Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2023 November 17

= November 17 =

Agamemnon: Mycenae vs Argos (and Homer vs Aeschylus)
Hello, two interrelated Qs: Thanks, 77.147.79.62 (talk) 17:32, 17 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Q1: In Homer's Iliad (~8th c. BC), Agamemnon is king of Mycenae while Diomedes is king of Argos. Why does the Agamemnon article says he was "the king of Mycenae or Argos, thought to be different names for the same area"? (Neither Mycenae nor Argos, Peloponnese mention such conflation.)
 * Q2: In Aeschylus's Agamemnon (play) (5th c. BC), the eponym is now king of Argos indeed. [Note: its article mentions Mycenae once, but the play is all about Argos. I dare not fix it.] Do we know the reason of this change? (I mean, I know plays took liberties with myths, but why make such a geographical change contra Homer?)
 * Without being able to answer specifically, I would observe that even after writing was (re-)adopted by the Greeks of Homer's era and later (though 'Homer' may not have been an actual person), and the previously orally-transmitted myths were collated and written down, such tales were still primarily transmitted orally and performed to audiences, not read by them. In such circumstances tale-tellers tailor their renditions to the expectations of their audiences, so if Mycenae had been largely forgotten, the narrators might well switch Agamemnon's realm to one whose name was generally known.
 * This is of course not a universal rule, which is why several of the cities mentioned in the Catalogue of Ships portion of The Iliad were by Homer's day unknown by both name and location – their correlation with modern-day archaeological discoveries is a useful indication of their relative antiquity. {The poster formerly knowna s 87.81.2130.195} 51.241.161.192 (talk) 01:48, 18 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Even Homer nods. DuncanHill (talk) 02:56, 18 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Our article misrepresents the cited source, which has:
 * As a place name, Argos is used in various ways in Greek mythology. Homer uses it to refer sometimes to the kingdom of Agamemnon, with its capital at Mycenae, and sometimes to the whole of the Peloponnesus, making the Greeks the “Argives.” He also mentions the specific town of Argos, of which the hero Diomedes was the leader.
 * --Lambiam 12:28, 18 November 2023 (UTC)