(the) American (Novel of)

238 Thomas Thorp
reordering of its own prior homeland, a reverse colonization that mimics
precisely the return from Ionia of preserved prearchaic traditions, not the least
of which would have been these songs about the Trojan war and about the
homecomings themselves.
14. For a beautifully argued summary of the view that Homer was
Ionian see Paolo Vivante, Homer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). On
the reestablishment of once severed contacts between mainland and islands
(some of which were colonies from the earliest Ionian colonization) see A. M.
Snodgrass, The Dark Age of Greece (New York: Routledge, 2000). On the question
of appeals to traditional or ancient foundations as a basis for new claims
to political legitimacy in the eighth and seventh centuries see the introductory
essay by Jean-Pierre Vernant to the collection he edited, La mort, les morts dans
les sociétés anciennes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), and in the
same collection, A. M. Snodgrass, “The Archaeology of the Hero.”
15. François de Polignac, Cults, Territory, and the Origins of the Greek City-
State, trans. Janet Lloyd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 38.
16. Snodgrass, The Dark Age of Greece, pp. 390–394. Oswyn Murray, Early
Greece (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
17. Odysseus recycles here several details from the Eumaeus lie, details
involving Thesprotia, and a near meeting with Odysseus, who happened to
have left just a day before to go from Thesprotia to Dodona for the purpose
of consulting Zeus as to how best to make the final stage of his journey;
compare 19.340 and 14.370.
18. This being one of three times when, were Odysseus all the people he
claims to be in his lies, he would have just missed bumping into himself. Imagine
the meeting on Crete between Castor (Odysseus in the Eumaeus lie), Idomeneus,
Idomeneus’s brother Aethon (Odysseus in the Penelope lie), Idomeneus’s son
Orsilochus, and the unnamed stranger who killed Orsilochus (Odysseus in the
Athena lie) had Odysseus only arrived in Crete ten days earlier.
19. Kant is the first and perhaps the last philosopher to comprehend this
fundamental quality of the lie. He sets it forth in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics
of Morals in preparation for a discussion of autonomy. See Immanuel Kant,
Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1994).