Forgive me if I don't reply to all of Lawrence's reply to my original comments. I've been trying to find out how tall the Ancient Greeks were. We used a secondary text in first-year humanities ages ago in which some useful figures were given but I can't remember its title and can't find anything on my shelves that might be it.
Here's an exchange that appeared some years back in the New York Times, October 11, 1987 Greeks of Stature To the Editor:Arthur Krystal comes up a little short when he writes ("How Beautiful Was Helen of Troy? What Homer Never Told Us," July 12): "Homer's most admirable heroes are so by virtue of their height [ italics mine ] and strength." I don't know which "admirable heroes" Mr. Krystal has in mind, but in Book Three of the "Iliad" we are told that not only was Agamemnon, the titular leader of the Greeks, shorter by a head than the others, but that Odysseus, certainly the most resourceful and most durable among them, was "shorter than King Agamemnon by a head."
According to the E. V. Rieu translation, "You would have taken him [ Odysseus ] for a sulky fellow and no better than a fool. But when that great voice of his came booming from his chest, and the words poured from his lips like flashes of winter snow, there was no man alive who could compete with Odysseus. When we looked at him then, we were no longer misled by appearances."
Obviously, height may have its shortcomings—unless buttressed by brains—even in Homer!
MILTON BIRNBAUM Springfield, Mass. Arthur Krystal replies:Homer repeatedly affixes the adjective "tall" to his heroes. It is "tall Achilles" and "tall Hector of the shining helm." Agamemnon, however, is no taller than he should be. Achilles calls him "a wine sack with a dog's eyes and a deer's heart," though "tall Priam" describes him as a "tremendous" man, a man of "power and stature." As for Odysseus, he was shorter than other chieftains, though he looked mighty tall to his wife's suitors back in Ithaca. The long and short of it is: we'll never know how tall Homer's heroes were. Odysseus was short, probably in the sense that a guard in the N.B.A. is short compared to [sic] a center.
------------------One would think that this information would be easy to come by on the Internet, but I've given up searching for now. Tomorrow I'll ask a colleague in classics. Meanwhile, an analysis of long bones found at Kato Zakro, 'a well known Minoan site' on the eastern shore of Crete, reveals that males in the population studied averaged 167 cm in height (a bit over 5' 5") and females 157.5 cm. Maybe by Homer's time people were somewhat taller.
Robert Paul ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
