Otreus

In the Greek mythological tradition, Otreus was the legendary founder of Otrea in southern Bithynia (Hellespont Phrygia).[1] His name has also been linked to Otrous, a Phyrgian town on the Eucarpitic plain.[2] He is possibly depicted on coins found in the area of Ilium.[3]

The father of Otreus is supposed by the scholiast on Homer to have been a Dymas, presumably the Dymas who was king of Phyrgia.[4]

In the Homeric and epic tradition

Otreus is mentioned in the Iliad only once by name, as having fought in a battle on the banks of the Sangarius against the Amazons, alongside Mygdon of Phrygia.[5] The aging king of Troy, Priam, is telling Helen about the battle, in which he had fought as a young man. Otreus is therefore to be placed among the heroic generation before the Trojan War.[6]

In the Argonautica of Valerius Flaccus, Otreus is also said to be a companion of Mygdon,[7] but the Dymas in the Argonautica who is connected to Otreus identifies himself as his friend and squire.[8] Valerius Flaccus has Dymas say that Otreus was killed by Amycus, a mythological type of the cruel tyrant who imposes a usually fatal task on travelers before he will allow them to pass through his territory, thus warning the Argonauts to anticipate this hazard, which they duly overcome. Their last major stopping-off point before they reach their destination takes them to the land of the Mariandyni where Lycus reigns. This Lycus is said to be the brother of Otreus, who ought to avenge his death.[9]

The family connections of Otreus in the Argonautica don't necessarily line up with the reference in the Iliad in terms of timeline. His death at the hands of Amycus is said to have occurred on his way to ask for the hand of Hesione in marriage, but according to post-Homeric legend, she had left Troy when Priam was a boy.[10]


Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite and Phrygian identity

In the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, Aphrodite pretends to be the mortal daughter of Otreus when she is in disguise to seduce the Trojan noble Anchises, identifying him as "the king of all of well-walled Phrygia."[11] Deception was required to overcome any reluctance a mortal man might feel about the cost of sleeping with a goddess: permanent impotence afterward. The disguised Aphrodite further explains that although she is Phrygrian, she can speak to Anchises in his own language because she was brought up by a Trojan nursemaid—a linguistic point indicating that in this period, the Phrygian and Trojan languages were distinct enough not to be mutually intelligible without acquisition.[12]

Ezra Pound names Otreus in Canto XXIII in a thematic use of the Homeric and epic cycle to show recurring patterns in history.[13] In a narrative passage that alludes to the Homeric hymn, Anchises is chatting with a helmsman as they sail. The helmsman observes that Adonis, another mortal desired by Aphrodite, died a virgin, and Anchises recalls Aphrodite's ruse and how she claimed "King Otreus, of Phrygia,/ that king is my father."[14] Pound's layered patterning may reference the fall of Troy and surrounding events in relation to the destruction of Smyrna during the Greco-Turkish War.[15]

Phrygian coins

B. V. Head identified Otreus as the figure depicted on a Phrygian coin that shows a warrior stepping onto the prow of a ship. The figure wears only a chlamys (a type of cloak) and is armed with a spear. Ernest Babelon believed this figure to be Aeneas, but the nudity may signify a semidivine founding hero, whereas Aeneas is more securely identified as fully armored on other coins of Otrous and neighboring Stectorium, the city of Otreus's friend Mygdon.[16] Pausanias's note that the tomb of Mygdon was located in Stectorium suggests he was venerated as a founding hero there. Some coins issued at Stectorium otherwise identified as Hector may therefore represent Mygdon, and Head proposed that the friends Mygdon and Otreus were similarly honored in their respective cities. The coins in question were issued at Otrous during the reign of Geta.[17]

References
  1. Peter Carrington, "The Heroic Age of Phrygia in Ancient Literature and Art," Anatolian Studies 27 (1977), p. 123, citing Strabo 12.4.7, C566.
  2. Carrington, "The Heroic Age," p. 123.
  3. Carrington, "The Heroic Age," pp. 123–124.
  4. W. R. Barnes, "The Trojan War in Valerius Flaccus' Argonautica," Hermes 109:3 (1981), p. 123, citing the scholiast on Homer's Iliad, 3.188, 189.
  5. Barnes, "The Trojan War," p. 367, citing Iliad 3.184ff.
  6. Carrington, "The Heroic Age of Phrygia," p. 118; Barnes, "The Trojan War," pp. 367–368.
  7. Barnes, "The Trojan War," p. 367.
  8. James E. Shelton, "The Argonauts at Bebrycia: Preservation of Identity in the Latin Argonautica," Classical Journal 80:1 (1984), p. 19, citing Argonautica 161–162, 165–168.
  9. R. W. Garson, "Some Critical Observations on Valerius Flaccus' Argonautica. II," Classical Quarterly 15:1 (1965), p. 119.
  10. Barnes, "The Trojan War,", p. 368.
  11. S. Douglas Olson, "Immortal Encounters: Aeneid 1 and theHomeric Hymn to Aphrodite," Vergilius 57 (2011), p. 59, adapting Richmond Lattimore's translation of the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, lines 105–106.
  12. Edith Hall, "When Did the Trojans Turn into Phrygians? Alcaeus 42.15," Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 73 (1988), p. 15.
  13. David Roessel, "The 'Repeat in History': Canto XXVI and Greece's Asia Minor Disaster," Twentieth Century Literature 34:2 (1988), pp.187–188, citing Canto 23.108–109.
  14. Burton Hatlen, "Pound and Nature: A Reading of Canto XXIII," Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 25:1/2 (1996), p. 185.
  15. Roessel, "The 'Repeat in History'," pp. 186–187.
  16. Carrington, "The Heroic Age of Phrygia," pp. 123–124.
  17. As discussed by Carrington, "The Heroic Age of Phrygia," pp. 123–124.
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