Epeius, carpenter and athlete

Extract

In the Odyssey Epeius is twice mentioned by Odysseus as the maker of the wooden horse—and Odysseus should know—so I hope it is not unreasonable to call Epeius a carpenter. In the Iliad this aspect of his talents is not mentioned; he appears as a competitor in two of the events in the funeral games of Patroclus, and there is no other mention of him in Homer. It is in his capacity as athlete that I want to talk about him today.

In the first place he appears as the central figure in a short but dramatic and amusing incident, the boxing match. Leaf says that he seems to be the representative of brute strength, and more recently Fernand Robert has called him a ‘brute ridicule’ and made other, and similar, disparaging remarks about him, even going so far as to say that the event in which he takes part is an ‘épreuve méprisée’. This seems to me not only to be unfair to Epeius but also to indicate a misunderstanding of what Homer tells us. First, there is no evidence of any contempt for boxing.