5 - Small world: pygmies and co.

Summary

THERE WAS A TIME when scenes painted on Greek pottery were understood to be closely linked to the varied literary sources that preceded or were contemporary with them, and the presumed connections between the two were investigated assiduously. The vase-painters were generally considered to be subsidiary to, and dependent on, the writers of the literary works. But the relationships between stories told through the medium of words and those presented in visual images are now seen to be more complex and to need more sophisticated treatment (see March below, pp. 119–39). Although the images are still useful in helping us to understand the varied levels of mythical narratives (including those met in literary works) and aspects of everyday life such as symposia, religious ritual and funerary practice, more attention is being paid to the reasons behind the choice of subjects, to the ways in which the images consciously or unconsciously comment on contemporary life and society, and to the less obvious meanings which lie hidden beneath the surface.

The year 1993 saw the publication of Veronique Dasen's excellent Dwarfs in Ancient Egypt and Greece, in which she collected together all the literary and visual evidence that concerned her subject. In her chapter on ‘Dwarfs in Myth’ in the Greek half of the book she was mainly concerned with ‘the exotic pygmies’, and in interpreting the material she had collected, she cleverly wove together the testimonia from different periods. What I want to do is to concentrate on what Greek writers wrote (and sometimes recited) and what Greek craftsmen presented of the mythical battle between the pygmies and the cranes (the Geranomachia) in the archaic and classical periods, and to consider how this related to shared knowledge and understanding of the story. So we must begin with Homer.

After the detailed ‘Catalogue of Ships’ in Iliad ii Homer introduces a striking double simile2 to describe the first clash that is about to take place in the poem between the Trojans and the Achaeans (iii.1–9):

Now, when the Trojans were marshalled, each contingent with their captains, they advanced with a clamour and with a cry like birds, just as the clamour of cranes rises beneath the sky, when they come to flee from winter and boundless rain, and with clamour fly towards the streams of Ocean, bearing slaughter and death to pygmies, and in the air they offer evil battle.