Belted Heroes and Bound Women

Book excerpt: This clearly written, beautifully illustrated book introduces a previously unrecognized Homeric theme, the 'belted hero, ' and argues for its lasting historical, literary, and archaeological significance. The belted hero fuses king, warrior, charioteer, and athlete into a supreme image of political power. The special 'heroic warrior's belts' (zosteres) worn by Agamemnon, Menelaos, and Nestor served as unimpeachable visual emblems of their exalted positions of rank. The feminine counterpart, or zone, presents the woman as superior in the competitive arena of love. Bennett shows that the belted hero represented an ideology attractive to wealthy landowners, their oikoi, and inter-family connections. He suggests that the communal spirit of the hoplite phalanx attempted to appropriate the belted hero ideal, even while undermining its ethos of personal honor. Bennett also makes several important iconographic interpretations that provide fundamentally new insights into early Greek oral epic compositional techniques, conceptions of time, and cosmological structure. Belted Heroes and Bound Women will be of interest to scholars and students of early Greek art, history, or literature.