Larides/Thymber
Some thoughts about Virgil, and they bear no relation whatsoever to Brexit. If anyone feels that a blog about traumatic separation betrays deeper preoccupations, they’re wrong. As for the image of a severed hand desperately trying to get back to the body it belongs to, entirely coincidental. This is pure escapism and my id is locked in the cellar.
We’re in Book 10 of the Aeneid, and Virgil gets graphic in a manner more typical of epic successors like Lucan and Statius. Pallas, the young warrior son of Evander and Aeneas’ protégé, is enjoying his aristeia, an extended display of martial prowess characteristic of epic heroes; less technically, Pallas is on the warpath.
At 10.390-6, he comes upon, and promptly dispatches, a pair of Italian warriors, Larides and Thymber. They are in fact identical twins:
uos etiam, gemini, Rutulis cecidistis in aruis,
Daucia, Laride Thymberque, simillima proles,
indiscreta suis gratusque parentibus error;
at nunc dura dedit uobis discrimina Pallas.
nam tibi, Thymbre, caput Evandrius abstulit ensis;
te decisa suum, Laride, dextera quaerit
semianimesque micant digiti ferrumque retractant.
You also, twin brothers, fell in the Rutulian fields,
Larides and Thymber, offspring of Daucus, most alike,
indistinguishable to your own, a delightful source of confusion to your parents.
But now Pallas gave you harsh marks of difference:
your head, Thymber, Evander’s sword took off,
while you, Larides, your severed hand seeks for as its own,
its dying fingers twitching and clutching at its sword.
The closing image is especially unsettling, if for us slightly suggestive of Hammer House of Horror. There’s nothing tongue-in-cheek about it here, though. The war that Virgil is describing is a legendary counterpart of the Roman civil wars that had finally ended just a decade before Virgil’s writing, and this epic war in Italy has all the brutality and moral incomprehensibility of civil conflict. For me, there’s no book of the Aeneid more extraordinary than Book 10, a profoundly challenging account of conflict between two peoples, Trojans and Italians, who were both the ancestors of the first Roman readers of the poem. Those readers were forced to question the validity of their national hero Aeneas’ claim to settlement in Italy, and to view events as much through the eyes of Aeneas’ implacable enemies as those of Aeneas himself. That ambivalent treatment of the war extends to Pallas, Aeneas’ closest ally, whose character we are encouraged to admire and whose violent death at Turnus’ hands (not long after this passage) we are guided to deplore, but who has a disturbing capacity for shocking bloodshed himself.
Homer had described warrior twins dying simultaneously in battle, in Iliad 5 and 6: in Iliad 5 Aeneas is the killer, so here one effect is to style Pallas a potential Aeneas, if only he might have managed to live long enough. But in neither Homeric passage are the characteristics of twinhood exploited to the extent that they are in the Aeneid.
What are these “characteristics of twinhood”? From the inside, I have no experience. From the outside, identical twins pose problems to us of distinguishability, essentially: they are different people, but the normal means of establishing their different identity are not available to us. This is how Virgil represents Larides and Thymber, two distinct men indistinguishable to their own– in a poignantly contradictory expression, gratusque parentibus error (392), a sweet source of confusion to their parents: confusion should not be a positive experience, of course. But the previous line (391) is a fine piece of composition, too, Daucia, Laride Thymberque, simillima proles, “Larides and Thymber, offspring of Daucus, most alike.” The names of the two brothers are so different, yet pressed so closely together, and surrounded by words describing what they have in common, their fatherhood by Daucus, their preternatural similarity. This impression of their inseparability is achieved as much by the structure of the line, deploying all the resources of an inflected language (allowing words to be placed where their impact is greatest), as by its content.
If that line expresses the strange togetherness of twins, the following (393) is jarringly corrective. “But now Pallas gave you harsh marks of difference”: Pallas brings violent definition to these indistinguishable men, killing them individually, and with Pallas’ intervention the poet is able to distinguish them, too: there’s a sharp contrast between lines 390 and 391, all about the twins’ interchangeability, and the lines that recount their deaths, which carefully separate Thymber (394) and Larides (395-6), and which Virgil renders as distinct as he can, in rhythm, organisation, length. Death has untwinned them.
But if in terms of composition line 391 expressed the unity of twins, 395 is its antithesis. In the deaths of both twins the theme of severance and dislocation is developed beyond their separation from each other: words of rupture, abstulit (“took off”), decisa (“severed”), describe a horrific partitioning of Thymber and Larides themselves. Thymber is decapitated, and Larides’ sword hand is chopped off. The culminating lines, quite as gruesome as any that Virgil penned, describe the efforts of Larides’ severed hand to be reunited with the rest of him. In 395 Virgil once again uses the shape of the line, as well as its sense, to convey disintegration. In English we have to translate it, “while you, Larides, your severed hand seeks for as its own”, but a word-for-word version of te decisa suum, Laride, dextera quaerit would be “you )( severed )( as its own, Larides, your right hand seeks”, the word for severed, decisa, separating te, you, and suum, (as) its own, and itself separated from its noun dextera, hand, mimicking in the word order the distance between hand and owner. The notion of a hand seeking out an entity distinct from itself to which it also belongs is inherently weird, but so here is Virgil’s line composition.
These are just seven lines of Virgilian verse, but within their scope parents’ puzzled joy collapses into the repellent image of a twitching, severed hand, and the harmony of twins into their physical disintegration. The implications of this little episode don’t quite stop there. The salient issue with Larides and Thymber, to my mind at least, is unity and its dissolution, and this is something key to the later books of the Aeneid. Aeneas, it is strongly suggested, will bring unity to Italy, but the problem, or maybe paradox, is that this future unity after Aeneas’ ultimate victory will only be achieved by extreme discord between Trojans and Italians, the warfare that will only end with Aeneas’ impassioned slaughter of Turnus, in revenge for the death of Pallas, in Book 12.
Here Virgil presents us with the ultimate example of togetherness, the bond between twins, then shows it shattered into pieces. The short tale of Thymber and Larides, or is it Larides and Thymber, encapsulates in its own way the loss of peace and coherence that is apparently essential, in Virgil’s mysterious account of the origins of Rome, to Aeneas’ unifying mission in Italy.
Did Alexander wear my hat?
This is a pakool, پکول, or you might hear it called a Chitrali cap, or even just an Afghan cap. At any rate it’s an article of headwear from the Afghan/Pakistan borderlands with which we’re these days pretty familiar. If you visit that part of the world, it’s an obvious souvenir: I purchased this one, like generations of travellers before me, in Chicken St in Kabul in 2008.
More recently I’ve been surprised to discover the pakool at the centre of quite a heated academic debate, pursued in the pages of some very prestigious classical journals. It began with an article in American Journal of Archaeology in 1981, “The Cap that Survived Alexander”, in which Prof. Bonnie Kingsley made the arresting observation that the pakool closely resembles an ancient item of headwear, the kausia (καυσία):
This is a terracotta figure of a “Macedonian boy” (from Athens, about 300BC) in the British Museum: the kausia seemed to have functioned for Macedonians pretty much as the kilt does for Scots, the defining garment of a Macedonian man.
It’s true, too, that this Macedonian boy does look exactly like he’s wearing a pakool. Kingsley didn’t think the similarity was coincidental, and argued that the kausia, along with other characteristically Macedonian items of clothing, originated in the part of the world where the pakool is now worn. There were no clear references to the Macedonian kausia, in texts or artistic representations, before Alexander the Great, she claimed, and so the pakool/kausia must have been adopted by Alexander’s troops as they approached India through what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan in 327-6BC. (There is some reference to the adoption of native dress by the soldiers: Curtius 9.3.10-11, Diodorus 17.94.2).
In 1986 Kingsley’s article received an academic response, and quite a decisive one. In Transactions of the American Philological Association Ernst Fredricksmeyer, an Alexander specialist, proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the kausia was just too established a staple of the Macedonian wardrobe for it to have been imported from Central Asia toward the end of Alexander’s campaigns. A nice illustration of the “Macedonianness” of the kausia is an epigram by Antipater of Thessalonica (in Macedonia), addressed to the Roman aristocrat L. Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus in around 11BC (Anth. Pal. 6.335):
Καυσίη, ἡ τὸ πάροιθε Μακηδόσιν εὔκολον ὅπλον,
καὶ σκέπας ἐν νιφετῷ, καὶ κόρυς ἐν πολέμῳ,
ἱδρῶ διψήσασα πιεῖν τεόν, ἄλκιμε Πείσων,
Ἡμαθὶς Αὐσονίους ἦλθον ἐπὶ κροτάφους.
ἀλλὰ φίλος δέξαι με· τάχα κρόκες, αἵ ποτε Πέρσας
τρεψάμεναι, καὶ σοὶ Θρῇκας ὑπαξόμεθα.
I, the kausia, once the Macedonians’ comfortable gear,
both shelter in a snow-storm and a helmet in war,
thirsting to drink your sweat, stout Piso,
have come, a Macedonian, to your Italian brows.
But receive me generously; maybe the wool that once routed
the Persians will help you too to subdue the Thracians.
So Fredricksmeyer scotched the idea that the pakool inspired the kausia pretty effectively, but he wasn’t ready to ditch the whole idea of a connection. He agreed that the hats were uncannily similar, and I think as a Classicist and Alexander expert he wanted the similarity to be significant. Kingsley had recorded an encounter in Afghanistan between a Californian and an Afghan (it’s not clear to me whether the Californian is Kingsley herself or someone else): “A Pashto-speaking Afghan living near the Khyber Pass, in giving a rust-colored cap to a young American from California, informed her that his tribal ancestors had received the cap from Alexander!” Kingsley had argued that the opposite was the truth: Alexander and the Macedonians had got their hat from the Afghans. But Fredricksmeyer was happy on this basis simply to reverse the direction of transmission. It was the Macedonians who had introduced the pakool to Afghanistan and Pakistan. In other words, in the pakool-wearing Mujahedin on our TV screens we were looking at a surviving relic of Alexander’s campaigns in the East.
That’s an intoxicating idea for a Classicist. Like a lot of intoxicating ideas, though, not very plausible. The debate between Kingsley and Fredricksmeyer rumbled on for a while (see the bibliography below; Kingsley’s last intervention was published posthumously), with Fredricksmeyer latterly slightly less confident about any connection between the pakool and Alexander the Great. The coup de grâce was administered by Willem Vogelsang of the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden (under the not-so-catchy title of “The Pakol, a distinctive but apparently not so very old headgear from the Indo-Iranian borderlands”), who showed that the pakool is actually a simple adaptation of caps with rolled rims worn all over the borderlands of China, India and Central Asia.
It took a sober ethnologist to puncture the romantic ideas of the Classicists. To put that another way, it took a scholar who understood this part of the world on its own terms to correct a perception driven by obviously Western priorities. But this is what for me makes this academic tussle is the 1980’s quite timeless. Classicists, or at least the classically educated, have been indulging similar fantasies about Afghanistan and Pakistan ever since the first Europeans arrived there. When the French mercenary Claude-Auguste Court first set eyes on the valley of Peshawar, he “wondered how the necessity to make a livelihood had given me, a mere French officer, the possibility to go so far away and behold the most beautiful scene of Alexander’s exploits.”** When the British beheld this surviving fragment of a Buddhist monastery, it was again as a sign that Alexander had been there before them:
In this case the British were encouraged by the Afghans, in whose folklore Alexander figured large. The local name for the Pillar of Alexander was the Minar-e Sikandar, but neither that nor the man near the Khyber Pass was the result of folk memories of Alexander’s campaigns, but rather the continuing popularity in Afghanistan of the cluster of tales known for convenience as the Alexander Romance (an astonishingly widespread storytelling phenomenon you can, if you’re so inclined, read more about here). I’m pretty sure that another product of the encounter between Alexander-obsessed Europeans and Afghan folklore is the persistent idea, thoroughly debunked, that the non-Islamic people who survive in Chitral are descendants of Alexander’s soldiers.
Well, at this remove it’s obvious enough, I think, that the Kingsley/Fredricksmeyer exchange says more about the 1980s AD than the fourth century BC. When Kingsley wrote her first article, pakools were all over our newspapers and television screens, worn by people that back then we idolised, the Mujahedin fighting the Soviet-backed government in Kabul after the Soviet invasion in 1979. Since then the associations of the cap have been variable. In the fighting between the Taliban and Northern Alliance before 2001, the pakool was the mark of the northern forces (a black turban identifying the Taliban), but the 1980s had lent the hat a lingering jihadi chic (there are photos of Osama bin Laden wearing one): the Pakistani Taliban favour it, as do some ISIS fighters.
Back in 1981, though, the impulse to link the Mujahedin’s characteristic headwear to Alexander must have been hard to resist. To me that’s as interesting as any other theory, because if Alexander the Great isn’t influencing anyone’s style of hat, he remains the filter through which the West all too often seeks to understand Afghanistan.
B. M. Kingsley, “The cap that survived Alexander”, AJA 85 (1981), 39-46;
— “The ‘Chitrali’, a Macedonian import to the West”, Afghanistan Journal 8 (1981), 90-93;
— “The Kausia Diadematophoros”, AJA 88 (1984), 66-68;
— “Alexander’s ‘kausia’ and Macedonian tradition”, Classical Antiquity 10, (1991), 59-76;
E. A. Fredricksmeyer, “Alexander the Great and the Macedonian kausia”, TAPhA 116 (1986), 215-227;
— “The kausia: Macedonian or Indian?” in I. Worthington (ed.), Ventures into Greek History (Oxford, 1994), 135-158;
W. Vogelsang, “The Pakol, a distinctive but apparently not so very old headgear from the Indo-Iranian borderlands”, Khil’a 2 (2006), 149-156.
(**J.-M. Lafont, “Private business and cultural activities of the French officers of Maharajah Ranjit Singh”, Journal of Sikh Studies 10 (1983), 74-104, at 86)