{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.043745141662422604, 'fraction_numerical': 0.007907363229420752, 'mean_word_length': 4.845816358508305, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 3, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Classical References in the Work of Witi Ihimaera : An Annotated Commentary

Given that classical references are especially meaningful in colonial and/or postcolonial contexts, an investigation of such references in New Zealand literature is a pressing desideratum. Accordingly, in this article, I collate and annotate classical references from the published fiction of Witi Ihimaera, the foremost Māori writer in Aotearoa New Zealand. I demonstrate by example that classical references can and do make a significant contribution to the warp and weft of Māori fiction.

Were one packing an intertextual toolkit for Māori fiction, one might well be tempted to leave out classical allusions entirely. 2 On the other hand, as scholars of classical reception rightly assert, all things classical are fraught, at least potentially, with a plenitude of meaning(s) in a colonial and/or postcolonial milieu. 3 That being so, any Māori literature which engages in classical reception affords an opportunity not to be missed, as much for New Zealand literary studies as for classical reception studies. Indeed, interactions between antiquity, Rezeptionsästhetik, and indigenous fiction are intrinsically problematic and worthy of attention -in New Zealand literature as well as, say, Caribbean or African literature. That is to say, classical references in Māori literature offer an ideal interdisciplinary testing ground in which to observe Māori, Pākehā, and European culture interacting in mono-bi-, and multicultural contexts. To borrow from Jauss, classical reception could be a provocation towards rethinking literary history, and vice versa. 4 Therefore, I propose to investigate classical reception in the novels and short stories of New Zealand's foremost Māori writer, Witi Ihimaera. 5 Ihimaera is New Zealand's post-colonial writer par excellence, and his dominant modus scribendi is intertextual mythopoesis. Ranging across Māori oral literature, historiography, opera, theatre, and much else besides; and taking in register changes, genre shifts, and narrative techniques outside Eurocentric literary norms; his mercurial, chameleonic voice readily inhabits the two 'worlds' of tikanga Māori and tikanga Pākehā. 6 Tellingly, Ihimaera's oeuvre, most (or all) of which engages on some level in writing back against empire, abstracts Pākehā literary culture as a unity of anglophone sources: 'I can ransack wherever it's [i.e. the English language] been, Greek culture, Roman mythology, American literature, I can do all of that.' 7 That is, instead of marking classical antiquity for either distinction or opprobrium as many writers do (indeed, classical reception studies in a sense assumes a privileged status for classical intertexts), Ihimaera claims to treat antiquity as (merely) another textual resource. Accordingly, my reading of Ihimaera's work reveals a consistent engagement with classical material alongside other prominent strands of intertextuality.
With this in mind, my purposes in this article are description, suggestion, and (Jaussian) provocation: I hereby collate, and annotate, classical references -references to phenomena from the Greco-Roman world -in Ihimaera's fiction. 8 For the time being, I aim to demonstrate (1) that classical material forms a significant, though rarely dominant, strand in Ihimaera's work, and (2) that this material deserves, and repays, closer examination.
To conclude these prolegomena, I observe a few general phenomena which future research might examine more closely. First: the magpie's approach to allusion and intertextuality, whereby (as quoted above) Ihimaera 'ransacks' world literature in The Matriarch (1986, revised 2009) 11 ARTEMIS, CIRCE, and DIANA The eponymous matriarch of Ihimaera's magnum opus and grandmother of the narratorprotagonist (Tama) is named Riripeti 'Artemis' Mahana. Tama also has an aunt named Circe. 12 Like her Homeric namesake, Ihimaera's Circe is a vaguely threatening figure; she opposes her mother 'Artemis'. In The Dream Swimmer, Circe is one of those who dispossess Tama of his birthright, and also the mother of Tepora, the cousin with whom Tama fathers a (dead) child. Tama's mother is named Tiana, a Māori transliteration of the Latin Diana (Artemis). The 2009 edition introduces a passage in which Tama first learns that Riripeti's European name was Artemis (Matriarch 2 , 31).

OLYMPUS
(Matriarch, 2 = Matriarch 2 , 9) our own Maori home of the gods, the legendary Hawaiki, our Maori Olympus As both physical mountain and celestial home for the gods, Olympus provides a close analogy for Hawaiki. 13 Whereas the epithet 'legendary' stresses equivalence, 'Māori Olympus' implies a Eurocentrist position whereby Olympus is the primary norm and Hawaiki the secondary approximation. Compare, likewise, 'Maori Poseidon', 'Maori House of Atreus', and 'Maori Ulysses' (see below).

TROY
(Matriarch, 48 ≈ Matriarch 2 , 70) As with the siege of Troy, the invaders occupied the Te Araroa Flats for some time, living on the plantations and the contents of the storehouses, then packed up and seemed to sail away. But instead, they hid behind Matakaoa Point. (Pomare had said darkly in retreat, 'Enjoy your wife tonight for tomorrow she will be mine'). Stealthily they returned and fell upon the unsuspecting residents who had descended rejoicing to their homes.
The Te Araroa battle recapitulates the Trojan War. Pomare and his 'invaders' occupy the Te Araroa Flats just as in the Iliad battle centres, at first, on the plain before Troy.
Pomare's rejoinder about raping his enemies' wives calls to mind Helen, quintessential stolen wife, passing from one husband to another in sequence (Menelaus, Paris, Deiphobus, Menelaus). Like the Trojans, the residents of Te Araroa Flats celebrate the supposed departure of the enemy and suffer the sack of the village in return.

ACHILLES
(Matriarch, 52) I put my hands firmly on her [Tiana's] toes. She truggled a bit as she always did. But my mother has an Achilles toe rather than an Achilles heel and in the end, she ceased struggling. 'Oh, you,' she said.
Tama revivifies the dead metaphor ('Achilles heel') into a punch-line by introducing the facetious notion of an 'Achilles toe'. By extension, the comparison suggests an allencompassing rage on Tiana's part, like the wrath (mênis) of Achilles in the Iliad.

ORPHEUS and EURYDICE
(Matriarch, 233 ≈ Matriarch 2 , 268) Unlike Eurydice, in the Greek myth, she [the underworld goddess Hine Nui Te Po] did not attempt to return with Tane […] She entered Rarohenga and became the great goddess. Her mouth is that of a barracouta. Her eyes are flecked with greenstone. Her hair is sea-kelp, still moist from the sea. It is she who awaits the neverending march of mortals to her domain.
Eurydice is the ideal to which the speaker compares the Māori example, Hinenuitepō. 14 Ihimaera thus reproduces patriarchal norms implicit in the respective mythological traditions, leaving only two options for female subjectivity: monster or wife. In Ihimaera's early works, Hinenuitepō is a stereotypical, threatening, chthonic female (e.g., Matriarch, 23). Eurydice, by contrast, is reduced to a prototypical wife who dutifully follows her man back to(wards) the world of the living. The reductive image of Hinenuitepō thus also reduces Eurydice, its inverse, to an idealised, voiceless, subservient wife. Tellingly, Ihimaera retracted this stance on Hinenuitepō in The Rope of Man and 'ask the posts of this house' (see below), not to mention the revision of The Matriarch itself (Matriarch 2 , 267-8). With that in mind, consider Ross Calman's timely warning not to over-emphasise Hinenuitepō's chthonic aspect: Her place in Māori thought should be considered carefully. She is dreaded as the goddess of death, but must also be remembered as a young woman fleeing from her shame, yet imbued with love for her innocent offspring and their descendants. In the later legend of Māui and his attempted conquest of death, a picture is conjured up of the dread figure of night swallowing up humankind, but in the legend of creation she is a beneficent being devoted to the welfare of her children. 15 Accordingly, the 2009 revision replaces the 'dread goddess' with the Great Mother. Reference to hexameter poetry (Hesiod, Empedocles) sets up the following Takitimu narrative as a mini-epic (epyllion). 16 Specifically, the myth of the separation of earth and sky, narrated in Hesiod's Theogony, recurs in Māori cosmogony in the form of Rangi and Papatūānuku, violently separated by their son Tāne. 17 In an important passage in The Uncle's Story (343), Ihimaera uses this myth to bring together his two constituencies, gay and indigenous. While addressing a First Peoples' gathering in Canada, Michael Mahana illustrates the global coming-out of GLBT indigenous people: 'I am a gay man. Of all the children of the gods, my kind -gay, lesbian, transvestite and transsexual -inhabited the lowest and darkest cracks between the Primal Parents. We, now, also wish to walk upright upon this bright strand.'

ARTEMIS
In certain respects, the reference to Empedocles is pregnant with semiotic potential. 18 While Strife (eris) is prominent in Hesiod (literally in Works and Days, structurally in Theogony), Empedocles introduced Love and Strife as cosmic forces; in The Matriarch, we see each in equal measure. Likewise, Love and Strife offer a hermeneutic for reading Uranus/Gaea and Rangi/Papa: excessive Love causes cosmic stasis; necessary Strife breaks that stasis; then follows another phase. 19 Anaximander, on the other hand, is of less pointed relevance as (merely) an early Greek thinker who wrote a philosophical treatise and made the first map of the world. To a degree, then, this passage from The Matriarch reads like a muddled compendium of material gleaned in a hurry from basic handbooks. As usual, however, Ihimaera's narrator makes a clear, forceful claim: Māori cosmogonic and theogonic concepts resemble ancient Greek philosophy.
In fact, A.W. Reed had already made this very point in his 1963 Treasury of Maori Folklore. 20 Reed disclaims any attempt to prove Māori superiority, and indeed the reverse is true of Reed's chauvinistic observations. Māori 'of old' supposedly lived a life 'far removed' from that of the 'cultured Greeks'. These noble savages avoided 'philosophical speculation' and 'cynicism and indifference' only by preserving their ancestors' 'barbarous concepts'. Māori theogonic narratives, qua 'parallel stories', complement Hesiod's Theogony. Nevertheless, one cannot hold such narratives to Hesiodic standards: they are 'closer to nature' (therefore less sophisticated), 'more bloodthirsty' (therefore less cultured), and 'more poetical' (therefore less philosophical). The best that can be said about 'the Maori imagination' is that it did not outgrow its natural talent for personification: 'We are not attempting to prove the superiority of the Maori imagination, but rather to show that a people who lived close to nature were able to evolve a form of belief that expressed itself in a genius for personification.' This is faint praise indeed. Compare Ihimaera's narrator: 'while the Maori people might be called a barbaric and savage race his knowledge and conception of the spirit world show a high plane of thought similar to the philosophical speculations of the earliest Greek philosophers'. The 'barbaric and savage' Māori just manage to scale the heights of Greek thought, not via philosophy per se but via 'the spirit world'. This unadorned simile ('like a Greek chorus') adds a momentary classical resonance, albeit one which misprepresents its vehicle: the choruses of Greek drama were anything but silent and far from eternal. One thinks also of the common misconception that Greek tragedy is a static performance medium, inhabited by a motionless chorus, in which all the action takes place offstage. The interlude was idyllic, the white marble shining against the deep blue of sea and sky. They stayed in Athens for two weeks, dreaming their way through the ancient landscape and dancing every evening in the Plaka […] Just prior to returning to London, Susan wanted them to consult the oracle at Delphi. They went by bus -a three-hour journey -and felt that they were travelling into the past. When they arrived at Delphi the mood was mystical -and when Mahaki asked for a sign of his future there was a rain of red blossoms. 'And you?' Mahaki asked Susan. 'Well, I saw the number twelve,' she said. 'Oh my God,' Mahaki responded, 'we'd better get started quick.' He knew that Susan was referring to children.

JULIUS
Like other New Zealand writers, Ihimaera reflexively depicts travel, especially the 'O.E.', as a journey into the past. (Compare, for example, Patricia Grace's Tu and Ned and Katina). This overseas location is also a dreamscape: Mahaki and Susan are 'travelling into the past' and 'dreaming their way through the ancient landscape'. In the context of the story (especially the mother who loves 'the Classics'), this reference to fabulous creatures frames the girl's reaction to the novelty of electric light in terms of her own privileged education, and her own literary experience, primarily of Greco-Roman mythology.

LATIN TROY
('Royal Hunt before the Storm'; Mansfield, 153) Men only subvert our overtures. They think them either as signs that we want to dominate them […] or as signs of feminine weakness. Either way they smell blood, as if we are some kind of prize in, yes, a -a royal hunt, or a Trojan war.
Ihimaera here plays with etymology. 'Subvert': Middle English < Middle French subvertir, Latin subvertere, to 'overturn'. 'Overtures': Middle English < Middle French ouverture, possibly < Latin apertura, 'opening', 'orifice'; 'approach', 'beginning'. That is, men overturn (subvert) the openings (overtures) which indicate feminine weakness, a weakness also suggested by the (menstrual?) blood, thereby casting all women as images of Helen of Troy. Finally, an attentive reader might associate the story's title ('Royal Hunt before the Storm') with Aeneas and Dido in Book Four of Vergil's Aeneid.

Bulibasha (1994)
MYTHOLOGY EPIC (Bulibasha, 11) With every sculpting movement of bulldozer and grader, they stripped the [Waipaoa] river of its mythology […] The epic dimension that existed when you travelled at thirty miles an hour maximum on a twisting, turning road has gone. This conflation of mythology and epic casts Bulibasha, more naturally categorised as a comic or picaresque novel, as a mythological epic.

HELEN OF TROY
(Bulibasha, 39) There are some souls, like Grandfather Tamihana, whom God signs contracts with before they are born. You can tell who they are when something shows up in the manner of their birth or in their accomplishments as young men or women […] God also marks such souls with a special blessing. In some cases it is astounding beauty, like Helen of Troy or redheaded Rhonda Fleming.
Helen of Troy is assumed to be well-known, providing merely a canonical example of 'astounding beauty'. Note the collocation of classical mythology and Hollywood.

POSEIDON
(Bulibasha, 111) He was a Maori Poseidon, water streaming from his deltoids and runnelling down his chest.
Ihimaera's protagonist-narrator, Simeon, uses the Greek god of the sea as a straightforward vehicle for illustrating the image of a young man swimming. As with the 'Maori Olympus' in The Matriarch, this 'Maori Poseidon' asserts Māori ownership of, but also dependence on, the classical pantheon.

OLYMPUS
(Bulibasha, 128) The gloves were off, and not only between the Mahanas and the Poatas. If I had to, I would bring down Olympus. Simeon's assertion of victory comes after Uncle Hone defies Tamihana. Note the continuing theme of intergenerational conflict and the kingship of heaven.

JASON
(Bulibasha, 202-3) NEW GOLDEN FLEECE AWARD The New Zealand Wool Board today announced the holding of a national competition to select the best shearing gang in the Dominion. A substantial cash prize of £5000 and the Golden Fleece Shield will be awarded to the winning gang. A gold statuette, christened 'Jason', will be given to the best shearer of the year, not necessarily from the winning gang.

JASON THESEUS
(Bulibasha, 226) The whole town [Gisborne] was caught up in the excitement, no doubt assisted by the local newspaper editor who likened our journey to that taken by the Greek hero Jason and his valiant argonauts, who sought and finally won the golden fleece. Even the mayor could not resist the opportunity for some classical allusion of his own. 'The hopes of the district go with you. On your return, we will look for a white sail of victory rather than the black sail of disappointment.' Here we find two instances of classical reception performed by a character for an internal audience. First, the journalists themselves compare the Mahana family to Jason and the Argonauts; second, the mayor makes his allusion to Theseus. For once, Ihimaera engages in allusion without naming the referent (Theseus), yet note the quasi-footnote ('classical allusion') reminding the reader that this is, indeed, a classical reference. In the person of the mayor one can also glimpse the shadow of the author, unable to resist another-less apposite-classical allusion yet unwilling to leave the task of recognition entirely to the reader.

HADES
(Bulibasha, 237) He didn't think we had a hope in Hades.
Thus Tamihana dismisses the chances of one of his own family's shearing gangs (Mahana Four) in the competition. The narrator likewise rejects the regular collocation 'hope in Hell' for the classicising variant 'hope in Hades'.

ZEUS
(Bulibasha, 237) I swear that Grandfather never moved a muscle and yet he seemed to be sending down thunderbolts of psychic energy designed to cripple their shearers or set fire to their wool.
Compare the earlier references to 'bringing down Olympus': Ihimaera effectively conflates Cronus and his son Zeus in the person of Tamihana. Throughout the novel, classical allusions develop a theme of cosmic crisis and intergenerational conflict shared with Greco-Roman literature. In that respect, the hero Simeon is himself both a Zeusfigure and a Prometheus-figure: a trickster-helper who defeats the supreme patriarch with deceit.

Nights in the Gardens of Spain (1995)
ORPHEUS and the MAENADS (Nights, 115) The night is a river and I am driven to wander its banks. In spite of Annabelle and Chris I am like Orpheus, compulsive in my search for peace from the shades that haunt me. Within the whispering forest the maenads are gathering to rip my heart out and tear me limb from limb.
Here we see the Orpheus myth put to a very different purpose from that to which it was put illustrating the figure of Hinenuitepō in The Matriarch. In Nights, unlike The Matriarch, the narrator is concerned with the death not of Eurydice but of Orpheus. There is no mention of Eurydice, and an apparent disclaimer in the sense that Annabelle, the narrator's wife, and Chris, his (male) lover, are mentioned together, and that the narrator is like Orpheus 'in spite of' them. Nevertheless, Orpheus is the archetypal husband who tried, and failed, to win back his wife. In Ovid's Metamorphoses (10.83-5), Orpheus also invents pederasty, restricting himself to male lovers after losing Eurydice. 22 This is, mutatis mutandis, what happens in Nights: after coming out to Annabelle, the narrator tries to stay but ultimately leaves to start a relationship with a man. It goes without saying that Ihimaera elides Ovid's heteronormative happy ending (Met. 10.61-6) in which Orpheus, now dead, is reunited with Eurydice in the underworld (on which see below, The Trowenna Sea).

ORPHEUS
(Nights, 221) I hated him [Charles, a lover who had left the narrator] for a time and cried like Orpheus. I found solace in marriage to Annabelle and in fatherhood. But I have always been searching the underworld for another soul of his magnitude.
Another unadorned simile comparing the narrator to Orpheus returns us to Eurydice, but without any gendering of Orpheus's desire or Eurydice's desirability. The focus is rather on the pathos of the doomed lover. Charles is Eurydice, with Annabelle a mere substitute. By extension, Chris is a more successful replacement; Annabelle, the woman, is no longer a second Eurydice. Ultimately, the perfect marriage of two (male) souls here requires a classical, heterosexual parallel: 'I have always been searching the underworld for another soul of his magnitude'. Repeated reference to Orpheus, archetypal mythological poet, suggests a reflexive, metafictional image of the novelist as suffering soul looking for (doomed) love.

EIDOLON
(Nights, 141) And too much of me, my gay eidolon, was trying to get out from behind the façade we had erected.
An eidolon (Greek eidôlon) is an image, figure, or spectre, possessing verisimilitude but not substance; contrast Greek psykhê, 'soul'. The narrator ascribes the failure of his reunion with Annabelle to repression of this 'gay eidolon', his true, inner, gay self. Ihimaera described Nights as 'keeping faith with his gay audience' much as he had been keeping faith with his Maori audience. 23 Redefining the eidôlon as an inner soul with independent volition provides him with a classical equivalent for the image of a repressed, gay, self trying to escape a straight-acting façade. 24 Ihimaera has himself used the image of the eidolon to describe himself and his writing, and it has been proposed as a fundamental symbol of his authorial subjectivity. 25

EIDOLON TITANS
(Nights, 235) Our [divorce] lawyers are eidolons of ourselves, sent out to do battle, clashing like titans.
Here the 'eidolons' (Greek plural eidôla) retain more of their classical form as spectres rather than independent souls. On the one hand, this passage offers a gentle dig at divorce lawyers for being less than whole human beings. On the other hand, the emotional consequences of coming out and of divorce once more prompt a classical analogy. The division of a household and its property attendant on divorce requires not only the hiring of lawyers, but also the division or compartmentalisation of the self.
The He was Tiresias, the Blind Man in Greek mythology, the one who waits at the crossroads near the feet of the sphinx in the hot noon sun. He was the oracle of Apollo, waiting for Orestes to come, to direct him to his destiny at Mycenae. He was the seer, the divinator, the matakite.

ORESTEIA
(Dream Swimmer, 150) Sylvia, a French classicist, gives a nuanced account of the Oresteia. Tama concludes that a son's loyalty should be with his father.

ORESTEIA
(Dream Swimmer, 201) In a famous passage from the Oresteia (Eumenides 657-66), Athena downplays the mother's role in procreation, asserting that the real parent is 'the one who mounts' (660), that is the father. Here Tama's sister reverses the terms of the equation: [A]lthough she often refers to Te Ariki as 'your father', excluding herself from his male parentage, she always talks about 'our mother' when referring to Tiana.

ORESTEIA
(Dream Swimmer, 276) 'E mokopuna, my grandson, you must be careful as you walk in the world. Beware, particularly, of the way of the Pakeha for it will be like unto a red carpet so comforting to your feet […] And the carpet will take you to the Paremata [Parliament] of the Pakeha, my dearest grandson, but it is a carpet of blood which your ancestors have trod before you into the House of the European […] O mokopuna, when you walk the red carpet be on your guard for you walk a sea of blood. And should you enter there, take great care lest the butcher plunge his knife into your heart -' Compare the famous 'carpet scene' from Agamemnon (lines 855-974). 27 Riripeti Mahana emphasises her allusion with repetition and with the phrase 'sea of blood'. Agamemnon walks a carpet dyed with red dye (literally, 'ooze') from the sea; Tama is warned off walking on a carpet ('red carpet', 'carpet', 'carpet of blood', 'red carpet') which is also a sea of blood. 'My friend,' Sylvia had said gently when we were wandering in Paris, 'your question is simple but the answer is not simple. Which has the greater argument for rightness? Does a son owe more devotion to his father or mother? Where do you think a son's devotion lies? I had answered wrongly and had been punished. I now know that the answer should have been: HOUSE OF ATREUS (Dream Swimmer, 174) One section of Act III of The Dream Swimmer, encompassing chapters 19-21, is titled 'House of Atreus'. These chapters concern Tama returning to Gisborne, deciding to undertake a second delegation to Wellington about his tribe's land, and rescuing his niece Eretra. That is, these chapters contain one of Ihimaera's versions of the Orestes story. You've always had the power to take it off, Son. What I did not know was that the Furies weren't behind me at all. They were ahead, waiting with their net of memories, to trap me in Wellington.
The Furies (Latin Furiae, Greek Erinues) are avenging female spirits who punish evildoers, particularly murderers or those who harm family members. In Eumenides, the final play of Aeschylus' Oresteia, the Erinues are transformed into the Eumenides, the 'Kindly Ones'.

FURIES/ERINUES
(Dream Swimmer, 284) The waves stormed across the concrete wall. As they flung their spray toward the moon I saw three dark shapes advancing and knew-The Furies were coming.

FURIES/ERINUES
(Dream Swimmer, 285) One section of Act IV, encompassing chapters 33-35, is titled 'The Furies'. This section narrates Tama's violent confrontation with Tiana in which he almost kills her, and represents the other major extended allusion to the Orestes myth.

FURIES/ERINUES
(Dream Swimmer, 296) Now let the occult arts rip apart the air and allow the entrance of the Furiae. Daughters of Kronos and Eurynome, come forth through Past's doorway. Wing down, Tisiphone, avenger of murder. Hover, Alekto, unwearied persecutor. Join then, Megaera, grim justice. Come, black-gowned ones, with your odious aspect, your coronets of vipers. Hold in your hands serpent, knife or firebrand.
You, implacable triad, look down this night and sit in justice upon her, Tiana, the mother who murders her children, and he, Tamatea, with murder in his heart for his mother.
In the Oresteia, the Erinues support Clytemnestra. Here Tama calls the Erinues not only upon himself, the Orestes-figure, but also upon Tiana, the Clytemnestra-figure. As elsewhere, Murray's Who's Who in Mythology provides the detail and much of the phraseology: 'Tisiphone (the avenger of murder)'; 'Alekto (the unwearied persecutor)'; 'Megaera (the grim)'; 'odious aspect'; 'carrying a serpent, a knife, or a torch'. Murray and Ihimaera use the names for the Erinues which Vergil canonised in the Aeneid, but Hellenise Vergil's Latin Allecto as Alekto. 28

FURIES/ERINUES
(Dream Swimmer, 297) Lightning slashed the sky. The three Furies were suddenly alight in the garish glare.

FURIES/ERINUES
(Dream Swimmer, 302) Of course I should have known that the Furies would take judgement against me. I had forgotten that matricide, the murder of a mother, was the highest of all homicides.
One of the roles of the Erinues is to persecute kin-murderers, and this is precisely what they do in the Oresteia. At this moment of final separation from his mother Tiana, Tama identifies himself with Orpheus at the moment of final separation from Eurydice. Orpheus thus exemplifies a particular kind of (Freudian?) subjectivity: a male subjectivity facing emotional stress caused by the loss of a nurturing, feminine aspect, but also a male subjectivity which constitutes the self by destroying the feminine other. By extension, Eurydice, the archetype for lost lovers, is recast into an archetype for lost (or banished) mothers.

ORPHEUS
(Dream Swimmer, 405) 'When you leave,' I said, 'don't look back. Don't look back. Ever.' The earlier reference to Orpheus encourages reading this moment, when Tama and his lover Tepora part, as a recapitulation of Orpheus and Eurydice.

Whanau II (2004) GLADIATORS
(Whanau II, 30) The whole of Gisborne had been there last night to celebrate his wedding, even the mayor, as if George [a rugby league star] was a modern-day gladiator being crowned with the laurel leaves of victory.
Roman gladiators typically did not receive a laurel wreath; victorious charioteers did.

MEDUSA
(Rope, 87) Some people consider that when she [Hinenuitepō] transformed from Hinetitama, child of the dawn, she became a monstrous inversion of herself. Her eyes were said to be flecked with greenstone. Her hair was sea-kelp still moist from the sea. She was a fearsome apparition with a mouth like a barracouta. I like to think of her differently. Not as some Maori Medusa but, rather, as the Great Mother […] Tama rejects Ihimaera's earlier treatment of Hinenuitepō in The Matriarch (see above) and describes her as a benevolent deity not at all like Medusa. By removing an extended description of Hinenuitepō's chthonic aspect from the first version of Tangi (compare Rope, 70-1) and adding this explicit rebuttal, Ihimaera radically rewrites a description of female mythological figures in his earliest novel. Ihimaera later adapted this rebuttal in 'ask the posts of the house' (see below). Note that in each earlier instance, Hinenuitepō is contrasted with a Greek mythological female figure (Matriarch: Eurydice; Rope: Medusa).

Ask the Posts of the House (2007) THE MUSE
('i've been thinking about you, sister'; Posts, 15) In a charged autobiographical interlude, Ihimaera writes in propria persona of the start of his writing career, and of the optimistic, lyrical voice which garnered him so much criticism: Instead, they got me. That other writer must have got delayed when old lady Muse swung by in her Peugeot and mistakenly picked me up instead.

CLEOPATRA HIPPOCRATIC OATH
('ask the posts of the house'; Posts, 60) Calorifically challenged, the women all appear to have taken some hippopotamic oath; and my most recent date has been with the reigning Cleofatra of the Aisle, Miss Fatuisi Falofasofa.
This passage best displays Ihimaera's off-hand, at times whimsical, approach to classical allusions: Cleopatra becomes a Pacific 'Cleofatra', and the Hippocratic Oath a facetious 'hippopotamic oath', neither of which needs to be read as more -or lessthan a clever pun like 'Aisle' or 'Falofasofa'. Later, when the English narrator learns that he is to have a granddaughter, he muses, 'Okay, Oliver, you can do this. A baby girl, oh my, a girl. Wasn't Boudicea a girl? And girls can learn war cries too, right?' (136).

VENUS
('in the year of prince harry'; Posts, 91) Yes, I met sweet, uncomplicated Fleur. A pocket Venus, dark skin, gorgeous hair, well stacked with a nicely balanced bottom, working in a law office in Porirua.

FURIES
('ihipi'; Posts, 149, 163) One section of this novella is entitled 'the attack of the furies'; another, 'in the lair of the furies'. 31 The 'furies' of the title are not supernatural beings but three doomed princesses, now old women. Kin-murder, something of great interest to the Erinues, does feature prominently.

MEDUSA
('ihipi'; Posts, 152) The young prince asks the old man to take off his mask; the old man refuses, saying, 'If I did that, you would be turned to stone.' HARPIES ('ihipi'; Posts, 164) Again, Ihimaera has recourse to the copious supply of dangerous female monsters in Greco-Roman myth: the three aged princesses attack the prince 'like harpies'.

EIDOLON
('ihipi'; Posts, 174) Meantime, I had instructed that effigies be made of us all -eidolons of Ohiri, myself and my daughters -and displayed on the walls of the city.
In this passage, Ihimaera egregiously prefers 'eidolon' to, say 'images', 'statues', or even 'simulacra'. As elsewhere, he picks and chooses Latinate or Hellenic vocabulary unsystematically, magpie fashion. (On the Greek concept of the eidolon, see above: Nights, 141, 235.) CHARIOT OF THE SUN ('ihipi'; Posts, 177) And the people say that the great Queen Ihi embarked on a second, epic journey […] Legend tells us that Ra, the Sun God, came to her aid; admiring her fearless spirit he rewarded her by sending a chariot made of fire.
In the mythico-historical setting of the story, Māori have no horses and thus no chariots. This passage suggests Medea using the chariot of her grandfather Helios (the Sun) to escape from Corinth, as at the end of Euripides' Medea. On the other hand, Queen Ihi's is an 'epic' journey; compare Medea's travels in Book Seven of Ovid's Metamorphoses.
The ghost of Queen Ihi, who sacrificed her daughter Ata to save her own husband, defends herself: 'I offer no excuse,' she called, defiant. 'I am not the first nor am I the last in the ancient world to sacrifice a child.' Authorial focalisation again insists on 'the ancient world' as the ideal comparandum, but by way of anachronism: how does Queen Ihi even know that she inhabits said ancient world? OEDIPUS ('ihipi'; Posts, 182) The old king Ohiri recalls killing Queen Ihi to avenge their daughter Ata, then blinding himself: Where the eyes had once been were two dark sockets. 'I killed Ihi,' Ohiri went on […] I could not bear the horror of it. I took a blade of obsidian and hacked out both my eyes. I wanted to make sure that there would be no further accidental reflection of myself in the water, or in any shining pounamu or obsidian surface. The Thrill of Falling (2012) DAEDALUS ('Purity of Ice'; Thrill, 138-9) 'Purity of Ice' reworks Moby Dick into intertextual science-fiction. In a post-globalwarming future, water hunters snare icebergs with helicopters; one such helicopter is called Daedalus. Making an inelegant landing, 'Daedalus dropped like a stricken angel' (139).

SIRENS
('Purity of Ice'; Thrill, 162) Within this realm lived the mighty kraken, the fabled giant squid, ready to pull the chopper down with its tentacles. Sirens sang men to their death.

LATIN
('Orbis Terrarium'; Thrill, 181-205) The title of this story makes a pun on the classical Latin phrase orbis terrarum, 'the world' (literally, 'circle of lands'), misspelling the second word. A 'terrarium' is a habitat or enclosure for small land animals, especially reptiles; 'Orbis Terrarium' concerns the Galapagos tortoise. The ancient tortoise El Rey twice uses the titular phrase: 'We who live in Orbis Terrarium […] the Inhabited World' (198); 'No inhabitant of Orbis Terrarium, no bird or animal or sea creature, would ever ask it' (200).
CLASSICAL EDUCATION ('The Thrill of Falling'; Thrill, 250) Ihimaera assimilates classical education into the realm of higher(-status) learning and upward social mobility: 'Is there anything else we offer that you like the look of? Food technology maybe?' 'Japanese and classical studies could be interesting,' Mum answered. 'He [the protagonist, Tupaea] might go to university after high school.' Most importantly, Ihimaera avoids any criticism of classical subjects in New Zealand schools such as one might expect in a passage such as this. Contrast Patricia Grace's 'The Dream Sleepers'. In that story, primary-school pupils complain when their teacher insists that they copy down into their exercise books 'all the things that have been handed down to us by the people of Ancient Greece'. 39 By contrast, Ihimaera suppresses the obvious disjunction between Japanese (modern, business-focused) and classical studies (ancient, resolutely non-vocational). An intelligent student destined for university might profitably study both.

OLYMPUS, CYCLOPS
('The Thrill of Falling'; Thrill, 292-3) Then the [philosophy] lecturer said something interesting. 'Of course, today, there are still many societies for whom the myths of Olympus or Valhalla, of gods, goddesses and one-eyed monsters, are still as real and as relevant as they were in ancient times.' The lecture hall rippled with amusement. 'What or how,' the lecturer continued, would they feel if Cyclops, say, had survived the ages of man and lived in a cave on Mount Olympus […] or even here, in New Zealand, near Invercargill! Our rational mind would refuse to admit that possibility, but what if?
As the laughter rose I thought to myself: 'Mate, you don't know the half of it. Maori still live with their own versions of Cyclops. Mine had his house in a cave at the back of Uawa where he slept in an ironwood cylinder and was kept warm by a royal loincloth of red feathers. Now he's in a storage unit in Porirua.' Polyphemus lives on an island -not Olympus -but that is not the point. The Cyclops exemplifies ancient myths at which rational moderns might laugh. As one of Ihimaera's narrators puts it, 'Our world was a continuum, in which all things possible and impossible could bind together' (Matriarch 2 , 222). Whether Greek, Viking, or Māori, it does not matter, for pre-rational or irrational fables can indeed come true in Ihimaera's magical-realist cosmos. All told, then, 'The Thrill of Falling' presents a pointed, pertinent image situated, via Invercargill (like Denis Glover's 'Johnsonville or Geraldine') in Porirua: the Cyclops, taken from a cave at the back of Uawa, now living alone in a storage unit, still wrapped in red feathers, still surprising 'our rational mind'.