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Odysseus and the Axes: Homeric Ballistics Reconstructed

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

Peter Brain  and
D. D. Skinner
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Extract

The celebrated trick with the arrow and the axes, described in the twenty-first book of the Odyssey, has been extensively discussed; but there is little agreement on how, if at all, it was performed. We report here an attempt at a practical reconstruction.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , April 1978 , pp. 55 - 58
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1978

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References

NOTES

1. Folktales in Homer's Odyssey (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), pp. 95 ff.Google Scholar

2. Butler, Samuel, The Odyssey rendered into English Prose (London, 1922), p. 284.Google Scholar

3. Stubbings, F. H. in A Companion to Homer (London, 1962), pp. 534 ff.Google Scholar

4. Loc. cit.

5. Pocock, L. G., Odyssean Essays (Oxford, 1965), pp. 12 ff.Google Scholar

6. We thank Dr. H. Telle for drawing some of the literature to our attention. A photograph of the experiment can be obtained from us at P.O. Box 2356, Durban 4000, South Africa. The editors of Greece & Rome have kindly brought to our attention an article by E. Delebecque (in Le Monde grec, Hommages à Claire Préaux, Brussels, 1975, pp. 56 ff.Google Scholar) in which a modified Stubbings-shot, with Odysseus shooting down an incline, is described. Delebecque would place the axes closer together, and the archer further away from the first, then we do; he has apparently not made a practical test. He says: ‘En fait, si les haches sont douze, c'est pour provoquer l'admiration du profane; car il n'est pas plus malaisé de traverser douze haches qu'une seule.’ With our arrangement, at least, this is not so; our archer could traverse one ring as often as not at 50 yards, whereas 5 yards is the maximum when there are twelve of them. Since submitting the manuscript he has successfully performed the trick while seated; but attempts without stabilizers, with which modern target bows are routinely fitted, were uniformly unsuccessful. Odysseus, however, had had all his practice without modern aids to accuracy.