Norman Simms

 

 

  The Healing of Aeneas and Menelaus:

Wound-Healers in Ancient Greek

and Classical Roman Medicine

 

Sept.19, 2005.

 

Midway through the final combat in Book XII of the Aeneid, Virgil describes the hero taken off the battlefield to have his wound healed or to die, and thus the Roman poet comes to describe one of the medici or military physicians who served with the imperial legions, his technique and beliefs concerning his craft, and their relationship to the gods.[1]  Let me cite the relevant lines in Rushton Fairclough’s translation that accompanies the Loeb edition of the Latin epic:[2]

 

   [384] …Mnesthius meantime and loyal Achates, and Ascanius by their side, set down Aeneas in the camp, all bleeding and staying every other step upon his long spear.  Raging, he struggles to pluck out the head of the broken shaft, and calls for the nearest road to relief, bidding them with broad sword cut the wound, tear open to the bottom the weapon’s lair, and send him back to battle.  And now drew near Iapyx, Iasus’ son, dearest beyond others to Phoebus, to whom once gladly did Apollo’s self, with love’s sting smitten, offer his own arts, his own powers—his augury, his lyre, and his swift arrows.  He, to defer the fate of a sire sick unto death, chose rather to know the virtues of herbs and the practice of healing, and to ply, inglorious, the silent arts.  Bitterly chafing, Aeneas stood propped on his mighty spear, amid a great concourse of warriors along with sorrowing Iülus, himself unmoved by their tears. The aged leech, with robe rolled back, and girt in Paeonian fashion, with healing hand and Phoebus’ potent herbs makes much ado—in vain; in vain with his hand pulls at the dart, and with gripping tongs tugs at the steel.  No Fortune guides his path, in no wise does Apollo’s counsel aid:

 

   [411] Hereupon Venus, smitten by her son’s cruel pain, with a mother’s care plucks from Cretan Ida a dittany stalk, clothed with downy leaves and purple flower; not unknown is that herb to wild goats, when winged arrows have lodged in their flank.  This Venus bore down, her face veiled in dim mist; this she steeps with secret healing in the river-water pour into bright-brimming ewer, and sprinkles ambrosia’s healthful juices and fragrant panacea. 

 

   [420] With that water aged Iapyx laved the wound, unwitting; and suddenly, of a truth, all pain fled from the body, all blood was staunched deep in the wound.  And now, following his hand, without constraint, the arrow fell out, and newborn strength returned, as of yore.  “Quick! Bring him arms!  Why stand ye?” loudly cries Iapyx, foremost to fire their spirits against the foe.  “Not by mortal aid comes this, not by masterful art, nor doth hand of mine save thee, Aeneas; a mightier one—a god—works here, and sends thee back to mightier deeds.”  He, eager for the fray, had sheathed his legs in gold on right and left, and, scorning delay, is brandishing his spear.

 

The scene is divided into three sections: first, the endeavours by Aeneas himself and then by Iapyx the physician to withdraw the weapon from Aeneas’s side and heal the wound; second, those human efforts failing, the descent by Venus to gather the herb dictamnus or dittany[3] and bring it to the camp, where she dips it into the water in the ewer Iapyx has been using; and lastly, Iapyx applying the now healing waters, withdrawing the arrow-head with tongs or forceps, and declaring that Aeneas has been healed by supernatural not human means and should return to battle immediately.  The series of stages in the healing illustrates this mixture of practical, theoretical, mythical and magical arts:

 

Iamque aderat Phoebo ante alios dilectus Iapyx

Iasides, acri quondam cui captus amore

Ipse suas artes, sua munera, laetus Apollo

Augurium citharmaque debat celersque sagittas. (XII.391-394)

 

Later, in comparing this episode to the model Virgil used in Homer’s Iliad, it will be clear that these medical techniques and divine involvement are not random but deliberate aspects of the imperial Roman perspective.

To understand the way in which the passage depicts the workings of medicine within this Latin epic celebration and justification of Augustan imperial rule, we need to examine somewhat more closely the three main aspects, one in each of the sections mentioned.  First there is the failure of Iapyx to heal by ordinary human efforts alone, and hence we want to know who he is and how he operates as physician to the Trojans and their allies during the war of conquest which is about to reach its climactic moment when, through the killing of Turnus, that war between enemy peoples is finally transformed into a civil war that merges the two sides—and the various races of peoples, Greeks, Trojans and native Italians—intro the Roman nation.  Second, when Venus observes her son Aeneas’s plight and intercedes on his behalf by bringing to him the Cretan dictamnus flower, anoints it with ambrosia and panacea, and secretly gives it to Iapyx, she indicates divine favor in putting the hero back into fighting form so that the decision of Jupiter to end the strife and establish the foundations of Rome may finally take place.   But as the third section indicates, the healing of Aeneas, while carried out almost simultaneously with Iapyx’s original actions as physician using human means is declared to be a miraculous cure, one that confirms Aeneas’s right to be theos-aner, the god-man progenitor of Caesar Augustus.

            In F.J. Jackson Knight’s prose paraphrase of Virgil’s poem,[4] the physician is described in the following way:

 

And now there stood beside him Iapyx, Iasus’ son.  Him Phoebus had loved beyond all others, and long since, overcome by his sharp passion, had freely offered him his own arts and his own powers, prophecy, the lyre and his swift archery.  But Iapyx wished to prolong the life of his father, then sick to the point of death, and he preferred to know the potencies of herbs and the practice of healing, and to ply this quiet art, resigning fame…..

 

The old Iapyx, his garment girt up and twisted back in the fashion of the Physician God, anxiously tried every means, using the healing hand and Apollo’s potent herbs, but all in vain; and in vain he worked the arrow-head with his fingers, or seized the iron piece in the forceps’ grip.

 

 

Oddly, Knight does not list Iapyx in his glossary of names at the end of the text. But this paraphrase brings to the surface some of the implications of the aged Trojan physician who treats Aeneas as best he can.  As a young man, when his own father, Iasus, was ill, he asked from Apollo, the god of medicine, rather than any other gifts—also signifying the various powers and gifts seen to emanate from this solar deity—those of knowledge of medicinal plants and the skill of healing.  This latter phrase is a rather general term, but one which seems from the context to refer to the ability to search wounds with his hands (hence the expression of a “surgeon” for one who both examines and restores wounds through manipulation).  In addition, no less inherent in the functioning of the role as physician, there is the humility of the healer who accepts a “secret” or “silent” position in society; in other words, to be efficacious and dedicated, the candidate for recognition as a physician stands back from the quest for fame, glory and memorability. 

There are thus two specific aspects—and one quiet quality in the personality—to the role of physician operating under the guidance of Apollo: the science of the pharmacopoeia and the gift of the healing touch.  In this instance of Aeneas’s wound on the battlefield, however, neither of these treatments seems to work.  Apollo, it should be recalled, does more than heal: he also sends down plagues, as he does in the opening of Homer’s Iliad, when he takes umbrage at the insults offered his priest by Agamemnon; and only ends the epidemic when the insult is ended by apologies, return of the priest’s daughter Chriseis, and due sacrifices are made.  We will see later in our examination of the analogous healing episode in the Iliad that Athena is at once the indirect cause of Menelaus’ wound and the agent by which the arrow meant to kill him is deflected to a less serious—perhaps more comic, and therefore more shameful—place in his body. 

            Before we move on to the second section, we need to ask about the background to Iapyx, and in particular the relation of his name to the arts he is endowed with by the God of Healing.  In addition, if there is some truth to the suggestion by the ancient commentators, such as Servius,[5] that Iapyx is Virgil’s symbolic honouring of Antonius Musa, the personal physician to Augustus, and incidentally to Virgil and Ovid as well, then how does his initial failure but later his divinely assisted success inform the whole episode’s function in mythologizing Augustus as the fulfillment of the Trojan promise in Aeneas and his son Iulus Ascanius?

            The father of Iapyx, Iasus, has a name which, in Greek is based on the root iasthai, means “healer.”[6] thus giving to the physician a double heritage, one through a human tradition of medical training and practice, the other divine, through his special relationship to Apollo.[7]  When we look at Iapyx’s own specific name, there is a different kind of doubleness to it.  On the one hand, his appellation derives from the name of the west-west wind, Iapygia, which blows from Brundisium in the southern “heel” of Italy across the Adriatic to Greece, and hence gave its name to the region known as Apulia and a river that runs through the place.[8]  On the other hand, there are various attestations of his lineage.  Marinden claims he was the son of Lycaon and a brother of Daunius and Penactias, both of whom went as leaders to found a colony in Italy; others say he was a Cretan.  Simpson identifies him as a son of Daedalus.  Virgil, as we have seen, makes him the son of Iasus.  Palinurus, the helmsman for Odysseus, is also known as Iasides, a son of Iasus, and hence draws the prestige and authority of Homeric precedent.  In other words, what seems most secure is Iapyx’s mythological background is not his historical (human) genealogy.  It is rather his association with the soothing western winds which aid sailors cross from Apulia to Greece that most brings out his character in the Aeneid, with the enhancement of training by Iasus his father and mentor and by Apollo the god of medicine and light as significant in granting him privilege as a physician.  It is this over-determined set of qualities as a physician that is carried forward in his prefiguration of Antonius Musa, “Augustus’s private physician”,  the medico Virgil wished to memori-alize.[9] 

A bridge between the legendary event, involving the mythical figure of Iapyx, and the historical physician is suggested by a fresco in the ruins of Pompeii.  In the so-called House of Sirocco, dating from the second half of the first century CE, that is, perhaps half a century after Virgil’s poem, Iapyx is depicted as drawing out the spearhead from Aeneas’s thigh using a forceps,[10] rather than with his bare hands, as suggested by the text.[11] 

            The second section of the episode turns from the purely human efforts by the physician to heal Aeneas to the intervention by the hero’s divine mother.  When Venus looks down at the battlefield in Latium and notes her beloved son Aeneas wounded and apparently beyond Iapyx’s abilities to heal, she descends to the mountain (part of the massif of Ida) which takes its name from this plant (or vice versa) in Crete to obtain the dittany or dictamne, a plant with a purple or red flower; this description of the plant and the goats is found in Aristotle (Hist. An. vi.9.1.)[12].  The power of this medicinal plant is known by the fact that goats, when wounded by hunters, seek it out to heal themselves.  It is thus both a natural substance, known less by humans than by animals, and yet sought after by a goddess in order to enhance the capacities of a trained physician.  Venus does not directly apply this substance to her son’s wound.  She dips the dittany, a plant which has the property of making the symptoms of an injury drop out of the affected body, into a solution of river (that is, running) water, ambrosia and panacea, so that the natural medicinal plant is given a further mythological boost by the honey-based wine of the gods used to enhance their incorruptibility and the strong-bitter herb (panacea deriving from pan =  “all” + acea = “healing”.   It is this potent liquor that she then adds to Iapyx’s ewer and which he then applies to the hero’s wound, as though it were an integral part of his normal treatment.

            In the third section, Venus’s covert intervention takes effect and Aeneas is quickly healed of his wound and thus able to return to battle to complete the routing of Turnus, when the arrow-head works its way out and the bloody wound closes up.  In this last section, according to Virgil’s words—as opposed to the image shown on the Pompeian fresco—Iapyx does not use an instrument but relies on his healing hands.  Nevertheless, Iapyx announces that this cure is not of his doing.  It is a miracle of divine intervention, and therefore the gods have enhanced the glory of Aeneas.  The ambiguity here is, however, telling, insofar as to all who look at the scene it is clearly Iapyx who has performed the role of  healer.  The old and wise physician humbly gives credit to a god, which is, after all, what any respectable and pious (pius) ancient would do.  He is, after all, not one of the mythical characters, such as Diomede, in Apulia who have the eponym Iapygian from the region of Italy’s heel where these Greek god-born heroes settled.  If there is a significance in the physician’s name it would be more likely to be associated with the beneficial winds or the medicinal herbs “of greater strength than elsewhere” found in Apulia.[13]  In particular, there was the highly potent medical application of the olive oil of the region known as Olea Iapygia referred to by Pliny (Nat. Hist. III.11.102).[14] 

            If we were to read the episode of Aeneas being healed in such a way that the central section of Venus’s intervention were simultaneous with Iapyx’s performance as a physician—searching Aeneas’s wounds, attempting to withdraw the spear-head, and applying medicinal waters—then there are these conclusions to be drawn.  For a great hero, such as the Trojan pater Aeneas, the suffering he must go through to earn the titles and honours required of the foundational ancestor of Rome and the primary prefiguration of Caesar Augustus needs to be beyond human skills, knowledge and tradition.  His recovery cannot be taken for granted until all the factors we have outlined come into play. The intervention of Venus, however, is not perceived by the human participants in the epic event, although the singer of tales, the persona created by Virgil to lend ancient authority to his poem, inspired by the Muses, knows and sees this higher dimension of reality in which the gods too are both spectators and actors in the theatre of the great war in Italy, and reveals this extra divine dimension to the listeners and readers of his narrative.  

            The Roman epic singer sees in the scene both what is historical and what works by common laws of nature in addition to what is mythical and transforms nature into signs, portents, and animated spirits expressing the will of the Olympian gods and the Fate that reigns above them and which protects Rome and its new imperator.  The reader or listener of the poem knows both facets of the sacred history of Aeneas the prefiguration of Caesar Augustus—not as a consequence of prophecies and premonitions alone, as the human characters within the action do, but as a manifestation of the enriched backwards glance at promises fulfilled and perfected in the ending of the Civil War and establishment of the Empire

In this light, Iapyx, the private and faithful physician to Aeneas, like Antoninus Muso the physician to Augustus, is a modest and pious man who does not claim for himself the powers of healing but assigns them to the action of the gods, if not Venus, who is unseen to him, and then to Apollo or even to Æsculapius.[15]  This act of piety, pietas,[16] further, confirms the godlike qualities of Aeneas, as it does of Augustus, since they each receive the services of the best of human physicians and the special care of heaven. 

To put Virgil’s episode into relief, it may be useful to look at its nominal model in Homer’s Iliad, Book IV, in which Menelaus is wounded and then cured by the treatment from the Greek army surgeon (iatros) Machaon.[17]  The wounding of the great battle-king of the Achaeans occurs in a passage which mirrors in a specific way the relief offered to Paris-Alexander when he is humiliated in single combat with the husband of Helen.  It is the shape and context of Meneleaus’ wound and healing rather than the specifics of the cure that sets off this Homeric incident from that we have just examined in the Aeneid. 

Briefly, in an episode that stretches from Book III through Book IV in the Iliad, the two sides in the war each demonstrate a profound sense of disgust and frustration with long and tedious siege of Troy, and therefore eagerly look forward to a way of ending it quickly through a single combat between Menelaus, whose loss of his wife to the Trojan prince Paris led to the assembling of the diverse Greek warriors—by blood, commercial or military alliance, and clientage, the various tribal groups swear loyalty to Menelaus to help him win back his wife and his honour; and Paris himself, the vain and weak youth who seduced Helen from her lawful husband.[18]  When it looks as though Paris will be killed by Menelaus in the fight, Aphrodite intervenes—paying back, it would seem, the biased decision of the prince to award her the apple in the famous Judgment of Paris—by deflecting the spear cast by the older, more experienced king and then carries the young warrior off the battle field in a mist and places him in his own room, in a luxurious bed, where he seems to be at once infantilized and made effeminate. 

It is while Menelaus searches fruitlessly in the scene of combat for the missing Paris that the Spartan king  is wounded, now by the traitorous act of the Trojan Pandarus, spurred on by Athena, who herself interferes in the epic events with the permission of Zeus and the other gods, all decided that the war should not end before the Greeks are sufficiently punished and humiliated to beg Achilles to return to fight beside them.  In the shape of Laodocus, Athena convinces Pandarus that he will earn great glory by breaking the truce through shooting the enemy leader. She “persuaded his heart in his folly” (IV.104).  At that point the texture of the narrative changes, as the narrator speaks in the second person to Menelaus, rather than describing the action in the third person: “Then, Menelaus, the blessed gods, the immortals, forgot you not…”  This rupture in the manner of the singer-of-tale’s approach signals a specific kind of intimacy between, not just himself and the Spartan king, but also between himself and the listeners to the epic, and thereby conflates the distance between the formal history of the war and the process of narration and reception of the heroic tale.  In the fourteenth book of the Odyssey, the singer-of-tales similarly addresses Eumaeus, Odysseus’ loyal swineherd.  In that case, which is unique to the epic of the hero’s wanderings and return to Ithaca, Eumaeus is the only character so addressed: “And you replied, Eumaeus, loyal swineherd.”  His loyalty and his role as the first person Odysseus meets, tests, and finds true at home, however, are not sufficient to explain this shift in textual intimacy; it would seem, rather, that the poet both honours the swineherd as a faithful workingman in a society where so many are not to be trusted and, given the special place of swine for hospitality to strangers and guests and sacrifice to the gods, a shared role as intermediaries between the timeless spirits of heaven and the historical personages of the fiction and in the audience.

Just as Athena interfered to incite Pandarus’ action, she now also interferes to protect Menelaus from a fatal wound:

she stood in front of you, and warded off the stinging arrow.  She swept it just aside from the flesh, as a mother sweeps a fly from her child when he lies in sweet slumber, and she guided it where the golden clasps of the belt were fastened and the double corselet overlapped. (IV. 130-133)

 

Note two things here.  First, the epic simile compares Athena’s protective act to that of a mother whisking a fly from her sleeping infant.  Second, the detailed, slow-motion description of the arrow’s route through Menelaus’ armour show how it is deflected from his lower belly towards his genital region.  The analogy is not completely apt here, at first blush, at least: Athena is like a mother, the arrow is like a fly, but is Menelaus like a slumbering baby?  The simile therefore serves to remind us of the infantalization of Paris when he was carried away by Aphrodite, as though he were a child hurt in a playground whose mommy picked him up and put him in his bed to rest, that image at the same time stressing his decadence and erotic coddling by the goddess of love.  The simile therefore serves to point out the contrast of the Spartan king and the Trojan prince, one effeminate, the other quite macho in his demeanor and appearance. 

Then, in the expansion of the description of the arrow’s route through Menelaus’ body, the projectile moves closer to the hero’s erotic zone, until it comes to rest in a very suggestive position:

and through the elaborate belt was it driven, and clean through the curiously worked corselet did it force its way, and through the apron which he wore, a screen for his flesh and a barrier against missiles, which was his chief defence; yet even through this did it speed.  So the arrow grazed the outermost flesh of the warrior, and immediately dark blood flowed from the wound. (IV. 134-140)

 

In a note to the original Loeb Classics edition of the Iliad, Murray points out that what is called an “apron” here is the Greek word mitre or μίτρή, which “appears to have been a short kilt-like piece of armor, covering the abdomen and the things.”[19]  What is protected between the abdomen and the thighs is the crotch, that is, Menelaus’ genitalia.  We will come back to the more precise nature of this wound that only grazes his flesh in a moment.

            Meanwhile, the poet elaborates on the nature of the wound through its appearance, and particularly the flow of blood that it occasions.  Again, in the midst of this extended description, there is a provocative and seemingly incompletely apt epic simile:

As when a woman stains ivory with scarlet, some woman of Maenoia or Caria, to make a cheekpiece for horses, and it lies in a treasure chamber, though many horsemen pray to wear it; but it lies there as a king’s delight, doubly so, as an ornament for his horse and to its driver a glory; even so, Menlaus, were your thighs stained with blood, your shapely thighs and your legs and your fair ankles beneath. (IV.141-147)

 

The analogy is drawn between the way craftswomen stain ivory red and the blood of Menelaus runs down from his crotch to his ankles, with the emphasis on his shapely thighs and his fair ankles, as though they belonged to a beautiful woman.  It would seem, on the face of it, that the comparison in appearance is of an artistic effect, the ivory stained red to enhance the beauty of the ivory cheek-piece, and the flow of blood calling attention to Menelaus’ handsome legs. 

But there is much more to it than this, and the more includes shocking gender reversals—in that Menelaus has a flow of blood that is compared to that of a woman’s: in other words, menstrual blood, in the traditional designation of the female as the being who bleeds without being wounded.  In addition, the hero who is made more beautiful by the red stains that trickle down the lower part of his body from his wounded genital region is also compared to the cheek-piece used by charioteers to control their horses.  The object crafted by the woman of Maeonia or Caria has a double value, the narrator says: on the one hand, there is the use value which drivers of the horse consider a glory; on the other, it is a king’s delight, an expensive and aesthetically pleasing ornament which is kept in a treasure chamber.  The transference from cheek of the horse to the crotch of the hero is also shocking here, and though we can extrapolate metaphorical signifiers concerning the penis and testes of the male warrior hidden in a treasure chest or scrotum, the details do not have to be precise.  More important is the sense of bleeding Menelaus appearing to be a menstruating woman.  He would seem to be in this condition because the arrow that pierced his armor did not castrate him; instead, thanks to the interference of Athena, he was only circumcised.

This outrageous suggestion is given further proof in the lines which follow.  The other Greeks, particularly Agamemnon, standing next to Menelaus, when they see his wound’s “dark blood,” shudder.  Why that frisson of horror?  Agamemnon sees not only the blood, but also the arrow: “he saw that the sinew and the barbs were outside the flesh.”  Murray notes that the sinew was that “[b]y which the arrowhead was fastened to the shaft.”[20]  Agamemnon then makes a ridiculously long speech praising his brother and lamenting the great loss his death will be to the Greek armies at Troy. The speech is ridiculous because, if the battle king really is so concerned, he ought to get on with the task of calling for medical attention.  He reacts irrationally to the sight of the wound, noting that it is superficial but nevertheless speaking as though it were fatal.   The reason for this misreading lies partly in Agamemnon’s character already established as irresponsible, hot-headed, and prone to ejaculations of passion and partly in the poet’s jocular delaying of information.  After Agamemnon’s long speech, Menelaus makes a short speech giving the precise details of his condition:

Take heart, and do not frighten the army of the Achaeans.  Not in a fatal spot has the pointed shaft been fixed; before that my flashing belt stayed it, and the kilt beneath, and the apron that the coppersmiths fashioned. (IV. 184-187)

 

This is simple and plain enough, yet still there is only the implication of what Menelaus looks like with the arrow sticking out of his crotch—the image that caused the “shudder” in the other Greeks.

            Then finally Agamemnon sends a herald to fetch medical attention, Machaon, son of Æsculepius.  According to the king, “the healer will examine the wound and lay on it herbs that will make you cease from dark pains.”  The healer is expected therefore to do two things to help out the wounded hero: first examine (that is, search the wound, meaning to look at it and by extension clean it, hence the term surgery) and second apply a medicinal salve to aid the healing.  At once, Talthybius runs to carry out the command and finds the army surgeon among other warriors.  Machaon is one of two sons of Æsculapius, the other being Podalirius,[21] both of whom are with the Achaen forces at Troy and are occasionally confused with one another in related poems and scholia on the Iliad.[22]  Robert Graves claims that Machaon’s name means “lancet”, a small lance used by surgeons, giving to his treatment a homeopathic quality; that which causes the wound also cures it, in the way of a pharmakon.

            As soon as he arrives, Machaon sizes up the situation and acts.  It is here that the comparison to the treatment of Iapyx in the Aeneid comes into its own, though we have to weigh up the total context of each episode to draw proper conclusions about the difference between a classical Roman notion of healing as evidenced in Virgil’s poem honouring Augustus Caesar and the ancient Greek idea of healing set within the parameters of the epic tale.  Machaon walks into the circle of Greeks surrounding their fallen king;

…the godlike man came and stood in their midst, and immediately drew out the arrow from the clasped belt; and as it was drawn out the sharp barbs were broken backwards.  And he loosed the flashing belt and the kilt beneath and the apron that the coppersmiths had fashioned.  But when he saw the wound where the bitter arrow had entered, he sucked out the blood, and with sure knowledge spread on it soothing herbs, which once Cheiron had given to his father with kindly intent. (IV.212-219)

 

These lines expand on the simple two-step operation Agamemnon had spoken of.  Now the surgeon extracts the arrow, then undresses the various layers of armor to expose the wound, which he “searches” by both examining it and then sucking out the infected blood, and lastly applies an ointment made of herbs according to a family recipe handed from his father, Æsculepius, and learned from the wise centaur Chiron two generations earlier.[23]

We may see in this process a number of stages in the treatment that distinguish it from that outlined in Virgil’s account of the healing of Aeneas by Iapyx.  It is also important to note the things that do not happen in Homer’s account, as well as the change in tone and implications of the medical operation.  Though the gods have been involved in the preliminaries, especially in the way Athena deflected the arrow from giving a fatal wound to Menelaus, once that is done, the scene is cleared of any divine machinery, except insofar as the healing salve applied by Machaon was learned from a mythical creature by his semi-divine father.  In some texts, this son of Æsculepius is himself deified,[24] at least in Gerenia (Messina) where his grave was a pilgrimage shrine.[25]  He is, however, treated by Homer as one among the many heroes who come to fight with Menelaus at Troy: he and his brother are described in the catalogue of ships, he had been among the suitors of Helen before she married Menelaus, and he was one of the warriors hiding in the wooden horse with Odysseus.[26]

Almost all the seriousness of Virgil’s poem is missing or diverted in a comic reduction to Agamemnon’s lengthy and pointless speech.  Machaon performs his surgery without explanation or other commentary, unlike Iapyx’s assignment of responsibility for success to the gods.  Instead, the Greek army doctor goes about his business in a business-like manner.  He pulls out the arrow without preparing the patient for the pains to be caused, although, thankfully, the barbs are bent backwards by the different layers of metal they pass through.  The exposed wound, now that the phallic-like missile has been removed, is then cleansed by sucking out the blood: the arrow is a “bitter” or a “black”  (possibly poisoned) [27] one, suggesting it causes a sting from its septic quality.  Then the herbal remedy is given as a salve or ointment to keep the area clean and heal the wound. 

In context, the healing of Menelaus is contrasted to the removal of Paris from the field of combat.  Where Paris then is seen as a child coddled by his mother and at the same time a sensuous coward who shames his wife Helen and her new “family” in Troy, the appearance of Menelaus—both in the descriptions given by the narrator in a straightforward way and in the similes that twist the exact applications—suggests rather bizarre inferences possible in the reception of the epic.  Unlike Virgil’s poem, with its emphasis on pietas and serious morality in regard to imperial governance of the world, Homer’s narrative skirts with comic implications, ridiculing of Paris as infant and fop, as irresponsible in his behaviour during the war, as he was in bringing Helen to Troy in the first place; and perhaps in more complicated conceits regarding Menelaus, comparing him, too, to an infant when Athena brushes aside the fly-arrow and protects him the way a mother does her child, but more shockingly in drawing the analogy between his bloody wound and that of a menstruant woman.  To the degree that these comic and inappropriate comparisons firm up the contrast to Paris, the similes enhance Menelaus’ status as a great warrior, and yet also allow the audience to have doubts about the wisdom in drawing the whole Greek nation into the protracted and frustrating war against Troy to retrieve a wife that was flighty enough to be tempted by the glamour of Paris. 

In addition, when Menelaus’s bloody wound is properly observed, it calls attention to itself as a mock castration or circumcision.  The joke from Athena is to push the arrow down below his belt and then make it protrude as though he were sexually aroused, at the same time as it makes him bleed like a woman in her flowers.  The medical procedure is performed, as we have seen, at least from one angle as an efficient, pragmatic affair, without interference from or thanks to the gods.  From another perspective, though, it also is comic: it is too quick, too spare in its description, coming after the long and complicated description of the wounding and the wound.  The only aspect that stands out is the way in which Machaon sucks out the blood.  This is something done to quickly remove venom after a snakebite, though the image created of the surgeon bending over the hero’s genitals calls to mind erotic depictions of homosexual fellation in Greek art.[28]  The action also occurs in the ritual of Jewish circumcision, when the mohel—professional circumciser—completes the removal of the foreskin on an eight-day old male infant by sucking out a drop of blood.[29]  This final procedure is said by Maimonides to be “so that the blood shall not congeal in the mouth pof the penis, which is dangerous.”[30] To the Greeks this operation was more than shocking and shameful; it was an indication of the inferior status of the Hebrew people.   When they could, the Greeks, like the Romans, tried to forbid Jews from carrying out their sacred and covenantal duty or mitzvah of the brit milah.

 It would seem, then, that Homer is making fun of the hero, less openly than he did of Paris, where the insults come quite explicitly from Helen and Priam to confirm the implications of the similes, but more so than many translators seem comfortable with when they try to gloss over or delete the less than honourable aspects of the episode.  Certainly, Virgil, in recreating the episode in honour of Caesar and his physician Musa, has gone out of his way to ensure that none of these untoward, satiric implications are operative in the Aeneid.

 

NOTES