This post is a continuation of Painful Signs, a series of posts on the Iliad. The full list of posts is here. New posts will be added on various books, with an emphasis on new projects and highlighting scholarship in general.
Do we really know why or how we make decisions? Do we want steak for dinner because of its social and cultural value or because of the evolutionary advantage of high protein diets or because of our body’s need for iron or because we just like the taste? (Ask a Homeric hero that one: they won’t share fish or vegetables with the gods!)
However we pose the question, it ultimately becomes one of determinism vs. free will and any honest discussion of the pair will likely determine that’s it’s complicated, to say the least. The distinction between the two may be a false binary and even asking the questions itself may in fact be a particular concern of a culture steeped in individualism and garnished with heroic narratives of individual (men) making the world safe and glorious through their own effort.
Homeric epic is far from disinterested in similar questions, but as Hayden Pelliccia (2011) has warned, our willingness to read such questions into Homer may be as much (if not more) a product of our culture than epic’s. But both the Iliad and the Odyssey frame their actions with statements about the relationship between human suffering and divine choice. The Iliad—perhaps problematically— announces that its events are all part of “Zeus’ will being fulfilled”. But the Odyssey changes this up just enough to be interesting: Near the beginning of the epic as he looks down on the mortal Aigisthos, who, despite divine advice to the contrary, has shacked up with Klytemnestra and helped murder Agamemnon, Zeus opines (Od. 1.32-34):
“Mortals! They are always blaming the gods and saying that evil comes from us when they themselves suffer pain beyond their lot because of their own recklessness.”
As I argue in my book on the Odyssey, I think this is a programmatic statement for the epic, inviting audiences to think about to what extent mortal decisions do impact their fate. And I don’t think this is all negative: if we can make our lives worse through our foolishness, certainly the opposite should be true, that we can ameliorate our fates through prudence. But the most important aspect of this is that the opening frame of the epic invites the audience to consider just how much human beings are partners in their fate.
In the Odyssey, I believe that the story of Telemachus is in part set up to show how mortals should work alongside gods, providing something of an ideal situation where humans work with divine sponsorship and inspiration, but choose to act on their own, attaining what psychologists have called a “sense of agency”. As many know, a sense of agency—alongside belonging—can be essential to mental health. But, to make matters more confusing, this may also be tied to cultural assumptions. (And, I use “sense of agency” to weasel my way out of worrying about free will.)
I also think that we tend to overestimate the importance of divine influence in the Iliad, in part because of that nod to “Zeus’ Plan” in the proem. Human decision-making runs parallel to and sometimes alters divine will. Even Zeus’ cosmic plan to rid the earth of the race of heroes is distorted by human decisions. No god inspires Agamemnon to refuse the ransom of the priest Chryses in book 1. Achilles acts according to his own feelings and thoughts when he asks Zeus to punish the Achaeans for slighting his honor. He makes the decision to allow Patroklos to fight. It is with such a fateful decision that he condemns his best friend to die. Zeus has plotted, in accordance with Achilles’s initial will, we should remember; Achilles nevertheless is free to decide on his own course of action. Patroklos’ death hits even harder because Achilles asked for it.
Classic debates from the 20th century about Homeric poetry from the secondary through the post-graduate level involve some variation on the relationship between fate and free will. When it comes to heroic behavior and divine intervention, this can get a bit involved: there are situations that seem somewhat clear (as when Athena pulls Achilles back by the hair in book 1 to keep him from drawing his sword and killing Agamemnon) and those that are less clear (in the same book, the narrative assertion that Hera inspired Achilles to call the assembly is not supported by any other evidence).
Evaluating these situations can be difficult for the audience external to the poem because we have nearly synoptic knowledge on what is going on. At times, we see the gods directly intervening and telling characters to do this and then the humans eventually realize they have been duped (see Athena as Deiphobos with Hektor in book 22); while in others, there are levels of obfuscation as when Zeus sends a ‘false’ dream to Agamemnon that promises him the Achaeans will be victorious on the following day, to which Agamemnon responds by ‘testing’ his army (in book 2).
Distinguishing between what the narrator reveals to us, what is revealed to internal audiences (including Homeric mortals), and what is held back helps us see that there is a lot of complexity in how and why decisions are made. Human beings are not without some agency: While everything in the Iliad may be part of Zeus’ plan, no divinity seems to cause Agamemnon to reject Chryses’ ransom and insult Achilles in book 1, even though he seems to make some claim to that effect in book 19; nor does any god inspire Achilles to ask Zeus to honor him by making the Achaeans suffer.
At a broader thematic level, then, Homeric heroes make important choices. Within the action of the epic and its interwoven plot, however, there are moments in which the gods seem more in control than others. Where Homeric characters seem ignorant of that fact, we see what scholars have called “double motivation” (or determination, or causality), following Albin Lesky. These moments offer interesting insights into Homeric views on human psychology, on theology, and on the limits of human knowledge about their own actions and motivations. On one level, we can see how human characters in the Iliad can use divine action as an excuse or explanation for their own behavior, without any clear reason for doing so. On another level, Homeric epic leaves ample room for reading different deterministic world views into the epic narrative.
This amphora pairs a scene of Dionysus with one of Herakles’ exploits: the struggle between Herakles and Apollo for the Delphic tripod. According to myth, Herakles traveled to the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi to consult the oracle, but, when no answer was forthcoming, the hero seized Apollo’s tripod, prompting a fight between the two. Herakles, draped in his lion-skin and carrying a club, menaces a youthful Apollo, while Herakles’ protector, Athena, and Apollo’s twin sister, Artemis, remain on the sidelines. On the back, Dionysus encounters the lame Hephaestus, god of fire and metalworking, riding on a donkey as a maenad looks on.
In his 2023 Homer’s Iliad and the Problem of Force, Charles Stocking enters into this conversation through a prolonged analysis of expressions for force, especially the doublet damazo/damnemi (“to subdue, kill, etc.”). Stocking argues that the concept “co-agency” is a better way of thinking about double determination because it is “underscored by the conceptual conditions for the production of epic poetry itself and the close link between poet and Zeus” (184). Stocking provides and intricate and persuasive argument that their is a hierarchy in the use and execution of force that pairs gods with mortals, men with women, etc., positioning a stronger party to help along the action of the weaker. He suggests that “the concept of co-agency” sidesteps [the issues of determinism and free will] by focusing the discussion not on the psychological cause of action but simply on how characters view themselves as sites of co-participation in action” (185).
In essence, Stocking is arguing that our modern understanding of ancient metaphysics and epistemology has prevented us from understanding the cultural beliefs represented in Homer, concluding that we should “rethink the Homeric person, not simply as a failed self-conscious individual but as an intersubjective dividual, one constituted by human-divine symbiosis” (221). For people following along with my reading of Stocking’s book, he has used a re-reading of Weil’s analysis of force alongside a critique of Snell’s progressive argument for the development of human consciousness to posit an entirely different picture of human/divine action.
I’ll confess to liking the argument, but wondering as I often do, where performance and audiences come in. Another—not necessarily exclusive—approach is that the epics function dialogically—they invite audiences to think about the relationship between divine will and human action and as a result produce narratives that mix and match different views on the problem. The result does seem to accord with Stocking’s argument, but in a slightly more complicated way. Homer’s heroes are engaged in navigating a world where they make some choices, have some made for them, and then twist the situation in turn by claiming choice or force depending on its rhetorical convenience.
A short bibliography on Homeric decision making and ‘double motivation’
n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know.
Allan, William. “Divine Justice and Cosmic Order in Early Greek Epic.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 126 (2006): 1–35. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30033397.
Finkelberg, Margalit (1995) “Patterns of Human Error in Homer.” JHS 115: 15-28.
Gaskin, Richard. “Do Homeric Heroes Make Real Decisions?” The Classical Quarterly 40, no. 1 (1990): 1–15. http://www.jstor.org/stable/639307.
Lesky, Albin (1961) Gottliche und Menschliche Motivation im Homerischen Epos. Winter, Universitätsverlag: Heidelberg
Pelliccia, Hayden. 2011. “Double Motivation.” Homer Encyclopedia V. 1. ed. M. Finkelberg. 218-2190
Polinskaya, Irene. “Conception of the divine in Greek polytheism.” In A Local History of Greek Polytheism: Gods, People, and the Land of Aigina, 800-400 BCE, vol. 178. Religions in the Graeco-Roman World. Brill, 2013: 71-85.
Segal, Charles. 1994. Singers, Heroes and Gods in the “Odyssey.” Ithaca.
Sharples, R. W. “‘But Why Has My Spirit Spoken with Me Thus?’: Homeric Decision-Making.” Greece & Rome 30, no. 1 (1983): 1–7. http://www.jstor.org/stable/642739.
Tor, Shaul. “Hesiodic epistemology.” In Mortal and Divine in Early Greek Epistemology:A Study of Hesiod, Xenophanes and Parmenides. Cambridge Classical Studies. Cambridge University Press, 2017: 61-103.
This post is a continuation of Painful Signs, a series of posts on the Iliad. The full list of posts is here. New posts will be added on various books, with an emphasis on new projects and highlighting scholarship in general.
How do we know what a work of art like the Iliad wants us to believe? Pour a cup of coffee (or maybe something stronger), because the answer’s not a simple one.
Iliad 2.203-6
“There’s no way all of us Achaeans here can rule! The rule of many isn’t a good thing. Let there be one sovereign, One king, to whom the child of crooked minded Kronos granted The scepter and the laws so that he might provide counsel with them”
Odysseus speaks these lines as he tries to reassemble the Achaeans into assembly after Agamemnon’s test at the beginning of book 2. One scholiast explains that Odysseus is basically saying “this won’t be a democracy” (οὐκ ἔσται δημοκρατία, school. bT ad Il. 2.304b) while another suggests that the single sovereign is “what the empire of the Persians was like—whence their destruction [came]” (οὕτως ἡ Περσῶν ἀρχὴ—ἀφ’ οὗ φθορά,schol. A ad Il. 2.204). Both of these responses emerge out of the political context of Classical Athens or later, since, as far as we can see from each epic, there’s no Homeric notion of democracy or the Persian empire.
The scholiasts are both engaged in a kind of double classical reception: relating the epics to their own experiences but also attributing meanings to ancient contexts that may be anachronistic. Modern scholars have been less concerned about anachronism than in evaluating here—and elsewhere in Homeric politics and culture—what values or ideology the Homeric epics are espousing. Readers like me who tend to see the Homeric poems as dialogic—that is positioning themselves as not giving any direct answers or projecting any specific values, but rather endeavoring to put different ideas in dialogue for audiences to work through—often find it hard to talk about something like ideology because we don’t see Homer as coming from any specific time or place or serving any particular interest. Yet, the nature of Homeric composition and competition with other genres and its seeming affinity for monarchy has attracted a lot of attention.
Evangelist Mark Seated in his Study…
Homer and Ideology
Should we see the Homeric epics as passively (or even actively) promoting a form of government or rule? Scholars have argued that the epics present “aristocratic values” and in doing so ultimately argue against an oligarchy or democracy in favor of some kind of monarchy (even a quasi-constitutional one). Yet these arguments run up against the contents of the poems and the reality of their evolution. The Homeric epics are not tied to one single polity and were embraced by city-states with very different political histories.
My general take has long been that the epics were (and are) in part successful in a “marketplace of myth” because of their ambiguity. They provide just enough information for audiences to see themselves and their own world in the poems but not enough to tie it down to any single place. When it comes to political ideology, the epics present rough ‘institutions’ like the general assembly and the smaller council of chieftains that functioned as analogues for the probouleutic aristocratic councils (think the senate or house of lords) and the larger, more representative assembly (house of representatives/commons).
For scholars less inclined towards the dialogic approach, there have been many discussions about which political values the epics transmit. Some, like Peter Rose (1988; 1997 184-7) see an essential heterogeneity in the epics’ values, while others see the tensions as due to the epics reflecting the values of an emergent city-state (For a summary of arguments labeling the Iliad’s reflections as either “pre-political” or pointing to geometric age Greece, see Hammer 2002, 20-5). David Tandy (1997 144 ff.) argues that the epics largely present the idealogy of the elite (see also Van Wees 1992).
But dominant ideology works best when it appropriates from dissenting ideas to establish something of an integrated status quo as both Peter Rose and William Thalmann argue in different ways. Thalmann (1988, 21) draws on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and suggests “the traditional epic diction in its normal usage is, in Bakhtin’s term, “centripetal.” It creates a unified verbal and ideological world by sustaining the power of this discourse, reveals that the world is too rich and complex to be captured in a straightforward and unitary language, and challenges the unifying socio-political ideology.”
When I was in grad school and first read this, I kept having to squint my eyes and shake my head to remind myself of how to understand the distinctions Thalmann is emphasizing here. Think of it as a difference between inertial (status quo maintaining) and entropic (disintegrating) forces. The dominant power structure is constantly altering its shape, retooling its discourse in order to account for fractures and changes within the space it is incorporating.
The ongoing struggle between maintaining traditional structures and their dissolution can be seen the tension between centripetal forces, in the Bakhtinian sense, and centrifugal forces. The latter represent the many voices and interests of an imperfect system like language or real life where the basic ‘qualities’ seem apparent but there is disorder and change. These forces threaten to yield disparate ideas, to press the very notion of unity apart to the outside, to resist systemization through the process of change and variegation. Centrifugal forces, in contrast, are those cultural forces that attempt impose unity on disunity.
Odysseus with the kind stabbing giant Polyphemus in his single eye. Vase painting from archaic (or late geometric) time. Archaeological Museum of Argos
Disney’s Idealized Zombies
Now, more than twice as old as I was when I started graduate school, thinking about this doesn’t strain my intellect the way it once did. But I think the opposition of the two forces as an analogy can appear simpler than it really is because in effect the processes are always ongoing and unpredictable. It is not as if culture is one master centrifuge constantly adjusting its speed and duration in response to developments and changes in various suspensions. Instead, I imagine multiple centrifugal forces operating at once in concert and then in conflict as their actions and notions are also involved the disparate, even chaotic, centripetal movements.
While closer to what I think is going on, this description will likely cause current readers to step back, perhaps even stop reading. The problem these analogies are trying to address is the interaction between an always changing dominant culture and subcultures within it. One thing less well addressed by the centrifugal analogy is the way that innovations and change within counter-movements are adapted into—or more properly appropriated by—the dominant movement in order to maintain is overall control (what we might call ‘hegemony’)
All of this can leaves head spinning. But let me offer a modern example that might help illustrate things just a little bit. Disney has a trilogy of musical movies starting with Zombies (2018; soon to be a tetralogy) that appear to use domesticated zombies being integrated with humans as an allegory for race relations in the United States (in later movies, the dynamic is repeated as new non-human species are added to the equation: werewolves, aliens, and in Zombies 4, according to my daughter, vampires are along the way). I have watched these movies many times with my family because the music is pretty good (there’s also dancing etc.) and because the message(s) are moving: the central story of the first movie is a Romeo/Juliet of a cheerleader (Addison) and a zombie (Zed) who fall in love.
The zombies are marginalized physically (they look different), geographically (they live on the shadier side of town), socially (they live in closed communities; do different jobs; and politically and legally (segregated from school). When they are forcibly integrated by the state at the beginning of the first film, their ‘worth’ to others is proved through the athletic prowess of Zed (he uses his zombie abilities to turn around the fortunes of the football team), musical abilities, and more. There’s just enough debate about the value of assimilating vs. retaining a different identity to make the echoes of structural racism clear to anyone over a certain age.
Now, as someone who has watched these movies at least a few times each and who has discussed them multiple times with my friend and fellow Homerist Justin Arft, I am both appreciative and skeptical of the ideological forces that produce them. The most important force here is in some way corporate: we have a narrative that is drawing on cultural experiences in order to perpetuate itself, by which I mean “make money”. Effective narratives that do so tap into audience experience and notions of identity and either challenge them (which is what I think good “art” does) or reaffirms identity in an ‘uplifting’ way (which successful commercial art achieves).
Disney has created an anodyne myth of overcoming difference: it takes the whole tension of the experience of racial difference and conflict and recasts its larger, oceanic currents as a conflict that can be addressed interpersonally. It acknowledges the oppositional tension between assimilation and identity, between survival and obeisance, and the sanitizes it in a way that makes the painful, threatening narratives safer, in a kind of ideological appropriation that erases some experiences, similar to the patterns Lyra Monteiro has identified in Lin-Manuel Hamilton’s Hamilton.
Given the way I have framed this, one might be forgiven for assuming that I have contempt for Zombies. The truth is far more complex. There are only a handful of times in their lives that my children have seen me cry (not that I am a tough guy; the kids are just not that observant yet). One of them is while watching Zombies. My wife and I met our first year of college: she is from South India and grew up expecting an arranged marriage; I grew up in rural Maine, and really hadn’t even talked to someone who didn’t code as ‘white’ until I went to college. Our story was wild to us, but so common for people like us: deep, dangerous love; conflicts on both sides of the family; ‘winning’ by getting married and being accepted by each side; learning only later in life after having children how this acceptance didn’t (and doesn’t) extend to the world around us or account for the loss of communities that are ready-made for homogenous families.
When we watch the first duet between Zed and Addition—in probably the best song of all three movies—we weep. They dance around an abandoned classroom, singing at first about the surprise and wonder, and then into the repeated chorus:
Someday, this could be, this could be ordinary Someday, could we be something extraordinary? You and me, side by side, out in the broad daylight If they laugh, we’ll say, “We’re gonna be someday”
We try to explain our reactions to our kids—how it was hard for us, but not like that bad; how we didn’t suffer in some clear pointed way, but lived through and with the tensions. They get it, but the way they understand anything from Disney: vicariously and part of a story with a happy ending.
The wish to both be ordinary and accepted yet to still be something special and unexpected? It strikes me as authentic and moving and pathetic (in the Aristotelian sense) every time. I can simultaneously know that Disney has selected the center-slightly-left values of a demographic with some money and sanitized it for both comfort and a wider audience and have contempt for that while also feeling real feelings in recognizing the experience it resonates in my world all while still recognizing the way that these processes implicate me in the creation of a new kind of neoliberal myth about race relations. The ideological appropriation is emotionally functional even if intellectually disorienting—like being subject to centrifugal forces while trying to move in different directions.
Back to Homer
Where does this analogy leave us with Homer? I suspect that the question of ideology and Homer is super-saturated with meaning because (1) the Homeric epics are diachronic objects, serving and responding to different cultural movements over time and as such reflect (and refract) subtle differences in values; in addition, (2) the ‘dialogic’ nature of the art form, that is, the way it invites audiences to read meaning into it, through it, and even in despite of it; and (3) while epic as the preferred discourse of a reconstructed elite may appropriate non-elite values in order to neutralize them, it also serves as a record of the fantasy of the past that serves the elite while revealing their desires.
The interpretive impasse—or the ideological aporia—that remains is (4) that the double ideological move of appropriation can strive to neuter a disruptive cultural subcurrent while also preserving it for later audiences to resuscitate. Finally, (5) we can’t avoid the ideological formation of the interpreter themselves, the way the observer decodes the discourse and valorizes one aspect of it, erring at times either anachronistically (i.e. without questioning differences between their own views and ancient ones) or monolithically (i.e. assuming homogeneity in reception during any period).
Consider the complex ideological patterning at the end of the Odyssey where Odysseus’ homecoming slaughter of the suitors has been seen as a culturally justified act that communicates a fantasy of a returning monarch exacting vengeance from a recalcitrant and decadent aristocracy. The dead-end nature of revenge highlighted in the epic’s final book, plus the individuation of the suitors, and the pathos developed in the punishment of the serving women and the mutilation of Melanthios, could also speak to early democratic or lower-class audiences, leaving just enough room for them to explore their own space in the political conflict while also providing enough ambiguity that readers like me, unfathomable generations into the future, might read productively against the grain of the dominant discourse of modern scholarship.
A short bibliography on ideology and Homer
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Trans. Holquist and Emerson.
Cairns, Douglas. “The first Odysseus: « Iliad », « Odyssey » and the ideology of kingship.” Gaia, vol. 18, 2015, pp.51-66.
D. Hammer, The Iliad as Politics: The Performance of Political Thought (Norman, OK, 2002), especially 82–92
Peradotto, John. “Outis and the ideology of kleos.” Abstracts of the American Philological Association, 1987, pp. 127.
Stephen Scully. “The Polis in Homer: A Definition and Interpretation.” Ramus 9 (1981) 1-34.
David W. Tandy. Warriors into Traders: The Power of the Market in Early Greece. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Rose, P. W.. Class in archaic Greece. Cambridge Books Online. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Pr., 2012.
Peter W. Rose. “Thersites and the Plural Voices of Homer.” Arethusa 21 (1988) 5-25.
—,—. “Ideology in the Iliad: Polis, Basileus, Theoi.” Arethusa 30 (1997) 151-99.
Stocking, Charles. 2023. Homer’s Iliad and the Problem of Force. Oxford.
William G. Thalmann. “Thersites: Comedy, Scapegoats and Heroic Ideology in the Iliad.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 118 (1988) 1-28.
—,—. “ ‘The Most Divinely Approved and Political Discord’: Thinking about Conflict in the Developing Polis.” Classical Antiquity 23 (2004) 359-99.
Hans van Wees. Status Warriors: War, Violence, and Society in Homer and History. Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 1992.
This post is a continuation of Painful Signs, a series of posts on the Iliad. The full list of posts is here. New posts will be added on various books, with an emphasis on new projects and highlighting scholarship in general.
One of the many questions about Homeric poetry that interests me is its engagement with other genres. There are some basic assumptions about how epic works in relation to other kinds of poetry that can restrict how we talk about epic, think about how audiences engaged with the poetry in performance, and how it influenced (and was influenced by) other kinds of song.
Before discussing some of these assumptions, it may be helpful to give some examples of what I mean. First, repeated language (words, formulae, even longer phrases) may not count as intergeneric engagement, since the genres of early Greek poetry really hail from a song culture that shared a special language. While some forms of Greek song are marked by dialectical differences (see Sappho or Corinna, e.g.), Greek poetry leaned on traditional forms and shared language as part of performance culture.
What I mean by intergeneric engagement is when we can see longer lines, motifs, or ideas at play within and across our evidence from Greek performance culture. Here are two examples from Homer and Mimnermus (a poet traditionally placed in the 6th century BCE). Homer, in describing the spirits of deaths has:
Homer, Iliad 12.326-8
“But now, since the spirits of death stand fast around us By the thousands, and there is no way any mortal can escape them, Let us go and offer a reason to boast to someone else, or take it for ourselves”
Mimnermus has language that is similar, using the same noun and verb in a combination that an Indo-Europeanist like Calvert Watkins would be “formulaic” in a way that would inform both composition and reception. That is, the noun-verb combination implies a sharing of an image/idea that attends a particular domain. Note, the traditionality of the image in Homer is expanded with more vivid personified language in Mimnermus.
Mimnermus, 2 [=Stobaeus 4.34.12]5-8
“The dark spirits of death are standing beside us. One holds eventual old age, in pain, The other has death. The fruit of youth is brief, As long as the sun’s light stretches across the earth.”
Another, more famous example, comes from Glaukos’ speech to Diomedes in Iliad 6 where he parries Diomedes’ question about lineage.
Homer, Iliad 6.146-149
The generations of men are just like leaves on a tree: The wind blows some to the ground and then the forest Grows lush with others when spring comes again. In this way, the race of men grows and then dies in turn.
these leaves don’t fall. Volute Zone Group – period / date: ripe / late archaic, ca. 540-510 BC
In this instance, the comparison is shared, but the language itself doesn’t necessarily lend itself to a formulaic comparison, unless we look at the core comparative word (οἵη/οἷά) + noun (φύλλων/φύλλα) + verb (φύει) sequence as indicative of a common articulation or a generative metaphor that is part of a traditional repertoire of ideas. This takes us right up to those assumptions I mentioned earlier. I’ll separate these into two categories I’ll call “priority trap” and the “generic fallacy”. Both of these categories are rooted in objections I have against supply side poetics–the tendency to privilege authorial intent/practice over what audiences do with poems (songs, etc.).
Let’s start with the priority trap. In my brief comments about Homer and Mimnermus I have operated on the assumption that Homer and Mimnermus draw on a shared corpus of language and image. This is what I would call a networked and non-hierarchical model of reading Greek poetry. It functions in contrast to hierarchical models that imagine Mimnermus “quoting”, “alluding to” or otherwise responding to an extant Homeric text.
Elton Barker and I started to think about these problems two decades ago in our article on the New Archilochus Fragment and Homer. In it, we emphasize that both Homer and Archilochus are likely drawing on shared traditions, using common language to produce different ‘takes’ on shared inheritance. While we believe that Homer was performed/composed prior to Archilochus, we don’t know for sure that the ideas presented within Homer and/or Archilochus were presented in the texts we have for the first time. Indeed, considering the iterative nature of performance culture, it is possible that the texts we have represent ideas that were explored many different times in many different forms. We have no way of actually knowing how the songs engaged with each other over time and how this influenced the final forms we have. This means that it is methodologically as important to ask if Homer is ‘responding’ to Archilochus as it is to invert the question or to consider if they are both responding to something else.
This takes me to another challenge: the generic fallacy. There’s an old and stubborn notion that the poetic genres of ancient Greece had firewalls between them and that there were restrictive rules about the contents and form. All of the imagined rules are eventually undermined: the New Simonides poems showed that elegy could in fact be historical; the new Archilochus demonstrated that elegy could contain narrative myth. (Prior to these publications, very respectable scholars insisted that these poems would not happen).
I have always found restrictions about interpretive flow between and across genres or restrictive use of genres to be suspect. Think of the way people use music today: I have often found myself listening to dance music while doing dishes, exercising, or driving the car. I think this is far from atypical. Song culture in ancient Greece was persistent and permeating, but the boundaries between kinds of songs and their occasions were not fixed and hard. Instead, they moved and were squishy, accommodating audience use and changing cultures over time.
I started thinking about again a few years ago because I have been reading Stephen A. Sansom’s article “Achilles and The Resources of Genre: Epitaph, Hymnos, and Paean in Iliad 22.386-94”. In it, Sansom builds on an earlier article by Christopher Faraone, proposing that Homeric singers integrated other hexametric genres into their creations. Faraone suggests that singers do this in order “to enhance a dramatic or narrative situation by fulfilling or upsetting the audience’s generic expectations.” Faraone uses literary theory (Bakhtin) to talk about embedded genres (similarly Melissa Mueller uses Eve Sedgwick’s reparative reading to talk about Sappho and Homer). I am a big fan of theoretical approaches, especially when they undergird a pragmatic reality. In this case, I am not sure we need literary theory to make a very basic proposition: Greek singers used the full range of language, music, and ideas at their disposal in order to engage with their audiences. It is my belief that as a ‘master genre’ of Greek song, Homeric epic regularly absorbed and integrated features from other genres.
I first started thinking about this when working on my dissertation and reading A. P. Lardinois’ work on the integration of proverbs into Greek epic. If we can ignore questions of priority and disregard the restrictive definition of genre that posits that elegy and epic and lyric are different poetic universes, it is easier to imagine a performance context where an epic rhapsode would adapt or otherwise integrate words, sounds, and ideas from other forms that audiences would know.
There is an interpretive payoff for this at micro-and macro levels. Sansom shows that Achilles uses language akin to hymnic epitaphs in thinking about Patroklos, indicating a characterization of Achilles that shows a consciousness of other genres and a humanizing move: the hero reflects on death the way ancient audiences did with their funerary epitaphs. This has a reinforcing as well as reflective impact on the shared culture of audience and song. There are structural aspects to this as well indicating group and individual songs, the beginning and end of ritual, and the overall shape and arc of the poem. Here’s what Sansom says
Achilles’ call for the paean in Book 22 repeats most of line 1.473 (ἀείδοντες παιήονα κοῦροι Ἀχαιῶν, the only other instance in the epic corpus) and seeks to inspire a similar or perhaps the same group of Achaians to sing (υἷες Ἀχαιῶν, 22.369; κοῦροι Ἀχαιῶν, 22.391). Considering the generic qualities of Achilles’ recollection of Patroklos, hymnos also precedes and works in conjunction with both paeans. From a wider view, then, we can observe that the Iliad thus begins and initiates its ending with embedded hymns: the first, a hymn from local cult; the second, a hymnic epitaph that prototypes the hero-cult of Patroklos. In doing so, it makes use of two of the formal functions associated with hymns: that of preface or prooimion in the epichoric hymn of Book 1, and as a transitional device between songs, themes, or locales in Achilles’ hymn of Book 22.’
There’s a lot more detail to support his argument–the whole piece is certainly worth reading. This joins a growing body of work that acknowledges that Homeric poetry is in a way trans-generic, or, perhaps less clunkily, that the genre of epic poetry is actively engaged with other song genres. Of course, there is a less positive way to think about it as well. As Elton and I have argued in Homer’s Thebes, there is a leveling, almost imperial character to Homeric poetry as it exerts its force on other genres. Like the Star Trek’s Borg, Homeric epic seeks to integrate themes and ideas from other traditions into its song, which it means to make the final one. And, resistance can indeed be futile: Homeric poetry makes its meaning as much by silencing ideas as sampling them.
A Short Bibliography on Homer and Other Genres
Alexandrou, Margarita. “Mythological narratives in Hipponax.” Iambus and elegy : new approaches. Eds. Swift, Laura and Carey, Chris. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Pr., 2016. 210-228.
Baratz, Amit. “The roots of divination in archaic poetry.” Classical Philology, vol. 117, no. 4, 2022, pp. 581-602. Doi: 10.1086/721576
Barker, Elton and Christensen, Joel. “ the new Archilochus fragment and its resonance with Homeric epic.” Materiali e Discussioni per l’Analisi dei Testi Classici, no. 57, 2006, pp. 9-41.
Blondell, Ruby. “Refractions of Homer’s Helen in archaic lyric.” American Journal of Philology, vol. 131, no. 3, 2010, pp. 349-391.
Currie, Bruno. Homer’s allusive art. Oxford: Oxford University Pr., 2016.
Dalby, Andrew. “ lyric and epic in the seventh century.” Archaic Greece: new approaches and new evidence. Eds. Fisher, Nick and Van Wees, Hans. London: Duckworth, 1998. 195-211.
Evans, Stephen. Hymn and epic: a study of their interplay in Homer and the « Homeric Hymns ». Annales Universitatis Turkuensis. Ser. B, Humaniora; 244. Turku: Turun yliopisto, 2001.
Faraone, Christopher A.. “On the eve of epic : did the Chryses episode in Iliad 1 begin its life as a separate Homeric « Hymn » ?.” Persistent forms : explorations in historical poetics. Eds. Kliger, Ilya and Maslov, Boris. Verbal Arts : Studies in Poetics. New York: Fordham University Pr., 2016. 397-419. Doi: 10.5422/fordham/9780823264858.003.0015
Griffith, Mark. “Man and the leaves, a study of Mimnermos fr. 2.” California Studies in Classical Antiquity, vol. VIII, 1975, pp. 73-88. Doi: 10.2307/25010683
Harden, Sarah J. and Kelly, Adrian. “Proemic convention and character construction in early Greek epic.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, vol. 107, 2013, pp. 1-34.
Hendricks, Amy N.. Approaching chorality : literary representations of the chorus in archaic Greek poetry. [S. l.]: [s. n.], 2020.
Janko, Richard (2016). the archetype of the Orphic gold leaves. Classical Quarterly, N. S., 66(1), 100-127. Doi: 10.1017/S0009838816000380
Kousoulini, Vasiliki. “Alcmanic Hexameter: Alcman’s poetry in its oral context.” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, vol. 53, no. 3, 2013, pp. 420-440.
Lardinois, André Pierre M. H.. “ the orality of Greek proverbial expressions.” Speaking volumes: orality and literacy in the Greek and Roman world. Ed. Watson, Janet. Mnemosyne. Supplements; 218. Leiden ; Boston (Mass.): Brill, 2001. 93-107.
Lardinois, André Pierre M. H.. “Characterization through gnomai in Homer’s « Iliad ».” Mnemosyne, vol. 53, no. 6, 2000 Ser. 4, pp. 641-661.
Lavigne, Donald. “Archilochus and Homer in the rhapsodic context.” Iambus and elegy : new approaches. Eds. Swift, Laura and Carey, Chris. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Pr., 2016. 74-98.
Levaniouk, Olga Arkadievna. “« Αἴθων », Aithon, and Odysseus.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, vol. 100, 2000, pp. 25-51.
Lulli, Laura. “Elegy and epic : a complex relationship.” Iambus and elegy : new approaches. Eds. Swift, Laura and Carey, Chris. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Pr., 2016. 193-209.
Martin, Richard P.. “ enigmas of the lyric voice.” Making silence speak: women’s voices in Greek literature and society. Eds. Lardinois, André Pierre M. H. and McClure, Laura K.. Princeton (N. J.): Princeton University Pr., 2001. 55-74.
Maslov, Boris. “The genealogy of the Muses: an internal reconstruction of archaic Greek metapoetics.” American Journal of Philology, vol. 137, no. 3, 2016, pp. 411-446.
Mueller, Melissa. “ Re-centering epic « nostos »: gender and genre in Sappho’s Brothers poem.” Arethusa, vol. 49, no. 1, 2016, pp. 25-46.
Mueller, Melissa. Sappho and Homer: A Reparative Reading. Cambridge. 2023.
Nobili, Cecilia. “ il nuovo Archiloco.” Maia, vol. 61, no. 2, 2009, pp. 229-249.
Nobili, Cecilia. “Female lyric voices in the « Odyssey ».” Philologia Antiqua, vol. 16, 2023, pp. 65-81. Doi: 10.19272/202304601006
Purves, Alex. “Who, Sappho ?.” Defining Greek narrative. Eds. Cairns, Douglas L. and Scodel, Ruth. Edinburgh Leventis Studies; 7. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Pr., 2014. 175-196.
Sbardella, Livio. “The Trojan War Myth: rhapsodic canon and lyric alternatives.” Submerged literature in ancient Greek culture: an introduction. Eds. Colesanti, Giulio and Giordano, Manuela. Berlin ; Boston (Mass.): De Gruyter, 2014. 61-75.
Strauss Clay, Jenny. “The new Simonides and Homer’s ἡμίθεοι.” The new Simonides: contexts of praise and desire. Eds. Boedeker, Deborah and Sider, David. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Pr., 2001. 182-184.
Swift, Laura. “Negotiating seduction : Archilochus’ Cologne epode and the transformation of epic.” Philologus, vol. 159, no. 1, 2015, pp. 2-28.
Toohey, Peter. “Archilochus’ general (fr. 114 W). Where did he come from?.” Eranos, vol. LXXXVI, 1988, pp. 1-14.
Walsh, Thomas R.. “Some refractions of Homeric anger in Athenian drama.” A Californian hymn to Homer. Ed. Pepper, Timothy. Hellenic Studies; 41. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Pr., 2010. 105-129.
Watkins, Calvert. “Let us now praise famous grains.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. CXXII, 1978, pp. 9-17.
Watkins, Calvert. How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics. 1995.
Węcowski, Marek. “Homer and the origins of the symposion.” Omero tremila anni dopo: atti del Congresso di Genova : 6-8 luglio 2000. Eds. Montanari, Franco and Ascheri, Paola. Storia e Letteratura; 210. Roma: Ed. di Storia e Letteratura, 2002. 625-637.
This post is a continuation of Painful Signs, a series of posts on the Iliad. The full list of posts is here. New posts will be added on various books, with an emphasis on new projects and highlighting scholarship in general.
“…How could I ever overlook godlike Odysseus?….When he is by my side, the two of us could comeback from burning fire, since he surpasses everyone in thinking!” (Il. 10.242-7 adapted)
This fall marks the 20th anniversary of my first published article, “Flight Club: The New Archilochus Fragment and Its Resonance with Homeric Epic” MD 57 (2006) 9–41. Elton Barker and I wrote it together over 2005 after an exhilarating few years together at the Venice International University Advanced Seminar on the Humanities for its inaugural program. The sheen on the article is darkened a little by the journey that the publisher of the fragment took in later years, but I have been thinking about it a lot lately. This piece changed the course of my career and set the tone for the work Elton and I have done together, and both in content and form has offered a different model for how to do the work we do in the academy.
Twenty years is oddly both a long and a short time. Oh, there are the clear Odyssean echoes, but in higher education, the past 20 years have been transformative (in mostly bad ways). In the history of classical scholarship? Well, two decades are almost nothing. Yet, at the same time, this period took me from being (relatively young) to (solidly) middle aged. We went from graduate students to full professors. We went from bachelors to fathers.
What do I think of it now?
First, I don’t know that I would be where I am today if not for this piece. I remember Paul T. Alessi, the classicist who hired me for my first job at UT San Antonio mentioning how much he liked it during my on campus interview. It was my only article in print at the time (to join a few book reviews) and I am certain I would not have made any short lists without it.
Second, I see in the piece some of the central methodological concerns that have framed my (and our) work for twenty years. We emphasize non-hierarchical approaches to interpretating the poetry of the Archaic period. This means, that instead of imagining that Archilochus is responding to Homer, we insist instead that because of the oral-formulaic performance environment and the unknown process of fixity and textualization, that it is actually more appropriate to imagine a dynamic interpretive environment wherein lyric and epic (and other genres) were in conversation with one another. Our “Homer’ is a product of a competitive song culture that appropriates and ‘remixes’.
Two other elements essential here, then, is our focus on understanding the orality of early Greek poetry and rivalrous nature of its performance culture. Add to this a consistent emphasis on decentering authorship and recentering audiences, and you find the foundations of years of work. While the details of this article’s presentation of flight from battle amidst an elegiac retelling of a different kind of Trojan War narrative are significant from a scholarly perspective, our concern was almost always about how to reconstruct how ancient audiences made meaning of poetic performances over time.
Third—and perhaps the most significant—the decentering of authorship in our work is, I think, connected as well to our deauthorizing of the solitary scholar model. Even while working on my dissertation, I had the benefit of a circle of peers I met who shared their work and read mine and changed it for the better. In researching and writing with someone, I found that our developing polyphony was far more conducive to recuperating the polysemy of ancient poetry.
Apart from such aspirational claims, there has also been the practical advantage. When I left graduate school, I barely knew how to write an article and I certainly did not know how to write a book. Much to his chagrin when he reads this, Elton was the Odysseus to my younger and brasher Diomedes from the epigraph to this post. I learned alongside him and from him, a few steps ahead of me. (Score a win for Vygostky’s zone of proximal development). There is so much more we can accomplish working together than individually. Yet, until recently, we have had people wonder if co-authored work matters, if it is worth as much as single authored work. My friends, it is worth more.
Elton and I arguing in 11/25/2006 in Oxford. Identity of rear end in background unknown
Over the years Elton and I have written seven articles/chapters together and three books. This is in many cases an entire academic career. This work in turn has shaped and encouraged the work we have done separately. And the experiences shaping it have been wild: from Elton showing up in 2007 to give a talk at Columbia that we wrote together in a flooded basement apartment, to him holding my first child awkwardly while we outlined what would be our second book to our weekly zoom conversations, we have lived and written alongside each other. We have lost loved ones. We have welcomed five children into the world. And we have returned again and again to Homer.
The technology has changed (we used to swap drafts chaotically over email and meet over skype; now we have dropbox and zoom); our stances have softened (we now integrate textuality in our work); we’ve lost that bloom of youth; but I can say that our friendship and collaboration has been a great comfort and strength, something I might not have anticipated at the time when I boldly asked if he wanted to write about this new fragment with me, but for which I remain deeply grateful.
We recently submitted that third book together, an introduction to the Iliad. In writing it we spent several months talking through ideas and making outlines (some of them based on posts on this blog). I turned the outline into a first draft. Elton turned it back into an outline then into prose again and then we edited and wrote and honestly, apart from the phrase “Troy Story”—which Elton will not quit—I do not know who wrote what when. And we found new meaning in the Iliad that neither of us found before. Each of these things is a gift. We write about this process in the preface:
While similar to the process that we’ve followed over the course of twenty years working together, our collaboration is in continual evolution. What we’ve noticed this time around is how we’ve used what each other has written as a springboard for thinking deeper with, and deeper into, the text. We’re more conscious this time of riffing off what the other has put down, sometimes keeping only one or two sentences in an entire paragraph, or even simply the kernel of the idea. And yet it remains a thing that we’ve both made, since neither of us individually would have come up with what we’ve found to say had it not been for the way that the other had already put things. The way that we continually invite each other to take up and spin off those views. A space in which to experiment and to play. The space to think. The most exciting experience of writing for us is in that space. When we have the structure, when both of us think we know what we want to say, and then another way of saying it comes to us. Or even another thing to say that comes to us, when we come to the text with guardrails in place guiding us. A kind of scaffolded inspiration. In its microscopically trivial, very limited way, it’s kind of how we think that the poet of the Iliad went about things.
I will return to regular Iliad posting again over the next few weeks. In this wildly unpredictable world, if you have a friend who made your life better, take the time this weekend to let them know.
2013 Beginner’s Guide to Homer, One World Publications
Articles and Chapters
(Forthcoming) “The Homeric Epics and the Reception of Thebes,” in Homeric Reception in Archaic and Classical Greek Poetry, Edited by Gazis and Doherty
“Heracles in Epic.” The Oxford Handbook to Heracles, edited by Daniel Ogden. 2021
“Odysseus’ Nostos and the Odyssey’s Nostoi.” G. Scafoglio (ed.). Studies on the Greek Epic Cycle. Philologia Antiqua, 2015: 87–112.
“Even Herakles Had to Die: Epic Rivalry and the Poetics of the Past in Homer’s Iliad.” Christos Tsagalis, (ed.) Special Issue Trends in Classics: Homer and the Theban Tradition, 6.2S (2014) 249–277.
“On Not Remembering Tydeus: Agamemnon, Diomedes and the Contest for Thebes.” Materiali e Discussioni per l’Analisi dei Testi Classici 66 (2011): 9–44.
“Oedipus of Many Pains: Strategies of Contest in the Homeric Poems.” Leeds International Classical Studies 7.2. 2008.
“Flight Club: The New Archilochus Fragment and its Resonance with Homeric Epic.” Materiali e Discussioni per l’Analisi dei Testi Classici 57 (2006): 19–43.
This post is a continuation of Painful Signs, a series of posts on the Iliad. The full list of posts is here. New posts will be added on various books, with an emphasis on new projects and highlighting scholarship in general.
This post is part three of three looking more closely at the proposition that our Iliad is made up of a series of songs or ‘episodes’ put together in a monumental performance. The first part looks at some of the internal evidence for performance and provides some historical context. The second part explores how much support there is for this model in the classical period. The third part offers some remarks on how this approach may or may not be different from neoanalysis and begins to sketch out how our Iliad may be broken up into songs or episodes.
In earlier posts, I have surveyed some internal evidence for episodic composition of the Homeric epics and later literary and iconographic support as well. The basic idea is that the epics themselves show smaller songs with recognizable titles or themes at home in the larger arc of the Trojan War potentially combined into narratives of longer duration (as in Odysseus’ tale of his own experiences to the Phaeacians in the Odyssey). Later authors like Aristotle and Aelian start (or continue?) a tradition of talking about the epics as composed of smaller episodes to support this.
I find the model attractive because it can help us understand how multiple performers of Homer could come together for a major event (like the Panathenaia in Athens) and sing longer epics that are like the poems we have from antiquity. Of course, this model does not explain how such performances would lead to our text. In addition, I want to be very clear that I don’t think this process was necessarily one of a majority of fixed songs. Nor do I think it would have occurred once or yielded the epics we have so easily.
The Ransom of Hector, hydria, by the Pioneer Group, Attic Greek, 510-500 BC, red-figure terracotta – Sackler Museum – Harvard University
Analysis vs. Neoanalysis
I preface this post with those initial caveats because the episodic thought experiment has led to some navel gazing. A question that I struggle to resolve for myself is how the approach I am taking may be differentiated from earlier scholarly frameworks like analysis or neoanalysis. At some level, many of the ideas will seem similar, but there are some contrasting foundational assumptions. Let me try to walk through what I think the differences are and see if they make sense.
Analysis was an approach to Homer that dominated near the end of the 19th century and for the first quarter of the 20th. The Analysts were primarily opposed to Unitarians. The latter group argued for the artistic unity of the Homeric epics against the growing consensus of scholarship in general that the Iliad and the Odyssey as we have them were not the products of a single author (or authors for each poem). Due to stylistic inconsistency, textual variations, and other aesthetic judgments based on the features of more modern literary authors, scholars had established that the epics we have couldn’t possibly be the product of individual minds.
As a response to this, Analysts sought to show how editorial intervention had changed the poems or how various songs had been edited together to create the epics that survived antiquity. Often Analysts were in search of the most “original” or ancient core of either epic and as a result endeavored in part to identify where parts of the epics we have came from. The poems of the so-called epic cycle were often seen as likely sources for sections that were otherwise added or adapted to the core stories of “The Rage of Achilles” and “The Homecoming of Odysseus”. Unitarians labored to show the “artistic unity” of the poems we have against this onslaught. The sheer volume of discrepancies and the lack of ‘scientific rigor’ in the Unitarian approaches rendered their arguments mostly romantic and easily undermined in the face of the ‘evidence’ provided by the Analysts.
The advent of oral-formulaic theory through the work of Milman Parry and Albert Lord and many others shifted the debate radically. In a simplistic summary, oral-formulaic theory countermanded questions about consistency, style, and the difficulty of composition offered by the Analysts in an evidence-based way that appealed to the scientific bent of scholarship coming out of the 19th century. A great deal of Homeric scholarship from the 1930s into the 1970s was engaged either with fleshing out the details of oral-formulaic theory or with coming to terms of how it shifted our notions of authorship, textualization, and transmission.
Neoanalysis eventually emerged as scholars returned to questions of the relationship between our epics and other narrative traditions. Neoanalysis does not generally claim that the epics we have were made up by editing together other narratives, but instead explores how the parts of the Iliad and Odyssey that we have may have drawn on other poems (or poetic traditions) such as the Aithiopis or the Kypria. This approach has been pretty fruitful in showing how our epics draw on motifs, plots, and scenes that we believe were in other lost poems. But often, neoanalytic claims betray older analytic motivations. Erwin Cook summarizes some of these tensions well in his work on Iliad 8:
“Analytic scholars such as Wilamowitz used the episode to support their argument that Book 8 was “late” because it echoes accounts based on the Aithiopis in which Nestor again suffers a chariot wreck, and his son, Antilokhos, rescues him at the cost of his own life.9 An assumption underlying this argument is that one account is “imitating” the other. The derivative account is inherently “inferior” to its model, and betrays its dependency in part by its aesthetic shortcomings, including its imperfect integration into the narrative. For example, the Neoanalyst Wolfgang Kullmann accepts Analytic claims about the relative priority of the two episodes, though he avoids the Analytic conclusion that the Iliadic passage is interpolated by arguing that the Aithiopis is earlier than the Iliad.”
My reservations about Neoanalysis have generally been (1) that the approach too often assumes that the Iliad or Odyssey are drawing on poems that were prior to them (therefore in some way more original and authentic) and (2) that a great deal of the evidence we have for the contents or even existence of these poems comes from scholarship that developed to explicate the Iliad and the Odyssey. There’s an essential circularity to claiming that the Homeric epics are based on material that only ended up being preserved in reference to the Iliad or the Odyssey. If we imagine epic performance as lasting hundreds of years in many different contexts, it seems tenuous to me to make significant compositional claims based on secondary evidence when many thousands of other performances may have helped shape their character. In addition to this concern for circularity, I think the hierarchical models favored by such approaches tend to create stemmata and trees that look like manuscript traditions and not the flowing and circulating of motifs, ideas, and structures that could make it very likely for a song we imagine as late to have actually influenced something we conceive as earlier while they were both in the process of developing into their final forms. (And to add more apprehension to this: the very notion of a final form is ill-fit to composition in performance.)
Episodicism (?)
Overall, it should be clear that I am not fundamentally opposed to the notion that the epics we have integrate material that existed prior to their final performances and textualization. My basic contention is that we cannot really know anything other than the poems we have and it is more fruitful to imagine that even if we have anIliad that was influenced by anAethiopis, each of the story traditions that these poems represent went through innumerable iterations that influenced each other. As a result, pointing to a scene in our Iliad and claiming it was based on a specific scene in a specific poem thoroughly misconstrues the nature of oral-derived poetry. (Many Neoanalysts are certainly proponents for the orality of the Homeric epics, of course.)
Given these distinctions, then, how is imagining our epic poem coming together through the performance of discrete episodes related to Neoanalysis? Some of the assumptions are certainly the same, namely that there were more or less fixed story traditions within the Trojan War narrative myth and that these traditions were recognizable to audiences.
I believe that this approach is different in two basic ways. First, I am exploring how the Iliad is made up of smaller parts to explain its compositional unity and not assuming the priority of any given part over another. Second, I am not proposing that the individual episodes are fixed and portable objects, but rather different song traditions with recognizable features that could be performed independently of the whole if needed. Unlike the Analysts, I am not proposing that there is a core and original Iliad that this process will be able to identify. Unlike some Neoanalysts, I am not trying to reconstruct how the Iliad was based on or made up of earlier poems. Instead, I am trying to imagine what it might look like over time to have a more or less regular list of episodes that could be performed as part of a larger performance. Karol Zieliński (2023, 664) presents a somewhat stronger articulation:
If, as we have already demonstrated, the songs of the cycle showed a given episode in the context of the whole Trojan War, then it follows that they must have retained a certain degree of independence. The presentation of these episodes in sequence must have taken place on special occasions, e.g. during great festivals like the Panathenaia. But the independence of a song depicting a given episode from the perspective of the whole war could have been possible only because the thematic range of the cycle had already been established and familiar, so it seems that the principle of sequential presentation is deeply rooted in Greek tradition.
(I must also confess to worrying that the distinction I am attempting to draw is too fine to be a difference that makes a difference. There are many different shades of Neoanalysis. This approach certainly contrasts with that of Martin West in The Making of the Iliad where he sees the integration of different narrative traditions as a very writerly pursuit. But there would be far less tension with the work of scholars like Christos Tsagalis whose approach is more flexible and in tune with oral traditional theory).
Here again, I think the Apologoi—books 9-12 of the Odyssey—can provide an instructive example. Imagine Odysseus’ audience in Skheria: they have no notion of Odysseus’ tale as a series of discrete episodes that may have had an independent existence in different story traditions. Instead, they experience a coherent narrative with many turns, all functioning in the service of explaining how Odysseus ended up on their island. The parts have different length and importance: the Cyclops episode and the Nekyia are longer and much more detailed than the tale of Aeolus or the Lotus-eaters. Circe’s island presents a beginning, middle, and end that is much more well-developed than the brief tales of the Laistrygonians or the Kikones. But they are connected through the narrative conceit of sea-faring in a way that renders them separate even as part of a whole. At the same time, they are thematically connected to the epic as a whole: the scenes end with the deaths of Odysseus’ men after they eat the cattle of the sun (anticipated by the proem in Odyssey 1) and Odysseus swept up on Calypso’s island, where the external audience finds him in Odyssey 5.
Now imagine the 10 scenes of the Apologoi as a set list in a live performance. It would take very little effort for a seasoned group of performers to musically “sample” or anticipate parts of the 9th and 10th songs at the beginning of the set. The songs could be blended together smoothly or abruptly as the performance required, giving the sense of functioning as a single composition even when the individual songs may have come from different places. In the context of one performance, moreover, the musicians might adapt the songs to fit one another in a way they might not if they were performed in a different order or individually.
We performed some of the Iliad during the first year of the COVID-19 Pandemic online
The Iliadic Set List
I have spent a good deal of time talking about the idea. Now it is time to make it a little more concrete and see what comes of it. I have reached out to a few friends to help explore methods for testing this, both quantitative (using statistical language modeling) and qualitative (thinking about thematic and artistic aspects). I am also trying to figure out how to use analogical methods too: to really think about how modern professional musicians “stitch” their performances together.
For now, here’s a list of the books of the Iliad and the episodes we have some reason to believe would have been identifiable in antiquity, based on evidence in ancient literature, art, and scholarship.
Book || “episode/Song”
1 Overarching: Rage of Achilles + Ransoming of Briseis + Strife of Agamemnon and Achilles
2 False Dream +Thersites +Catalog of Ships
3 Teichoskopia + Duel of Menelaos and Paris + Helen and Paris in the Bedroom
4 Oath Breaking (Pandaros) +Epipolesis
5 +Diomedea / Aristeia of Diomedes +Wounding of Aphrodite + Theomachy
6 Hektor’s Visit to the city + [Glaukos and Diomedes as an independent episode]
7 Duel between Hektor and Ajax
8 Echoes of the Aethiopis
9 Embassy to Achilles
10 Doloneia
11 Aristeia of Agamemnon + Wounding of Diomedes
12 Teikhomakhia
13 Fighting by the Ships/Battle of the ships
14 Dios Apate
15Echoes of Succession Myths
16 Patrokleia
17 Fight over the body: Menelaos v. Hektor over Euphorbus
18 Arms of Achilles / Shield of Achilles
19Reconciliation (?); Achilles talks to his horses
20 Aeneas vs. Achilles
21 Theomachy
22 Achilles Kills Hektor + Achilles mutilates the body
23 Achilles kills captives + Contest for Patroklos
24 Ransoming of Hektor + Laments of Hecuba and Andromache
I have italicized a few episodes I want to identify but can’t find good support for.
For me, what is surprising in this list is not so much that there is some support for an episode in nearly every book, but that there is so little support for books 8 and 15, which have been identified by scholars like Bruce Heiden as really important to the structure and themes of our particular Iliad. In addition, even a cursory review of the material shows much that is not accounted for. The greater portion of the episodes identified in antiquity accord with the epic’s first third (where it seems to engage the most with the traditions that precede the war). There’s a compositional echoing of the Odyssey here as well: both epics seem to be more fluid and strange in their second halves than their first. Scenes like Agamemnon’s intervention in the sparing of Adrastus in book 6 may be special to this version of the Iliad and therefore more significant for its interpretation. Political scenes like those in books 1, 2, 9, 19, and the beginning of 24 that people like Elton Barker have shown are crucial for understanding the Iliad’s politics also seem underrepresented in the episodic tradition.
None of this vitiates the thought experiment–instead, I think it provides a really unique chance to reconsider again that dynamic relationship between the Iliad we have and the performance traditions that produced it. Thinking about the relationship between the synchronic moment of that performance and how singers came together to respond to their audiences and their times is one of the things that not only keeps the Iliad alive for me, but keeps its study vital.
Next steps include mapping out the line numbers for the episodes and interstitial parts, doing more research to see if other song traditions have been overlooked, and then taking turns with others working on this process, and pushing through the various frameworks for thinking about this reimagined performance. If you’re reading this and have thoughts, please share them. Like the epics in their composition, their interpretation is something that happens best with many people taking turns.
Bibliography: As Always, not exhaustive. Also, shared bibliography for all three posts.
Beck, Bill. “Lost in the middle : story time and discourse time in the « Iliad ».” Yearbook of Ancient Greek Epic, vol. 1, 2017, pp. 46-64. Doi: 10.1163/24688487-00101003
Rinon, Yoav. “« Mise en abyme » and tragic signification in the « Odyssey »: the three songs of Demodocus.” Mnemosyne, Ser. 4, vol. 59, no. 2, 2006, pp. 208-225. Doi: 10.1163/156852506777069673
Beck, Deborah. “The presentation of song in Homer’s « Odyssey ».” Orality, literacy and performance in the ancient world, edited by Elizabeth Minchin, Mnemosyne. Supplements; 335. Leiden ; Boston (Mass.): Brill, 2012, pp. 25-53.
Dué, Casey, Susan Lupack, and Robert Lamberton. “Panathenaia.” Chapter. In The Cambridge Guide to Homer, edited by Corinne Ondine Pache, 187–89. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Edmunds, Lowell. “Three short essays on Demodocus’s song of Ares and Aphrodite (Odyssey 8.266-369).” Yearbook of Ancient Greek Epic, vol. 4, 2020, pp. 55-71. Doi: 10.1163/24688487-00401003
Edwards, Mark W.. “Neoanalysis and beyond.” Classical Antiquity, vol. IX, 1990, pp. 311-325. Doi: 10.2307/25010933
Haft, Adele J.. “Odysseus’ wrath and grief in the Iliad. Agamemnon, the Ithacan king, and the sack of Troy in Books 2, 4, and 14.” The Classical Journal, vol. LXXXV, 1989-1990, pp. 97-114.
Finkelberg, Margalit. “The first song of Demodocus.” Mnemosyne, vol. XL, 1987, pp. 128-132. Doi: 10.1163/156852587X00111
Finkelberg, Margalit. “The sources of Iliad 7.” Colby Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 2, 2002, pp. 151-161.
Gaisser, Julia Haig. “Adaptation of traditional material in the Glaucus-Diomedes episode.” TAPA, vol. C, 1969, pp. 165-176.
Heiden, Bruce. “The placement of « book divisions » in the Iliad.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. 118, 1998, pp. 68-81. Doi: 10.2307/632231
Herrero de Jáuregui, Miguel. “Priam’s catabasis: traces of the epic journey to Hades in Iliad 24.” TAPA, vol. 141, no. 1, 2011, pp. 37-68. Doi: 10.1353/apa.2011.0005
Howes, George Edwin. “Homeric Quotations in Plato and Aristotle.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 6 (1895): 153–237. https://doi.org/10.2307/310358.
Hunter, Richard L.. “The songs of Demodocus: compression and extension in Greek narrative poetry.” Brill’s companion to Greek and Latin epyllion and its reception, edited by Manuel Baumbach and Silvio Bär, Brill’s Companions in Classical Studies. Leiden ; Boston (Mass.): Brill, 2012, pp. 83-109.
Kakridis, Johannes Theophanes. “Auch Homer ist in die Lehre gegangen.” Gymnasium, vol. XCIX, 1992, pp. 97-100.
Karanika, Andromache. “Wedding and performance in Homer: a view in the « Teichoskopia ».” Trends in Classics, vol. 5, no. 2, 2013, pp. 208-233.
Kelly, Adrian. “Performance and rivalry: Homer, Odysseus, and Hesiod.” Performance, iconography, reception: studies in honour of Oliver Taplin, edited by Martin Revermann and Peter J. Wilson, Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Pr., 2008, pp. 177-203.
Marks, Jim. “Resisting Aristotle : episodes in the Epic cycle.” Tecendo narrativas : unidade e episódio na literatura grega antiga, edited by Christian Werner, Antonio Dourado-Lopes and Erika Werner, São Paulo: Humanitas, FFLCH/USP, 2015, pp. 55-71.
Most, Glenn W. “The Structure and Function of Odysseus’ Apologoi.” Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-) 119 (1989): 15–30. https://doi.org/10.2307/284257.
Murray, P.. “Homer and the bard.” Aspects of the epic, edited by Tom Winnifrith, P. Murray and Karl Watts Gransden, New York: St. Martin’s Pr., 1983, pp. 1-15.
Nagy, Gregory and Olga M. Davidson. “On the problem of envisioning Homeric composition: some comparative observations.” Philologia Antiqua, vol. 16, 2023, pp. 15-25. Doi: 10.19272/202304601002
Nelson, Thomas J.. “Iphigenia in the « Iliad » and the architecture of Homeric allusion.” TAPA, vol. 152, no. 1, 2022, pp. 55-101. Doi: 10.1353/apa.2022.0007
Nishimura, Yoshiko T.. “The Circe-episodes in the « Odyssey ».” Journal of Classical Studies, vol. 45, 1997, pp. 40-49.
Postlethwaite, Norman. “The duel of Paris and Menelaos and the Teichoskopia in Iliad 3.” Antichthon, vol. XIX, 1985, pp. 1-6.
Rengakos, Antonios (2002). Zur narrativen Funktion der Telemachie. In André Hurst & Françoise Létoublon (Eds.), La mythologie et l’« Odyssée »: hommage à Gabriel Germain : actes du colloque international de Grenoble, 20-22 mai 1999 (pp. 87-98). Droz.
Rinon, Yoav. “« Mise en abyme » and tragic signification in the « Odyssey »: the three songs of Demodocus.” Mnemosyne, Ser. 4, vol. 59, no. 2, 2006, pp. 208-225. Doi: 10.1163/156852506777069673
Roisman, Hanna M.. “« Rhesus »’ allusions to the Homeric Hector.” Hermes, vol. 143, no. 1, 2015, pp. 1-23.
Segal, Charles (1994). Singers, heroes, and gods in the Odyssey. Cornell University Pr.
Sels, Nadia. “The untold death of Laertes: reevaluating Odysseus’s meeting with his father.” Mnemosyne, Ser. 4, vol. 66, no. 2, 2013, pp. 181-205. Doi: 10.1163/156852511X584991
Thomas, Oliver. “Phemius Suite.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. 134, 2014, pp. 89-102. Doi: 10.1017/S007542691400007X
Tsagalis, Christos. “Towards an Oral, Intertextual Neoanalysis” Trends in Classics, vol. 3, no. 2, 2011, pp. 209-244. https://doi.org/10.1515/tcs.2011.011
Wyatt, William F.. “Homeric transitions.” Ἀρχαιογνωσία, vol. 6, 1989-1990, pp. 11-24.
YAMAGATA, NAOKO. “USE OF HOMERIC REFERENCES IN PLATO AND XENOPHON.” The Classical Quarterly 62, no. 1 (2012): 130–44. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41820000.
Part 2: Evidence for ‘Episodes’ from Literature and Art
This post is a continuation of Painful Signs, a series of posts on the Iliad. The full list of posts is here. New posts will be added on various books, with an emphasis on new projects and highlighting scholarship in general.
This post is part one of three looking more closely at the proposition that our Iliad is made up of a series of songs or ‘episodes’ put together in a monumental performance. The first part looks at some of the internal evidence for performance and provides some historical context. The second part explores how much support there is for this model in the classical period. The third part offers some remarks on how this approach may or may not be different from neoanalysis and begins to sketch out how our Iliad may be broken up into songs or episodes.
In the last post, I explored the composition of the Homeric epics through a combination of episodes, focusing especially on the evidence from the Odyssey and on the tradition of the “Panathenaic rule”, the conventional performance of Homer in Athens by multiple rhapsodes. The internal and external evidence suggests that the full epics are made up of smaller parts integrated by multiple performers. In addition, it suggests that the epics evolved during performance over time. This means that we don’t imagine ancient performers creating from scratch each time, but working in concert and competition to integrate–or ‘stitch together’, to observe one of the etymologies of rhapsode–traditional themes and songs into a much larger performance.
As I discussed when talking about Odysseus’ story in books 9-12 of the Odyssey, it seems likely that longer compositions were in part developed from shorter, recognizable episodes. Logically, this makes sense, and late evidence from the Roman imperial period has provided some support for this, both in terms of the general idea itself and with some indication of what sections may have been considered self-standing songs. The 2nd Century CE Roman Aelian (Claudius Aelianus) reports that the epics were sung in “separate parts”:
Varia Historia, 13.14
“The tradition is that the ancients used to sing Homeric epics in separate parts. For example, they sang the “Battle By the Ships”, the “Doloneia”, the “Aristeia of Agamemnon”, the “Catalogue of Ships,” the “Patrokleia” and the “Ransoming” or the “Contest for Patroklos” and the “Breaking of the Oaths”. These were from the Iliad. From the other poem they sang “Events at Pylos” and “Events at Sparta” “Calpyso’s Cave,” “The Raft Story”, “The Tales of Alkinoos” and “The Kyklopeia” and the “Nekyuia” or “Events with Kirke”, “the Washing”, “The Murder of the Suitors,” “The Events in the Country”, “Laertes’ Tale”.
Rather late, Lyrkourgos the Spartan was the first to bring the poetry of Homer together into Greece; He brought them back with him from Ionia when he was living abroad. Later, Peisistratos collected them and had the Iliad and the Odyssey performed.”
Here, Aelian combines several details that have been irresistible to Homerists interested in the epics’ textualization and performance: a connection between their final form and quasi-legendary foundation narratives along with details about the relationship between parts and the whole. Near the end of the anecdote, we find famous and semi-legendary leaders of Sparta and Athens as authorities who introduced the full epics into their communities, aligning in part with a historical movement that modern scholars have called Panhellenism. But before that, we find the attractive idea that really old performers (palaioi) sang (aiedon) the epics of Homer split into parts. And the parts align with some of the discrete sections of each epic that we have recognized as somewhat self-standing, such as the catalog of ships or the Doloneia.
I am one of those who really like this passage and find it valuable to think with. Nevertheless, I am concerned about how much of it we can rely on. My anxieties come in two forms: first, the relative antiquity of Aelian; second, the lack of corresponding evidence for episodes of these names or consistent nomenclature for episodes prior to Aelian.
Let me start with the first: Aelian is from the so-called second sophistic. I don’t know if we can say that anything he knows or reports about Homer does not come from Hellenistic editing practices. That is to say that he is almost six centuries removed from the Panathenaic rule at Athens and was educated in a system dominated by the editorial and rhetorical practices that canonized and transmitted the epics more or less as we have them.
In addition to limits on what Aelian could have known or how his knowledge was shaped by the rhetorical and editorial tradition preceding him, the contents of this passage are correspondingly curious: there is a lot of each epic not reported within his anecdote. Now, the omissions may simply be a case of Aelian leaving out the most well known plot points such as the embassy to Achilles in the Iliad or the Telemachea in the Odyssey. But the language he uses for the “separated epics” also gives me pause because it assumes each epic as a pre-existing whole. I am not sure that if there were traditional terminology for individual songs it would sound like this.
This leads me to the second concern I have for this passage: the lack of corresponding support from earlier evidence prior to the Hellenistic period. One of the most famous passages for thinking about the composition of the epics comes from Aristotle. In it he writes about the epics being composed of “episodes”:
Poetics 1459a
“For this reason, Homer should seem rather inspired compared to others: for, although the war has a beginning and an end, he did not try to compose the whole story. For the story would have been too overwhelming and incomprehensible or, if kept to a reasonable length, confusing because of its complexity. Instead, although he has taken up one plot [meros], he has employed many other episodes [epeisodiois] such as the catalog of ships and other episodes through which he has varied his composition.”
It is really tempting to read this passage and infer that Aristotle’s episodes may be in some way coterminous with Arrian’s “separated parts”. But when I read epeisodos elsewhere, I think it functions as much as a “scene” as it does a specific and self contained narrative equivalent to the songs of Phemius and Demodocus in the Odyssey. There’s also something else I find both intriguing and compelling here: epeisodios seems to be etymologically tied to the parts of tragedy between the choral odes. The term seems to be related to the entrance and exit of different actors or characters on the stage. Applied to epic performance, it is tempting to imagine epeisodion as delimiting the space for a single singer or song within a larger composition.
In the Poetics, Aristotle’s primary focus is on the genre of tragedy. His episodes, if read carefully, blur the lines between major scenes in Attic tragedy and parts of the Trojan War narrative integrated into Iliad or the Odyssey. At times I am certain he means that the overall plot of the “rage of Achilles” is expanded or embellished through other episodes from the whole war. Aristotle does us a favor here by distinguishing between an episode of the war and the story of the whole. But if one reads through the Poetics carefully, the issue is much more uncertain. There is some indication in Plato that audiences thought in terms of particular scenes. For example, consider the longish question in the Ion where Socrates is trying to prove to the rhapsode that he is divinely inspired when he recites Homer:
Plato, Ion 535 c
Tell me this Ion and don’t hide anything from me whatever I ask you. Whenever you are performing epic and you especially astound the audience—either when you sing about Odysseus leaping upon the threshold and then appearing to the suitors as he pours arrows out on them all of a sudden or the part about Achilles chasing after Hektor or one of the sad things about Andromache or Hekuba or Priam—are you at that point in your own mind or are you outside yourself and does your spirit think you are among the events themselves, inspired by the very words you are speaking, either in the Ithaka or Troy or wherever the songs take you?
Here, Plato has his Socrates point to scenes of particular vividness or tension–action scenes where Odysseus is about to murder the suitors and Achilles is chasing Hektor. These suspenseful scenes that create the emotion implied by the verb ἐκπλήξῃς. In addition, Ion may or may not be referring to specific events when he mentions “something of the pitiful things about Andromache, Hecuba, and Priam”. I am tempted to imagine these as correlating to their laments for Hektor, but the language itself (specifically the ἐλεινῶν τι + περὶ) makes me think Ion means what happens to them.
While both scenes certainly are from episodes (the ‘murder of the suitors’ or the pursuit of Hektor) they may not correspond to specific episodes themselves. This does not mean that Plato did not conceive of episodes: later in the same dialogue he refers to the “battle around the wall” as a part of the Iliad: “Or often in the Iliad too, for example in the teikhomakhia, when he says…” (πολλαχοῦ δὲ καὶ ἐν ᾿Ιλιάδι, οἷον καὶ ἐπὶ τειχομαχίᾳ· λέγει γὰρ καὶ ἐνταῦθα, 539 b3). He also seems to refer to funeral games from Patroklos earlier when he mentions the chariot race specifically (“Tell me now what Nestor says to his son Antilokhos when he is advising him to be careful around the turning post in the chariot race for Patroklos.” ΣΩ. Εἰπὲ δή μοι ἃ λέγει Νέστωρ ᾿Αντιλόχῳ τῷ ὑεῖ, παραινῶν εὐλαβηθῆναι περὶ τὴν καμπὴν ἐν τῇ ἱπποδρομίᾳ τῇ ἐπὶ Πατρόκλῳ, 537a7“)
Plato provides at least the possibility that 5th and 4th century authors conceived of discrete parts of the Iliad as having their own titles and perhaps independent standing. I suspect there is more extensive support for this contention among the Greek orators, but the more interesting data is available from Greek art. In vase painting especially we have images from the 6th century and earlier that correlate to famous scenes from the Trojan War narrative such as the judgment of Paris and the ransoming of Hektor. As authors like Steven Lowenstam have shown, these are not simply static scenes but they act as metonyms for narratives. Of course, it is a mistake to see these images as correlating with the narrative we have. Instead, they indicate the basic premise of each episode as part of a larger whole (to go back to Aristotle). What the total evidence shows, though, is not a clustering of episodes from the Iliad and the Odyssey but a wide range of scenes from the Trojan War in general and a concentration of those that are not actually in our extant epics.
There is little agreement among classical scholars about the relationship between iconography and narrative traditions. Generally, I think it is unwise to overdetermine such things–by which I mean limiting to a less than useful extreme the range of relationships an image can have with the story it inspires in viewers. When it comes to traditional narrative episodes, images can denote very specific things or be rather open. Consider images of a crucified Christ: one may be a simple figure on a cross while another may show a wound from the centurion’s spear etc. There is iconographic drift even within one general narrative tradition.
An image can, therefore, stand metonymically to potential variations for narrative traditions. The popular image of a human figure blinding a giant–almost always identified as Odysseus–can support a level of detail that implies or conveys a very specific narrative correspondence. Consider how the krater in the image below allows alignment with the story where Odysseus gets Polyphemus drunk before blinding him while the image below it shows a “sleeping Cyclops” but without the specific allusion to wine, unless we consider the lines and dots stylized vines. The third image has neither.
Eleusis Amphora, dated to ca. 660 BCOdysseus blinds sleeping Polyphemus. Black-figure vessel for wine.Clay. Ca. 500 BCE. Paris, Louvre Museum.Neck Amphora from the British Museum, c. 520BC
So, iconography is indicative but not necessarily determinative for episodic performance. There are tempting parallels from other traditions that could push the boundaries of what we think the relationship between epic performance and images were, however. In Rajasthan, the performance of religious epics like Devnarayan, which can take a full week of all night recitations, are offered alongside a tapestry with images from the story. In this tradition, the Bhopa, a religious figure and singer, recites the tale while a partner illuminates the Par or Phad to correspond with parts of the tale. (I first learned about this from William Dalrymple’s 2006 article “Homer in India”)
A Phad to accompany the epic of Pabuji
I offer this analogy not because I believe that something similar happened in the performance of Homer in ancient Greece, but because it can point to some essential features of the relationship between episodic performance and imagery. First, the relationship between an image and a tale in this dynamic is metaphorical and metonymic: the image is not the story, but instead provides a possible window into the story. It can trigger a range of associative details that unfold over time. So, images stand for a story, but when they fix it in time can become something else on their own (and vice versa, to avoid making image secondary to the always primary narrative). Second, discrete series of images help to order or sequence more or less complex series. I often recall the cognitive concept of 7 plus/minus 2, which is generally how many discrete tasks/facts a human mind can keep track of at any given time. Any technology or practice that can divide larger sequences into manageable sets of 7 plus/minus 2 can help to explain the creation of longer and intricate compositions by individuals or groups.
Digression aside, there are multiple ways to think about the relationship between image and story in Greek myth. For thinking about the performance of Homer, I think that early art, when combined with the textual evidence the archaic and classical material discussed here, mostly supports the premise that many parts of the Homeric epics that we know had an independent status as shorter songs. The concretization of these scenes into identifiable parts could also be scene as a feature of the evolution of the epics and their later textualization. By phrasing it this way, I am leaving open two possibilities: one is that later scholars identified separate parts of the poems and gave them names based on their content; the other is that the songs were extant and the names are only articulated later. The material from the Homeric scholia is somewhat scattershot: episodia denote larger scenes much less frequently than shorter scenes or motifs. Much later authors, like Eustathius, seem to use the term more frequently to indicate different narrative traditions, but all this signals to me is a shifting of the term over time to be more inclusive. From Herodian to Eustathius, we can observe the development of episodes for nearly every book of the epic.
This post is a continuation of Painful Signs, a series of posts on the Iliad. The full list of posts is here. New posts will be added on various books, with an emphasis on new projects and highlighting scholarship in general.
This post is part one of three looking more closely at the proposition that our Iliad is made up of a series of songs or ‘episodes’ put together in a monumental performance. The first part looks at some of the internal evidence for performance and provides some historical context. The second part explores how much support there is for this model in the classical period. The third part offers some remarks on how this approach may or may not be different from neoanalysis and begins to sketch out how our Iliad may be broken up into songs or episodes.
One of the suggestions about the composition and textualization of the Homeric poems I have mentioned in a previous post is that the poems we have received from antiquity are somehow made up of shorter songs or episodes. The inspiration for this comes in part from the poems themselves where we don’t find ‘epic’ poets performing songs anywhere near the length of the Iliad or the Odyssey but instead performances that occur during meals–as in Phemios’ song during book 1 of the Odyssey–or other activities, as when Demodokos sings the song of Hephaestus, Ares, and Aphrodite in book 8.
Scholars like Richard Hunter have seen evidence in these performances for the aesthetics and poetics of Homeric epic writ large (see Segal 1994 for the clearest articulation of this). I think Casey Dué puts this well in her Achilles Unbound when she writes (2019, 42):
“There are, moreover, several passages within the poems that depict the performance of epic poetry, such as the performances of Phemios for the suitors in the house of Odysseus and those of Demodokos for the Phaeacians in the house of King Alkinoos. These passages show a bard performing at banquets, often taking requests for various episodes involving well-known heroes. Such passages in the Homeric texts that refer to occasions of performance are fascinating windows into how ancient audiences imagined the creation of epic poetry ”
Others have extended the idea from these performances to Odysseus’ own narration in Odyssey 9-12 (see Beck 2005 for a discussion). Despite broad agreement that there is some relationship between the depiction of singers in the epics themselves and the generation of epic poetry, however, there remains some skepticism that the shorter performances represented in Homer actually correlate in any meaningful way to the Iliad and Odyssey themselves, both because of the length of the latter and the performance context of the former (see especially Murray 1983).
Three of the inset examples we do find–the song of the homecomings of the Achaeans in Odyssey 1, Demodokos’ song of the strife between Achilles and Odysseus or the tale of the Trojan horse in Odyssey 8–provide us mere titles and little else. Even the reported song of Hephaestus’ trapping of Ares and Aphrodite in book 8 is more of a summary than a song itself. Each takes place while people are doing other things: dining and drinking or playing games. Only Odysseus seems to hold his audience in rapt attention.
Nevertheless, despite the difference in length and putative performance contexts, these shorter songs can help us think about the larger compositions. Based on these examples in the Odyssey and the length of the transmitted narrative Homeric hymns such as the Hymns to Demeter,Aphrodite, Apollo, and Hermes, which are between 200 and 500 lines, scholars have often imagined a traditional performance of a ‘Homeric bard’ as being around the length of the shortest books of the Iliad and the Odyssey. For example, Odyssey 6 is the shortest at 331 lines; Iliad 5 is the longest book at 909 lines. The second longest Homeric Hymn, Apollo, is 546 lines, but many believe it is really two older songs put together. The Hymn to Aphrodite, at just under 300 lines, seems like a reasonable analog to the songs presented in the Odyssey.
Odysseus and the Sirens. Detail from an Attic red-figured stamnos, ca. 480-470 BC. From Vulci.
Odysseus’ “Set List”
At a medium pace–c. 5 seconds per line–a 300 line song would probably take about 25 minutes to perform. 25 minutes certainly seems tolerable for a ‘dinner theater’ performance. But the Odyssey may have another model for us too. The story Odysseus tells provides an interesting example because books 9-12 have 2233 lines. Performed at the same pace, this would take a little over three hours (with a slight break after 1473, 11.333 when everyone is silent lasting until 11.378 when Odysseus resumes his take). This is a long tale, but not much more so than the running time of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023, 3 hours).
There’s a certain common sense logic to an argument that follows from these considerations, namely, that the major compositions we have in the Iliad and the Odyssey are likely made up of shorter songs. Indeed, the internal examples of the Odyssey provide some support for this. Those four books are generally split into distinct episodes themselves:
Book 9 (1) the first attack against the Cicones at Ismaros; (2) the Lotus-eaters; (3) the Cyclops scene
Book 10 (4) Aeolus and the bag of the winds, (5) the Laistrygonians and (6) Circe;
Book 11 (7) The Nekyia [in two parts, Catalog of Heroines [Intermezzo]; Catalog of Heroes]
Book 12 (8) Sirens, (9) Skylla and Charybdis, and (10) Helios’ Cattle
(see Most 1989; Cook 1995, 65-80; Christensen 2018 and 2020 Chapter 4 for more on these structures and their functions).
While these episodes vary in length, the average (c. 223 lines) is closer to the shorter of the narrative Homeric Hymns like Aphrodite than it is to the representation of songs by Phemios and Demodokos. What I find even more interesting from this comparison is that several of these scenes are also represented in early Greek art including Odysseus and the Cyclops, the Sirens, and Circe. Evidence from other poetic traditions like the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women also implies that scenes like the Nekyia were traditional too. So, one way of looking at Odysseus’ own story is as a collection of traditional episodes connected together for a specific performance. On a narrative level, of course, it is a series of memories provided by Odysseus to explain how he ended up naked on the shore of Ithaka. But there is no a priori reason that the majority of these scenes unfold in the order they do.
Nirvana’s Final Set List
The Panathenaic Rule
The implication from this analysis, of course, is that larger compositions can be brought together from smaller known songs for the right occasion. Such an argument has been bolstered as well by the report of the Panathenaic rule, the only evidence we really have for the monumental performance of the epics in their entirety in antiquity. According to this tradition, rhapsodes would take up singing the Iliad or Odyssey in sequence, picking up where another left off. Additional evidence has suggested that this was a venue where shorter compositions could have been performed to create a corporate whole.
But before pursuing that line of thought, let’s look at some of the evidence for the Panathenaic rule. The first comes from a dialogue ascribed to Plato.
[Plato], Hipparchus 228b–c
Hipparchus was the oldest and the wisest of Peisistratos’ sons. He provided many other wonderful deeds as an indication of his wisdom and was the first to bring Homer’s epics to this country. He compelled the rhapsodes at the Panathenaic games to go through them in order (ἐφεξῆς ) and taking turns (ὑπολήψεως), even as they still do now.
A few qualifying remarks. There’s no good reason to believe that the Panathenaic festival–an annual competition for traditional song–was the only context for the performance of epic poetry. Instead, one possibility is that it is the venue that provided the best opportunity to concretize and eventually textualize the epics we have. The basic outline is that there was a state sponsored festival that provided for the performance of Homeric epic by multiple rhapsodes. Note, however, that the passage refers to “Homer’s works” (τὰ ῾Ομήρου ἔπη) rather than the Iliad and Odyssey in general.
There’s also some debate about how to translate the words I render as “taking turns” and “in order”. There are good discussions in works by Derek Collins, Jose Gonzalez, and Gregory Nagy (see the helpful overview in Dué, Lupack, and Lamberton too). Collins (2004) believes that this passage makes it very unlikely that the epics were performed in their entirety at the festival and points to a passage he positions as indicating an older tradition in Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Eminent Philosophers
Diogenes Laertius 1.57 = Dieuchidas of Megara FGH 485 F 6
“Solon legislated that Homer’s songs be performed by rhapsodes by prompt [ὑποβολῆς] where when the first stopped, the subsequent singer would start.”
Here we have another traditional lawmaker establishing the performance of Homer by rhapsodes (again, note the generic nature of τά τε ῾Ομήρου) as part of an annual festival sponsored by the city. As Nagy has explored, there is an etymological felicity in the name rhapsode for the creation of a larger composition from individual songs. He has reconstructed the meaning as “one who stitches the songs together”. Nagy (2002) translates ἐξ ὑποβολῆς “by relay” instead of “prompt” for some good reasons he elaborates. I am less concerned about the precision of translation for either passage than what I think both passages indicate: a practice of multiple singers taking turns performing Homeric songs in some kind of an order.
It is not clear, as I mentioned above, that the resulting performance had to be our Iliad or Odyssey. There’s also no good reason to assume that what each rhapsode performed was a fixed song. Indeed, Collins believes that there was plenty of room for rhapsodic improvisation and Nagy argues as part of his evolutionary model for the textualization of the Homeric epics that the fixity of the songs changed over time. What I would like to imagine is a flexibility between the two possibilities: that songs that were in some way recognizably Homeric had to be performed but that rhapsodes were expected to embellish and connect them in different ways.
Bibliography: As Always, not exhaustive. Also, shared bibliography for all three posts.
Beck, Bill. “Lost in the middle : story time and discourse time in the « Iliad ».” Yearbook of Ancient Greek Epic, vol. 1, 2017, pp. 46-64. Doi: 10.1163/24688487-00101003
Rinon, Yoav. “« Mise en abyme » and tragic signification in the « Odyssey »: the three songs of Demodocus.” Mnemosyne, Ser. 4, vol. 59, no. 2, 2006, pp. 208-225. Doi: 10.1163/156852506777069673
Beck, Deborah. “The presentation of song in Homer’s « Odyssey ».” Orality, literacy and performance in the ancient world, edited by Elizabeth Minchin, Mnemosyne. Supplements; 335. Leiden ; Boston (Mass.): Brill, 2012, pp. 25-53.
Dué, Casey, Susan Lupack, and Robert Lamberton. “Panathenaia.” Chapter. In The Cambridge Guide to Homer, edited by Corinne Ondine Pache, 187–89. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Edmunds, Lowell. “Three short essays on Demodocus’s song of Ares and Aphrodite (Odyssey 8.266-369).” Yearbook of Ancient Greek Epic, vol. 4, 2020, pp. 55-71. Doi: 10.1163/24688487-00401003
Edwards, Mark W.. “Neoanalysis and beyond.” Classical Antiquity, vol. IX, 1990, pp. 311-325. Doi: 10.2307/25010933
Haft, Adele J.. “Odysseus’ wrath and grief in the Iliad. Agamemnon, the Ithacan king, and the sack of Troy in Books 2, 4, and 14.” The Classical Journal, vol. LXXXV, 1989-1990, pp. 97-114.
Finkelberg, Margalit. “The first song of Demodocus.” Mnemosyne, vol. XL, 1987, pp. 128-132. Doi: 10.1163/156852587X00111
Finkelberg, Margalit. “The sources of Iliad 7.” Colby Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 2, 2002, pp. 151-161.
Gaisser, Julia Haig. “Adaptation of traditional material in the Glaucus-Diomedes episode.” TAPA, vol. C, 1969, pp. 165-176.
Heiden, Bruce. “The placement of « book divisions » in the Iliad.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. 118, 1998, pp. 68-81. Doi: 10.2307/632231
Herrero de Jáuregui, Miguel. “Priam’s catabasis: traces of the epic journey to Hades in Iliad 24.” TAPA, vol. 141, no. 1, 2011, pp. 37-68. Doi: 10.1353/apa.2011.0005
Howes, George Edwin. “Homeric Quotations in Plato and Aristotle.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 6 (1895): 153–237. https://doi.org/10.2307/310358.
Hunter, Richard L.. “The songs of Demodocus: compression and extension in Greek narrative poetry.” Brill’s companion to Greek and Latin epyllion and its reception, edited by Manuel Baumbach and Silvio Bär, Brill’s Companions in Classical Studies. Leiden ; Boston (Mass.): Brill, 2012, pp. 83-109.
Kakridis, Johannes Theophanes. “Auch Homer ist in die Lehre gegangen.” Gymnasium, vol. XCIX, 1992, pp. 97-100.
Karanika, Andromache. “Wedding and performance in Homer: a view in the « Teichoskopia ».” Trends in Classics, vol. 5, no. 2, 2013, pp. 208-233.
Kelly, Adrian. “Performance and rivalry: Homer, Odysseus, and Hesiod.” Performance, iconography, reception: studies in honour of Oliver Taplin, edited by Martin Revermann and Peter J. Wilson, Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Pr., 2008, pp. 177-203.
Marks, Jim. “Resisting Aristotle : episodes in the Epic cycle.” Tecendo narrativas : unidade e episódio na literatura grega antiga, edited by Christian Werner, Antonio Dourado-Lopes and Erika Werner, São Paulo: Humanitas, FFLCH/USP, 2015, pp. 55-71.
Most, Glenn W. “The Structure and Function of Odysseus’ Apologoi.” Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-) 119 (1989): 15–30. https://doi.org/10.2307/284257.
Murray, P.. “Homer and the bard.” Aspects of the epic, edited by Tom Winnifrith, P. Murray and Karl Watts Gransden, New York: St. Martin’s Pr., 1983, pp. 1-15.
Nagy, Gregory and Olga M. Davidson. “On the problem of envisioning Homeric composition: some comparative observations.” Philologia Antiqua, vol. 16, 2023, pp. 15-25. Doi: 10.19272/202304601002
Nelson, Thomas J.. “Iphigenia in the « Iliad » and the architecture of Homeric allusion.” TAPA, vol. 152, no. 1, 2022, pp. 55-101. Doi: 10.1353/apa.2022.0007
Nishimura, Yoshiko T.. “The Circe-episodes in the « Odyssey ».” Journal of Classical Studies, vol. 45, 1997, pp. 40-49.
Postlethwaite, Norman. “The duel of Paris and Menelaos and the Teichoskopia in Iliad 3.” Antichthon, vol. XIX, 1985, pp. 1-6.
Rengakos, Antonios (2002). Zur narrativen Funktion der Telemachie. In André Hurst & Françoise Létoublon (Eds.), La mythologie et l’« Odyssée »: hommage à Gabriel Germain : actes du colloque international de Grenoble, 20-22 mai 1999 (pp. 87-98). Droz.
Rinon, Yoav. “« Mise en abyme » and tragic signification in the « Odyssey »: the three songs of Demodocus.” Mnemosyne, Ser. 4, vol. 59, no. 2, 2006, pp. 208-225. Doi: 10.1163/156852506777069673
Roisman, Hanna M.. “« Rhesus »’ allusions to the Homeric Hector.” Hermes, vol. 143, no. 1, 2015, pp. 1-23.
Segal, Charles (1994). Singers, heroes, and gods in the Odyssey. Cornell University Pr.
Sels, Nadia. “The untold death of Laertes: reevaluating Odysseus’s meeting with his father.” Mnemosyne, Ser. 4, vol. 66, no. 2, 2013, pp. 181-205. Doi: 10.1163/156852511X584991
Thomas, Oliver. “Phemius Suite.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. 134, 2014, pp. 89-102. Doi: 10.1017/S007542691400007X
Tsagalis, Christos. “Towards an Oral, Intertextual Neoanalysis” Trends in Classics, vol. 3, no. 2, 2011, pp. 209-244. https://doi.org/10.1515/tcs.2011.011
Wyatt, William F.. “Homeric transitions.” Ἀρχαιογνωσία, vol. 6, 1989-1990, pp. 11-24.
YAMAGATA, NAOKO. “USE OF HOMERIC REFERENCES IN PLATO AND XENOPHON.” The Classical Quarterly 62, no. 1 (2012): 130–44. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41820000.
This post is a continuation of Painful Signs, a series of posts on the Iliad. The full list of posts is here. New posts will be added on various books, with an emphasis on new projects and highlighting scholarship in general.
When I was in high school–like many a high school geek in the early 90s–I was in a band. The other members of the band all had “cool parents” who played instruments and listened to early punk and the edgier “oldies”. (My father was congenitally deaf; my mother trended towards Neil Diamond and James Taylor). My best friend’s parents had us listening to the Talking Heads by middle school and by the time I got to college, I knew most of Stop Making Sense by heart. We obtained a VHS copy of the concert and watched it all the time.
But then, at some party or another, I heard a strange version of “Psycho Killer”. It was slower, tinnier, and flatter in a way I immediately disliked. When I objected to the party host, he retorted that this was the original release from 1977 and that the version I knew was a later recording from the film, more palatable to the masses (or something like that).
It is hard for people accustomed to streaming music and the internet to relate to what it was like being a music fan in the analog era. Songs would basically just not exist unless you had a parent, friend, or some loitering older sibling who had them on record, a Maxell audio tape, or, in later years, CDs. I remember the days of Napster, followed by uploading CDs by the dozens to Apple iTunes, and then limewire (shhhh), just opening up worlds of music with an immediacy that is exhilarating and overwhelming. The ubiquity of music—the unmediated access—is worse than an embarrassment of riches–it in some way devalues it. (There’s an analogy to mortality and immortality in Homer here, but I have already digressed too much.)
My point in recalling this episode is the memory of that tension between “texts” (if you’ll permit me to refer to a recording thus.) I have been thinking for some weeks now about how Stop Making Sense, the film, can serve as a framework for thinking about the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey, in particular, the relationship between their development and prior versions (performances, or texts) and the 24 books we have.
Homeric Book Divisions
Pseudo-Plutarch, De Homero 2.4
“Homer has two poems: the Iliad and the Odyssey, each of them is divided into the number of letters in the alphabet, not by the Poet himself, but by the scholars in Aristarchus’ school.”
Let me start my explanation with a quick reminder of Homeric book divisions. As I discussed in a post on Iliad 14, we don’t really know where Homeric book divisions come from.
We have the basic options below that are discussed well by Minna Skafte Jensen, Bruce Heiden, Steve Reece, and Rene Nünlist (in addition to the overviews of textualization offered by Gregory Nagy, Jonathan Ready, and M. L. West)
The book divisions were there from the beginning, because the alphabet was adopted to write Homer down
The book divisions are features of smaller performance units
The book divisions were a product of Hellenistic editing, following the adoption of a regular alphabet and the impetus to present standard, synoptic versions of epic
The book divisions were a result of the process of dictating the poems: each one represents a day’s dictation, or something like that.
One of the things that really struck me while I was reading the Iliad and working on the posts in the substack, was how many episodes that were considered ‘traditional’ in some way were worked into narrative structures that subordinated them, even awkwardly at times, to the whole. So, the Catalogue of Ships makes sense in Iliad 2 both as a traditional unit and as a thematic restarting of the action after the political strife in Iliad 1. Book 3, with the duel between Menelaos and Paris following the Teichoskopia follows this “historical” anachronism to the thematic beginning of the war, but without losing the narrative of the present tale. This interweaving reminds me of the way performers combine and change songs from different parts in their career, from separate catalogs, and separate artists, to create a performance that in someway coheres in the real time of the audience’s experience.
The names we have for ancient performers of Homeric epic shift a little over time. Within the poems, we find singers (aoidoi), but our evidence from later periods have rhapsdoi, whose name has been etymologized as having to do with a staff or baton (rhabdos) or with a poetic metaphor that has to do with stitching or sewing. The distinction between the pair has been well summarized by José González who writes:
“The greatest hindrance to a proper understanding of the Homeric rhapsode and his craft is perhaps the entrenched, and diachronically invalid, opposition between a ‘creative ἀοιδός’ and a ‘reproducing (uncreative) ῥαψῳδός.’ Scholars who resort to this polarity often seek to preserve compositional creativity up until the time of the alleged ‘monumental composer’—Homer—who, with his dictated texts, arrested the traditional practice of recomposition in performance” (2013, Chapter 10).
Rhapsodes–and perhaps schools or ‘guilds’ of them like the Homeridae, can be dismissed as simple reciters of traditional poems; or we can understand them as something much more complicated and integral to a process of textualization.
Before explaining this, let me return to Stop Making Sense. I have always been a fan of live albums, concert movies, and live performances because of what it shows about the artists and their songs. Great performers allow their songs to be living things–part of the delight of a live performance these days is the productive tension between the ‘text’ (the recording) and the ongoing experience: how rhythms, melodies, and words change over time; how they can be integrated into other songs, both in transitions, and medleys; and how the performers in question arrange them (both internally as songs and as groups of songs).
Stop Making Sense is itself a text–it is a visual and audio recording of a series of concerts. It is a production made of Talking Heads songs but recorded from multiple performances and stitched together through editing. When I was in middle school, the only recorded versions of Talking Heads songs I knew were from this album, yet I had not seen the whole film. It has a plot that is independent from the songs: it builds from David Byrne’s entry on the stage with a spare “Psycho Killer” to the wild anthems “Burning Down the House”, the more contemplative “Once in a Lifetime” to the ending “Crosseyed and Painless”. Along the way, Byrne and his colleagues integrate different musical styles, different musicians, and different engagements with the audience.
For ‘original audiences’ of this tour, the songs built their meaning in part through the tension between their former existence as “texts” on albums, their memories of the individual songs on the radio (or in a friends smokey car or apartment) and prior performances. Many audience members would have performed these songs on their own! (My college band did “Psycho Killer” and, well, it was one of the few songs that actually killed.) For newcomers–and later audiences like me–Stop Making Sense was the text of its own that we took for granted, both in its pieces and its whole.
Part of the artistry of a live performance today is the fiction of improvisation, the energy brought by not knowing what the band on stage will do. As the recent rerelease of Stop Making Sense has made clear, there was little about this film that was not scripted. Jonathan Demme and David Byrne theorized the entire show; Byrne worked extensively on his odd (and unforgettable) dance moves. But the impact of the whole has years and countless other contributors to thank for it.
We have: (1) the songs that were developed by the band over time in recording studios and other performances alongside songs from different projects (solo songs, the Tom Tom Club etc.; (2) the original releases that presented the songs that appear in Stop Making Sense in different contexts; (3) years of performances that reshaped the songs, in part in response to audiences; (4) the decision by Demme and Byrne to transform these songs into a larger narrative performance that itself was transformed into a text through a different kind of technology. The concert film is an ‘epic’ performance that both depends upon and transcends the earlier instances of the same song. But it is a qualitatively difference experience from listening to the albums or the earlier song.
Singers at the Panathenaia: Papposilenoi holding lyres walking towards a flute-player. Side A of an Attic red-figure bell-krater. MET
Epic Setlists
Now, how does this analogy work for the Iliad? Imagine that if we return to the idea of a monumental performance and the so-called “panathenaic rule” that had performers of epic in relay. The festival context would have furnished an opportunity to stitch together the episodes (“songs”) that were part of the ‘whole story’ of the rage of Achilles or the homecoming of Odysseus. The performers–rhapsodes–were competent not just at performing a traditional episode (say, Helen describing the heroes from the walls or Odysseus defeating the cyclops), but they were also adept at integrating these episodes into larger pieces, composing in performance to connect and interlink scenes, and collaborating with other performers to help provide the fullest Iliad or Odyssey possible.
Audience members would ‘know’ the songs, but delight in their multiformity, in the tension created between the performance offered now and those they had heard before. Their responses would guide the performers who were in nearly every sense of the word professionals who practiced, adapted, expanded, and re–stitched epic nearly every day of their lives. These rhapsodes, whether Homeridae or not, were constantly composing and recomposing their songs in and out of performance. The context of a large performance of an entire theme in front of a live audience would necessarily recreate something ‘new’. (And, to be clear, I don’t think this undermines the evolutionary model for textualization.)
I don’t know if this analogy does everything I’d like it to do; but what if we add to this the additional technology of ‘recording’ over time–scribes at performances here and there, themselves stitching together the song in the way Demme’s cameras and editing bring together the four live performances that provided the raw material for Stop Making Sense. Just as the existence of Stop Making Sense does not erase the earlier ‘texts’ (those recordings), so too would the performance of whole epic poems and transcripts made of them not supplant the old performances and new ones. But over time, as tastes and contexts changed and as the politics and economics of the Mediterranean transformed the transcript to the sacred/fixed texts of the Alexandrians, the monumental form remained and the earlier forms were lost or forgotten.
Dué, Casey. 2018. Achilles Unbound: Multiformity and Tradition in the Homeric Epics. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies.
González, José M. 2013. The Epic Rhapsode and His Craft: Homeric Performance in a Diachronic Perspective. Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies.
G. P. Goold. “Homer and the Alphabet.” Transactions of the American Philological Association, 91:272-91.
Bruce Heiden. “The Placement of ‘Book Divisions’ in the Iliad.” Journal of Hellenic Studies, 118:68-81.
Minna Skafte Jensen. “Dividing Homer: When and How Were the Iliad and the Odyssey Divided into Songs?” Symbolae Osloenses, 74:5-91.
Nagy, Gregory. 2004. Homer’s Text and Language. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Nünlist, René. “A Neglected Testimonium on the Homeric Book-Division.” Zeitschrift Für Papyrologie Und Epigraphik 157 (2006): 47–49. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20191105.
Barry B. Powell. Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Presss
Ready, Jonathan. 2019. Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics. 2019.
This post is a continuation of Painful Signs, a series of posts on the Iliad. The full list of posts is here. New posts will be added on various books, with an emphasis on new projects and highlighting scholarship in general.
Why read Homer? Why read Homer when any reasonable person might think that our “bronze age is collapsing”? A simple answer: it brings me peace. I have returned to the Iliad and the Odyssey throughout my life both as a touchstone for world events and as a type of therapy.
I started grad school in NYC right before 9/11 and turned away from all my schoolwork just to work on Homer. There’s no accident that my dissertation ended up being on Rhetoric and Politics in the Iliad–I was only dimly aware of responding to world events through my work. Similarly, following my father’s sudden death at 61, I immersed myself in the Odyssey. When the COVID-19 Pandemic hit, I teamed up with Lanah Koelle and Paul O’Mahony to start Reading Greek Tragedy Online, which culminated in a 24 hour, round the world reading of the Odyssey.
I used to think of these responses as escapist, at best providing some indirect ways of working through the challenge of ‘real’ life. But a conversation with one of the founders of the Sportula, Stefani Echeverria-Fenn, helped me understand that there is more going on than that. As Stefani wrote at the time, the slow reading of Greek or Latin can help rearrange reality, providing a therapeutic method of reasserting agency on the world. The slow reading of philology, of communing with the dead through their languages, can help produce what psychologists call a “flow state”.
There are important neurobiological aspects to such a state: when we are fully engaged on a task that takes us outside of ourselves, it can have positive effects on mental and physical health. It can slow down the heart-rate and calm a racing mind. There are studies that show similarities with the neurophysiology of prayer or other meditative practices. The deliberative practice of reading intensely creates space outside of time and the daily self. The space and the process can be therapeutic.
Years ago, when I was an undergraduate, I studied poetry with the translator and poet Olga Broumas. I distinctly remember a meeting when I told her I was an atheist and she calmly responded that I was not. How, I asked, could she say that? She told me I just hadn’t learned the words to talk about the universe in a way that made sense yet and that I was too spiritual to be an atheist. I can’t say that this much has changed in a quarter century, but I can say that when the world gets dark, I somehow find light in Homer. And that’s a pretty good start.
New Book Alert!
Homer’s not just useful for mental health! Greek epic also provides a way to think about how humanity got where it is and what we need to do to survive. In addition to the resurgence of fascism, the stupidity of modern technology and its claims to intelligence, the horrors of ongoing conflicts, and rising income inequality, we may be facing an extinction level event from climate change over the next century. Not to be an alarmist–there is hope! But the hope diminishes with each passing year of inaction.
Ecocriticism is a cross–disciplinary theoretical approach to literature. While the term was first coined in the 1970s, the approach has seen slow adoption in past-focused disciplines like Classics. Ecocriticism can characterize a lot of work that looks at the interaction between human beings and the environment, and it can also apply to individual works like Richard Powers’ novel The Overstory that speaks directly to ecological concerns and humankind’s relationship with nature.
When it comes to classical studies and Homer, ecocritical approaches can have an important historicizing contribution. Just as post-colonial studies of Homer can help us understand the systems of values that have shaped Homeric reception and help us to understand epic’s fundamental relationship to enslavement, misogyny, political power, etc, and how these values have influenced later cultures and Homer’s appeal, so too can ecocritical studies help us understand how our modern relationship to the natural world draws on ancient beliefs.
The last decade has seen increasing interest in the depiction of the environment Homer. William Brockliss’ book on Homeric Imagery and the Natural Environment is a great resource for thinking through the presentation of the environment in Homer. Wayne Mark Rimmer has suggested that Homeric warriors function as an index of humanity’s ‘precarious place in a delicate natural world”. Julio Vega Payne does a great job in his dissertation of developing the way that Homer uses the natural world as a character to explore human-environmental dynamics. In her blog post “Bring Timber Into The City”: Reading The Iliad Against The Grain” Lindsay Davies concludes
“A human ecological reading of the Iliad requires us to recognize that in the world of the poem, humans, in their mobility of mind and body—remember swift-footed Achilles—are greater than trees and beasts. They transcend the earth through their imagination and ingenuity, if not in their bodies. Their eyes are cast upwards to the sky for meaning, not downwards to the earth. In this context, as Robert Pogue Harrison argues in his great study of the meaning of forests in culture, it becomes imperative to clear the trees, for “Where divinity has been identified with the sky, or with the eternal geometry of the stars, or with cosmic infinity, or with ‘heaven,’ the forests become monstrous, for they hide the prospect of god” (6, italics in original). This association of the sky with transcendence also explains the significance of Homer’s poor pigeon whose death causes warriors to wonder. For the bird struck down while striving to fly skyward potently symbolizes the quest for heroic glory, that which appeared to turn a man into a god yet simultaneously guaranteed that he would bite the dust.”
A little earlier, Jason Bell argued for a reading of the Odyssey that centered environmental ethics (see Elizabeth Schulz’s article on the Odyssey and ecocriticism too); and Sam Cooper’s article on “Speculative Fiction, Ecocriticism, and the Wanderings of Odysseus” shows how “Ecocritical readings of the Odyssey that wander purposefully between that epic and its receptions (let it be clear that the one I offer is by no means exhaustive) may help us to stay with its ecological troubles, and with those of later periods, and with our own.”
I think there is definitely more work to be done on the Odyssey’s relationship with the natural world, especially if we position the Odyssey in cosmic history as a text moving from a world of fantastic abundance (consider the endless feasting of the Iliad or the meals in the early part of the epic itself) to one of comparative scarcity (the suitors’ unchecked eating is a major concern). Given current interest in abundance and inequity, epic’s arc from the zero-sum game of Achaean honor in Iliad 1 to the premise that “wealth and peace should be enough” to avoid conflicts in book 24 of the Iliad is worth tracing. But I have been thinking about ecocriticism and Homer since I first Edith Hall’s Epic of the Earth: Reading Homer’s Iliad in the Fight for a Dying World.
I am going to say very little about this book right now, except that I think it should be one of the most important books written about Greek poetry of the year, if not the decade. I hosted Edith for a talk at Brandeis last year where she presented some of the research for this book and I immediately recognized its importance. It forces us to reconsider the natural world presented in Homer and to think as well about how the heroic world and its values contain the seeds of our own destructive relationship with the planet.
The book unfolds in part by looking at the poetics and the contents of the Iliad, following chapters about interpreting the poem, historical contexts, and ecocritical approaches. Hall traces the work of Loggers, Farmers, and Smiths, through chapters that blend history, archaeology, and philology to ask readers to confront the consumptive deforestation that Homeric epic presupposes as a necessity for heroic (if not Human) life. In the Epilogue, she notes that “central to the ideology of the Iliad is the idiom of infinitude, an assumption that the physical Earth, its contents, and the resources needed by humans, somehow limitless” (202). Homeric culture, as it were, is founded upon a need to continually expand to add new resources to fuel the machine of human war and politics. As Hall continues, “The Iliad shows that the seeds of environmental capacity were already sown by warfare at the dawn of human civilizations less than ten thousand years ago” (203). The military industrial complex is the largest driver of climate change today; and this has always been the case.
And, yet, Hall does not with total despair. She reads the Iliad as a record and a lament. It is “not only the poem of the Anthropocene; it has the potential to become the epic of the Earth–the poem for the Anthropocene” (205). By bearing witness, the Iliad advocates for all that has been lost to the blades of war; by learning from this witness, modern audiences have a chance to contemplate the nature of things in truth.
The world burning is not inevitable. It is a product of the way human beings choose to live. According to Hall, epic can help us choose to live a bit longer.
“And so they were completing the burial of Hektor, tamer of horses”
῝Ως οἵ γ’ ἀμφίεπον τάφον ῞Εκτορος ἱπποδάμοιο
Imagine if all we had of the poem was a scholarly record conveying these two lines. What would we make of the journey that we would have to take to get from line 1 to line 2? How would we relate the opening request with the final fact and then connect these in turn to a larger tradition of myth? One might naturally assume that the former leads to the latter in a causal fashion, but there’s no necessary reason to posit that.
There’s an openness, though, to both lines. The initial invocation asks for a story to be told; the final one offers a scene in process: the imperfect tense of the verb ἀμφίεπον shows an action that is ongoing but not yet complete, it leaves the audience with the sense that more is still to come, that the final word has not actually been spoken. This certainly functions to mark the epic as part of a larger story cycle, just as the imperfect in line 1.7 (Διὸς δ’ ἐτελείετο βουλή) indicates that the Iliad is part of a larger process, a cosmic narrative arc.
Yet, without external evidence, each name is merely an empty sign waiting to be filled, a story needing to be told. But we have the whole poem. We can follow from line 1.1 to 24.804. And we still likely ask why the Iliad ends with the burial of Hektor, tamer of horses. Ancient scholars had a range of less than satisfactory answers. The scholia record that a scholar named Menekrates believed that Homer was silent about the events after Hektor because “he sensed his own weakness and inability to tell the events in the same way” (Schol. bT ad. Hom. Il. 21.804). Another claims that some modified the final line:
Schol. T ad. Hom. Il. 21.804a
“Some people write “and so they were completing the burial of Hektor. Then the Amazon came / the daughter of Ares, the great-hearted man-killer”
In this version, we find the possibility of an ever-expanding tale, moving from the Iliad to the events of the Aithiopis without much of a break at all. While I have no doubt that ancient performances offered such opportunities for stitching and re-stitching narratives together, I think we still need to contend with the beginning, middle, and end of our Iliad. Even if a performer would segue from an Iliad to an Aithiopis, we still face the fact that each was felt to be a unitary and individualizable narrative. So, here are some other reasons why the Iliad ends as it does.
1.‘Epic’ time is different from normal narrative time: it is more like a time loop in modern science fiction. All the main events always happen and have already always happened, but there’s room for variation in the journey between them. This occupies a place between what we might clumsily call “ritual time” and a causal narrative chain. For the former, I have in mind the narrative cycle of a liturgical calendar where congregants/audiences are treated to the same stories at the same part of the year. The stories never change because they have happened and must happen the same, but our experiences of them change as we move from one repetition to another. For the latter, the logic of causation is imposed through the repetition of the same basic events, but by finding space in the interstices to tell different stories, audiences explore the dynamic interaction between determinism and agency, between accepting what one cannot change and being empowered to alter what one can.
2.The city has already been destroyed in the imaginations of the characters and the audience. Following on the immutable layering of epic time, Iliadic narrative refers to canonical events of the Trojan War but mostly moves around them: the judgment of Paris, the abduction of Helen, the marshaling of the armies, the sacrifice of Iphigenia, the sack of the city, and other events all exist on the periphery, at times marginalized to such an extent that scholars can doubt whether or not the Homeric epics appeal to them. At the same time, the Iliad appropriates and reperforms moments from the larger tale that should not be part if its tale, engaging in a creative anachronism that manages to place the catalogue of ships, the teikhoskopia, the duel over Helen, and the building of Achaean fortifications between Achilles’ falling out with Agamemnon and the embassy to try to resolve the spat.
The Iliad reshuffles the deck of mythical time both to assert the supremacy of its story and to show that no series of events, no causal chain, can alter the outcome of the overall narrative. This is theological in the cosmic sense: notions like Zeus’ plan and the double determination (when the narrative shows the gods ‘causing’ an action but also features mortals choosing to act without knowledge of divine will) underscores the complexity of causation and the inscrutability of single efficient causes. At the same time, such shuffling is evocative of human cognition, the way we understand and retain basic concepts of beginning and ending but can lose track of intermediary steps.
3.Achilles has already died. In a way, this is no different than the previous point, but it is important enough to emphasize again. The Iliad does not merely deal out the deck of myth in a different order, it redraws the images on the most important cards to achieve similar ends. Achilles dies through Patroklos—his physical death is disassembled and re-used in book 11 and then book 16, anticipated in books 18, 19, 22, 23, and 24, but never performed because it has already been achieved. Just as the city is destroyed in the words of Hektor, Andromache, Priam, and Hecuba, so too is Achilles’ death portrayed through Patroklos’ surrogacy and the divine and mortal speeches that anticipate it.
4.Hektor’s death may be more important than Achilles’. As I have mentioned before, the Iliad takes part in an etiological (that is, explanatory) arc that moves from the dios boulê, Zeus’ plan to rid the world of the race of heroes, to an era when the realms of gods and men are more thoroughly distinct. While the Odyssey more-or-less completes this journey toward Hesiod’s Works and Days, where human beings toil distant from tangible divine favor or aid, the Iliad moves audiences from the twin rages of Achilles and Apollo in book 1 (where they are both upset at Agamemnon) to Apollo’s anger at Achilles for his treatment of Hektor in book 24. Apollo—much to Hera’s surprise—takes the side of a non-divine mortal for the rite of burial against one closer to his own kin.
Along the way, we see the widening distance between divine knowledge and human knowledge—the whole motif of double determination, whereby we as audience members see the gods and mortals as understanding different levels of causation for a given action. The repeated toggling between divine intervention paired with human decisions shows us separate worlds, even separate realities or dimensions whose entanglement does little more than increase damage and pain to one another. It is almost as if the Iliad attests to a time when the fabric between two different realities was thin enough to be permeable and that it shows us how perilous it is when beings from one realm meddle with events in another. The world of the gods was overturned by the silly decision of one man (Paris!); the mortal plain roils with each outsized, overwrought divine act. The steady movement towards emphasizing the honor of mortals in death and the separation of gods and humans both justifies and supports the way the world is for mortals and suggests rather strongly that it is better this way.
5.Hektor’s burial is the end of an era. And also a beginning. Hektor is different from Achilles as a full-mortal and as a ‘family’ man. By ending with his burial rather than the fall of the city or the funeral games for Achilles, the Iliad elevates his importance and closes out the race of heroes by encapsulating a different series of values in this one fallible man. Hektor is far from perfect throughout the epic: he struggles to understand his role in leading the city, he blusters and glowers when things don’t go his way, and he is shown to be in the framework of Achilles and Diomedes somewhat un-heroic in his final moments. But the laments that follow his death in books 22 and 24—cast against the obscenity of Achilles’ treatment of his body—double down on the importance of his unheroic character as a son, father, and a man whose kindness towards the most hated woman in the world and the cause of all his troubles is so incredible that scholars have speculated he was under the spell of her charisma. Hektor’s inconsistencies and internal contradictions form a counterpoint to Achilles’. In a universe where even the gods are churlish and quick-to-rage, what kinds of excess should we be grateful for in a man?
6.Hektor’s burial may also be self-reflective for epic poetry. As I mentioned above, the tense/aspect of the verb performing Hektor’s burial is incomplete, and ongoing (῝Ως οἵ γ’ ἀμφίεπον τάφον ῞Εκτορος ἱπποδάμοιο). The Iliad doesn’t so much end as fade away, to black as in the end of the final episode of the Sopranos. The process of burying Hektor remains ongoing as the poem ends, as we all continue to engage in its continuation through sharing in his memory. But I think the process, the imperfectivity goes farther than this.
The process of the burial is the beginning of enshrining Hektor’s memory and creating his kleos. But this may also be an example of an unnoticed ekphrasis. While the tomb itself is not the creation of a work of art like Achilles’ shield, it is still the execution of a physical craft described within an oral/written artform. As such it may contain an implicit comparison between the practice of burial and the art of epic poetry.
Homer, Il. 24.797–800
“They quickly placed the bones in an empty trench and then They covered it with great, well-fitted stones. They rushed to heap up a marker, around which they set guards In case the well-greaved Achaeans should attack too soon.”
In Iliad seven, Hector challenges the ‘best of the Achaeans’ to a duel. There he imagines that, once he had won the contest, the dead hero’s tomb would be a monument to, and sign of, his everlasting glory. Ironically, the dead hero’s tomb turns out to be his, once the Trojans construct it at the epic’s end
But what kind of sign is it? Homer describes how the Trojans’ burial mound for Hector leaves ‘a mark’—the word here is sêma (from which we get the words ‘semantics’ or ‘semaphore’), and also means a sign or symbol. In the end, then, the epic leaves us with a symbol of some kind that I think points back to this epic itself. Ostensibly, of course, that is Hector’s burial mound, a physical marker of his fame—and as a metonym it stands for the fame of all the heroes who fought at Troy. Yet, its immediate referent, the physical thing it describes, is a ‘hollow grave’ (koilên kapeton).
An English speaker might wonder whether or not the hollowness of the grave marks some sort of empty meaning and thus offers some judgment on the vanity and meaninglessness of the conflict, perhaps evoking ambivalence. But part of the trick in translating metaphors from one culture to another is understanding that a cognitive valence can be very different. In English, ‘hollow’ and ‘empty’ tend to refer to the absence of substance within something else. (Hence, our use for it to describe depression or anhedonia.)
But in ancient Greek, the word koilê is used to describe the shape made by a thing that allows it to hold something else. It can sometimes then come to shift to point to the absence of that something else, but it is, more often, a marker for the vessel which can carry something, even when it is carrying it. In conjunction with Hektor’s grave, consider the following lyric mentions of the ‘hollow ships’ of the Trojan War:
Consider:
Ibycus fr. 1a 16-19
Nor yet the overreaching virtue of heroes whom the hollow, many-benched ships brought as the destruction of Troy.
In both these passages, the ships are marked out for their potential to carry something and their ability to do so. It is also arguable that the ships carry ethical content of the heroes they convey to Troy as well. Of course, in the Iliad the ships are often invoked as empty in their capacity to carry things as well as people—but these moments are also seen as critical in telling the story, as when the Trojan herald Idaios refers to the beginning of the conflict:
Homer, Il. 7.399-400
“However many possessions Alexandros led in his hollow ships To troy. Oh, how I wish he had died first!”
On the internal surface, around the rim, four ships. Cemetery of Ancient Thera. 3rd quarter of the 6th cent. BC Archaeological Museum of Thera.
So, when the word used to describe that ‘hollow trench’ (koilein kápeton) is the same used for the ships that brought the Achaeans to Troy and will take their stories away, the grave is being marked out as a vessel for Hector’s fame. The message of Hektor’s “empty grave” is not like the elegiac regret of T.S. Eliot’s “Hollow Men”, but instead it represents the potential of an empty vessel to be filled by the audience in its reception of the poem. It is a signal, I think, of the assumption that meaning continues to be made outside the world of the poem and that when we stare into the sign we create the meaning based on what we ‘read’ there and knew before. Each time we engage in this process, we create anew. This outward looking burial mound that is simultaneously Hektor’s grave and the Iliad itself is a continuation of the narrative’s strategy of showing us characters responding to other’s narratives by reflecting on their own lives and then engaging in storytelling themselves, as we see in Achilles’ final story to Priam in book 24. We are the people to come, walking or sailing by on the Hellespont or traveling through the tale as it is sung or read. We recreate the story of Achilles, bound up in the grave of the man he killed, just as Hektor imagined his story would be told through his own enemy’s tomb.
So, in addition to Hector’s grave, this vessel, this sêma, refers to the Iliad itself. The epic is a vessel of fame, of Hector’s, Achilles’, and Agamemnon’s, but it is also a marker for the death of a world, for the end of a bygone time. On the one hand, it marks the transition from the heroic age to the present day. On the other, it acts as a grave marker of an entire tradition of epic poetry which would have sung about the wars at Troy and Thebes. We as audience members recreate the tale, but in the raiment of our time, transforming it, but reviving it too.
The hollowness of this thing is not about being empty, but about having the power to carry something, to produce something else, even something new. As the Tao Te Ching states, “We shape clay into a pot / but it is the emptiness inside / that holds whatever we want. We hammer wood for a house, but it is the inner space / that makes it livable” (Chapter 11; Stephen Mitchell, 1988). Thus, Hector’s grave carries with it everything he was or could be; and the Iliad, far from empty and devoid of meaning, is that vessel that carries so much unknown across the oceans of time.
Tao Te Ching: Chapter 11 translated by Stephen Mitchell (1988)
We join spokes together in a wheel, but it is the center hole that makes the wagon move.
We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.
We hammer wood for a house, but it is the inner space that makes it livable.
We work with being but non-being is what we use.
black-figure terracotta vessel depicting an ancient greek ship.
