Thalatta! Thalatta!

Thálatta! Thálatta! (Greek: Θάλαττα! θάλαττα! — "The Sea! The Sea!") was the cry of joy when the roaming Ten Thousand Greeks saw Euxeinos Pontos (the Black Sea) from Mount Theches (Θήχης) in Trebizond, after participating in Cyrus the Younger's failed march against the Persian Empire in the year 401 BC. The mountain was only a five-day march away from the friendly coastal city Trapezus. The story is told by Xenophon in his Anabasis.[1]

Θάλαττα, θάλαττα — The Sea! The Sea! — painting by Bernard Granville Baker, 1901

Linguistics

Thálatta (θάλαττα, pronounced [tʰálatta]) is the Attic form of the word. In Ionic, Doric, Koine, Byzantine, and Modern Greek it is thálassa (θάλασσα).

Legacy

Heinrich Heine uses the cry in his cycle of poems Die Nordsee published in Buch der Lieder in 1827.[2]

The cry is mentioned by the narrator of Frederick Amadeus Malleson's translation of Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth,[3] when the titular expedition discovers an underground ocean. It is absent from the original French work.[4]

The phrase appears in Book 1 of James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses when Buck Mulligan, looking out over Dublin Bay, says to Stephen Dedalus, "God! ... Isn't the sea what Algy calls it: a great sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. Epi oinopa ponton. Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks! I must teach you. You must read them in the original. Thalatta! Thalatta! She is our great sweet mother. Come and look." In Book 18, Molly Bloom echoes the phrase in the closing moments of her monologue: "and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire."[5] In book III.3 of Finnegans Wake this is echoed as "kolossa kolossa!"[6] combining the original chant with Greek kolossa, colossal.[7]

Iris Murdoch wrote a novel called The Sea, The Sea, which won the Booker Prize in 1978.[8]

Anabasis

Sol Yurick’s 1965 novel that inspired Walter Hill's 1979 film of the same name, The Warriors, was based on Anabasis, and the movie references this quotation near the end, as the titular gang stands on a Coney Island beach and their leader (Michael Beck) comments, "When we see the ocean, we figure we're home."

The shout briefly appears in Lionel Dunsterville's memoir The Adventures of Dunsterforce (1920), when, after passing Rasht, Dunsterville's small force reaches the Caspian Sea:

It was about an hour before sunset that the proximity of the sea was announced by the sand dunes, a moment later—Θάλασσα! θάλασσα!—the blue waters of the Caspian became visible in the distance, and we were soon in the outskirts of the Kazian settlement.[9]

See also

References
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Thalatta! Thalatta!.
  1. Xenophon. "Anabasis: Book 4, Chapter 7, Section 24". Perseus Project. Tufts University. Retrieved 17 September 2013.
  2. "Heine, Heinrich: Buch der Lieder. Hamburg, 1827".
  3. Journey to the Center of the Earth, translated by Frederick Amadeus Malleson
  4. Verne, Jules (1864). Voyage au centre de la Terre (1st ed.). Paris: Hetzel. p. 220. Retrieved 27 December 2020.
  5. Joyce, James (1922). Ulysses (Gabler ed.). New York: Vintage, 1986. pp. 4–5, 643.
  6. Joyce, J. Finnegans Wake. p. 551
  7. McHugh, R. Annotations to Finnegans Wake. p. 551
  8. Murdoch, Iris (1978). The Sea, The Sea. Chatto & Windus. ISBN 9780701123390.
  9. Dunsterville, Lionel (1920). The Adventures of Dunsterforce.
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