Contrast with the quotation from the Odyssey

Odysseus and the Axes: Homeric Ballistics Reconstructed Author(s): Peter Brain and D. D. Skinner Source: Greece & Rome, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Apr., 1978), pp. 55-58 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/642273 Accessed: 01-05-2019 17:22 UTC

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ODYSSEUS AND THE AXES: HOMERIC BALLISTICS RECONSTRUCTED

By PETER BRAIN AND D. D. SKINNER

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.

'Now', says Penelope (Od. 19.5 72 ff.), 'I shall set up the contest: the axes, which that man [Odysseus] used to erect in order in his halls, like keel-stocks, twelve in all; and standing far off he would send an arrow through them.' The bow to be used is a famous one, previously owned by the mighty Eurytus (21.32), and the suitor who can string it and perform the shot shall have Penelope. It is not, how- ever, an easy test; even to string the well-polished bow, says Antinous (21.91 ff.), will probably be beyond them, since there is no one as strong as Odysseus in their company. Telemachus now sets up the axes, 'digging one long trench for all of them, and setting them up true to the line; he piled up earth on both sides' (21.120 ff.). Then he tries, in vain, to string the bow; next the suitors attempt it, again without success. Meanwhile Odysseus is present in disguise, and in due course he strings the bow and performs the shot without diffi- culty. Without even leaving his seat, 'he let fly the shaft, aiming straight ahead. He did not miss the end of the handle of any of the axes, but the arrow, weighted with bronze, went right through and out at the door' (21.420 ff.). After which, as everyone knows, he used the rest of the arrows on the suitors.

We do not wish to add to the arguments that have been put forward; these are well summarized by D. L. Page.' Bizarre explanations apart, there are two main schools of thought. The first makes the arrow pass through the holes in the axe-heads that receive the handles when the axes are in use. Protagonists of this view take the noun aTELXELt to mean the hole in the head that receives the handle, not the handle itself, and translate: 'He did not miss a single hole from the first onwards.'" Stubbings3 has a picture of the axe-heads, which have a blade on either side of the hole, planted in the ground, and says: 'The fact that the haftless axe-heads would not stand far above ground level fits in with the fact that Odysseus shoots from a sitting posture.' But even if Odysseus' stool were only a foot high, his eye, which must be on the level of the holes for aiming, would be more than three feet above the ground; likewise, if he holds the bow in the ordinary

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56 ODYSSEUS AND THE AXES

way, the arrow must be at least half a bow's length above the ground. To perform the Stubbings-shot, to use Page's terminology, he would have to lie flat on the ground and hold the bow horizontally. Butler offers an eccentric variation.4 Remarking that the difficulty of this passage has surely been overrated, he suggests that the iron part of each axe was wedged into the handle, or bound securely to it, so that the hole was left open; the handles were then planted in the ground, bringing the hole to a suitable level for a sitting shot. He rather spoils this remarkable explanation by finally observing: 'The feat is absurdly impossible', and for once we can agree with him. Pocock5 gets over the problem by postulating a megaron on two levels, with the axe- heads buried a la Stubbings on the upper one and Odysseus on the lower; but although he mentions earlier that he shot from far off, when he draws his plan he puts Odysseus right up against the first hole, where indeed he would have to be if such a shot were to have any chance of success. The second explanation is that of Page, who revives and ingeniously

argues an old idea that these were ceremonial Mycenaean double-axes; the head and handle are in one piece, all of iron, and the handle ends in a ring which, from contemporary representations, appears to be of some size. The heads are planted in the ground with the handles standing vertically, and the arrow passes through the rings. This is also shooting 'through the iron', a phrase that is repeatedly mentioned, and the shot is obviously possible if the rings are large enough. Page quotes some information from practising archers, but not all of it was very reliable. As far as we are aware, no one has attempted a practical test with a bow, though Pocock made some experiments with a small-bore rifle, a distinctly non-Homeric weapon. We therefore set out to find how large the rings would have to be, and how close together they must be placed, to make the shot possible. As a starting-point, we assumed with Page (p. 112) that the rings

were 4 inches in diameter. We used a bow with a 47 lb draw; although heavier bows, up to 100 lb, exist, and Odysseus was a strong man, 47 lb is about the maximum that a strong archer would use for accurate target shooting today, and in any case it seemed improbable that Homeric technology could have made a string for a stronger bow than this. An uninitiated person of ordinary strength would have diffi- culty in stringing it. We had next to decide what 'far off' (roXX'dv &vevOe) meant, and we made the arbitrary assumption that it meant as far Iou Lhe first axe as that axe was from the last; thus, if the axes occupy a length x, the total length of the set-up is 2x. The next question is that of trajectory. Page says (p. 99) that no one cares about gravitational fall over so short a distance, but in fact this is the

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ODYSSEUS AND THE AXES 57

heart of the problem. Our first experiment, conducted in an office corridor, established the fall of the arrow over the second half of its flight (i.e. the part occupied by the axes) for various values of x. Having shot several arrows into a target from a distance x, our archer retired a further x, and, aiming at the same mark without altering his sights, shot a further series of arrows. The difference in height between the first and second groups is the fall over the second distance x. In the hope of showing the trajectory more directly we conducted some experiments at night with a small lamp attached to the arrow, but it travelled too fast for photographic recording. If we use rings 4 inches in diameter, and take account of the over-all diameter of the arrow (it has fletches at the rear end to make it fly straight, and no part of the arrow may touch any of the rings), then a fall of 2 inches is about as much as we can allow. This is obtained

when x is 12 feet. Placing the rings a yard apart, as suggested by Page, would mean a fall of more than a foot in the second half of the 66-

foot flight, and this makes the shot quite impossible. We therefore decided to put our rings one foot apart. Quite a modest megaron- which Odysseus' was not, because it contained all the suitors-would then suffice for the trick.

To simulate the rings we cut twelve pieces of expanded polystyrene, 9 inches square and / inch thick, and made a 4-inch-diameter hole in the middle of each. These were attached with rubber bands to cross-

pieces nailed to a horizontal plank 11 feet long, so that they stood vertically with the holes one behind the other and a foot apart. These rings are extremely light and the slightest touch causes obvious move- ment, while any hole or nick is easily seen. As the archer had no experience of shooting from a chair we erected the rings at eye level, and he stood with the tip of the arrow, when drawn, 11 feet from the first ring. A bale of straw received the arrows at the far end. After three sighting shots with only the first and last rings in place, in the course of which the first ring was damaged, we fitted all the rings and he made a perfect shot; no ring was touched and the nock of the arrow could be seen protruding from the straw in the middle of the tunnel of rings when looking down it from the shooting position. His next shot nicked one of the middle rings, but the following three were all perfect. We then increased the distance between the archer and the first ring, and found that the shot was still possible when this was 15 feet (a total course of 26 feet) but not when it was 18 feet. The archer thinks that at the original distance of 11 feet he could probably do it with slightly smaller rings, say 3 inches in diameter, but we have not tried this. He is also sure that with a little practice he could perform the trick sitting down, as Odysseus did.

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58 ODYSSEUS AND THE AXES

There are, of course, several differences between archery today and in Homer's time. Modern bows have sights, stabilizers, and other fittings, and are carefully tuned to shoot consistently; even more important, arrows are made with great precision to fly straight. Modern archers, in consequence, can improve somewhat on the per- formance of the professionals mentioned by Page, who, about the turn of the century, usually missed a 4-foot target at 40 yards; a modern archer of good club standard should consistently hit a dinner-plate at that distance, and a champion will have no difficulty with a saucer. When we consider the deficiencies in ancient equip- ment it seems very improbable that any archer of Homeric times could have done better than we did. This means that any tests in- volving the handle-holes in axe-heads-unless they were at least 3 inches in diameter-could not have been performed from a position 'far off', and there is no point in discussing such tests further. The Page-shot, given 4-inch rings a foot apart and a skilled archer, is perfectly practicable. Probably the poet of the Odyssey had wit- nessed some such feat, standing, after dinner, well out of the target area in someone's shadowy megaron. Odysseus, who knew all the tricks, could surely have done it; but it is not a shot for beginners, and Penelope was probably quite safe in proposing it to the suitors.6

NOTES

1. Folktales in Homer's Odyssey (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), pp. 95 ff. 2. Samuel Butler, The Odyssey rendered into English Prose (London, 1922), p. 284. 3. F. H. Stubbings in A Companion to Homer (London, 1962), pp. 534 ff. 4. Loc. cit.

5. L. G. Pocock, Odyssean Essays (Oxford, 1965), pp. 12 ff. 6. We thank Dr. H. Telle for drawing some of the literature to our attention. A photo-

graph 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 ' Claire Preaux, Brussels, 1975, pp. 56 ff.) 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 malaise 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.

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