The gods abandon the city (1)

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A necessary precondition of the fall of Troy was the removal of its protecting goddess as embodied in her holy statue, the Palladion. Odysseus and Diomedes mounted a commando raid and carried it off. This is an episode entirely oriental in character. It was regular practice in the Near East to carry off the gods of a defeated city, that is, its divine images, and keep them. The breakdown of the city’s divine protection may also be expressed by saying that its gods themselves abandon it. Aeschylus’ Eteocles observes that a captured city’s gods are said to desert it (Seven 217-218), and Sophocles represented the gods of Troy as carrying their own images away on their shoulders, knowing that the city was forfeit (fr. 452). The desertion of a city by its gods is a commonplace motif in Sumerian and Akkadian literature. Sometimes they depart in anger at the wickedness of the inhabitants or of the king; sometimes they flee in fear of the forces arrayed against them, turning themselves into birds or some other kind of observable creature. In the fragment on the siege of Uruk one reads: ‘The gods of Uruk the sheepfold turned into flies, they were buzzing about the plazas; the protecting deities of Uruk the sheepfold turned into mongooses and went out via the drains.’ There is a possible echo of this undignified mode of exit in classical tradition mode of exit in classical tradition. Odysseus and Diomedes are said to have got into Troy through a sewer. Literary sources do not mention that they brought the Palladion out by the same route, but it would be logical, and the Capitoline Tabula Iliaca in fact shows them emerging from a vaulted opening which is taken to be that of the Trojan cloaca maxima.

Sources (list of abbreviations) (source links will open in a new browser window)
Aechylys, Seven against Thebes 217-218
Sophocles fr. 452

Bibliography

Amar Annus

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