Diomedes Don't Get No
Respect
This was
inspired by —and is a comment and fantasy on—
Travels in Daunia, a marvelous essay by the
Neapolitan archaeologist and historian, Amedeo Mauri. The original
Maiuri essay was dated 1954 from the town of
Foggia. It appeared in Italian as "Viaggio in
Daunia" in a collection entitled Passeggiate
in Magna Grecia/Walks
in Magna Graecia in 1963 (ed. L'arte Tipografica,
Naples, pp.191-193.)
Diomedes- a Roman copy from the
2nd-3rd century of a Greek original
from 5th century BC- in the Louvre
Guided tours in this
neck of the boot are always trying to put you in
the wake of Ulysses or Aeneas (as told by Homer
and Virgil, respectively), or on the trail of
Hercules or hook you up with the Sirens on the
Amalfi coast. Much of all that will take place
near Sicily and then to the north, up the
Tyrrhenean coast from the strait bounded by the
mythological deadly whirlpools of Scylla and
Charybdis —the Straits of Messina— up through the
Campania region, past Naples to the southernmost
part of the adjacent region of Lazio. You will
then be at Cape (or Mt.) Circeo near the town of
Gaeta. If you hug the coastline from Messina to
Circeo, it's a distance of some 450 km/280 miles.
On the other
hand, and other side of Italy along the Adriatic
coast, you find the long single region of modern
Apulia, home in ancient times to quite another
hero: Diomedes, a stalwart in Greek mythology,
known for his part in the Trojan War. In Homer's Iliad,
Diomedes is placed alongside Ajax and Achilles as
one of the greatest warriors. Even without his own
epic (such as The Odyssey or the The
Aeneid) to sing his praises, Diomedes was a
grand hero of land and sea with nothing to be shy
about in comparison even with Ulysses. Besides, as
Maiuri points out, Ulysses was a womanizer,
or at least a sirenizer, as a result of
which a lot of his men were turned into cannibal
yum-yums or at least swine. Indeed, he wasted a
lot of time on his voyage “beyond the sunset and
the baths of all the western stars." [Tennyson]
watercolor by W. & J.
Blaeu from 1645
Not so,
Diomedes. He returned from Troy to Argos, escaped
an evil plot by his wife, Aegiale, to murder him,
and went west to seek refuge with King Daunus,
ruler of the ancient kingdom of Daunia (today's
Italian region of Puglia/Apulia). Daunus and his
people, too, are said to have fled from Greece to
Italy, but earlier than Diomedes, in the late
Bronze Age (11th-10th centuries BC) and become
inextricably mixed with even earlier Italic
peoples. Today “Daunia” is an historical reference
to an area corresponding roughly to the “spur” of
the boot of Italy and extending about halfway
across the peninsula (pictured, left).
Today, it's easier simply to say “the Gargano,”
the name of that peninsula. Maiuri reminds us that
Diomedes, instead of lounging with his own local
versions of Circe and Calypso, used all that stone
taken from the shattered walls of Troy to lay the
foundations for cities in eastern Italy, cities
such as modern Benevento, Brindisi, Venafro, and
many others, even sailing out to settle what today
are the Trèmiti islands (in
the Italian region of Puglia and province of
Foggia); to the Romans they were known as
the Diomedean islands. Diomedes was the great
mythological protector and hero of that part of
Italy, says Maiuri, well before the advent of the
divine protector, Michael the Archangel and well well
before the medieval father and son team of Frederick II and Manfred, who dotted the
ancient Daunian landscape with a few structures of
their own.
If you are inclined to give mythology the benefit
of the doubt —and I do not discourage that— recall that many sources
(including Pausanias, Virgil, and
Strabo) say
that Diomedes, out of gratitude for refuge,
helped Daunus mop up the local inhabitants,
the Messapians, high-handedly dismissed
(above) as "earlier Italic peoples." There is
another tale of Diomedes'
military prowess.
It has to do with Turnus, who became king when
his father Dauno abdicated. With a little really
free translation from the sources mentioned
above, the story goes something like this
(maestro, Dorian B-flat 7, please...):
Turnus:
Hey, so you were one of the guys in that big
Trojan cow? Holy mackerel!
Diomedes:
Holy mackerel? What, you worship fish now? Oh,
it was a horse...a big Trojan horse...not a
cow. Yes, you bet I was there. First one out
of the horse. Gung-ho.
Turnus:
Horse. Right. What I meant was 'Holy Cow'! You
were in that big Trojan horse?
Diomedes: What's your
point?
Turnus:
I have just heard on Grapevinepedia that there
is this Trojan refugee moving up
the west coast of
Italy...Aeneas something..maybe...
Diomedes: I remember
him. What a
loser. Not to
worry. I used to bench-press punks like him
before breakfast.
Turnus:
Well, he might be a problem. What say you and
me just go over and clean his sun-dial once
and for all, real
good?!
Diomedes: I'm telling
you, he's a loser. What is he going to do,
found a city that will rule the known world or
something?
Leave it alone...you
know, I'm tired of fighting Trojans, anyway. I
came here to live in peace and build cities.
Hand me that boulder.
[Scholarly
note and spoiler alert: According to
Virgil's Aeneid, Turnus decided
to go it alone and met Aeneas on the
field of battle. Luca
Giordano (1634-1705) painted the
results (image, above). It did not end
well for the king of Daunia. For the
future of Rome, however, it worked out
fine.]
Maiuri
passes on to modern times and notes that the city
of Foggia has miraculously come back from the
ruins of World War II, in which it lost 29,000
citizens (either from Allied air-raids or from
wartime losses elsewhere —those who never
returned). He comments favorably on local efforts
to document the history of ancient Daunia with a
museum the way they have done in other parts of
southern Italy with their own ancient traditions
and archaeology. He hopes that they do this and do
that —well, they've done it! Maiuri did not live
to witness it but would be pleased with the news
that there is now (since 2014) a National
Archaeological Museum of Daunia in the city of Manfredonia on the
southern side of the Gargano peninsula.
In his last
paragraph, Amedeo Maiuri fondly mentions the town
of Ordona, ancient Herdònea—founded by Diomedes—
on the Tavoliere, the high plain to the west of
the Gargano spur. Here Maiuri was welcomed to the
premises of a rural establishment where they raise
horses; he toured the stables, admired the colts,
spoke with the hands, all this on a site that had
ceased to exist after resisting Hannibal two
thousand years earlier. The Romans resurrected the
city and it's still here and they are raising
horses. That is good, says Maiuri; we are, after
all, in the land of Diomedes. They say he was
quite a horse breeder, too, you know. He deserves
the respect.