The Homeric Poems after Ionia: a Case in Point

The general topic of this paper is the reception of the Homeric poems in mainland Greece after their substantial formation in Ionia in the late eighth and early seventh centuries BC. The case in point is Sparta in the late seventh and early sixth centuries BC in the aftermath of the Second Messenian war. I argue that Sparta, after expelling a surviving Pylian population from the Peloponnesos in the Second Messenian war, began to promote the idea that the Homeric city of Pylos had not been in Messenia in the first place, but further north. The crucial evidence to be confronted in promoting this radical idea was precisely the Homeric poems, in which Nestor’s Pylos figures prominently. By following the details of the ensuing controversy, which affected the Homeric text in certain points, and which involved the Homeric Hymn to Apollo in a fundamental way, it is possible to assess more fully what the Homeric poems had become in the minds of mainland Greeks a century after the poems’ substantial formation in Ionia.

The argument, which involves close analysis of both texts and geography, is meant to demonstrate that there was a “fixed text” of the Iliad and the Odyssey by the time the Pythian half of the Hymn to Apollo was composed in the late seventh century BC. By “fixed text” I do not mean what was understood by this term in the nineteenth century, namely a written text. I operate under the assumption (which I defend elsewhere) that the Iliad and the Odyssey were first expanded on a monumental scale by a completely oral process, and that they were then maintained in a more or less fixed form by a further oral process, at least at first. Schools of rhapsodes, in particular the Homeridai of Chios, were in my view responsible for preserving the Homeric poems in a fixed oral form. At some point written texts also became a factor in the transmission of the poems; this stage can be demonstrated, I think, for late-sixth-century Athens. The period considered in this paper is a century before that, when written texts are possible, but by no means necessary. At the end of the second Messenian war, when the Hymn to Pythian Apollo was composed, I think that we confront something of a paradox: on the one hand poetry continued to be oral and creative; on the other hand the Iliad and the Odyssey had already achieved something like a fixed form and a fixed place in the Greek world.

In the mid-sixth century BC Solon is said to have quoted the evidence of the Homeric catalogue of ships to persuade Spartan arbitrators to award Salamis to Athens rather than to Megara. [1] When did the Homeric poems acquire this kind of authority in mainland Greece? I propose to examine a set of circumstances from the end of the seventh century BC and to argue for a date at least this early. In my view the Iliad and the Odyssey were created in Ionia at the end of the eighth and the beginning of the seventh century BC; it was then, I think, that the poems were expanded on a monumental scale substantially as we have them today. My argument, then, is that the Iliad and the Odyssey became authoritative in mainland Greece within a century of their creation in Ionia. This seems to me a significant finding if it is true.

The case that I wish to study involves the Homeric Hymn to Apollo. As we have it this hymn is composed of a Delian and a Pythian part, the relationship of which to each other remains controversial. In my view the two parts of the hymn once existed separately and were joined together for a specific occasion: this occasion, according to a suggestion of Walter Burkert and Richard Janko, who reached the same conclusion independently, was Polycrates’ celebration of a combined Pythia kai Delia in 523 or 522 BC. This connection makes a great deal of sense to me. [2]

Both parts of the Hymn to Apollo bear on the reception of the Homeric poems, but in different places and at different times. The Delian hymn belongs to the Homeridai of Chios, a guild of rhapsodes that traced itself to a founder/ancestor whom they called Homer: the reference in the hymn to the blind bard of Chios is intended to evoke this founder/ancestor, and, whoever the actual poet or poets of the hymn, the hymn’s allusion to Homer is in effect the sphragis of the guild. [3] The putative founder/ancestor, the blind bard of Chios, is, I think, modeled directly on Demodokos, the blind bard of the Odyssey, and this speaks to the close relationship between the Chian guild and what we know as the Homeric poems. [4] At the end of this paper I will come back to the Homeridai of Chios as the primary “locus of diffusion” of the Iliad and the Odyssey outside of Ionia. In the Hymn to Delian Apollo, which most likely dates to the mid-seventh century BC, we see that the influence of the Homeridai already extends beyond what is strictly Ionia (the twelve cities of the dodecapolis) to Delos in the mid-Aegean; I have little doubt that by the time of the Delian hymn their influence had also reached the Aegean’s other side.

The Hymn to Pythian Apollo is my main concern in this paper. The authorship of this hymn is unknown, and one of the primary objects of my study is to determine this authorship to the extent possible. More is known about the possible date of the hymn, and I begin with this question. The hymn tells how Apollo chose Delphi for his oracle and shrine and brought Cretan priests there to serve his cult. At the end of the hymn, when the cult has been established, the Cretan priests are warned about acts of hybris, as a result of which they will be subjected to new masters. [5] The lines in question are reasonably taken as an allusion to the First Sacred War, which resulted in the destruction of nearby Krisa in 591 BC and the imposition of a new regime at Delphi by 586 BC. [6] There has long been a debate as to whether the hymn’s final passage was added to an already existing hymn after the First Sacred War to reflect the war’s outcome. In fact a strong case can be made that the victors in the war appropriated an older hymn and added to it this vaticinium ex eventu. [7] The threat made against the priests at the end of the hymn is not only unanticipated earlier in the hymn, but it contradicts the hymn’s very purpose, which is to celebrate the establishment of the Delphic oracle and its Cretan priesthood. The poem cannot well have set out from the start to undermine its own purpose at the end. [8] Particularly hard to understand in the hymn is the role of Krisa, the goal of both Apollo’s journey from Olympos and his priests’ voyage from Crete, if at the moment of the hymn’s composition Krisa had already been destroyed and its land withdrawn forever from human cultivation. [9]

On this evidence the Hymn to Pythian Apollo already existed before the First Sacred War and was modified after the war by the victors: Athens, Sicyon, and the Thessalians. [10] There may have been other modifications of the hymn as well in the aftermath of the war. When Apollo slays the she-dragon at the site of his future temple at Delphi, there is a long passage about Typhaon, the monster whom Hera conceived and bore on her own to retaliate against Zeus for bearing Athena on his own. The passage is only very loosely connected with the hymn (Hera gave Typhaon to the she-dragon to raise), and it also seems to match the outlook of two of the victors in the Sacred War: the reference to Athena’s birth from the head of Zeus brings honor to Athens; the portrayal of Hera, the chief goddess of Argos, as the mother of a monster would not have been unwelcome in Sicyon. [11] The Typhaon passage is probably a second modification of the hymn by the victors in the war.

The Hymn to Pythian Apollo, which I date to the period before the Sacred War, is much concerned with geography; [12] I would go so far as to call it a geography lesson. The hymn presents a schematic geography of the mainland Greek world, at the center of which is Delphi. Two broad arcs, one beginning in the north, the other in the south, converge at Delphi as the hymn unfolds: first Apollo leaves Olympos in the north in search of a cult site, and his journey takes him through Thessaly, Euboea, and Boeotia to Delphi; then his priests leave Crete in the south, and their ship, commandeered by Apollo, sails past the entire southern and western Peloponnesos before it reaches the gulf of Krisa (Corinth) and proceeds to Delphi. The arc of Apollo’s initial journey southward is counterbalanced by the arc of the Cretans’ voyage northward, both ending in Delphi; the overall scheme is like two halves of a circle that connect only at this one point.

The hymn’s geography is in general impeccable. [13] In the northern half seventeen places and tribes are named between Olympos and Krisa, and all are correctly located and put in the proper order, with one exception: the Kephisos river is wildly out of place. After crossing from Euboea to Boeotia Apollo proceeds on a straight line through Boeotia from east to west, past Mykalessos first, then Teumessos, then the site of future Thebes, then Onkhestos; before he reaches Haliartos, the next point on his journey, and the two final places before Krisa (Telphousa and the land of the Phlegyai), something goes badly wrong: after Onkhestos he crosses the Kephisos river and the town of Okalea before he reaches Haliartos (Hymn to Apollo 239–243):

The Kephisos river rises in Phokis, north of mount Parnassos and Delphi, and empties into the western end of the Kopaic lake, the site of Boeotian Orkhomenos. Onkhestos and Haliartos, on the other hand, border the south shore of the Kopaic lake at its eastern end. Apollo, who is moving west, is nowhere near the Kephisos river as yet, nor will he ever have to cross it on his way to Delphi. If the Kephisos river is wildly out of place, the town of Okalea is less so, but it too is on the wrong side of Haliartos, some thirty stades west of that town according to Strabo. [14] Apollo, for whatever reason, approaches Haliartos from the wrong direction. Impeccable geography? Not with this passage. Rather the poet seems to have lost his way completely. On the other hand, what is said about the Kephisos is accurate in itself: the river does rise near the town of Lilaia in Phokis, as we know from a Hesiodic fragment preserved by the scholia to Iliad 2.552 (Hesiod fr. 70.18 MW = Rz. 37): ὅς τε Λιλαίηθεν προΐει καλλίρροον ὕδωρ. [15] Remarkably this line of Hesiod is the same as line 241 of the hymn with only a minor variation of the verb (προΐει for προχέει). The question arises, do lines 239-342, with what appears to be a Hesiodic line, belong in the hymn at all? And if not, why are they there?

Let us proceed. After Apollo founds his cult in Delphi and punishes the nymph Telphousa for earlier bad faith, he looks for priests to serve his cult. He sees Cretans who have set sail on a voyage to Pylos and he goes to meet them (Hymn to Apollo 397–399):

After the dramatic appearance of Apollo on board the ship in the form of a dolphin, and the acquiescence of the Cretan sailors in Apollo’s command, the ship continues on its course, which is described in selective detail: the ship rounds cape Malea and passes the Laconian land and cape Tainaron; the sailors try to land at cape Tainaron, where the flocks of Helios graze, but the ship no longer obeys them. It sails onward keeping the Peloponnesos at a distance until it reaches the region of the Alpheios river. We should note in passing that nothing whatever is said about Messenia, which represents most of what the ship passes between Tainaron and the Alpheios; Messenia is a blank in this story, and Pylos, the original goal of the Cretan sailors, is located north of the Alpheios river, in what was historically Elis (Hymn to Apollo 418–424):

The Hymn to Apollo here makes a statement about the location of Pylos, the original goal of the Cretan sailors, and in so doing it engages the Homeric Iliad. The towns named in the passage, except for the otherwise unknown Argyphea, all occur in the first two lines of the Pylian entry to the catalogue of ships, the second line of which the hymn uses verbatim; the first two lines of the Pylian entry are as follows (Iliad 2.592–593):

The Homeric catalogue does not list these towns in geographic order, for that is not its purpose. The hymn, on the other hand, describes a voyage, and the order in which the towns are named is the order of their appearance, from south to north; the principle is the same as in Apollo’s journey from Olympos to Krisa, where the order is strictly geographic. The line borrowed from the catalogue of ships names the Alpheios river, and this feature of the landscape is a key point in the hymn, dividing what lies south of it from what lies north of it. The ship comes first to Arene, which was later identified with Samikon, a Hellenistic fortress some 12 kilometers south of the Alpheios, an identification that is also generally accepted today. [17] Since Argyphea occurs only in this passage of the hymn we do not know its location; in all likelihood it is named less because of a well known location (it cannot have been a very significant place) than to show a certain independence from the Homeric catalogue of ships: the poet does not simply repeat what he finds in Homer, but is an expert in his own right. [18] Thryon, ‘ford of the Alpheios’ (Ἀλφειοῖο πόρον), was on the river itself; this town serves to bring the Alpheios, which is all important to the hymn, into the picture. Aipy, named in the same line with Thryon, was perhaps on the Alpheios as well, but this is only an ancient guess; the location of the town was no more known to ancient scholars than it is to us. [19] The uncertainty does not matter much, however, for the purpose of the hymn’s list of five places is to put Pylos north of the Alpheios, and the order of three of the five places – Arene, Thryon-on-Alpheios, Pylos – does this unmistakably. We should note the poet’s skill in establishing the point: he has simply taken the first two lines of the Pylian entry to the catalogue of ships and shifted Pylos from first position to last position (and put Argyphea in for good measure); since the order in the catalogue is not geographic, Homer has in no way been violated by this rearrangement.

There is no way to avoid the conclusion that the hymn locates Pylos in Elis if we assume that the geography of the hymn is intended to make sense. Some have doubted such an intention, but a hymn as preoccupied with geography as this one surely knew what it was about. I also note that a tradition persisted in historical times that Pylos lay in Elis, although the location of this city, whether on the coast or inland, itself became an issue. [20] The hymn for its part intends Pylos to be on the coast of Elis. But where then was Elis itself? [21] The hymn has an answer for this too. In order to make room for Nestor’s kingdom north of the Alpheios, Elis is identified with its own northeast corner, in what was historically Achaea; this is achieved by putting Elis past Dyme, the westernmost city of Achaia, which according to Strabo was once part of the Epeian realm. [22] After the ship passes Pylos it continues as follows (Hymn to Apollo 425–426):

The poet clearly intends to archaize with this location of Elis in western Achaea: the voyage of the Cretans must be imagined as taking place in primeval times, before the Eleians had reached their historical homeland; at this early time the future land of Elis was as yet home to only two obscure places, Khalkis and Krounoi, and, just to the south, to Nestor’s kingdom. [23]

I return to the larger theme of this paper, namely the authority of the Homeric poems in a matter like the location of Nestor’s kingdom. We have already seen that the poet of the hymn is well aware of the Pylian entry to the catalogue of ships in Iliad 2, which he uses to locate Pylos north of the Alpheios river; the poet cannot be said to falsify Homer in this since the catalogue says nothing at all about the location of Pylos. But did the Homeric poems present no other bar to putting Nestor’s kingdom in Elis? I postpone for now the issue of Nestor’s story in Iliad 11, which presents one such bar. Apart from Iliad 11 the only real Homeric barrier to an Eleian Pylos is in the Odyssey, namely Telemachus’ voyage home from Pylos to Ithaka. In Odyssey 15 Telemachus sets sail from Pylos after bidding farewell to Nestor’s son Peisistratos and taking on board the seer Theoklymenos. As they sail along the coast with a favorable wind sent by Athena the sun sets and the ship heads for Pheai , a town on a prominent cape not far past the mouth of the Alpheios river; it then passes Elis, and from there Telemachus puts out to sea toward unnamed islands (Odyssey 15.296–300):

In this voyage it is the town of Pheai that is fatal to a location of Pylos in Elis: Pheai is too close to the Alpheios river for Nestor’s kingdom to lie in between the two. [24] Pylos must be south of the Alpheios, and the impression given by the narrative is that it is well south of the Alpheios. If the Hymn to Apollo respects the Homeric poems, it must do something about the town of Pheai in Odyssey 15.297 – and it does: it contests this town outright. We see this in the next stage of the Cretan sailors’ voyage. In a line that closely resembles Odyssey 15.297, the Cretans’ ship, after passing Dyme and what once was Elis, heads not for Pheai, but for Pherai, a town beyond Dyme in Achaea; [25] that this version of the line is meant to show that Pherai is also the correct name in Odyssey 15.297 is immediately clear from the close correspondence between the two lines, and it becomes doubly clear in the next line of the hymn, when, for no apparent reason, Ithaka suddenly appears out of the clouds to the sailors at just this point in the voyage (Hymn to Apollo 427–29):

It was from this point in his voyage, we are meant to understand, that Telemachus struck out across the open sea for Ithaka. [26] It does not matter that the Cretan ship has been sailing eastward, away from Ithaka and the three other named islands, for more than 20 kilometers when it passes Dyme and heads for Pherai; Ithaka appears to the sailors at this point in their voyage not for geographical verisimilitude, but despite it, in order to establish the true course of Telemachus’ voyage. With this purpose achieved the rest of the Cretans’ voyage, into the gulf of Krisa and onward to Delphi, passes quickly and without further complication. At the end of the voyage the poet once again reminds us of Telemachus’ voyage, echoing the passage in which Telemachus first sets sail from Pylos and Athena sends a favorable wind (Odyssey 15.292–294):

The last two lines occur in the hymn nearly verbatim, but here Zeus replaces Athena in sending the wind, and the wind itself is said to be from the west, so that it follows the ship as it sails through the gulf of Krisa to Delphi (Hymn to Apollo 430–439):

The echo of Homer’s language in this passage is loud and clear, [27] as it is in the earlier mention of the Alpheios river when the ship first approaches Pylos, and as it is again when Ithaka appears to the Cretan sailors as they head for Pherai. This language is not used for mere convenience, or because the poet could not express himself otherwise, but to make a point: the Pylos from which Telemachus departs in Odyssey 15 is in Elis, not further south. [28]

The Hymn to Apollo bears witness to an early controversy over the location of Nestor’s kingdom. The text of Homer also shows significant traces of this controversy. The most striking is that in Odyssey 15.297 the reading Pheas, which we know must be correct, is preserved only by Aristarchus and Strabo; all our manuscripts of the Odyssey read Pheras. [29] It must have been those who wanted Homeric Pylos to be in Elis who put Pheras in Odyssey 15.297, and their view had demonstrable success – all our manuscripts of the Odyssey bear witness to it. The next line in the Odyssey, in which Telemachus passes by Elis, may have been added by the other side in the controversy to protect the name Pheas, which was now under challenge (Odyssey 15.297–298):

With this two-line sequence Pherai can no longer well replace Pheai, for Pherai would push Elis too far east; Elis in the second line is clearly meant to follow Pheai in the first line and to occupy its known historical location. The line with Elis thus reflects the viewpoint of those who did not accept the new location of Homeric Pylos in Elis. The same line occurs in the Hymn to Apollo, as we have seen: in the hymn it serves to shift the location of Elis eastward past Dyme in western Achaea. The line seems to have been introduced into the Odyssey secondarily to counter the hymn: not only does it protect the name Pheas in the line before, but it also restores Elis to its known location. In doing so it attempts to use the Hymn to Apollo against itself. For the question of priority it is significant that the line sits comfortably in the Hymn to Apollo, but in the Odyssey it is connected only very loosely with what precedes. [30] Before the controversy caused Elis to enter the text of Odyssey 15 in this way, Telemachus’ voyage was a simpler matter: he headed along the coast for cape Pheai, and from there he struck out across open sea for the islands. [31]

The Iliad too bears witness to the controversy over a location of Pylos in Elis, and again the issue is Pheai. This town, which had to be eliminated from the Odyssey to allow Pylos to be in Elis, has been added secondarily to the Iliad to show positively where Pheia (so the town is now called in an otherwise post-Homeric form) lay in relation to the true (i.e. the Eleian) Pylos. In Iliad 7, to shame the Achaeans into meeting Hector in single combat, Nestor tells how he once accepted the challenge of the club-wielding Arcadian giant Ereuthalion, and slew him. The Pylians were at war with the Arcadians, their neighbors to the east, and the battle between champions took place at the Keladon river, where the two armies fought. This, at least, is how the story begins in Iliad 7.133–134, but in the next line, 7.135, an additional location is given, and an additional river is specified, the Iardanos: this line also sets the battle “by the walls of Pheia” (Iliad 7.133–136):

The location of the battle beside two different rivers has long been regarded with suspicion, and the presence of Pheia in the story has seemed wholly inexplicable: how can Pheia, eight miles north of the Alpheios river on the coast of Elis, have been the site of a battle between Pylos and Arcadia? [32] The answer, however, is clear: the Pylos envisaged by Iliad 7.135 lay in Elis, north of the Alpehios, and also north of Pheia, just as it does in the Hymn to Apollo. When the Arcadians attacked this Pylos, they first had to pass by Pheia, where Nestor stopped them by slaying their champion. Iliad 7.135 is an expansion of Nestor’s story, which is intended to change the site of his battle from Arcadia to the coast of Elis. [33] The presence of the town Pheia in Iliad 7.135 must be viewed together with the absence of the town Pheai in the manuscript tradition of Odyssey 15.297: Pheia is meant to be a correction of Pheai both as to the form of the name, and as to the town’s location relative to Nestor’s Pylos, south of it rather than north of it. The one-line expansion of Nestor’s story in Iliad 7 and the one-word change in Telemachus’ voyage home in Odyssey 15.297 constitute the entire reworking of Homer with respect to the location of Pylos in Elis. Everything else in the poems stayed the same because no other change was needed.

This brings us to the other barrier in Homer to an Eleian Pylos, namely Nestor’s story in Iliad 11; certain passages of this story locate Pylos south of the Alpheios river, where it cannot be if it is in Elis. The situation here is different from the Odyssey in my view. Unlike the name Pheai in Odyssey 15.297 the barrier in Iliad 11 to an Eleian Pylos did not have to be removed from the text of Homer because in all likelihood it did not yet exist at the time of the Hymn to Pythian Apollo. In 1942 Räto Cantieni showed that Nestor’s story in Iliad 11 had an earlier form and a later form, and he isolated four passages that in his view belong to a secondary version of the story: it is in two of these secondary passages that Pylos is located south of the Alpheios river. [34] It is not my purpose in this paper to consider Nestor’s story in detail; I have done that elsewhere, and I have come to the same conclusion as Cantieni, although my starting point is quite different from his. [35] A brief discussion will suffice to explain the difference between the two versions of the story.

In Iliad 11 Nestor tells how as a youth he led Pylos to victory in battle against hostile neighbors, the Eleians or Epeians, who attacked in chariots after Nestor raided a large number of their cattle. The battle is an odd mixture of epic exaggeration – Nestor on foot wins himself a chariot by killing the leader of the enemy horsemen, and from this newly won chariot he single-handedly kills the double occupants of fifty other chariots – and very precise geographical description. The precise geography locates Pylos south of the Alpheios river, in the historical region of Triphylia. After Athena’s nighttime alarm warning the Pylians of an impending Epeian attack the Pylians march as far as a river near Arene before dawn; Arene, we recall, was the site of Hellenistic Samikon, some twelve kilometers south of the Alpheios; departing from there at dawn the Pylians reach the Alpheios by mid-day – a well calculated interval for the distance. The Epeians too are at the Alpheios, because they have interrupted their advance on Pylos to lay siege to Thryoessa, the Pylian town called “Thryon, ford of the Alpheios” in the catalogue of ships. The battle begins the next morning, and Nestor’s heroics take him deep into the enemy’s land, to Bouprasion, before he ends his rout of the Epeians and leads the victorious Pylians home.

The precise geographical detail of Nestor’s story, all of which has to do with the Alpheios river, puts Pylos in Triphylia, between Samikon to the north and Lepreon to the south. Hellenistic scholars did not fail to notice this, and they even knew of a place called Pylos that had been absorbed by Lepreon at some earlier date; their arguments are found in Strabo, who fully supports their conclusion that Nestor’s city lay in Triphylia. [36] A century ago Wilhelm Dörpfeld, persuaded by the same arguments, found within the same vicinity a Bronze Age site at Kakovatos that he took to be Nestor’s actual palace. Soon after this discovery Felix Bölte wrote an important article showing in detail how closely the city of Pylos in Nestor’s story in Iliad 11 correlates with such a location. [37] In Bölte’s view Nestor’s story accurately preserves the record of a real Bronze Age battle, step for step.

But if the geographical passages are integral to Nestor’s story, as Bölte is not alone in believing, how did anyone ever take seriously the idea that Nestor’s city lay in Elis? His story in Iliad 11 plainly rules this out. The implication of this is clear: the poet of the Hymn to Pythian Apollo, who puts Pylos in Elis, and who does so with the text of Homer very much in mind, cannot have known these geographical passages. There was an older version of Nestor’s story, which had none of the precise geography of the received text, but instead staged Nestor’s battle between Pylos at one end and Bouprasion at the other, with no mention of the Alpheios river in the middle, but only a vague reference to a plain on which the two warring peoples met: in this simpler story the Pylians left their city by night after Athena’s alarm; they met the Epeians on a plain between their lands at dawn; and Nestor, who was still on foot, won himself horses as soon as the battle began, routed the Epeians as far as Bouprasion, and led the victorious Pylians home, all in one day. This is epic exaggeration on an impressive scale, given the actual distances of the western Peloponnesos, but it is not inconsistent with Nestor’s feat in killing the double occupants of fifty chariots single-handedly while driving his own chariot. The geography is not realistic, but this makes it consistent with the rest of the story. It is the realistic geography of the later passages that is inconsistent with the story. In these passages we have the siege of a town, well timed marches, an encampment, all adding a full day to the story. In the earlier version we had Nestor’s exaggerated heroics, and nothing else. Before Nestor begins his story in Iliad 11 he lifts his famous cup, which is described in elaborate detail; the poet comments that another man would have lifted this cup with difficulty, but Nestor lifted it with ease (11.632–637). This sets the stage for Nestor’s story, in which he tells how he accomplished feats that no ordinary mortal could; on that day he was like a whirlwind (λαίλαπι ἶσος), and realistic geography did not stand in his way. [38]

I leave to one side the intriguing question of when Nestor’s story may have been expanded with the four passages detected by Cantieni. I note only that we do not hear about a Triphylian location of Nestor’s city until the Hellenistic age, and it may well be that the expansions of Nestor’s story do not go back so very much earlier than that. [39] For our purposes, however, it is enough to say that the expansions of Nestor’s story must have been carried out after the Hymn to Pythian Apollo was composed, so in the sixth century BC at the earliest. Whatever its date, however, the new version of Nestor’s story, once it had been accepted as Homeric, effectively ended the old controversy as to whether Pylos lay in Elis, for such a location was now impossible. A location in Elis became a curious artifact in the long debate over the location of Pylos; modern scholars attribute it to local historians of Elis, who somehow did not see that what they claimed was impossible in view of Iliad 11. But, as the Hymn to Pythian Apollo shows, the controversy was much older than local histories of Elis. By the time Nestor’s story in Iliad 11 was expanded, and Triphylia was put forth as a new contender for the location of Nestor’s city, the old controversy had, I think, long since faded. Only the traces of it were left.

For modern scholars, who consider only the expanded version of Nestor’s story in Iliad 11, Elis has never been a serious contender in the debate about Pylos’ location. The modern debate is between Messenia, which most today regard as the true location of Nestor’s Pylos, and Triphylia, which those who focus on the expanded version of Nestor’s story in Iliad 11 still maintain. The debate is as yet unsettled. [40] Archaeologically Triphylia has been trumped by Messenia: the site discovered by Carl Blegen at Ano Englianos in 1939 has been accepted as the Bronze Age city of Pylos even by champions of Kakovatos in Triphylia; the latter maintain their belief in Triphylia by regarding the Homeric city of Pylos as different from the Bronze Age city, for whatever reason (such is the influence of Nestor’s expanded story). [41] Messenia, which has archaeology on its side, also has the better ancient pedigree as the site of Nestor’s city. Unlike Triphylia, which was perhaps first put forward by Demetrios of Scepsis in the second century BC, [42] Messenia was regarded as Nestor’s home in the classical period: Pindar, for example, calls Nestor “the aged Messenian” (Μεσσανίου δὲ γέροντος, Pythian 6.34). This evidence is discounted by some as relating to the Messenian resurgence of the fourth century BC, which had its roots in the fifth century BC; according to this line of thought the Messenians had to reinvent their entire past, which had been wiped clean during the period of Spartan domination, and it was only in the course of this that they laid claim to Nestor and Pylos. [43] While there may be truth in this analysis of Messenian traditions generally, it does not, I think, explain the history of the name Pylos in Messenia. In the fifth century this name was used of an uninhabited place on the Messenian coast at the north end of the bay of Navarino, opposite the island of Sphakteria; the Spartans called this place Koryphasion, but others called it Pylos. Herodotus refers to it in connection with the Persian wars, and it was also here, famously, that Spartan hoplites were taken prisoner by the Athenians in 425 BC. [44] The site is not the same as the Bronze Age site at Ano Englianos, but 9-10 kilometers southwest of it. The site was indeed important to the resurgent Messenians, who founded a new city of Pylos there in 365 BC, but the history of the site did not begin with the Messenian resurgence of the fifth and fourth centuries. This site, in my view, played an important part in the older controversy over the location of Nestor’s kingdom, as to whether it lay in Elis or further south.

When the Bronze Age kingdom of Pylos fell c. 1200 BC, the site at Ano Englianos was abandoned, but survivors seem to have settled in successor cities nearby that they continued to call Pylos, the last of which was the site at the north end of the bay of Navarino. [45] The Spartans finally drove these remaining Pylians from the Peloponnesos at the end of the Second Messenian War, c. 600 BC. [46] The Spartans, who called the place Koryphasion rather than Pylos, clearly did not wish to memorialize the Pylians whom they had just expelled. [47] But the name Pylos stuck to the site, as we see in the fifth century, when non-Spartans still called it this. [48]

The Spartans, in my view, are the only likely candidates to have invented the idea that Homeric Pylos lay in Elis. Once the Spartans had driven the surviving Pylians from the coast of Messenia, they wanted to expunge their memory as well. These Pylians were at least notionally descendants of Neleus and Nestor, and expelling them and taking their land did not bring the Spartans credit. The problem was the Homeric poems, for it was here that Nestor and the Pylians were particularly celebrated. But the Homeric poems were also the solution if they could be made to show that Pylos once lay in Elis, and that therefore only the Eleians could answer for what became of Nestor’s people. This idea was not as hard to promote as might be imagined once the Pylians themselves had been removed from the scene. The only negative evidence in the Homeric poems was the name Pheai in Odyssey 15.297, and we have seen how this was dealt with. But there was also a positive argument that could be brought to bear, namely Nestor’s story in Iliad 11. In its older form, as discussed, this story is hyperbolic in the extreme: Bouprasion, where Nestor ends his rout of the Epeians, was always thought to lie on the far side of Elis from Pylos; [49] Pylos, to a contemporary Homeric audience, would have meant Messenia, and more particularly the still surviving city of Pylos on the bay of Navarino. Nestor, who leaves Pylos at night and reaches Bouprasion the next day before turning homeward effectively conquers the entire western Peloponnesos in a single day. [50] This is all well and good for the hero with the famous cup that only he could lift. But it was also possible to take Nestor’s story literally, and to ask where must Pylos have been if Nestor reached the far side of Elis in a single day, and to this question the answer is simple and straightforward: to do this in reality Nestor could only have started from somewhere inside of Elis. Ironically Nestor’s story in Iliad 11, which in its later form ruled out an Eleian Pylos, in its earlier form very likely was the main argument for an Eleian Pylos.

The Hymn to Pythian Apollo makes sense as a Spartan product of the late seventh century BC. The end of the Second Messenian War and the expulsion of the Pylians are dated to c. 600 BC, and the hymn, I think, followed quite soon after these events; at the lower end, as discussed, the hymn precedes the First Sacred War, which resulted in the destruction of Krisa in 591 BC: a date of c. 600 BC for the hymn is probably not far wrong. [51] The hymn, which centers on Delphi, does not reveal its particular provenance, for to do so would undermine its purpose: Delphi is the hymn’s focus, and Delphi is neutral; it removes any charge of bias. The Laconian land is mentioned, including cape Malea and cape Tainaron, and even a cult of Helios on cape Tainaron; this is noteworthy, but many other places are mentioned in the hymn, and arguments have been developed to connect the hymn with some of these. [52] A far more powerful argument for Sparta is the complete absence of Messenia from the hymn; as noted earlier, Apollo steers the Cretan ship wide of the entire region, so that nothing at all is said of it: it is a blank. Messenia in fact now belonged to Sparta, and that is the reason that nothing is said of it. As for Pylos, one did not reach Nestor’s fabled kingdom until after the Alpheios river (and Messenia) had been passed.

Sparta’s chief divinity was Apollo, to whom the city’s three main festivals were dedicated: the Karneia, Hyakinthia, and Gymnopaidiai. [53] Was the Hymn to Pythian Apollo composed for performance at one of these festivals? Like other Homeric hymns, the Hymn to Pythian Apollo must have been composed as a prooimion to introduce a performance of Homeric poetry. Such prooimia were composed in Sparta as elsewhere, the practice having been introduced at the latest in the first half of the seventh century by Terpander of Lesbos. [54] At a festival outsiders, especially other Peloponnesians, would presumably be present, and this offered an opportunity, if not to rewrite the past, at least to present the Spartan point of view. In such a setting a performance of the Hymn to Apollo, as prooimion, could have been followed by a performance of Homeric poetry that included Odyssey 15. This would have been an ideal occasion to present the corrected version of Telemachus’ voyage home from Pylos, the true course of which had international significance c. 600 BC. The Second Messenian War had called forth the talents of one Spartan poet, Tyrtaeus, who had shown himself an able propagandist for the Spartan state; the war itself is sometimes called “the Tyrtaeus war” because of the prominent part that he played. If he lived long enough, perhaps Tyrtaeus also composed the Hymn to Pythian Apollo once the war was over.

Kleisthenes of Sikyon, one of the victors in the First Sacred War, ended rhapsodic contests in his city because the Homeric epics celebrated his enemy Argos. This well-known episode most likely related to performances of the Iliad, although the precise meaning of Herodotus’ phrase “Homeric epics” (Homereia epea) is debated. [55] The set of circumstances that I have considered is probably somewhat earlier than this well-known episode, but it belongs to the same general period. Taken together the two examples show the Iliad and the Odyssey as well established in the Peloponnesos at the end of the seventh century and the beginning of the sixth century BC; the poems were then a factor that could not be ignored in relations between cities. The authority of the Homeric poems in mainland Greece in this period is the question with which this paper began, and I have now made my case. But my argument has another step. What is striking about the controversy over the name Pheai in Odyssey 15.297 is that there was something well established to argue against – a text of the Odyssey that was widely known and accepted. I do not mean to imply anything for an oral Odyssey versus a written Odyssey by using the word text, but I do need to say something about this question in a general way. For me the expansion of the Iliad and the Odyssey on a monumental scale at the end of the eighth century and the beginning of the seventh century BC was an entirely oral process; this expansion, as I imagine it, could not have been carried out by means of writing. [56] But I am also convinced that a written text of Homer played a part in the Panathenaic festival in sixth-century Athens; certain small-scale changes to the poems can be traced to this historical context, and these changes, I think, show clear signs of writing. [57] Thus in my view written texts of Homer appeared sometime between the early seventh century BC and the late sixth century BC, and I do not know when. I think that in the period that concerns us, the late seventh century BC, epic poetry must still have been a largely oral matter: if the Homeric text at that time was to a large extent fixed, then it must have been rhapsodes who maintained it in a fixed form; if the text was disputed, as in the case of Odyssey 15.297, then the rhapsodes who performed it must have disagreed with each other. Thus it is not just that the Homeric poems had authority, but that different versions had authority, and the question would arise in any particular case what the basis of that authority was. Here, I think, different schools of rhapsodes enter the picture. As I said at the outset, I think that the Homeridai of Chios were the primary locus of diffusion outside of Ionia for what were in fact Ionian poems. The Homeridai were the guardians of an inherited tradition, and there must have been agreement as to what exactly that tradition was. In the case of Telemachus’ voyage home from Pylos, for example, the Homeridai would all presumably know that the ship headed for Pheai before it struck out for the open sea, and this small bit of the poems would have been included with the rest as the poems were carried to the mainland and elsewhere. Given this scenario, on what basis did one contest the name Pheai in Odyssey 15.297 in late seventh-century Sparta? I suggest that a link was claimed with Homer other than through the Homeridai. As early as Aristotle we hear that the Spartans claimed to have received their Homeric tradition, not from the Homeridai of Chios, but from the Kreophyleioi of Samos: Kreophylos, the putative ancestor of this guild of rhapsodes, is supposed to have hosted Homer himself on Samos, and the Kreophyleioi, his descendants, are supposed to have passed the Homeric poems on to Lycurgus when he visited Samos from Sparta. [58] The Kreophyleioi, who were known for the Oechaliae Halosis tradition of Heracles, thus seem to have claimed an independent tradition for the Homeric poems as well: Homer, it seems, gave the poems to his host Kreophylos, who passed them on to his descendants. [59] Aristotle is the first to tell us that the Spartans claimed to have received the Homeric poems, not from Chios, but from a rival member of the Ionian dodecapolis, Samos. How much older this tradition is than Aristotle we cannot tell, but there is no reason that it cannot be significantly older. One prominent scholar has recently dated it to the late sixth century BC; [60] I would suggest instead the late seventh century BC, when the Hymn to Pythian Apollo was composed: this hymn’s authority for the view that Nestor’s kingdom lay in Elis, I suggest, was not the Odyssey of the Homeridai, but the Odyssey of the Kreophyleioi, to whose ancestor Homer had given the true version of the poem. Or so it was alleged.

But if the Kreophyleioi were indeed put forward as the authority for a new location of Nestor’s kingdom, would this guild of rhapsodes have actually backed what amounted to a bogus claim? There is reason to think so, and not simply because, like Hesiod’s muses (and poets generally), they knew how to tell things like the truth (Pherai) as well as the truth itself (Pheai). The reason has to do with the role played by Samos in the events that led to the controversy over Pylos in the first place, namely the expulsion of Nestor’s descendants from Messenia. Herodotus provides a piece of evidence that cannot be securely dated, but which strongly suggests complicity between Sparta and Samos in this very deed. When a group of Samians exiled by Polycrates asked Sparta for help returning home, Sparta responded by sending a force against the Samian tyrant; Sparta claimed to have its own reasons for doing this, namely acts of piracy committed by Polycrates against the Spartans, but according to the Samian exiles the Spartans helped them for a different reason: it was to repay an earlier good deed, when the Samians once sent ships to help the Spartans against the Messenians. [61] Franz Kiechle has argued that the ships once sent by Samos against the Messenians were instead (or more specifically) sent against the Pylians and the other coastal populations of Messenia during the Second Messenian War. [62] While the episode is undated in Herodotus, it clearly preceded the tyranny of Polycrates, and Kiechle’s dating of it to the Second Messenian War has been accepted by others. [63] Paul Cartledge, who accepts Kiechle’s dating, argues that there was a centuries-long “special relationship” between Sparta and Samos, and that, to judge by the exchange of goods between the two cities, this relationship began by c. 650 BC. [64] Sparta’s special relationship with Samos extended, I think, to the Kreophyleioi; the claim to have received the Homeric poems from them was later linked to the “fluid wonder-worker” Lycurgus, [65] but it actually originated, I suggest, in the aftermath of the Second Messenian War. If Sparta was embarrassed by what had happened to Nestor’s descendants in Messenia, so must Samos have been after providing the naval forces to drive them out. The idea that Nestor’s kingdom had never been in Messenia, but in Elis, could well have been the result of Spartan-Samian connivance, especially if Samos had the Kreophyleioi to vouch for any necessary adjustments to the Homeric poems.

It remains to tie a loose end, which has to do with the other side in the early controversy over the location of Pylos. Ultimately the idea that Pylos was in Elis did not succeed. The memory of Messenian Pylos’ final site on the bay of Navarino was preserved in the name that remained attached to the site; Athenian authors like Thucydides and Aristophanes use the name routinely in connection with the events of 425 BC, and Herodotus fits the same pattern. [66] Had any of these authors been asked where Nestor’s kingdom lay, they would have answered Messenia, and the same answer would have been given in earlier generations as far back as one cares to go. [67] We saw earlier that those who did not accept that Pylos was in Elis took measures to insure that the name Pheai remained in Odyssey 15.297: another line was added to protect that name. I suspect that Athens was at the center of this effort to set the record straight. The Athenians had close ties to Ionia, and they must have received the Homeric poems soon after their creation; they probably had a connection with the Homeridai from the very start. [68] Within a century of this foundational period of Homeric reception the Hymn to Pythian Apollo made a strong bid to establish the Spartan point of view concerning the location of Nestor’s kingdom in the Homeric poems. If the hymn was launched at Spartan festivals, as suggested earlier, it did not remain a local phenomenon, but circulated more widely. It must have been particularly associated with Delphi if the victors in the First Sacred War appropriated it when they became Delphi’s new masters. Athens, as one of the victors in the war, was doubtless involved in the hymn’s appropriation. The purpose of appropriating the hymn was to neutralize it. I come back now to the one passage in Apollo’s journey from Olympos to Krisa that is clearly out of place in the hymn, namely when he crosses the Kephisos river traveling in the wrong direction. Later in the hymn the Cretan ship, with Apollo on board, will pass another river, the Alpheios, before reaching Pylos. Whoever inserted the Kephisos river into Apollo’s journey, and made him cross this river backwards, clearly had in view the voyage of the Cretan ship, which similarly puts Pylos on the wrong side of the Alpheios. The effect of the new passage is to neutralize the hymns’ location of Pylos in Elis. To the question whether the Cretan ship really reached Pylos by passing the Alpheios river the answer would now be: no more than Apollo really went from Onkhestos to Haliartos by crossing the Kephisos river. To the underlying question, is Pylos in Elis, the answer would be simpler: nonsense. The earlier version of the Hymn to Pythian Apollo that had gained currency before the First Sacred War could not somehow be withdrawn or eliminated after the war, it could only be countered. The preferred Greek way to counter anything was not outright denial, but to take the point and stand it on its head. This was a topsy-turvy world, but it had its logic. [69] The geography of the hymn was effectively turned into nonsense by the victors in the Sacred War, and that by and large is what it has seemed ever since. [70]

Map 1. By Jill Curry Robbins, after Pausanias, Description of Greece. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918–1935, vol. 5, pl. 9.

Map 2. By Jill Curry Robbins, after Pausanias, Description of Greece. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918–1935, vol. 5, pl. 1.