Trinity Journal of Literary Translation
From The Catalogue of Women
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trans. Claudio Sansone
...handsome Agamemnon, lord of men, married
the dark-skinned Clytamnestra, daughter of Tyndareus.
She engendered, in that Great Hall1, the beautiful-ankled Iphimede
and Electra both, whose formed2 beauty competed with that of the immortals. The well-greaved Achaeans slaughtered Iphimede at the altar of swift Artemis of the golden arrows,
so that on that day, paying the beautiful-ankled Argive —illusory phantom—3
as blood-money, the ships might might sail down to Ilium; but the deer-hunting archer4 easily kept her5 safe,
and let fall lovely ambrosia taken from deep in the earth, and placed her where her skin may set firmly, immortal and incorruptible forever.6
And now the the tribe of men in that land
call her the priestess of Artemis, renowned servant of the shooter of arrows.
1 2
21
The House of Atreus. I have added ‘formed’ because I felt ‘beauty’ was reductive of eidos, which in its most literal sense means ‘form, shape’. It has been translated (in this same semantic setting) as ‘countenance’ and ‘appearance’, seemingly with a similar intent to underscore the particularly human component of beauty. I have also wanted to emphasise it in order to juxtapose Electra’s eidos with Iphimede’s eidōlon. 3 As Solmsen notes, the term eidōlon (which belongs at the head of the next line, fits very clunkily into the text, gramatically speaking. This likely to be both for emphasis, and to connect the sentences through the word in a rhetorical turn that will not translate nicely, so instead I have emphasised it in a different way, much to the same effect, as an injunction. 4 Artemis. 5 The ‘real’ Iphimede, rather than her phantom left to be sacrificed. 6 Solmsen suggests that this passage promotes an “illustrious destiny which is not the same as in the Cypria” (353). However, having reviewed Proclus’ summary of the lost epic, I find the destiny is exactly the same, and have no reason not to suggest the location she is transported to is indeed Tauris. As Solmsen later notes, however, Pausanias attests that in the Ehoeae Iphemede is said to have been transformed into Hecate by Artemis—this evidence could change the way we read the passage, as the implications would then abound—I would venture to suggest the entrance to the underworld, given Hecate’s Cthonic affiliation, and the view of her presiding over liminal spaces.
