Speech Act Theory and Homer

This post is a continuation of my substack on the Iliad. This post is part of my plan to share new scholarship on Homer. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis.

In his speech to Achilles in Iliad 9, Phoinix laments the idea that he may be separated from Achilles. Part of his sorrow, it seems, resides in the fact that he has work still to do (437-443):

“How could I be left here without you, dear child,
alone? The old man and horse-trainer Peleus assigned me to you
on that day when he sent you from Phthia with Agamemnon
still a child, not yet educated in the ways of crushing war
or assemblies where men become most prominent.
He sent me for this reason: to teach you all these things,
how to be a speaker of words and a doer of deeds.”

πῶς ἂν ἔπειτ’ ἀπὸ σεῖο φίλον τέκος αὖθι λιποίμην
οἶος; σοὶ δέ μ’ ἔπεμπε γέρων ἱππηλάτα Πηλεὺς
ἤματι τῷ ὅτε σ’ ἐκ Φθίης ᾿Αγαμέμνονι πέμπε
νήπιον οὔ πω εἰδόθ’ ὁμοιΐου πολέμοιο
οὐδ’ ἀγορέων, ἵνα τ’ ἄνδρες ἀριπρεπέες τελέθουσι.
τοὔνεκά με προέηκε διδασκέμεναι τάδε πάντα,
μύθων τε ῥητῆρ’ ἔμεναι πρηκτῆρά τε ἔργων.

A Scholiast (Schol. bT in Il. 9.443 ex 1-4) suggests that what Achilles needs to have learned is “rhetoric” (φαίνεται οὖν καὶ τὸ τῆς ῥητορικῆς ὄνομα εἰδώς) whereas another scholion (Schol. AT in Il. 9.443 c1) emphasizes the fact that the execution of both deeds and words requires “good counsel” (εὐβουλία: σημείωσαι ὅτι τὸ ὁμοιοτέλευτον ἔφυγε μεταβαλὼν τὴν φράσιν· οὐ γὰρ εἶπε ‘μύθων τε ῥητῆρα καὶ ἔργων πρακτῆρα’. καὶ ὅτι πάντων διδακτικὸν εὐβουλία). In the Pseudo-Plutarchean Life of Homer, these lines are used to assert (1) that virtue is teachable and (2) that Homer was the first philosopher (Ps-Plutarch Vita Homeri 1736-1739):

“For life is sustained by means of actions and words, and he says that he was made a teacher of the young man about both. From these lines he asserts clearly that every kind of virtue is teachable. Thus Homer was therefore first to philosophize concerning ethical and natural affairs.”

ἐπεὶ γὰρ ὁ βίος ἐκ πράξεων καὶ λόγων συνέστηκε, τούτων φησὶ διδά-
σκαλον ἑαυτὸν τοῦ νεανίσκου γεγονέναι. ἐκ δὲ τῶν εἰρημένων δῆλον
ὅτι πᾶσαν ἀρετὴν ἀποφαίνει διδακτήν. οὕτω μὲν οὖν πρῶτος ῞Ομηρος
ἔν τε ἠθικοῖς καὶ φυσικοῖς φιλοσοφεῖ.

But there’s another angle to all this as well: there are many Homeric words that are in fact actions themselves that change the relationships of the people who speak and hear them (rebukes, threats, oaths). Rather than seeing a polar opposition between being a speaker and a doer, we might want to consider whether we have a binary opposition here (“both…and” instead of “either/or”). Or, to be more salacious, a hendiadys: to be a Homeric hero, one is an Agent. Some of these actions are conducted through words.

At the end of his chapter, “ “Stronger”: Performative Speech and the Force of Achilles” (from his 2023 Homer’s Iliad and the Problem of Force), Charles Stocking rephrases his argument to assert, “to frame it another way, the Iliad not only demonstrates “how to do things with words” but also how to undo them”. While this sentence aims at a bit of a chapter-closing provocation, it also builds on a large body of philosophy, linguistics, and some important work on Homer. Stocking’s contribution is an important step, because it interweaves some often overlooked comments on “speech act theory”. It is also interesting to bring up now as we enter an election cycle where the importance and efficacy of words will be debated using the only medium for doing so: more words.

Stocking looks at the way that “performative speech” is used in book 1 of the Iliad to argue that while Homeric speakers do envision speech as an alternative to action–witness the oft-repeated goal of being a speaker of words and a doer of  deeds–utterances about hierarchy and force tend to rely on and strengthen notions of inequity on force relations to increase the authority of a given speech act. As such, a given ‘performative utterance’ relies in part on the material reality of its articulation (the context, the players, etc.) to advance the goal of the speech in question. For Stocking, this is an important adjustment to how others have approached speech acts in Homer because it departs from a simple approach to how speech functions as action and is “consistent with [Pierre] Bourdieu’s own insistence that performative speech must rely on external material conditions as the source for authoritative speech” (72).

(And to make another few important distinctions: we use performative loosely in English. Sometimes performative means having to do with a performance, therefore, not part of the everyday. In a related pejorative use, performative has come to mean “superficial” or in some way not real. For analytic philosophy and linguistic, a performative is in some way realer than other language.)

To follow the argument here, I think we should first establish what the stakes of the argument are, the tradition within which Stocking is working, and why these distinctions matter (in multiple questions. Let me start with the stakes in simplistic terms: the world we share together is one mediated if not created by language. Language can alter our perception of the world and what we do in it; it can inspire action, and it often does so regardless of whether said language conveys anything remotely resembling what we call ‘truth’. In a world described entirely by language–such as that of epic poetry–the basic reality I just described is perhaps more severe: all action in Homer is really speech. And, from something of a post-modern perspective, all speech is in a sense action insofar as once re-articulated (that is, read) it becomes again, if only in the imagination.

Don’t worry! I am not aiming for a metaphysical quandary of whether or not our reading of Homeric epic in some way makes it real, but instead to set up a different kind of distinction. Homeric poetry is also representative or mimetic speech. When talking about “performative speech” in Homer, it is crucial to note that we are not talking about the performance of Homer, but instead about the representation of performative speech in a very narrow sense in a poem that in itself, when performed, becomes and does something in the world.

(There is debate about the application of speech-act theory to literature (barred generally by Austin). Searle contends that the operation of cultural rules within the narrative world makes it valid (1979, p. 33-34 and 64). See also Pratt (1977) and Johnson (1980). For a broad critique of the application of speech-act theory, see Gorman (1999)

Again, I run the risk of sounding nonsensical, so I will step back just a moment: J. L. Austin was one of the first philosophers to qualify as a “performative speech act” an utterance that in some way changes reality by effecting or amounting to an action. His examples were fairly limited: utterances like “I bet” or “I thee wed” are those that need no accompanying action or other act to suffice to have changed the relationship between the speaker and others (or among those subject to the speech) based on the context. Austin added more vocabulary to this: a felicitous speech act is one that obtains its outcome (and infelicitous is one that does not). Austin also helpfully distinguished between different kinds of outcomes: he calls the intended effect of a speech-act the illocutionary effect of the speaker and the actual outcome the perlocutionary effect. If we take the example of making a bet, an infelicitous “betting” would be one where the process or formula were wrong or either the speaker or the recipient did not have the contextual (social) standing to execute the speech act.

I got interested in speech act theory while working on my dissertation, focusing in part on how Zeus’ language changes and effects reality (and there’s support here for a larger view of Zeus’ language and that of poets creating reality and their shared ability being reflected at the beginning of Hesiod’s Theogony, but who has time for that!) I was interested in part in the act of making a bet or an oath (as it shows up in Iliad 23) but also in trying to disentangle the intentions from the results in Agamemnon’s testing of the army (the so-called diapeira of Iliad 2). Richard Martin was one of the first to apply speech-act theory to Homer, insisting that the speeches in Homer are stylized versions of speech acts that would have been recognized by Homeric audiences. (Elizabeth Minchin builds on this too in her 2007 Homeric Voices; see Barker 2004 and 2009 for the use of speech act theory in political institutions and the creation of the Achaean assembly ).

By integrating Bourdieu’s work alongside the mainstays of Austin and Searle, Stocking reiterates the strong complementarity between speech and deed in Homer, insisting that “performative speech does not simply supplement force in the Iliad. Rather, Homeric characters actively attempt to construct the very relations of physical force upon which their speech acts rely” (28). In making this argument, Stocking of course needs the work of Pratt (who argues that literary speech does not constitute a world apart from regular speech for this kind of analysis, against Austin), Martin (who argues that Homeric speech reflects consistent type and genre to constitute as performative) and Minchin (whose argumentation supports Martin’s moves). Stocking’s contribution is to asseverate the how the material conditions make certain kinds of utterances possible, focusing on the genealogy of Achilles and the power of Agamemnon as expressed metonymically through his scepter. Stocking also cites Benveniste’s critique of Austinian theory as ignoring the importance of authority (39-42) and is reliant on a particular sense of subjectivity. It is through this connection that we get to one of the throughline’s of Stocking’s book, a different model for agency and action in Homer that combines both divine and human volition

I am not wholly convinced that Stocking needs speech act theory to get where he wants to with this book. Yet, in an overview of force in Homer, how can we not talk about language? Anyone who reads the Iliad is aware of how nearly evenly split it is between narrative scenes of overwhelming violence and direct speech by Homeric characters: speech and deed are certainly matched in Homer. And in an epic where people are motivated by stories, insults, cultural constructions of honor and heroism, it is all the more appropriate to ask what words themselves contribute to the carnage.

Short Bibliography

n.b. this is not exhaustive. please let me know if there are other articles to include.

Austin J. L., How to Do Things With Words, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1975.

Barker E. T. E. 2004. “Achilles’ Last Stand: Institutionalising Dissent in Homer’s Iliad.” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society: 92–120.

———. 2009. Entering the Agon: Dissent and Authority in Homer, Historiography and Tragedy. Oxford.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Harvard University Press

Brown, H. Paul, «Addressing Agamemnon: A Pilot Study of Politeness and Pragmatics in the Iliad», Transactions of the American Philological Association, nº 136, 2006, p. 1-46.

Christensen Joel P., «The End of Speeches and a Speech’s End: Nestor, Diomedes, and the telos muthôn», dans Reading Homer: Film and Text. Kostas Myrsiades (ed.), Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009, p.136-162.

Christensen Joel P., «First-Person Futures in Homer», American Journal of Philology nº 131, 2009, p. 543-571.

Clark Matthew, «Chryses’ Supplication: Speech Act and Mythological Allusion», Classical Antiquity, nº 17, 1997, p. 5-24.

Gorman David, «The Use and Abuse of Speech-Act Theory in Criticism», Poetics Today nº 20, 1999, p. 93-119.

Gottesman Alex, «The Pragmatics of Homeric Kertomia», Classical Quarterly, nº 58, 2008, 1-12.

Martin, Richard, The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the Iliad, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1989.

Elizabeth Minchin, Homeric voices : discourse, memory, gender. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. 1 online resource (ix, 310 pages). 

Pratt M. L., Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse, Bloomington, University of Indiana Press, 1977

Roochnik David, «Homeric Speech Acts: Word and Deed in the Epics», Classical Journal, nº 85, 1990, p. 289-299.

Searle J. R., Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1969.

Searle J. R., « A Classification of Illocutionary Acts». Language in Society, nº 5, 1976, 1-22.

Searle J. R., Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theories of Speech Acts, Cambridge, 1979.

Wilson Donna F., Ransom, Revenge, and Heroic Identity in the Iliad, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Mixing it up in the Funeral Games

This post is a continuation of my substack on the Iliad. This post is part of my plan to share new scholarship on Homer. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis.

Every time the Olympics come around, I find myself talking about ancient Greek athletics, even though the topic is a bit far outside my expertise. As a Homerist, these contests stick out in my mind because they are (1) part of the apparatus of Panhellenic culture with Homer that emerges before the classical period; (2) like Homer, they reflect a growing fantasy of a heroic age that appealed to elite culture in the Classical period; and (3) their spirit of competition and glory resonates with the questions that are posed—if never answers—by the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Both epics have athletic contests as scenes where internal (and external) audiences are invited to consider heroic ‘worth’ based on participation in games. In Odyssey 8, the young Phaeacian princes invite Odysseus to show what kind of a man he is by engaging in after-dinner competition. (He eventually bests them with a discus, after criticizing them for putting too much emphasis on appearances.) That epic’s centering of cleverness and de-centering of the conventional heroic physique is tied to the identity of its hero and the skills he needs to return home (as I try to tease out a bit in an essay on disability studies in Homer).

For the Iliad, the funeral games of Patroklos occupy nearly an entire book. In writing my posts for each of the Iliad’s books, I think I gave short shrift to the funeral games. This is a little ironic, since the final chapter of my dissertation focused almost entirely on the games and the job talk I developed from it certainly helped me get my first academic position! The games are central to the epic’s plot in allowing it to return to the themes of the conflict in book 1. Oliver Taplin has argued that “one of the main poetic functions of the funeral games [is] to show Achilles soothing and resolving public strife, instead of provoking and furthering it” (1992, 253) and other authors who write on politics in Homer have seen these connections explicitly, including, but not limited to, Donna Wilson, Dean Hammer, Deborah Beck, Walter Donlan, David Elmer, Elton Barker, and more!

Games are never just about play and fun! They are opportunities for individuals to compete, but when communities are involved, they are also a form of deferred or transformed strife, nearly always loci of political posturing and the exploration of inter-social hierarchies. One just needs to check out ESPN’s Medal Tracker to note, even if superficially, that individual performance in the games is translated into some sign of collective worth or esteem. Further, we narrativize our own experiences and values through what happens on the screen: games are a place where we negotiate our differences and litigate what they mean. Consider recent controversies about gender, ongoing nationalistic feuds over clothing (though, mostly only what women are allowed to wear), and historical manipulation of the games.

The funeral games in Iliad 23 are an opportunity where Achilles experiments with new ideas about authority and the distribution of goods, resolving in part the conflict between him and Agamemnon lingering from book 1, but creating, I think a dissonance for external audiences about to what extent the solutions offered are available outside of epic.

I am not just reminded of the games because of the ongoing Olympics! In Charles Stocking’s Homer’s Iliad and the Problem of Force, which I have been reading and thinking about, the third chapter, “Force and Discourse in the Funeral Games of Patroclus”, presents an in depth reading of the games that adds to essential reading on the topic (work I have mentioned above, plus articles by Grethlein, Kelly and Kitchell cited below”.

Stocking opens the chapter looking at the “problem of force” in the famous advice Nestor gives Antilochus before the chariot race. The race is the central part of the games and takes the longest amount of story time. It initiates a series of disputes and a pattern. The disputes are about the outcome of the contest where the presumed “best” competitors failed to meet expectations because of adverse luck (or questionable tactics). Achilles intervenes in several arguments and proposes solutions that provide new prizes from his personal store to restore/maintain the positions and honor of the competitors.

This would be the equivalent of an official from the IOC adding new medals to the competition. Imagine if the US Men’s basketball team loses a gold-medal game and a shocked world clamors for them to receive the top prize because everyone knows they have the best players! So, the IOC introduces a platinum medal for the team with the most talent and hype. This is a simplified form of what happens in book 23.

But there are many turns. Stocking’s full-chapter treatment is one of the most extensive and detailed analyses of the conflicts and prizes in the games that I know of. he goes through each of the major conflicts with a careful reading of the context and the language that makes it possible. He also introduces some alter work by Michel Foucault in which he discusses the games as a crucial point in “western” history’s exploration of “the will to truth”. Working with and through Foucault’s frameworks, Stocking provides a fine reading of Antilochus’ dispute with Menelaos as a complex negotiation of the fact that “the final distribution of prizes does not match up with the expectations outlined by the original sequence” (138).

During the chapter, Stocking focuses less on “force” directly than in the hierarchy of status implicit in the notion of who is best and the implications of the tension between assumed ability or excellence and outcomes due to accident or fate. In his words, the games become something of a “non-contest” because Achilles intervenes regularly abandoning “the logic of competition a a means for determining or representing social order” (166). Achilles, Stocking argues following others, replaces the contest by creating or recreating the order through his own “verbal performance”.

In this last detail, Stocking may miss an opportunity to set this Achilles as equivalent to the Odyssey’s Odysseus. Both heroes bend the perception of the cosmos for their audiences to their own liking, but both end up creating additional fantasies that may not have equivalents in the external worlds. Part of the disjuncture is the world of plenty heroes have to deal with: Achilles breaks with Agamemnon in book 1 over a slight to his honor when a distribution of goods is recalled in the king’s favor, yet repeatedly redistributes prizes in book 23, drawing from a store of goods that has no end. Odysseus comes home to punish the suitors for consuming his wealth, but there seems to be no end of meat and wine for feasting on Ithaka either. The worlds of Homer’s heroes approach no material limit.

The absence of this limit has a strange relationship with competition: for a feat to have value, it needs a context—we communicate ours by historicizing records of accomplishments and commemorating with symbolic prizes. In the Iliad’s games, the heroic world seems to always be spilling over its ends. As Edith Hall argues in her forthcoming Achilles in Green, the world of Homer’s heroes is extractive and consumptive to the extreme, perhaps anticipating our own modern fiction of endless expansion, profits without end. Without a limit or canon for the heroic games, they become performances of identities reified by Achilles’ addition of prizes whenever the expected worth doesn’t play out as it is expected.

The tension here—I suspect—is that the goal of epic itself is compromised. While Achilles’ never clearly chooses kleos aphthiton in exchange for his war-shortened life, the Iliad leaves us to assume that he nevertheless receives it. But kleos without end is as problematic as human honors that do not change regardless of what actually happens in the games. As Glaukos says, the lives of men are like the leaves that grow and fall. They—and anything related to them—cannot truly be aphthiton, “unwithered, imperishable” because they are made of perishable stuff.

Perhaps the tension in the games relies in this: it is both about replaying the politics of book 1 and trying to approach the deep disappointment of being an example of human greatness, as yet subject to the failures of human life. Achilles’ management of the games is a navigation through personal as well as political value. It is a prelude to the contemplation of mortality in book 24, rather than an exultation in the variety and wonder of human achievement.

my old overview of the funeral games

Short Bibliography

n.b. this is not exhaustive. please let me know if there are other articles to include.

Deborah Beck. Homeric Conversation. Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2005.

Christensen, J. (2021). Beautiful Bodies, Beautiful Minds: Some Applications of Disability Studies to Homer. Classical World 114(4), 365-393. https://doi.org/10.1353/clw.2021.0020.

Dunkle, Roger. “Nestor, Odysseus, and the μῆτις-βίη antithesis. The funeral games, Iliad 23.” Classical World, vol. LXXXI, 1987, pp. 1-17.

Ellsworth, J. D.. “Ἀγων νεῶν. An unrecognized metaphor in the Iliad.” Classical Philology, vol. LXIX, 1974, pp. 258-264.

Elmer, D.F. (2013). The Poetics of Consent: Collective Decision Making and the Iliad. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press., https://doi.org/10.1353/book.21075.

Grethlein, Jonas. “Epic narrative and ritual: the case of the funeral games in Iliad 23.” Literatur und Religion: Wege zu einer mythisch-rituellen Poetik bei den Griechen. Eds. Bierl, Anton, Lämmle, Rebecca and Wesselmann, Katharina. MythosEikonPoiesis; 1.1-2. Berlin ; New York: De Gruyter, 2007. 151-177.

Kelly, Adrian. “Achilles in control ? : managing oneself and others in the Funeral Games.” Conflict and consensus in early Greek hexameter poetry. Eds. Bassino, Paola, Canevaro, Lilah Grace and Graziosi, Barbara. Cambridge: Cambridge University Pr., 2017. 87-108. Doi: 10.1017/9781316800034.005

Kenneth F. Kitchell. “‘But the mare I will not give up’: The Games in Iliad 23.” The Classical Bulletin 74 (1998) 159-71.

Mouratidis, Ioannis. “Anachronism in the Homeric games and sports.” Nikephoros, vol. III, 1990, pp. 11-22.

Mylonas, George E. “Homeric and Mycenaean Burial Customs.” American Journal of Archaeology 52, no. 1 (1948): 56–81. https://doi.org/10.2307/500553.

Rengakos, Antonios. “Aethiopis.” The Greek Epic Cycle and its ancient reception : a companion. Eds. Fantuzzi, Marco and Tsagalis, Christos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Pr., 2015. 306-317.

Roller, Lynn E. “Funeral Games in Greek Art.” American Journal of Archaeology 85, no. 2 (1981): 107–19. https://doi.org/10.2307/505030.

Scott, William C.. “The etiquette of games in Iliad 23.” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, vol. 38, no. 3, 1997, pp. 213-227.

Stocking, Charles. Homer’s Iliad and the Problem of Force, Oxford, 2024.

Oliver Taplin. Homeric Soundings: The Shape of the Iliad. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Christoph Ulf. “Iliad 23: die Bestattung des Patroklos und das Sportfest der “Patroklos-Spiele”: zwei Teile einer mirror-story.” in Herbert Heftner and Hurt Tomaschitz (eds.). Ad Fontes! Festschrift für Gerhard Dobesch zum 65 Geburtstag am 15. September 2004. Wien: Phoibos, 2004, 73-86.

Malcolm M. Willcock, ‘The funeral games of Patroclus’, Proceedings of the Classical Association, LXX. (1973) 36.

Donna F. Wilson. Ransom, Revenge, and Heroic Identity in the Iliad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.