I am moving some essays and longer projects to a substack called “Painful Signs, Or, Joel’s Substack.” I am experimenting with this space for a few reasons: (1) wordpress has gotten a little annoying; (2) I’d like to try something different; (3) substack seems to make it easier to raise funds we can donate to good causes. Here’s the summary on the first page from the site:
It is an extension of the sententiaeantiquae.com multiverse designed for longer essays, threaded projects, and revision and renewal of older ideas. I have spent over a decade building a website bringing together translations and commentary on ancient Greece and Rome with great collaborators and partners. This site will feature only my own work and, in its first months/years, focus in particular on the Iliad.
As sententiaeantiquae.com nears 10,000 posts and the twitter feed @sentantiq dies a Musk-fueled death, this new space provides something of a tabula rasa to think again about writing outside of the cycle of academic publication, about public engagement, about how to think and write about the past, and how to develop and sustain new projects.
This site will have free and paid subscriptions. Free subscriptions get access to regular shorter posts; longer posts and the archive go to paid subscriptions.
All funds generated by paid subscriptions will be donated to non-profit groups working to support the study of the ancient world and emphasizing public engagement. I will make annual statements about where funds are sent.
I have trouble imagining too many people doing paid subscriptions, but anything we get from the other site will be sent to groups and initiatives we have supported in the past.. Sententiaeantiquae.com isn’t going anywhere. I won’t cross-post much from substack, so check it out and subscribe (for free or otherwise!)
Why “Painful Signs?”
“Painful Signs” is my loose translation of the description of the message Proitos sends along with Bellerophon in book 6 of the Iliad when he sends him to Lykia, with the hopes his father-in-law will murder him. (Proitos’ wife was in love with Bellerophon, but he refused her, so she told Proitos that Bellerophon raped her. Because they were guest-friends, however, Proitos could not have him killed in his country).
Homer, Iliad 6.168-170
“Then he sent him to Lykia and he gave him painful signs,
He marked many heart-rending things on a folded table,
Which he told him to show to his father-in-law, so he would die.”
This is the only apparent reference to writing in Homeric epic, but most sources believe it is not actually so. Here are ancient scholars’ comments:
Schol. T ad Hom. Il. 6.168 ex
Murderous signs: letters.
“It would be strange if people who developed every kind of craft would not know about letters. Some people claim these are like the sacred images of the Egyptians, used to communicate actions.”
“written on a folded tablet”: this appears to use letters. But it does not mean this-instead to scrape [graphein] means to ‘smooth’ out. This is really the impression of images through which Proitos’ father-in-law may understand”
I like this phrase “painful signs” and its use in the Iliad because it conveys (to me) some sense of the peril of secret messages, of the potential dangers of a fixed communication, of the insidious side of language. There’s something telling in the way that the message’s bearer does not know its contents and their implications.
So, I am taking this phrase as a bit of a thematic tuning for the beginning of a return to thinking about the Iliad . I think it is probably tenuous to claim that this tablet taken from the Peloponnese to Asia Minor is in away a symbol for epic itself, but I don’t think its too much to say that the episode shows a poetic concern with what effects signs have on the world, and how they have different meaning depending on who you are.
Waxed ivory tablet from British Museum. #131952. Neo Assyrian, 8th Century BCE
Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward. And then remember this. The Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural.
Karis Nemik, Andor, episode 12
If you spend a little time learning about Greek myth and ancient epic, you’ll encounter the Epic Cycle, a term for a group of poems around that told the story of the Trojan War from the very beginning (the wedding of Peleus and Thetis?) to the very end (Odysseus’ return home and its aftermath). Recent years have seen dozens of articles and books on the topic. As a Homerist, I have had to engage with this scholarship a great deal.
And my central problem is this: I think the Epic Cycle, as we talk about it, is a scholarly fiction.
***
I have been catching up with the Disney series Andor over the past few weeks and find myself agreeing deeply with a general opinion of its excellence–the plot is exciting, the characters are moving, and the themes of the rebellion both advance those of the original movie and complicate them. The rebels here are conflicted–some are aggrieved, some are true believers, and some are more venal. Together, they dramatize the cost of resistance and the seductive dangers of that complacency that makes us all complicit in oppression.
But watching Andor and enjoying it–after also cheering for The Mandalorian, Obi-Wan, and the Book of Boba–has made me think repeatedly about the relationship between canon and fixity and what it means to be an audience to an expanding universe. As a Homerist who comes from the end of Gen X (I was born in 1978), watching the explosion of the Star Wars universe has made me think a lot about the epic cycle and secondary narratives.
Hephaistos Polishing Achilles’ Shield – THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES. Caskey-Beazley, Attic Vase Paintings (MFA), no. 082.
The making of a canon
It is impossible for my children to imagine what Star Wars meant when I was their age. One of my first memories is seeing The Empire Strikes Back in a drive-in theater with my parents and being terrified by Darth Vader. Anyone who can remember prior to 1999 knew of Star Wars as an unfinished but finished trilogy: there were always rumors that George Lucas would return to a galaxy far away and long ago, seeded especially by the numbering of the first movie as IV, but for a decade or so it seemed like it would never happen.
To be a fan of Star Wars prior to the return of the movies was to rewatch VHS cassettes and read authorized novels and wait for random viewings of the super strange Ewok adventures, The Battle for Endor and Caravan for Courage. Part of what made Star Wars moving was its boundedness and the promise of more. As a child, I would weep at the end of Return of the Jedi because I didn’t want it to end. As an adult, I have written about our uncomfortable relationship with narrative closure, how we want it to come but we also dread it because it is the end of a world and is, in some way, an echo of our own deaths.
Episodes and Universes
There are two ways of thinking about entries or episodes in a narrative universe. For Star Wars what became canon were the movies–but the more episodes added to the list, the less stable the canon became. There’s a danger of surplus narrative and how we refer to the whole changes two. I think people mean two different things when they talk about the epic cycle. One is general, expansive: the cycle refers to the full range of narratives associated with the Trojan War. The other is an imagined canon of episodes.
So, the classic Trojan Cycle described by Proclus include the Cypria, Aithiopis, Little Iliad, Iliou Persis (Sack of Troy), Nostoi (also called, according to some, The Return of the Atreids [ἡ τῶν Ἀτρειδῶν κάθοδος], and the Telegony. We have only a handful of fragments for most of these poems Some scholars have also suggested different ‘cycles’ which would focus around heroes (a cycle of epics about Herakles, for example, the Calydonian Boar Hunt or the Argo) or centering around cities other than Troy (where a Theban cycle might include the Oidipodeia, Thebais, Epigonoi, and perhaps even the Alkmeonis). This is the one I don’t think is real.
The larger a canon is, the less effective it is in exerting authority. I think that the original Star Wars trilogy exerted a centripetal force on its audiences, pulling them together to a narrative center. As the universe expands–or as the canon multiples–its force is more centrifugal, moving audiences into clusters. This is one way I think comparing a modern entertainment ‘universe’ to Trojan War narratives is useful: the Iliad and the Odyssey were panhellenic texts that persisted in applying aesthetic pressures on other traditions and their audiences. But the narrative world of the Trojan War included countless other stories and spanned many different kinds of genres.
Often when we talk about the authority of the Homeric poems, we are talking about the cultural position they occupied in Archaic and Classical Greece as performance narratives connected to political power. This authority transformed as they moved into fixed texts and aesthetic objects for Hellenistic readers and later. Over time, they became quasi-sacred. But other stories set in the Trojan War world existed prior to our epics and kept on spinning out from a notional but fictive center: local, epichoric traditions preceded the Iliad and Odyssey and persisted well into the Christian era. The discrete episodes filled out the Universe and allowed audiences to live within them: the static nature of the canonized object is mitigated by the fluidity of ongoing traditions.
This comes clear often in accounts of ritual and local practices, like those observed by Pausanias who puts Penelope’s grave in the Peloponnese, not far from that of Aeneas’ father Anchises. What’s different, I think, about ancient Trojan War narratives is that these local or epichoric narratives developed prior to the canonized epics and continued long after. As Irad Malkin has shown in The Returns of Odysseus, as Greeks spread across the Mediterranean, they took their stories with them, adapting their myths of people like Odysseus to accommodate their new realities.
When I first watched the Mandalorian, I was simultaneously charmed and critical: prior to the new movies, you could not imagine two characters with more commercial potential than a Boba Fett analog and a baby Yoda. People my age loved Boba Fett because his action figure looked so cool. (I used to sleep with Boba as a toddler, I confess.) These characters are also tangential to the canonized storyline, they allow the space to create a new story while also still drawing on the nostalgia and cache of the center. This is part of the thrill and peril of expanding narrative traditions: the cameo of a main character in a peripheral story can be fun, but when the canon limits overmuch, the story becomes campy and over allusive (which explains, in part I think, why Rogue One works well but Solo does not).
The cultural forces of capitalism that produced the Mandalorian are, of course, different from those that perpetuated Trojan War narratives in Archaic and Classical Greece, but they remain somewhat analogous cultural forces. Both rely on audience interest and respond to changing cultural trends.
Audiences and Change
When we talk about the market forces that influence the expansion of the Star Wars universe, we are talking in part about audiences. Discussions of the epic cycle–and Homer in general–too often forget that ancient performers responded to their audiences as well. Audiences exist through time and time creates different kinds of audiences. When we talk about interpreting or making sense of cultural objects, we emphasize the intention of creators because it is so difficult to talk about the multiplicity of audiences. But I have been thinking about audiences as palimpsest. A palimpsest is a manuscript that has been cleaned and repurposed for a new text, and yet the old text can often be seen underneath it. Christos Tsagalis has used it productively as a metaphor for how oral traditions work. Yet this model is still about the object and not the people who view it. We change as individuals over time and our relationship to a text or cultural object changes from one generation to another.
I took dates to the rerelease of the original three movies in high school. When The Phantom Menace was released, I was there on the first weekend with roommates and my future wife (who purchased Star Wars legos while waiting to see the movie and assembled them during the film). And despite the exhilaration of the opening chyron and the music, I left disappointed. The second trilogy is cluttered, confused and confusing, and tries too hard to fill in the blanks of the later/earlier films. The second trilogy is both shaped and trapped by nostalgia.
Part of the problem is the difference between a backstory that is unexplained and a forced explanation. The “clone wars” as referenced in Star Wars are nebulous and strange: we know they were in the past and bad. When we get to them in the later trilogy, they lose the menace and strangeness. What was a detail in service of another narrative fails in certain ways when it is fleshed out because it does not and cannot exist on its own terms.
The later Star Wars films have a secondariness in that they both serve to fill out a preexisting story and they also attempt to establish intertexts and references to the earlier films that prevent them from truly being their own. This is part of the challenge of judging narratives that develop in the shadow of a canon: we love them because they continue the larger story, but also begrudge them for not being the originals they imitate. Indeed, when authors like Jasper Griffin critique the poems of the epic cycle–without actually having access to them–for their fantastic content or their derivative nature, they are judging them by aesthetic standards, by rules, that they can never actually attain.
But changing some of the boundaries creates new space: consider the effectiveness of different kinds of Trojan War narratives on the tragic stage. Similarly, the later film Rogue One and the television series inhabit a familiar and attractive world but have their own stories to tell. They are compelling because they do not rely on their audiences fully knowing the original trilogy, but merely being familiar with the general ‘rules’ and characteristics of the Star Wars universe. They are free to respond to contemporary concerns and to establish new narratives. Further, with the television shows especially, they benefit from different generic boundaries: the pacing of episodic television lends itself to different kinds of stories from a 120 minutes space opera.
What I am trying to say, I guess, is that the process of canonization limits narratives that try to do the same thing as the canonized object but provides space for those that forge into new genres or plots. In addition, the further from the canon that narratives go, the more space they have to respond to changing audiences. Once Lucas released Star Wars into the world as a billion dollar intellectual property, others were able to escape the canonicity, to use the familiar world to tell new stories.
Mykonos vase (Archaeological Museum of Mykonos, Inv. 2240). Decorated pithos found at Mykonos, Greece depicting one of the earliest known renditions of the Trojan Horse
Homer and Trojan War Narratives
The relationship between the later narratives of the Star Wars universe and the original trilogy has made me think a lot about the relationship between the Iliad and the Odyssey and Trojan War narratives. This analogy fails at a certain point because the Homeric epics likely had many different versions of their own narratives and were engaged with and responding to epic performance of all kinds (and not just Trojan War and heroic poems). But the main point I take with me is the willingness of audiences to engage in the expansion of narrative worlds and how narratives in the expanded Trojan War universe change based on new genres and new audiences.
One of the things I regularly emphasize about the limits of our own ability to understand ancient epic because we know so little about what ancient audiences knew or how they experienced epic. Think here of the difference between someone like me for whom Star Wars was canonical and my children who love Grogu and have always known who Luke Skywalker’s father was. They don’t labor under the same aesthetic weight either: they do not judge Phantom Menace by the standard of Star Wars because they don’t remember a time before when these films did not co-exist. The difference between the expanded Star Wars universe material and the second trilogy is that between inhabiting/exploring a world and concretizing/freezing it.
When it comes to the cultural position of the Homeric epics, we make the mistake of assuming the Iliad and the Odyssey always had the same monumental status as they gained by the end of the 5th century BCE. I have had exchanges recently with the Assyriologist Seth Sanders who has been somewhat perplexed by Classicists’ tendency to see “cycles” in ancient near eastern literature. He has remarked on how the development of fixed–or ‘charismatic texts’–occludes the varied and continuing nature of oral traditions and living narrative mythscapes. As a comparison, he points out the possibility that some texts from the Hebrew bible were transmitted as “monuments”. In calling it this, he notes he is adapting the art historian Alous Reigl’s notion of monumentality as a dialogic dynamic between a cultural artifact and an audience for whom that object defines something of their community’s past or authoritative identity.
The impulse to tell the whole story is a feature of post-canonization. Audiences yearned for more Star Wars and eventually got them. But the narrative satiety that resulted was disappointing until the limits set by the canon could be exceeded. As the Iliad and the Odyssey became canon, the Trojan War mythscape moved to another genre with different boundaries (tragedy) and different narrative traditions. There was no cycle telling the later tale until scholars of a post-canonized period felt the need for it.
The Fictive Epic Cycle
Imagine a future scholar of narrative, say in 3023, trying to make sense of the Star Wars universe. The collapse of time might very well lead them to believe that the nine movies of three trilogies were always part of an authoritative cycle. But the content and contemporary responses to the later movies would likely perplex them. The collection of stories about the Trojan War are from a much longer period in time than the mere forty years that spans the release of the Star Wars movies. We know less about the alleged poems origins than we do about their contents, but they are not centered in the same cultural space and time.
But to step back for a moment: what is the epic cycle? The ‘Epic Cycle’ most often refers to the Trojan War poems recorded by Proclus (2nd or 4th Century ce) in his Chrestomathia (appended to the Venetus A manuscript; 10th Century ce, Codex Marcianus Graecus 822) and summarized by the later Photius (9th Century ce, Patriarch). The limited fragments of these poems are conventionally dated to the 7th through 6th centuries bce. The phrase Epic Cycle refers both to the mythical events spanning from creation to the end of the race of heroes and in the same way as Proclus, in isolating a specific group of poems that tell the story of the Trojan War. There are many similarities between Proclus’ summary and the work of the mythographer Apollodorus; but there is not a one-to-one correspondence between the events of the Trojan War myths and the poems of the cycle.
Rudolf Pfeiffer suggested that kuklos meant everything that was composed by Homer, everything that was attributed to a heroic world set in the story of the Trojan War. Gregory Nagy suggests that there’s some relationship between the etymology of the name Homeros as “one who fits things together” and that the kuklos points to the whole. Marco Fantuzzi and Christos Tsagalis expand on this idea in their introduction to their 2015 handbook by suggesting that the term is “historically ambiguous” referring to the entirety of the sky, a ring composition, or anything that repeats and returns.
The dual notion of totality and repetition, I think, makes the or a kuklos an attractive concept but an impossibility in actuality. It is both a metonym and a metaphor. This reading works well if we consider kuklos as indicating potential entirety or completion rather than an actual one. In the world of performance, the terms kuklos and Homeros may rightly become signals of authority: to be Homeros is to be a singer who has the skills to bring the potential of the kuklos into reality; to assert that a story or song is part of the kuklos is to authorize it ex post facto as part of the tradition. It is both a nodding to a canon and an alteration of it.
I am only partly convinced that kuklos functioned in this way in performance traditions in Greece; I am certain, however, that it became something completely different in the hands of literate and literary scholars. There is a wider discussion of kuklika poems and kuklikoi poets among Hellenistic scholars (starting with Aristarchus of Samothrace, 3rd-2nd Centuries bce). But evidence for both the term kuklos and the practice of separating the kuklikoi poems from the Iliad and the Odyssey is often traced back to Aristotle who makes a few enigmatic references to Kuklos poetry (Elench. 171a10 7-11) and who also distinguishes Homeric epics from other poems by other poets based on assessments of quality (Poetics 1459a37). The poems (and poets) who appear in these scholarly traditions, however, do not align with Proclus’ summary. Scholars have explained this away by saying there were other cycles, e.g., those around Thebes, Herakles, or other topics.
Here is my summary of the principles to keep in mind.
There is no evidence of a series of epic poems that told the whole story of the Trojan War from the same performance tradition and period of the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey
All of our evidence comes from Aristotle and later. The evidence is from literary scholars treating the Iliad and the Odyssey as texts.
There is evidence of long narrative poems about other traditions (e.g. Thebais)
Our emphasis on the Epic Cycle is skewed by the gravity of Homer: We have more extensive fragments from Panyassis and Aristeas than we have for anything from the epic cycle
There is significant evidence of Trojan War narratives in other genres: lyric, elegiac, iconographic contemporaneous to or even prior to the epics we possess
The Epic Cycle is an initial creation of Hellenistic scholars trying to provide narrative and aesthetic frameworks for the Iliad and the Odyssey. This initial creation has been concretized by subsequent Classical scholarship, a process intensified by some of the scholarship of the past decade.
The positivistic assumption of the epic cycle as a stable set of texts and plots reasserts textual and literary aesthetics on a system that was much more fluid and dynamic (leading to a range of interpretive problems)
And, from this, a secondary list of things we can say about the epic cycle:
Everything we know about the epic cycle is subordinate to the Iliad and the Odyssey as canonized, monumentalized epics.
This subordination occurred either as part of trying to tell the whole story of The Trojan War or as evidence of the aesthetic superiority of the Iliad and the Odyssey
The fragments and their summaries were selected to facilitate point #2 and are likely secondary or tertiary selections rather than excerpts taken from whole poems at the hands of Hellenistic editors.
The privileging of Trojan War narratives as part of these efforts has suppressed the extent and importance of non-Trojan War epics: e.g. Thebais, Oedipodea, Heraklea.
The Riddle of the Sphinx: An Attic red-figure lekythos | NGV
There are many moments while watching a show like Andor that invite audiences to think about its relationship to various narrative authorities–to the shape of the empire in the original trilogy to the future events of Rogue One. But it succeeds in part because its narrative is different enough. Successful expansions of narrative universes allow traditional narratives to respond to contemporary concerns, the way that Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos turns an ancient myth to an opportunity to reflect on plague and politics in contemporary Athens. Authoritative narratives exert a special gravity on their audiences; but audiences push back too: they make these stories into vehicles for their own lives. When the stories become too inflexible, they adapt them or make new ones.
The expanding Star wars universe allows this now too, and sometimes with discomfort. One of the subplots of Mandalorian Season 3 troubled me: the presentation of the New Republic’s amnesty program and the betrayal of Dr. Pershing by Elia Kane suggests that while the attempts of the New Republic to be progressive and inclusive are more just than the fascism of the Empire (and its descendants), they remain coercive and subject to the baser impulses of human nature.
This ‘both-sides’ approach to the struggle against fascism in an imaginary universe is a reflex of our own contemporary experiences and conversations. Such a thematic reflection would likely be lost on future audiences as they treat the Star Wars narratives as part of a canonized cycle of tales. In much the same way, Trojan War stories developed in particular times and places, in responses to their audience’s experiences and needs. Subsequent scholars imposed an order and created a systemized series of tales that never truly existed, to respond to their own needs for stability and closure.
Some things cited and some things to read
Alwine, A. T., ‘‘The Non-Homeric Cyclops in the Homeric Odyssey’’, GRBS 49 (2009) 323-333.
Arft, J., and J. M. Foley. 2015. “The Epic Cycle and Oral Tradition.” In Fantuzzi and Tsagalis, 78–95.
Barker, E.T.E. 2008. “ ‘Momos Advises Zeus’: The Changing Representations of Cypria Fragment One.” In Greece, Rome and the Near East, ed. E. Cingano and L. Milano, 33–73. Padova.
Barker, E. T. E., and J. P. Christensen. 2006. “Flight Club: The New Archilochus
Fragment and its Resonance with Homeric Epic.” Materiali e Discussioni per l’Analisi dei Testi Classici 57:19–43.
———. 2008. “Oedipus of Many Pains: Strategies of Contest in Homeric Poetry.”
Malcolm Davies. The Greek Epic Cycle. London: Bristol, 1989.
Fantuzzi, M., and C. Tsagalis, eds. 2014. The Greek Epic Cycle and its Ancient Reception: A Companion. Cambridge.
Margalit Finkelberg. The Cypria, the Iliad, and the Problem of Multiformity in Oral and Written Tradition, ‹‹CP›› 95, 2000, pp. 1-11.
Lulli, L. 2014. “Local Epics and Epic Cycles: The Anomalous Case of a Submerged Genre.” In Submerged Literature in Ancient Greek Culture, ed. G. Colesanti and Giordano, 76–90. Berlin and Boston.
L. Huxley. Greek Epic Poetry from Eumelos to Panyassis, Cambridge 1969.
Richard Martin. Telemachus and the Last Hero Song, ‹‹Colby Quarterly›› 29, 1993, pp. 222-240.
Jasper Griffin. “The epic cycle and the uniqueness of Homer.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 97 (1977) 39-53.
Ingrid Holmberg “The Creation of the Ancient Greek Epic Cycle”
Malkin, I., The Returns of Odysseus: Colonization and Ethnicity, Berkeley 1998.
Marks, J., ‘‘Alternative Odysseys: The Case of Thoas and Odysseus’’, TAPhA 133.2 (2003) 209-226.
Gregory Nagy. The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek poetry. Baltimore 1999.
Nagy, G., “Oral Traditions, Written Texts, and Questions of Authorship”, in: M. Fantuzzi / C. Tsagalis (eds.), Cambridge Companion to the Greek Epic Cycle, Cambridge 2015, 59-77.
Nelson, T. J., ‘‘Intertextual Agōnes in Archaic Greek Epic: Penelope vs. the Catalogue of Women’’, YAGE 5.1 (2021) 25-57.
Rutherford, I., “The Catalogue of Women within the Greek Epic Tradition: Allusion, Intertextuality and Traditional Referentiality”, in: O. Anderson / D. T. T. Haug (eds.), Relative Chronology of Early Greek Epic Poetry, Cambridge 2012, 152-167.
Albert Severyns. Le cycle épique dans l’école d’Aristarque. Paris: Les Belles Lettres 1928.
Albert Severyns. Recherches sur la Chrestomathie de Proclos. Paris: Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres, Liége, 1938.
Giampiero Scafoglio. La questione ciclica, ‹‹RPh››78, 2004, pp. 289-310.
Laura Slatkin. The Power of Thetis: Allusion and Interpretation in the Iliad. Berkeley 1991.
Michael Squire. The Iliad in a Nutshell: Visualizing Epic on the Tabulae Iliacae. Oxford: 2011.
Tsagalis, C., Early Greek Epic Fragments I: Antiquarian and Genealogical Epic, Berlin / Boston 2017.
Marco Fantuzzi and Christos Tsagalis. “Introduction: Kyklos, Epic Cycle, and Cyclic Poetry.” In M. Fantuzzi and C. Tsagalis (eds.). ACompanion to the Greek Epic Cycle and Its Fortune in the Ancient World. (Brill, 2014).
Martin L. West. The Epic Cycle: A Commentary on the Lost Troy Epics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
“To remember the past, you tell a story about it. And in recalling the memory, you tell the story again. It is not always the same story, as the person telling it does not always want the same things….As children become better storytellers, they become better rememberers. But their memory system also becomes more susceptible to distortion.”
Charles Fernyhough, Pieces of Light, 98
“He was like someone speaking many lies similar to the truth.”
When Odysseus returns to Ithaca in the second half of the Odyssey, he spends seven books in disguise. Part of the motivation for this is to give him the ability to test the loyalty of the people in Ithaca and justify the murder of the suitors and the slaughter of the handmaids at the end. But another part is that Odysseus explores who he is by reflecting on others’ stories. He uses his narratives in the second half of the epic to negotiate different parts of identity, to imagine different lives for himself, and to distance himself from the trauma of war and wandering.
In studying memory Martin Conway suggests that there are two forces in human recall: correspondence, which is about equivalence between details of ‘reality’ (or experience) and details of a story and coherence, which means that details make sense together in a narrative. When we tell stories about ourselves, we are not repeating a one-to-one correspondence between what happened and what we say about it. Instead we are engaging in the creation of autobiographical memory to create a coherent sense of ourselves.
The problem with seeing Odysseus as doing this in the second half of the Odyssey, of course, is that his stories are only obliquely about himself. They are mostly lies and they change depending on who he talks to: he shifts in narratives from Eumaios, to the suitors, and to his father at the epic’s end. His lies say something about him, certainly; but they also say something about how he views others.
The stories he tells lets him mirror and then use others. And he uses them to complete the hardest (and most violent) parts of his homecoming.
“I don’t know. No one ever knows his own father himself.”
There are a series of days each year when my father’s memory presses upon me: father’s day, his birthday, the day(s) he died, and holidays. I miss him deeply; but I also spend the years pondering the questions I don’t have answers to, wondering how much of what he was shapes me still.
When my father died, it was a shock both for its suddenness and then for the series of minor mysteries that followed. The first was the uncertainty of what happened. He died at 61 after a sudden bout with pneumonia. The autopsy revealed his lungs were filled with sawdust from years of fiddling around with woodworking, mask-less in a garage with no circulation. He also had Lyme disease. And years of smoking and drug use had made his breathing weaker and his sense of his own health attenuated.
We search out he causes of things but often find no clear answer. So, often, we choose a simple answer to help us get by. How and why he died suddenly gave way to a series of mundane, pressing questions: funeral arrangements, financial concerns. Packing up a life is never easy; the secrets left behind are entangled in ways the living didn’t imagine and the dead will never learn.
After my father’s death, I expected some trouble. He was a man who shifted easily between lives. He had a rich fantasy life—always dreaming that he would accomplish something great, that he would end up someone different. As the oldest of three, it fell to me to try to make sense of the mess: years of unpaid taxes; a maze of debt and collection bureaus; accounts tied to strange addresses; unopened summonses and bills.
At one point, I had to log in into my father’s email account, at first to contact some business associates who owed him money, and later to sift through his last few weeks of correspondence to try to figure out whether or not he knew how sick he was. (He did. Forty-eight hours before his death he sent an email to his older sister, writing “This is the sickest I have ever been.” He still waited another 36 hours to go to the doctor.)
There was a strange type of voyeurism in the process. I suspected some of what I would find, but not everything. Infidelity, I knew about. Debt and delinquency? This had been the story of our lives. But during the process of arranging for my father’s funeral, writing a eulogy, and trying to make an initial reckoning of his accounts, I started emailing with one of my father’s business associates, a man I will call Felix.
“There is one universal law among mortals
And one that is right to the gods, I believe truly—
And to all animals as well: to love the children we bear.
In everything else, we follow different laws.”
Upon his return to Ithaca, Odysseus spends a significant amount of time enjoying hospitality of his enslaved swineherd, Eumaios. He tells Eumaios some terrific stories: he was a warrior from Crete who made the wrong decision to go to war and after years of suffering and betrayal he ended up enslaved and sold. Part of that story is true, of course; and the enslavement can function as a metaphor for his pains at sea and how he was subject to cruel fate. But the story also serves to endear Odysseus to Eumaios by anticipating Eumaios’ own story: how he was kidnapped as a child by a devious nurse and sold off to slavers who brought him to Ithaca.
When we meet new people, we eagerly find common ground through personal stories: we grew up in the same/similar place; we went to school in the same city; we worked in similar industries, etc. But as relationships deepen, we share those harder stories. Sometimes, to identify with people, or even to upstage them, we embellish or reshape our stories.
Even false tales can arise from real pain. Life leaves physical markers on us as literal as Odysseus’ scar. But the marks that define us are more often than not unseen. Just as the year’s calendar eventually becomes a catalog of days for the lost and gone, so too can our memories become a latticework of scars and open wounds. The facts of the stories we tell can be less meaningful than the truth they are trying to convey.
Odysseus and his father
My father’s colleague Felix confided in me that my dad had become a close friend, in part because of his empathy regarding Felix’s daughter. His daughter had suffered from an “unknown progressive neuro-muscular disorder causing severe dystonia” and the pain she endured alongside the uncertainty of her diagnosis (which seemed to indicate a shortened life) wracked him and his family with the kind of suffering that only parents can imagine.
Felix made it clear that my father changed his life because he was always there just to listen and because he inspired him with his love of his family and his expressions of religious faith. He also inspired him, he revealed, because he shared with him his own story of loss, the loss of his daughter Rachel.
“There is a good time for lies and god honors it”
ψευδῶν δὲ καιρὸν ἔσθ’ ὅπου τιμᾷ θεός #Aeschylus
I never had a sibling named Rachel. But I didn’t say this to Felix because he had forwarded me an email where my father wrote:
“Every day I wake up thinking of my daughter –Rachel – go to bed thinking of Rachel. We had 4 children – now 3 but the blessings and gifts they have brought blow my mind […] but always Rachel is the background- never goes away- but I have still have joy and overwhelmed with blessings.”
Felix assured me that he had never mentioned this email to anyone. Even as I type this now I can smell the stale smoke in my father’s office where I read this for the first time. I remember calling my wife in to read it. Under the pall of our grief, we couldn’t process this, we couldn’t make sense of what it meant or whether it was possible. Soon, like my father, I was waking up and thinking about Rachel.
“If I tell the truth, I won’t make you happy.
But if I am to make you happy, I will say nothing true.”
There’s a scholarly tradition of dismissing the end of the Odyssey. Ancient scholars complain that the Odyssey ended properly with the reunion of Odysseus and Penelope, while the Archbishop of Thessaloniki, Eustathius, observed that book 24 is full of really important things, like “the recognition scene between Odysseus and Laertes.” Odysseus’ reunions take him through the major roles he plays in life as part of re-establishing an Ithakan identity. In book 24, he must reconcile with his community and his dad.
Infant and Skull, Medieval, Louvre
When I talk about the Odyssey publicly and I get to its end, I explain that I never really understood the reunion scene until I became a father and lost my father in the same year. Odysseus tests and teases his father cruelly, only to panic and give up the ruse when he makes Laertes cry. Odysseus’ scar is a necessary but insufficient proof of his identity to his father. To confirm their relationship, they rehearse the stories of the groves and trees they used to tend together when Odysseus was young.
My father spent a good deal of the last few decades of his life clearing and planting in the woods of southern Maine. His primary engagement with my brother and me was this land: planting grass, mowing the lawn, developing gardens, planning for the future. The land my mother and brother still live on is also a map of memory: the places where we played games; the trees we climbed; where we fought; where we buried pets. In my father’s absence, there was one fewer person in the world who could attest to the truth of our stories.
So I was left with new stories for this landscape. Eventually, I tried to make ‘Rachel’ cohere with reality. My mother had miscarriages before me and after me and, as family lore goes, was told she wasn’t able to have children. When I was younger and the whole family was more religious, they told me (the oldest) that they hadn’t had a child until they joined a new church and started to pray. I was baptized and confirmed in that church. The minister was my godfather. I have a picture of him holding my daughter.
But when I asked my mother, in a probably less than sensitive way, if there were any other children or if they had planned on naming one of the miscarriages Rachel, she thought it was absurd. It didn’t seem to me likely that my father had spent years brooding in secret over a lost child when he had three healthy children.
But as a recent father, I could imagine the possibility at least. From the moment I knew my wife was pregnant, I would feel a deep, gut-wrenching fear at even imagining the death of a child. In this I have found the ultimate failure of Stoic prior contemplation: I cannot conceive of a world where I knit myself back together after losing a child. Is that what happened with my father?
As we approached his funeral, I daydreamed a future story where I interviewed distant relatives and friends about may father’s past, the type of people who might know about a lost child, or about a baby born out of wedlock whose brief existence had been hidden from my mother. As the long hours past, I thought that maybe this was Rachel: a brief alternative life in the past whose loss had festered in my father as a metonym for all of the other lives he could have lived. Or, as that fourth child, that extra helping of happiness that might have tipped the scales in a middling life.
“I once lived in a house among men, a blessed man in a
wealthy house, and I used to give much to a wanderer”
There is a cold empathy in Odysseus’ stories—he is a kind of predating narrator in echoing Eumaios’ greatest sorrow, his kidnapping and enslavement as a child. When Odysseus tells his lies to manipulate Eumaios or test the suitors, he instrumentalizes narrative. He plays upon their suspicions and experiences to put himself in a better position. But that’s an oversimplification of the story too. He also can be seen tracing out he story of his own life, exploring different ways of thinking about what happened to him. As the fugitive Cretan, he tells Eumaios that his men forced him to go to the Trojan War (14.261), he laments that he cared too much for war, and laments how cruel fate has been to him.
Lovis Corinth “Odysseus Fighting the Beggar” 1903
In my own narrative quest, I emailed a woman my father had an affair with and asked her directly if she knew anything about ‘Rachel’. She, who had known my father quite well for years, said she would have been shocked if there were or had been another child, that my father loved his children so much that it would be inconceivable that he would have never mentioned Rachel. And, then, she added enigmatically, “He did say last summer that he would have named your [daughter] Rachel, if it was up to him.”
After my father’s funeral, things spiraled downhill for my family. We eventually got most of the finances under control by writing off credit debt and paying federal and state taxes; two new grandchildren were born over the next year. I left the issue of Rachel quiet to protect my mother and the rest of us from the uncertainty. But I never really stopped thinking about it
When Telemachus first sees Odysseus revealed in the Odyssey, he refuses to believe it his father. Odysseus appears suddenly and he looks too good. There’s a slight delay before Odysseus gets angry, but then Telemachus accepts him, even though he has no proof. Penelope, however, delays acknowledging her husband to the point that when she knows who he is remains an interpretive knot of the poem. I like to imagine her suspecting from the beginning, but resisting seeing in this old, broken beggar the man who left her so many years ago. Even after the slaughter of the suitors—or perhaps, especially after it—she makes him wait, testing him first to see how he reacts when she claims to have moved the bed around which their home was built.
I eventually concluded that there were three possibilities: (1) that my father had emotionally connected with a miscarriage, naming it Rachel and keeping the pain to himself; (2) that he had fathered another child who died (or was estranged); or (3) that he had made up the child drawing on his experiences to empathize with Felix. Given the absence of any evidence for the first two options, I decided that the last was most likely.
When Odysseus lies to his father, crafting a tale that echoes the pain they have both gone through, it is a step too far. As his father cries, Odysseus breaks in and says, “I myself, I am the one about whom who you ask / I have come home in this twentieth year to my paternal land” (κεῖνος μὲν δὴ ὅδ’ αὐτὸς ἐγώ, πάτερ, ὃν σὺ μεταλλᾷς, / ἤλυθον εἰκοστῷ ἔτεϊ ἐς πατρίδα γαῖαν, 24.321–22). But this is not enough for Laertes after so many lies: he asks for a clear sign (σῆμά τί μοι νῦν εἰπὲ ἀριφραδές, 329) and Odysseus shows him his scar and tells him the story of the trees his father described to him when he was a child (333–45). Laertes’ limbs give away as he “recognizes the signs” (σήματ’ ἀναγνόντος … ).
What does it mean to believe that your father was the kind of man who would fabricate a dead child in order to make a connection with someone? Is this even possible? What was the name Rachel to him and why did it recur in different contexts?
Sirens and Odysseus by Fracesco Primaticcio, 1560
My father was a man cut off from many people by his deafness and his aloofness (interconnected). He was also capable of long-term deceit (for self-defense) and short-term confabulation (to try to keep others happy). If he did manufacture the memory of a child, I am almost certain he did it with a full range of emotions drawn from the rest of his life and that part of him wanted to believe it. We make up stories all the time. We all bend the truth and introduce new details into old stories. If he invented a Rachel to console Felix, he did it because he wanted to feel with him, to be his friend, and through grief to be more fully human.
But perhaps this conclusion is still just more evidence of me creating the father I wanted to have rather than acknowledging the man he really was. To some, inventing a dead child might sound diabolical. But, given the other options, it speaks to me of someone who wanted to feel, of a man who into his last days was trying to be something real.
And this in turn is a lesson on the complexity of what makes each one of us who we are.
Many of the concepts in this entry come from this book
Today Reading Greek Tragedy Online returns to Sophocles’ Philoktetes at 3 PM EDT Online, and LIVE at Harvard University’s Hilles Cinema, sponsored by the Division of Arts and Sciences and Department of the Classics at Harvard University and the School of Arts and Sciences and Department of Classical Studies at Brandeis University. Tune in Live, return for a recording, or, if you can make it, stop by in person and say, “ἆ ἆ ἆ ἆ.”
Sophocles, Philoktetes 971-2
“You aren’t bad but by learning from wicked men you became used to pursuing wicked things”
RGTO is produced by a partnership of Out of Chaos Theatre, the Center for Hellenic Studies, and the Kosmos Society. This project started at the onset of COVID19 lockdowns in the US and UK and brings together actors and researches to stage scenes from the ancient stage and talk about how they impact us to this day. We have over 50 episodes posted already and will add a few more by the end of the year. In the first year of the Pandemic, we went through every extant Greek tragedy. As we have moved on, we have tried to broaden our scope, expanding the questions we ask of the past and reaching out to bring more people and perspectives into discussion.
Sophocles, Philoktetes 54-55
“You need to bewitch
Philoktetes’ mind with your words.”
τὴν Φιλοκτήτου σε δεῖ
ψυχὴν ὅπως λόγοισιν ἐκκλέψεις λέγων
This performance marks the first time many of us have met in person and the first time some of us have been together since before the start of the pandemic. As we have written about elsewhere, the process of putting on these readings has helped us to rethink Greek Tragedy. For me, it has forced a re-centering of performance and audience experience in creating a play’s meaning. Viewing and reflecting on tragic action together expands our emotional and cognitive grasp, helping us to see each other and ourselves through the characters on stage. In particular, the practice of listening to other peoples’ interpretations and using them as a sounding board for our own gives the moment of performance and its aftermath power that is often impoverished on a simple page.
Cast and Crew
Eunice Roberts
Damian Jermaine Thompson
René Thornton Jr.
Sara Valentine
Directed by Paul O’Mahony, translated by Ian Johnston.
With host Joel Christensen, and special guests, Naomi Weiss and David Elmer
Amazing People
Artistic Director: Paul O’Mahony (Out of Chaos Theatre) Host and Faculty Consultant: Joel Christensen (Brandeis University) Executive Producer: Allie Marbry (Center for Hellenic Studies) Producers: Keith DeStone (Center for Hellenic Studies), Hélène Emeriaud, Janet Ozsolak, and Sarah Scott (Kosmos Society) Director of Outreach: Amy Pistone (Gonzaga University) Poster Designer: Allie Marbry (Center for Hellenic Studies) Poster Illustration Artist: John Koelle
Sophocles, Philoctetes 86-95 (Neoptolemus to Odysseus)
“For my part, son of Laertes, I hate to carry out those plans which pain me to hear. I was not born to do anything from evil contrivance, nor was the one (as they say) who begot me. But I am always up to the task of taking a man by violence and not trickery. With his one foot, Philoctetes will not overwhelm us, who are so many, in a violent contest. Yet, since I was sent as your helpmate, I would rather not be called a traitor; but my lord, I would rather err while acting nobly than prevail while acting basely.”
We first visited Philoktetes on the island of Lemnos in 2020 with special guest Norman Sandridge. At the beginning of the pandemic it was impossible not to see Philoktetes’ isolation and dehumanization as a way to think about the impact of COVID19 on our lives.
Sophocles, Philoktetes 446-452
“He would survive, since nothing rotten ever dies,
but the gods take good care of these things
and they love turning the wicked back from hell
even as they are always damning the just and good.
How can we make sense of this, can we praise it
when look close at their work and realize the gods are evil?”
“We use ‘self-sufficient’ not to mean a person alone—someone living in isolation—but to include one’s parents, children, spouse, friends, and even fellow citizens, since a human being is a social creature by nature. Now, some limit needs to be observed in these ties—for it will go on endlessly if you extend it to someone’s ancestors and descendants. But that’s a problem for another time.
We posit that self-sufficiency is something which in itself makes life attractive and lacks nothing and for this reason we think it is happiness, since we imagine that happiness is the most preferable of all things when it is not counted with others. It is clear that it is desirable even with the least of the goods—the addition of goods increases the total, since the greater good is always desirable.”
No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man
is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine;
if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe
is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as
well as if a Manor of thy friends or of thine
owne were; any mans death diminishes me,
because I am involved in Mankinde;
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.
Late in 2021, I had the great honor of being asked to preside over the wedding of a former student and friend, Zach as he married his long time partner, Molly. In the midst of COVID19 still and all the chaos in the world, it was a moment of respite and celebration and a sign that life continues on. Here’s the better part of it to mark a commercial holiday with all the meaning that we make of it.
Welcome friends, family, and all of you who gather today to celebrate Molly and Zack. After nearly two years of uncertainty and fear, there are few things more life affirming and hopeful than this–two people confirming their love for each other and asking their community to stand with them to recognize that in a shifting and unsettled world, this is something to count on.
As a sage once said, how did we get here? When Zach first asked me before the Pandemic to officiate I said yes without hesitation–not because I have any authority or experience in doing so, but because I can think of an honor no greater than this, to stand here and help Molly and Zach speak into existence something they made for themselves, something to shape, define and comfort them for the rest of their lives.
As is the custom with these things, I am in a position to offer some reflection and advice to the soon to be wed couple on what marriage means. Three short stories; three things to think about: politics, passion, and age.
I was Zach’s teacher in the Department of Brandeis University in the Department of Classical Studies. I used to joke to Zach that the nicest thing said about marriage in all of classical literature comes in Homer’s Odyssey when Odysseus, naked and bedraggled, gives a blessing to the young princess Nausikaa
“May the gods grant as much as you desire in your thoughts,
A husband and home, and may they give you fine likemindness,
For nothing is better and stronger than this
When two people who are likeminded in their thoughts share a home,
A man and a wife—this brings many pains for their enemies
And joys to their friends. And the gods listen to them especially”
Doesn’t this sound great! The lesson here, it’s a political one, the promise of the married couple working as a team to achieve their goals and punish all those who oppose them. But there’s a limit too-a close reading shows that homophrosyne, likemindedness, means having shared aims and plans, but it really looks externally, to surviving the world outside the home.
If the Odyssey tells us about the politics of marriage, and dominating your neighbors, another famous story is about passion. Ovid’s Metamorphoses gives us the Babylonian Pyramus and Thisbe. Two young lovers, forbidden to be with each other, housed right next door. When they sneak out to meet, Thisbe runs from a lioness and leaves her veil behind only to have Pyramus arrive to see what he thinks is a predator with a bloody grin. The two end up taking their own lives in sorrow and inspiring tales like Romeo and Juliet.
Pyramus and Thisbe, House of Dionysus
This story is in a way an warning allegory about passion and excess–it reflects the kind of love that burns bright and then fades. The frantic love of youth is a memory. It inflames, but is hard to sustain.
The one story from the ancient world that has always seemed to me to understand love the most is Baucis and Philemon, also told by Ovid. They were an aging couple in a wicked city and when the gods came to test them, they were the only ones who offered strangers hospitality. In thanks, Hermes and Zeus turned their home into a temple and when they died, they turned into two trees, rooted near each other, and over time they grew so intertwined that you couldn’t tell where one started and the other ended but you could still clearly see the wood and character of each tree.
Jan van den Hoecke, “Peasants Philemon and Baucis visited by Jupiter and Mercury.”
This too is an allegory for love: the way people grow together and change, shaping and shaped in turn, creating a life and story that is so intertwined that you cannot remember where one starts and the other ends. As I have learned in spending more than half my life with my partner, few gifts are more comforting and sustaining, to be part of something bigger while still yet becoming yourself. Passion inspires us to love; life requires us to team up and face the daily struggle, age and the passage of time brings this great, unexpected gift: becoming more than yourself by loving someone else.
May you bring joy to your friends and eliminate your enemies, may you feel the passion of youth for as long as it burns, and may you grow so close and strong together that no power on earth can move you apart.
I am presiding over another wedding this spring (!) and will have to come up with new stories to tell.
“No one is so old that he thinks he could not live another year”
nemo enim est tam senex qui se annum non putet posse vivere #Cicero
2021 has kept us busy: from another year of Reading Greek Tragedy Online, to the debut of Pasts Imperfect, to a new baby, minor medical incidents, and just making it through each day, there’s been a lot of busyness in the second year of our COVID. Somehow, we kept this page up and running. Shit, if COVID, an insurrection, and a pandemic baby won’t kill this page, only Zeus knows what will.
So, another year, another list. Here are the new posts that got the most attention in 2021. Notable is that this is the first year when a majority of the top posts are by guests.
Just a Girl: Being Briseis: an anonymous post on the challenges of teaching the Iliad when students (and instructor) have encountered sexual violence.
Some conventional things were published too, email or DM for a copy
“Beautiful Bodies, Beautiful Minds: Some Applications of Disability Studies to Homer.” Classical World 114.4
“Catharsis During Covid-19: Learning about Greek Tragedy Online.’ Teaching Classics in Pandemic Times (Didaskalika 7) edited by Wolfgang Polleichtner. 2021 Speyer: Kartoffeldruck. 34–48.
(With E.T.E. Barker) “Heracles in Epic.” The Oxford Handbook to Heracles, edited by Daniel Ogden.
“Odysseus’ ‘Right’: Failed Transition and Political Power in the Odyssey” SAGE Business Cases
Elena, ekkolapsis (ἐκκόλαψις) la schiusa dell’uovo, Museo archeologico nazionale di Metaponto. In calcare, V sec. a.C.
“…the egg that Orpheus claims was created, projected from the boundless matter, was born like this: the quadruple matter is alive and all of the endless deep flows eternally but it moves in an unclear war, pouring forth here and there endless incomplete mixtures from one time to another. For this reason, it pulls them back too and then opens wide as if for the birth of a creature that cannot be bound.”
The poet and classicist Anne Carson has an essay that sticks like maple syrup to your subconscious, called “Essay on What I Think About Most.” She begins the poem by addressing the idea of the error and what we can learn from it by dissecting a bit of poetry from Alcman of Sparta, a Greek lyric poet from the 7th century BCE.
[made?] three seasons, summer
and winter and autumn third
and fourth spring when
there is blooming but to eat enough
is not (trans. Carson)
Carson notes that the verb in Alcman’s laconic rumination on hunger seems to have no subject. She addresses whether this was a grammatical mistake caused by transmission and fragmentation; a way modern philologists can scrub away “errors” of the past. “But as you know, the chief aim of philology,” she says, “is to reduce all textual delight / to an accident of history. And I am uneasy with any claim to know exactly / what a poet means to say. So let’s leave the question mark there “
The lack of any punctuation is the kicker there. The absence does more work than any ellipsis or period ever could. Carson demonstrates how, for her, Alcman “sidesteps fear, anxiety, shame, remorse” connected to mistakes in order to engage with a truth:
“The fact of the matter for humans is imperfection.”
And that is in part what the first column of Pasts Imperfect argues forin addressing the construction, impact, and harm of Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth: the need to embrace the mess and variants of the past. To do this, we must also situate the “classical” Mediterranean within a global antiquity.
What is Pasts Imperfect? It is a column and a space for commentary, reviews, essays, reflections, statements, and any other words needed to help us negotiate between the past and our present world. We talk about pasts because antiquity isn’t just one land, timeline, or narrative; it is multiple and multiplied by the perspectives we bring to bear on it. Our Pasts are not just Greek, Roman, and Mediterranean; they are not just elite, white, and male. The past includes these people and perspectives, but also those who were silenced or left behind: the people, the languages, and the histories in or beyond the margins.
Imperfect is about value and aspect. We acknowledge that the past is far from perfect and we study antiquity to help us understand ourselves and the causes of things, not to render fictive, to emulate, or to praise simply because something has been praised before. To be human is to be imperfect; to love as a human is to love imperfectly. Our studies of the past and ourselves must honor and inhabit such complexities.
Imperfect is also about incompletion. We see the study of the past as a process that is ongoing and never truly done: each generation, each embodied person, each new perspective contributes to challenging what we think we know about what has come before.
Pasts Imperfect seeks to bring critical and transparently progressive reflections and scholarship on antiquity to a wider audience. It is a column, a space, and a developing network for those who want to engage in challenging discussions about antiquity, its construction and reception in scholarship, and its impact on the modern world. As our editorial college and paid writer-network begins to expand and to take pitches, we hope to venture into a more global understanding of the past while also making space for imperfection.
Plutarch, On the Affection Offspring (Moralia 496b)
“There is nothing so imperfect, helpless, naked, formless, and unclean as a human being glimpsed at the moment of birth, someone to whom nature has not even given a clear path to the light.”
The 2020 Olympics, postponed because of COVID19, are due to start this week in Japan. They might be cancelled again, but the athletes have been training hard and Sarah E. Bond and I talked about the beginning, the end, and the tender parts of the Olympics with Jonathan Van Ness on his podcast Getting Curious. (Go here for a transcript). Here’s a short post from Sarah and me.
Pindar, Olympian 10. 26-61
“Zeus’ laws move me to sing of that exceptional contest-ground which Herakles
Set up by the burial place of Pelops along six altars
After he killed Kteatos, Poseidon’s perfect son
And Eurutos, because he was willfully
Trying to get his pay from arrogant and unwilling Augeas.
Herakles set an ambush in the underbrush near Kleônai and defeated the men near the road.
Once before the intolerable Moliones crushed
His army from Tirynth
When it was at rest in the valley of Elis.
Not long after that the king of the Epeians
Who deceived a friend
Saw his rich country and his own city
Laid low under the deep current
Of tireless fire and steel blows.
There’s no way to decline
A conflict with stronger people.
And that guy at last
Was found caught thanks to his own foolishness
And he didn’t escape sheer death.
Then Zeus’ bold son gathered the whole army and the spoils
In Pisa and created a sacred space for his father supreme.
He brought all of Altis around into an enclosure and marked it off.
He made a circle in the plain and a place for feasting,
Not failing to honor the stream Alpheus and the twelve high gods.
He named this the hill of Kronos because it was nameless before
When Oinomaus was king and it was crowned with damp snow.
The Fates stood nearby during this birth-rite
Alongside the only one who can test the true truth of things,
Time.
Then as Time moved forward, it revealed the clear truth of things—
How Herakles distributed the spoils of war
And made the best of them sacred;
And how he created the four-year festival with the first Olympic games and their triumphs.”
In Pindar’s 10th Olympian Ode, we find the traditional story for the creation of the first Olympic games. Herakles established them to honor his father and the rest of the gods during his various labors. Pindar’s poem, an epinician (a poem composed in honor of an athletic victory) is one of many that blends myth, history, and effusive praise–a heady mix wielded by sportswriters to this day.
The traditional date of the first Olympics is 776 BCE. The event was so important that its four-year cycle was the only calendar system shared by ancient Greek cities. (Each city-state had its own way of keeping time, typically a luni-solar system based around religious festivals, agrarian rites etc.)
But the Olympics were not the only Panhellenic games. Between the legendary founding of the Olympia and the Classical Age three other major games developed: the Nemean, Isthmian, and Pythian. These games had what you might expect: running, archery, boxing. They also had musical and choral competitions and some of the biggest events wouldn’t be found at today’s Olympics (the chariot games).
Athletic festivals like the Olympian games were part of a handful of cultural practices we now recognize as creating Panhellenic identities. Other include worship at the cult-sites of Delphi and Delos and Homeric and Hesiodic poems. The Games were an essential part of aristocratic culture–so much so that there are accounts of people considering the games a good place to find a spouse.
remains of temple at Olympia
Just as today, most of us would have no chance of competing in the games: they were for those healthy and wealthy enough to spend their time training and of blood noble enough to have the presumption to enter the contests. They were of such prestige in Athens that an Olympic victor was awarded with meals for life in the public dining hall.
The earliest games we have recorded in literature are in Homer’s Iliad where Achilles hosts funeral games in honor of Patroclus. Those games create an experimental space where the leading figures of the Achaeans could compete against one another without actual murder. Indeed, a close reading of Iliad 23 will show that Achilles, Menelaos, Antilokhos, and friends negotiate some of the same political tensions that causes the conflict in book 1.
Athletic contests in early Greece, then, developed as a ritualized kind of practice for war. Most of the events practiced–running, wrestling, javelin throwing–are those that aristocrats would have practiced in preparation for war. But instead of fighting each other to the death, they struggled over honor on the field. Probably naked. Probably cheating and scrabbling for every advantage just like today.
Note on Pindar’s 12th Olympic Ode, 15th century (Harley MS 1752, f. 126r) (Image via the British Library).
The traditional date for the last ancient Olympic games is 393 CE—even if ancient historians such as David Potter (2011) and Sofie Remijsen (2015) have questioned the reality of this rather synthetic date.They place the final games later into the reign of the emperor Theodosius II (r. 408-450 CE). In the years prior to the concluding competition, the Roman emperor Theodosius I, a Nicene Christian born in Hispania, had undertaken sweeping legislation and withheld state funds in order to quell traditional Roman religio and address heresies within the empire. The closing of the famed festival games held in honor of Zeus may have been but one move in a broader agenda which promoted Nicene Christianity while suppressing spaces, rituals, and people labeled as either pagan or heretical. Or the games may have simply petered out and fallen victim to the institutional and financial shifts at play in the late Roman Mediterranean.
In 380, the “Edict of Thessalonica” (also known as Cunctos populos; CTh 16.1.2 trans. Jacobs) was directed predominantly at the heretics of Constantinople. It took on a more wide-ranging significance defining Nicene Christianity as the “official” faith of the Roman Empire with the compiling of the Theodosian Code in 436. However, other imperial actions did signal attempts to literally and figuratively snuff out paganism. In 391, the eternal flame of Vesta in Rome was extinguished and numerous laws banned sacrifices or withheld money from traditional religious cults. As Remijsen notes, the closing of Greek athletic festivals in Late Antiquity was not just religiously motivated, but also influenced by financial, institutional, and political aims. Agonistic budgets were high and the shift to a more centralized financial scheme meant athletic festivals could not be paid for.
Fragment of a Document and List of Olympic Victors (P.Oxy. XXXIII 2381, TM 59764, LDAB 868, MP3 2188, 3rdC CE) (Image via the British Library).
Fragment of a Document and List of Olympic Victors (P.Oxy. XXXIII 2381, TM 59764, LDAB 868, MP3 2188, 3rdC CE) (Image via the British Library).
Whatever the motives for the demise of the Olympic games in Late Antiquity, the historic festival has left behind a wealth of literature, papyri, inscriptions, art, and archaeological remains that continue to grip the imagination of the modern public since the reinstitution of the games in 1896. The Olympics can and have been used for nefarious purposes (e.g. the Berlin Olympics of 1936 and Leni Reifenstahl’s propaganda film Olympia). However, the modern Olympics can also nudge us to reinvestigate the origins and evidence for the Archaic games.
“I was asking him next why he made his poem start with the “rage of Achilles”. He said that it just leapt into his head that way without any prior thought.”
Here’s a bit of something different: I’d like to talk about new book my a good friend. Emily Austin’s Grief and the Hero: The Futility of Longing in the Iliad was released a few months ago. As anyone who has published something during the pandemic knows, there’s not much room for something as simple as a book in all the noise.
But this is a book I think people should read. Now, I read a lot of books about Homer. It is not just a job, it is something I have done as a hobby since I first read Gregory Nagy’s The Best of the Achaeans and Richard Martin’s The Language of Heroesas an undergraduate. I often ignored homework assignments in graduate school in favor of reading books like Donna Wilson’s Ransom and Revenge or Hilary Mackie’s Talking Trojans. See, before I started working on the Odyssey,I was all Iliad all the time.
D Schol. ad ll 1.1
“Sing the rage..” [People] ask why the poem begins from rage, so ill-famed a word. It does for two reasons. First, so that it might [grab the attention] of that particular portion of the soul and make audiences more ready for the sublime and position us to handle sufferings nobly, since it is about to narrate wars.
A second reason is to make the praises of the Greeks more credible. Since it was about to reveal the Greeks prevailing, it is not seemly to make it more worthy of credibility by failing to make everything contribute positively to their praise.”
Everyone knows the Iliad starts with the “rage of Achilles”. What that rage means and how it shapes the poem is not so universally understood. My first Greek teacher and now friend of two decades, Leonard Muellner, wrote one of the best books on this topic. In his The Anger of Achilles: Mênis in Greek Epic, Lenny shows how Achilles’ anger has cosmic implications and is rooted in a thematic pattern shared by gods like Demeter and Zeus. He also notes that there may have been versions of the poem that put Achilles’ rage alongside Apollo’s
The proem according to Aristoxenus
Tell me now Muses who have Olympian Homes
How rage and anger overtook Peleus’ son
And also the shining son of Leto. For the king was enraged…”
What I love about Emily Austin’s book is that she enters into a deep and ancient discussion and asks what seems like a simple question: what about the cause of rage? Starting from the premise that the absence of things, longing, what a Lacanian might call a “lack” (my words, not hers), Emily offers a reading of the epic that doesn’t countermand the importance of rage, but instead, decenters it, looking at how longing (pothê,) shapes the poem and its audiences expectations.
Here’s Emily talking about her book:
In Grief and the Hero, I set aside conversations about the Iliad’s composition and authorship, and instead consider the poem as narrative poetry. The heart of my book is Achilles’ experience of futility in grief. Rather than assuming that grief gives rise to anger, as most scholars have done, Grief and the Hero traces the origin of these emotions. Achilles’ grief for Patroklos is uniquely described with the word pothê, “longing.” By joining grief and longing, the Iliad depicts Achilles’ grief as the rupture of shared life—an insight that generates a new way of reading the epic. No action can undo the reality of his friend Patroklos’ death; but the experience of death drives Achilles to act as though he can achieve something restorative. Achilles’ cycles of weeping and vengeance-seeking bring home how those whom we have lost will never return to us, yet we are shaped by the life we shared with them. In Grief and the Hero, I uncover these affective dimensions of the narrative, which contribute to the epic’s lasting appeal. Loss, longing, and even revenge touch many human lives, and the insights of the Iliad have broad resonance.
I am not a disinterested party in this book. I read an early manuscript and recognized early on that this was an original contribution to an old debate. There is an urgency to longing and the absence of what we need to complete ourselves that motivates the actions of the poem and feeds the timeliness of this book. In a year of violence, disruption, and isolation, it is a perfect time to think about the causes of the things that set us apart.
Grief and the Hero provides a perfect complement to Muellner’s analysis of the thematic function of Achilles’ rage; it also functions as a corrective for many responses to Homer that shy away from the grand themes and the big stages of human life. There are a few dozen books about Homer I think a Homerist must read; there are only a handful I think everyone should try. Emily’s Grief and the Hero is now one of them.
Of course, I’m biased here. I’ve learned so much from talking to Emily about literature, loss and grief over the past few years that I am certainly not objective. But I asked a couple other friends for their thoughts too.
Emily Austin has written a rare and welcome contribution to recent Homeric scholarship: a “robustly literary” meditation on grief and the Iliad. In her reading, the Iliad shows how anger born of grief is never satisfied. It cycles on, relentlessly forward. Peace that comes from vengeance is illusory, and the yawning chasm of loss can only be repaired by letting go.
I have spent the better part of three years living inside the characters of the Iliad as I composed and now perform the Blues of Achilles, my first-person song cycle adaptation of the epic. I found Grief and the Hero exhaustingly resonant with what I’ve come to vividly understand as the core emotional arc of Achilles and those caught in his orbit. Grief and the Hero works for me on multiple levels: academic, creative, and, most importantly, human, so beautifully teasing out the most powerful and universal theme of the poem that I only began to fully discover and appreciate as I wrote my songs: the resolution of grief.
“In addition to providing a novel interpretation of the Iliad‘s narrative and applying close readings of phraseology and structures, Emily brings new depths to the character of Achilles that all subsequent interpretations will need to consider. Her approach is a perfect balance of careful scholarship and elegant interpretation.. She has challenged me to think about the human dimension of the stories.”
Those of us in academia have missed some minor things during the pandemic: book release parties, dinners to celebrate tenure, long talks away from loud conferences with friends. These are so insignificant compared to the losses of the past year that I feel bad even mentioning them. But loss is part of what makes us who we are.
Take a chance on a book; let’s make Emily’s year special.
and some epigrammatic humor to end the post
Palladas of Alexandria, Greek Anthology 9.169
“The Rage of Achilles has become the cause for me
a grammarian, of destructive poverty.
I wish the rage had killed me with the Greeks
before the hard hunger of scholarship killed me.”
A few weeks ago, I wrote about Orchards and Trees, using them as a metaphor to think about he development of Homeric poetry and its promulgation. Metaphors, of course, are not the things themselves! While one comparison can help us see a truth of a thing, several can help us get a better understanding of the things day-to-day language and thinking have trouble grasping.
The metaphor of the tree is at its core, a visual one. It may call to mind things and how we use them (ships and wood) or roots and branches, as in the stemmata of textual traditions. Homeric poems developed in a song culture, an aural landscape. Aural memory and oral performance inspire different qualia. And it is difficult–if not mistaken–to try to transfer an aural understanding to a visual one. As Epicurus observes, our senses do not translate from one domain to another. What does it mean to feel a smell?
So, try this one now. Imagine a supremely complex symphony: as you listen, melodies rise and fall over time, movements come and go and they return again, sometimes changed, sometimes syncopated, sometimes just an echo of what they once were. But some three or four note sequences are more insistent than others—they press through the sound and are emphasized first by this instrument and then by those.
Early 16th-century manuscript in mensural notation, containing a Kyrie by J. Barbireau. I have always been jealous of the talented musicians who can ‘see’ songs
The problem is that there are many of these sequences and some repeat intensely only to be lost and never to return, while others burst back through the rising wall of music to take over when they are least expected.
The music is beautiful but terrifyingly hard to follow: when you pause, however briefly, you realize you’ve been listening to one line of song when there were three or four others going on at the same time. It is hard to start again because you don’t want to lose track of the one you just heard. But you are already thinking about that brief gasp of song that escaped you.
The 16 thousand lines of the Iliad and 12 thousand lines of the Odyssey are like 24 and 20 hours of polyphonic music, played by musicians in separate rooms who can’t really hear each other but are somehow working in concert. The audience stands someplace apart. If we relax and let the composition fall over us, we can get some idea of the whole. But when we listen closely, we can get lost in the depth of each passing strain.
This is how I explain why it is so hard to translate epic or even to interpret it well. Each line has melodies full of resonant meaning that echo differently based on who you are and what you’ve heard before. When someone tells you the Iliad is about this or the Odyssey is about that they are following one repeated series of notes for their movement and resolution, and necessarily leaving others aside.
The total density of the soundscape of the poems and the generations of meaning’s potential within them makes them impossible to understand or explain in ‘real time’. When I hear someone talking about what epic means, sometimes it is like hearing a different poem talked about altogether. I have been listening to other movements, contemplating different themes.
The individual lines of Homer break into three units—segments scholars from Milman Parry and Albert Lord to John Miles Foley and Egbert Bakker have seen as units of composition (intonation units) or what we might even think of as ‘measures’. The ‘formulae’ are repeated patterns in a bounded soundscape. They are not simple building blocks, they are merely the observable repetitions of a system with clear limits: words and rhythm are part of the form of expression, not something imposed upon it.
We make meaning differently based on our sensory inputs and our cultures of performance and reception. There’s a strange prejudice Walter Ong identifies (explored more by Foley too) that visual cultures and literary productions are in some way more sophisticated and elaborate in both creation and reception than others. This ‘primitive’ pose is an outcropping of colonialism, yes, but it is also a simple observer bias. Even literary Greeks like Aristotle saw ‘writers’ in Homer where he should have found song.
Oral-formulaic theory helps break down our own cultural prejudices by revealing what is instrumentally possible for composition in performance. This is on the side of production; theories like J. M. Foley’s “traditional referentialtiy” or Barbara Graziosi’s and Johannes Haubold’s “resonance”. Each in part also draws on reader response theory, centering how audiences hear and respond to poems. If we try, we can intellectually grasp how intricate songs emerge in performance and how audiences dynamically receive them.
From Song to Translations
All this leaves aside how the epics moved from living song to the fossils we piece together on the page. This runs through the problems of performance, text, and reperformance. I emphasize song and aurality here because Homeric epic developed and flourished outside the constraints of a page. When a translator or interpreter tries to make sense of what they see on the page, it is like a conductor looking at a score for a symphony written in a different system of notation with many sections unclear.
The role of some instruments is left undesignated; some sounds cannot be made anymore; and some sequences just don’t make sense to a modern ear. As Casey Dué notes, Greg Nagy proposes a movement from performance, to transcript, to script, to scripture in the stabilization of the narrative: a translator has to move backward through these stages, yet abandon none
Because of the polyphony of Greek epic it is charged with meaning: the lines of song exist through time and carry many meanings at once. A translator listens to the whole song as it echoes and picks the melodies that ring strongest now.
Each of us is to an extent a translator of Homer and those of us who read the Greek but teach in another language are constantly moving from one domain to another. If Homer is a langue each of us has our own Homeric parole. In my first semester teaching as a professor, I gave a full lecture on the mythic, even Iliadic “plan of Zeus” (Dios d’eteleieto boulê), going so far as to have the students recite the line in the Greek. At the end of the class, a kind and forgiving student came up to me and said, “that was really cool, but there’s no plan of Zeus in my Iliad.”
I had assigned Stanley Lombardo’s fine translation. He writes about “Zeus’ Will” (as many others do). I hadn’t checked the translation and sounded as if I were speaking of a poem none of the students had read.
The way we each create our own Homer is in part why I have such trouble reading any version other than the Greek. This is why for even the best translations the fairest reaction is to crib from Richard Bentley’s response to Pope’s Iliad: “a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer.” Here’s another quick example of this danger from Emily Wilson’s successful Odyssey translation.
Let’s start with my simple translations and the Greek. In the Odyssey’s proem, the narrator says of Odysseus:
“But he didn’t save his companions even though he wanted to.
They perished because of their own recklessness”
The fools! They ate up the cattle of Hyperion’s son Helios
And he deprived them of their homecoming day.”
The line σφετέρῃσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν (their own recklessness/stupidity) echoes through the poem as a theme that connects Odysseus’ companions, the suitors, and the hero too.
It comes again a mere 20 lines later as Zeus complains
“Friends, how mortals are always blaming the gods!
They say that evils come from us. But they themselves
Have pain beyond their fate because of their own recklessness.
So now Aigisthus too [suffered] beyond his fate…”
This is one of those four-note sequences, a melody earlier scholars would have called a formula that follows, indexes and guides the interpretation of the poem. When I read/teach the Odyssey I point to these passages as inviting us to see the world and its actors in a particular frame
In Wilson’s translation, σφετέρῃσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν disappears from the proem altogether, yielding the following.
“…He failed to keep them safe; poor fools,
They ate the Sun God’s Cattle, and the god
Kept them from home…”
And soon after, σφετέρῃσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν is rendered simply as “By folly.”
“This is absurd,
That mortals blame the gods They say we cause
Their suffering, but they themselves increase it
By folly. So Aegisthus overstepped:”
These choices limit the repetition and play down the theme of responsibility and recklessness that is central to the poem (from my reading). “Folly’ also disambiguates the complexity of atasthalia, which evokes foolishness, rashness, arrogance, and blindness. Of course, this is not an oversight Wilson commits alone: Lombardo translates the first example as “recklessness” and the second as “witlessness”
To be clear, Wilson and Lombardo have to make some choices; no language conveys the same semantic ambiguities of another. Translators perform hermeneutic magic, moving things from one realm to another. Some moments dazzle, others are imperfect illusions.
This takes us back to the symphony played in separate rooms heard only in parts. When people ask me why Homer is different, I sputter about its bigness and depth and land on the layers and power. Like translation itself, analogy and metaphor only take us so far.
There are several works cited above, but for the atasthalia theme see my recent Many Minded Manor these better books:
