité et à l’âge du mariage. L’exemple classique, dans la mythologie
grecque, est celui d’Achille à Skyros, déguisé en jeune fille mais ne pouvant
résister à la vue d’une arme” (Vidal-Naquet 1981: 139; cp. Burkert 1979: 29-
30). Dowden (1989: 57) points to a series of associations between Achilles and
the symbolism of initiation — death of young men and women, education in the
arts of war in a liminal setting — and to ephebic rituals performed at a shrine of
Achilles in Laconia. Like several other short-lived figures from Greek
mythology, he “tread[s] the path of initiation and death” (Dowden 1989: 68).
14 According to Austin & Vidal-Naquet (1977: 36-48) the central institution of
the Homeric world, corresponding roughly to the post-Mycenean Dark Ages of
the 9th-10th centuries BCE, was the aristocratic oikos, a semi-autonomous
homestead housing an extended family and its slaves. Exchanges with the
outside, to obtain goods and prestige items not produced by the oikos, were
essentially limited to: (i) war and pillage; (ii) gift and counter-gift between