Made in myth.(The Locrian Maidens: Love and Death in Greek Italy)(Book Review)

James M. Redfield The Locrian Maidens: Love and Death in Greek Italy. Princeton University Press, 4-59 pages, $55

Epizephyrian Locri is a no man's land for classicists. Those who study this strange Greek colony on the Italian peninsula--and few do--tend to begin with the Locrian sage Zaleucas, the earliest known lawgiver in ancient Greece. Zaleucas made some very good laws for Epizephyrian Locri. His laws were so good, in fact, that when Pythagoras came to offer his services to the city, the citizens met Pythagoras at the border and said:

 
   We, Pythagoras, hear that you are a man both 
   wise and able. But since we find no fault with 
   our own laws, we for our part will try to stand 
   by our established order. Therefore go somewhere 
   else, taking from us anything you 
   might need. 

Thanks, but no thanks. The Locrians were content to sit civilly on the sidelines of Greek civilization and fan the glory of their neighbor Syracuse. As James M. Redfield writes in his new book, The Locrian Maidens: Love and Death in Greek Italy, "When all the other great Greek cities were deeply engaged in making history--which is to say, in the struggle for power--the Locrians seem to have been content to settle for happiness." The Locrians looked neither to Sparta nor to Athens for cultural guidance. They had their own distinct way of being Greek.

The Locrians were one of the original Greek peoples. According to Pindar, they were the offspring of the rocks that Deucalion--the Greek Noah--brought down with him from Parnassus after the great flood. Old-world Locris was comprised of two discontinuous territories on the Greek mainland, stretching from Euboea to the Corinthian gulf. In the seventh century B.C., these people founded one of the earliest colonies in Southern Italy: Epizephyrian Locri. This colony became one of the major cities on the western frontier.

Redfield sees little similarity between the Locrian colony and the motherland, although he contends that the two cities acknowledged the same foundational myth--that of the Locrian maidens (of his book's title). The legend goes that during the sack of Troy, the "lesser" Locrian Ajax, who plays second fiddle to the "greater" Telamonian Ajax in the Iliad, tried to rape Cassandra while she held on to the Palladium, a wooden statue of Athena given to the Trojans by the gods. The rape itself would have presented few problems to the Greek conscience, were not Cassandra clutching the figure of Athena so tightly that Ajax knocked the statue off its plinth. The scene is a ...