“The wise Euripides put in his poetic drama about the Cyclops that he had three eyes, indicating by this that he had three brothers and that they cared for one another and kept a watchful eye on one another’s places in the island, fought together, and avenged one another.
And he also adds that he made the Cyclops drunk and unable to flee, because Odysseus made that very Cyclops “drunk” with a ton of money and gifts so he would not “eat those with him up”, which is not actually to consume them with slaughter.
He also says that Odysseus blinded his one eye with torch fire, really meaning that he stole away the only daughter of Polyphemos’ brother, a maiden named Elpê, with “fire”, which means he seized her on fire with burning lust. This is what it means that he burned Polyphemos in one of his eyes, he really deprived him of his daughter. The very wise Pheidias of Corinth provided this interpretation saying that Euripides explained this poetically because he did not agree with what the wisest Homer said about the wandering of Odysseus.”
“Whether domestic or civic duties occupy you, keep some time of the day for caring for the body. The chief way of caring for the body is exercise and it should always be done before eating. The work should be greater for one who has labored less and digested well and less for one who is tired and has not digested.
Good exercises include reading aloud, drilling, playing ball, running, walking. The last is not the most useful on a level road, since going up or down moves the body with a variety, unless the body is completely weak. It is better to walk out in the open than under a roof. And it is also better, should your head endure it, to walk in the sun instead of the shade. But better still in the shade than under a roof and better a straight than an indirect walk.
The end of exercise, moreover, should come with sweat or some bit of tiring which should still be on this side of fatigue. Sometimes more and sometimes less needs to be done. But one should not follow the model of athletes with their fixed rule and excessive workout.”
Quem interdiu vel domestica vel civilia officia tenuerunt, huic tempus aliquod servandum curationi corporis sui est. Prima autem eius curatio exercitatio est, quae semper antecedere cibum debet, in eo, qui minus laboravit et bene concoxit, amplior; in eo, qui fatigatus est et minus concoxit, remissior.
Commode vero exercent clara lectio, arma, pila, cursus, ambulatio, atque haec non utique plana commodior est, siquidem melius ascensus quoque et descensus cum quadam varietate corpus moveat, nisi tamen id perquam inbecillum est: melior autem est sub divo quam in porticu; melior, si caput patitur, in sole quam in umbra, melior in umbra quam paries aut viridia efficiunt, quam quae tecto subest; melior recta quam flexuosa. Exercitationis autem plerumque finis esse debet sudor aut certe lassitudo, quae citra fatigationem sit, idque ipsum modo minus, modo magis faciendum est. Ac ne his quidem athletarum exemplo vel certa esse lex vel inmodicus labor debet.
Hippocrates, Regimen 2 61
“I will now explore what kind of impact exercises have. For some are natural and some are pretty violent. Natural exercise deals with sight, hearing, voice, and thinking. The power of sight is like this. The soul, when it attends to what can be seen, moves and warms. As it warms it dries because the moisture is extracted. In hearing, when sound strikes, the soul shakes and works and as it exercises, it turns warm and dries.
A person’s soul is moved by however many thoughts it has and it also warms and is dried and it spends its moisture as it works—it can empty the flesh and make a person thin. Whenever people exercise their voice either in speaking, reading or singing, all these things move the soul. When it is moved, it warms and dries and uses up the moisture.”
“My Epigenes, how important for health exercise is—and how it is right to engage in it before good—has been sufficiently explained by much earlier men, the best of the philosophers and doctors. But no one before has sufficiently explained how much exercises with a small ball are better than the others. It is right, for this reason, for me to explain what I know so that you may evaluate it as someone who is of all men most well practiced in these arts and also so that it may be useful for others—should you truly believe that they have been elaborated sufficiently—when you share the work with them.
For I say that the best of all exercises are not only those which thoroughly wear out the body, but can also delight the soul. Men who invented the practice of hunting with dogs figured out how to combine hunting with pleasure, delight, and competitive spirit—they were wise in respect to human nature. The soul may be moved so much in this activity, that many people are freed from disease because of pleasure alone while many others who felt sickness coming on were relieved of the pressure.
There is nothing of the experiences of the body which is so strong that it completely overpowers the soul. Therefore, we should not neglect the movements of the spirit—whatever kind they are—but, instead, we should make a greater consideration of it than of the body because it is that much more powerful. This is certainly a shared quality of all exercises which happen pleasurably, but it is a choice quality of those performed with the small ball, which I will now explain.”
Attic b.-f. lekythos. About 500 B. C. Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, 260. A bearded man prepares to throw a rather large ball. Three youths mounted pick-a-back are ready to catch it. Between two of them is inscribed κ λευσον, ‘Give the order’, the application of which is not clear.
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 Homer’s Iliad and the Problem of Force,Charles Stocking (see my earlier post about it), sets out to differentiate various words that are translated as “force” in Homer (e.g. biê, kratos, alkê, menos, sthenos, (w)is, and dynamis) as a corrective engagement with earlier approaches to force/violence and agency in the Homeric poems (especially Simone Weil and Bruno Snell).
In examining kratos, Stocking emphasizes that it “encapsulates a notion of “agonistic alterity,” where the force of kratos requires supremacy over others” (2023, 15). This argument is especially attractive when Stocking provides a reading of Nestor’s response to Achilles and Agamemnon in Iliad 1, where the elderly king of Pylos claims that Achilles is stronger (karteros), because he has a divine mother, but Agamemnon is better (pherteros) because he rules over many (1.280-281). Following Émile Benveniste, Stocking suggests that kratos is always relational—that is, it is about superiority in relation to others. In this passage, Nestor seems to innovate, creating what Stocking terms a “scale of superiority” to acknowledge Achilles’ genealogical superiority, Agamemnon’s political sovereignty, and his own superlative status (Nestor claims he fought with the kartistoi against the kartistoi). Agamemnon’s political power—which also comes from divine authority—is rendered as superior to Achilles’ birth.
Chapter 1—where Stocking engages with these arguments—makes creative and effective use of speech act theory (about which I will post later). In chapter 2, Stocking turns to kratos and its relationship to democracy, providing an engaged reading of Jacques Derrida’s Rogues, which reflects on the impact of Odysseus’ claim in Iliad 2, that “we can’t all be kings…the rule of many is not good…”. For Stocking (and for many like me, Elmer, Barker, Hammer etc.), this is part of the political debate at the heart of the Iliad. As he puts it “What is the relationship between physical force and power.
Drawing on linguistics and structuralism, Stocking uses Derrida’s notion of “ipsocentric force” to explore how the Iliad’s notion of politics “is inseparable from larger cosmic concerns..” In doing so, chapter 2 offers a close reading of the notion of political force in the Iliad, while also critiquing Derrida’s reading of Homeric kratos as “ipsocentric” (by which he means emerging from or relying on the self, and translating paradoxically into the bedrock formulations of democratic sovereignty). For Stocking—and the larger argument toward which he builds—Homeric discourse is subject to constant debate and cannot thus be reduced so directly.
Deianeira-type lekythos with a depicition of the preparation of a warrior. Ca. 550 BC. Kerameikos Archaeological Museum (Athens). n° T 5B/VII.
I am a fan of any reading of Homer that acknowledges that its internal representation of a topic or debate is essentially dialogic (or dialectic). Homeric poetry is not propaganda—it may bear the imprint of different ideologies, but it emerges out of a plurality of meanings and presents a both a widening and narrowing of meaning. In approaching this oscillation of meaning, Stocking relies on semiotics and emphasizes how ore concepts in Homer represent the shifting and ultimately the breakdown of the relationship between signifier and signified (the word and the concept implied by the word). What I am not sure about, from my reading so far, is what Stocking is positing as the cause of such essential polysemy.
Still, this is more proof of the inviting way in which this book unfolds. I find myself writing a lot in the margins, underlining, objecting, and then reconsidering. One of the things that struck me in the introduction to chapter 2 was the quotation of a scholion to Odysseus’ famous words that glosses them as meaning “there won’t be a democracy”. Stocking suggests that the scholiast’s comments are anachronistic, but this assertion gave me pause.
If we treat the Homeric poems as diachronic objects—by which I mean, narratives that develop over time and absorb the characteristics of different periods and then are treated from different theoretical and aesthetic perspectives as they persist through other periods—then they are always, already anachronistic. But a view of the scholia’s invocations of democracy in general, show a rather consistent range of political responses that would be at home in the 5th century BCE (or earlier, as the Greek city states experimented with different political arrangements).
Below I have pulled out the five times I can find where a scholiast talks about democracy in reference to the Iliad. Note that in the first example, Achilles is called democratic for opposing Agamemnon. In the second, the scholiast notes a difference in expectations based on social status (perhaps seeing democratic rights as those connected to aristocratic position). The third and fifth examples invokes concepts of freedom of speech, emphasizing parrhesia (the right to say what you want) over isêgoria (the right to access to public speech in the assembly).
“Not into war: this [is the statement] of a democratic king and a demagogue.”
Schol. AT ad Hom. Il. 1.226 ex. οὔτε ποτ’ ἐς πόλεμον: τοῦτο δημοκρατικοῦ βασιλέως καὶ δημαγωγικοῦ.
“There’s no way we can all be king”: He means there will not be a democracy. If he were saying this to the more important men, he would be inciting rebellion, by assailing men eager for power in such a chaos”
“This is right, lord, in the assembly” As is the custom in a democracy. This is placed in the agora, since it is the custom to speak with freedom of speech [parrêsia] in the assembly. People report that Seleukos took issue with the “Lord”, here.
“Go, there’s the road, but the rest will remain…” It is bitter for one of them to hear this, but especially sweet for the other to consider it. For Agamemnon wants to hear from the Achaeans that they are willing to accept the danger, as if they are part of a democracy, and not sent to this by force.”
“Now I will tell you this again. We have “now” instead of “not among everyone”. For Hector is not rejecting advice, but instead equal access to speech [isêgoria] for everyone. The affairs of the Greeks are closer to democracy, and there is a great deal of freedom of speech [parrêsia] among the leaders. For instance, Diomedes says to Agamemnon, “I will fight with you foremost when you’re being foolish” and Odysseus says, “Ruinous one, I wish you ruled over a different, more unseemly army and weren’t lord over us!”
“When Menander was asked what the difference was between Sophokles and Euripides he said that Sophokles makes people feel pleasure while Euripides makes his audience feel anger.”
“When he was asked why he made people with noble characters and Euripides made those of base ones, Sophokles answered “Because I make people how they should be and he makes people as they are.”
Things are strange with Servius (=Jacoby Abas 46, f1)
Servius on Virgil, Aeneid 9.262
devicta genitor (sc. Aeneas) quae cepit Arisba]
“Which his father took once Arisba was conquered…”
“(And yet, according to Homer, Arisba sent aid to the Trojans and was overcome by Achilles)…the city is called Arisba after the daughter of Merpos or Macareus who was the first wife of Paris. According to some authors, Abas, who wrote the Troika, related that after the Greeks left Troy, the rule of this city was given to Astyanax. Antenor expelled him once he had allied himself with the states neighboring where Arisba’s location. Aeneas took this badly and took up arms for Astyanax; once the expedition was prosecuted successfully, he returned the kingdom to Astyanax.”
[[atqui secundum Homerum Arisba Troianis misit auxilia et ab Achille subversa est …]] dicta est Arisba ab Meropis vel Macarei filia, quam primum Paris in coniugio habuit. quidam ab Abante, qui Troica scripsit, relatum ferunt, post discessum a Troia Graecorum Astyanacti ibi datum regnum. hunc ab Antenore expulsum sociatis sibi finitimis civitatibus, inter quas et Arisba fuit. Aeneam hoc aegre tulisse et pro Astyanacte arma cepisse, ac prospere gesta re Astyanacti restituisse regnum.
Several details of this are strange. First, the fact that Paris had a first wife, though not strange on the surface, is rarely mentioned. Second, Astyanax’s survival after the fall of Troy is far from typical—the typical tale is his murder at the hands of Odysseus. Less surprising but still worth mentioning is the antagonism between Antenor—who is depicted in some sources as being friendly to Menelaos and Agamemnon—and the surviving heir of the house of Priam. Finally, I find it touching that Aeneas would take a break from all of his own troubles to help his cousin’s star-crossed son.
“Akesandros tells the story in his Concerning Cyrene that when Eurypylos was king in Libya, Cyrene was taken by Apollo because there was a lion plaguing the land. Eurypylos put his kingship up as a prize for anyone who could kill a lion—and Cyrene killed the lion and gained the kingdom. Her children were Autoukhos and Aristaios. Phularkhos says that she came to Libya with a group, and when they went on a hunting expedition, she joined them too.”
This story is really exceptional in Greek myth and history for a couple of reasons. First, here we have a female beast-slayer who follows the classic pattern of killing a monster and gaining a kingdom. Second, while her children are mentioned–following a typical pattern of defining women by their offspring–her mate is not. There are some other sources on this figure.
Nonnos, Dionys. 13.300-301
“Cyrene, another deer-pursuing Artemis,
The lion-slaying nymph bore him, after sex with Phoibos.”
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.
When I talk to reasonably well-informed, non-Homerists about Homer (by which, I mean well-read non-academics, or academics who are into literature but not up-to-date with Homer), they typically ask about one of the following scholarly issues from the 20th century.
Is it true that Homeric characters have no sense of self (or interiority)?
Is it true that Homer didn’t write the Iliad and the Odyssey?
To start with # 2, for Auerbach, Homer’s paratactic (that is, additive, linear, rather than subordinating) style lends itself to the extreme digression of focusing on the story of how Odysseus got his scar at the moment Eurykleia sees it and demonstrates a commitment to the part to the detriment of the whole. This perspective imagines a poetic narrative not in control of itself, growing in whatever direction works at the time, like twisted branches searching for light. (see Egbert Bakker’s discussion and adjustment of this here.)
As a ‘professional Homerist, the other three issues are more grievous for me, because they are harder to answer and are asked/reiterated to such a degree that it is really hard to disabuse people of the idea that (for 1) Weil’s essay is great, but isn’t even .01% of Homeric scholarship on Homer, (for 3), different modes of representation don’t indicate a “primitive” view of the self; and (4), you don’t need authors or writing to complexity and length in art.
While the apparatus of 20th Homeric scholarship in some way or another has addressed all these questions, we have not reached a firm consensus on them all and we have largely not translated what ideas we do have outside of the sphere of classical scholarship (or, in many cases, even outside of Homeric conversations. In addition, so much of what we have accomplished to answer these questions has come from interdisciplinary efforts–when literary theory, linguistics, cognitive science, or other fields change or emerge, there are often new opportunities to think about old problems.
Stocking’s Homer’s Iliad and the Problem of Force starts out by invoking both Simone Weil’s articulation of “force” as the subject of the Iliad rending Homeric poetry–in Stocking’s words–“a transhistorical monument to the singularity of force, which transforms the human subject into an object” (2023, 1) and Bruno Snell’s analysis of different forms of force in his famousDie Entdeckung des Geistes (The Discovery of the Mind). Where Weil sets up “force” thematically as a central concern of the epic (and ignores that there are many ways to talk about it), Snell sees the varied expressions for ‘force’ in Homer (menos, bie, sthenos, kratos, alke, (w)is, dynamis etc) as evidence of an externalization of motivation and agency in Homeric characters. For Snell, according to Stocking, “the plurality of forces parallels [Snell’s] other observations on the plurality of sight and cognition….[which] are symptomatic of a “primitive” form of “self-consciousness” which is not yet capable of unifying “self-conscious thought…[playing] a critical role in Snell’s overall argument that “Homeric man” is incapable of understanding himself as a single, unified individual, neither in body nor mind” (2023, 3).
What Stocking is getting at in his introduction, is that Snell uses the multiple words for force and their applications in epic to argue that Homer depicts people as subject to a number of external powers in a fragmentary way that implies they are incapable of imagining themselves as singular wholes. This argument–connected to a rather particular mid-century, European model of human development that is radically out of step with modern physical anthropology, human cognition, and more, was extremely influential in the 20th century. The most egregious–and amusing–example of an author taking Snell very, very seriously is Julian Jaynes in his The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (his use of Greek material is not good).
[As an aside, I read Weil, Snell, and Jaynes as an undergraduate in 1999 and I don’t think I have ever been the same.]
While I am personally less aggrieved by Simone Weil’s approach, Stocking’s book does an excellent job both of contextualizing her argument and suggesting why we need to examine the approach of both authors further. Stocking leans heavily on linguistics and the inheritors of structural theory, working with less well known approaches to force from Émile Benveniste, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. Despite bringing together so many heady authors, Stocking does a really good job of providing intellectual histories and summarizing their contributions so that nearly any reader can keep up with the argument.
The stake in Stocking’s argument, for me, is that neither Weil nor Snell take Homeric characters as independent from the powers that govern them, as capable in some way of altering the world around them, of making choices as subjects rather than things that are acted upon. Stocking’s method–to generalize it overmuch–is to do the philological work of analyzing the contextual meaning of all those ways of talking about force and then to see how these possible meanings reflect on our interpretation of the whole Iliad. As a result, there’s a lot of close reading of passages and discussion of linguistics, philosophy, and epic language.
I have written at length about the sense of agency in Homer’s Odyssey, casting the question as one of a dynamic dialogue about determinism and in finishing Stocking’s book, I am going to be looking to see if his explanation for the plurality of ideas about force is one of an absorption of different cultural perspectives on human agency and cognition, an invitation to think about the balance of human will and divine action, or some combination between. This is the kind of book where the details of individual line readings might drive people crazy, but that the overall picture is persuasive, and important. I might end up not liking some of this house’s decor, but I suspect I will admire its foundations and layout for years to come. The first chapter has already made me worry that I was completely wrong about Nestor in my dissertation.
One of the most difficult things about explaining to people why it really doesn’t matter who composed the Iliad or the Odyssey or when writing was introduced into their textualization, is that fully comprehending oral-formulaic theory requires a familiarity with linguistics and Homeric language that is increasingly harder to gain. And, unfortunately, many people who gain expertise in one or the other end up with calcified ideas about language and literature that makes it harder to take that leap of faith needed to let go of prior assumptions. There have been a handful of books that have done this well– I would probably suggest anyone start with Albert Lord’s The Singer of Tales, John Miles Foley’s How to Read and Oral Poem, and Casey Dué’s Achilles Unbound as a good starting points, but Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy and Ruth Finnegan’s Oral Poetry are standards as well.
Chiara Bozzone’s Homer’s Living Language is likely to most important book-length contribution to oral-formulaic theory since Egbert Bakker’s Poetry in Speech: Orality and Homeric Discourse. This is a big claim, I know, but Bakker really capped over two generations of theorizing through linguistics, comparative approaches, and internal analysis to flesh out (and improve) the approaches to Homeric trail-blazed by Milman Parry and Albert Lord. Bozzone is similar to Bakker in that she adapts cutting-edge (for classicists) linguistic and cognitive theory to help us understand the form of Homeric language and its function.
Bozzone argues that Homeric kunstsprache (our term for an artificial language for an art form) is an “adaptive technology” that “emerge[s] in response to the challenges of oral-poetic performance”. In response to a century of hand-wringing over what this means for creativity and “innovation”, Bozzone presents a powerful case that rather than limiting a performer’s freedom, this technology contributes to “the greatness of his art”. In this book, I will be looking for what the singular “poet” means to Bozzone and how the modern scholarship engages with ancient concepts, but already suspect that I will be a fan of the process of discovery Bozzone shares with us. She adduces comparisons from chess and jazz alongside lessons from play-by-play announcers and hip-hop, all while presenting pretty technical and enlightening overviews of Greek dialect and meter. I think some of these chapters are going to make my brain hurt, but it will be a good kind of pain.
Both of these books are exceptionally well researched, written, and polished. I will post tidbits here and there as I work through them.
“Deukaliôn, in whose time the deluge happened, was the son of Prometheus and his mother—according to most authors—was Klymenê. But Hesiod says that his mother was Pronoê and Akousilaos claims that it was Hesione, the daughter of Okeanos and Prometheus. He married Pyrra who was the daughter of Epimêtheus and Pandôra the one who was given by Epimetheus in exchange for fire. Deukalion had two daughters, Prôtogeneia and Melantheia, and two sons, Ampiktuôn and Hellen, whom others say was actually an offspring of Zeus, but in truth he was Deucalion’s”.
This story is a bit strange but repeats the typical connection between man and Prometheus. Here, however, mortal man is descended from Prometheus via Deucalion. He married his cousin, which was not all that uncommon, and the rest of the story proceeds somewhat as is typical (leading to the birth of Hellen, the origin of the ethnonym Hellenes).
The Schol. In Ap. Rhod. 3.1086 tells this part of the story, except, he gives us another mother:
“Deucalion was the son of Prometheus and Pandora, which is what Hesiod says in the Catalogue [Of Women] and that Hellen was the son of Deucalion and Pyrra, from whom the Hellenes and Hellas were named. He also said that Deukalion was king of Thessaly…”
This passage is, of course, more than a little messed up, since it makes Pandôra into Deukalion’s mother. West in the edition with Merkelbach (1967, 4) comments “locum funditus corruptum varie sanare conati sunt viri docti” (“learned men have tried to correct this deeply corrupt passage in different ways”).
The names given for Deucalion’s mothers are interesting. Hêsione is the same name as the Trojan princess rescued by Herakles but not the same figure. She appears in connection with Prometheus in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound. Klymene—whose name may have something to do with weeping or flowing—may be associated with Deucalion because of his relationship with the flood (κατακλυσμὸς). And the other alternative, Pronoê, is merely a parallel formation for Prometheus (both mean forethought).
The problem of Deukalion’s mother goes on: Herodotus (4.45) makes her Asia. Thought the schêoliast says that “most authors” make Klymenê Deukalion’s mother, this is a bit of a problem if we look to Hesiod’s Theogony (507-511):
“Iapetos took as wife the fine-ankled Okeanid
Klumenê and put her in his own bed.
She bore to him the strong-minded child Atlas.
She also bore overawing Menoitios and Prometheus
Fine and clever minded, and then messy-minded Epimetheus.”
So, it is clear that Klumenê is not likely to have been Prometheus’ mother and his wife. This also explains why Hesiod listed a different mother for Deukalion—Hesiodic poetrymade the Okeanid Prometheus’ mother. To generate a wife, it seems to have created one based on the idea of her husband’s name. It is thoroughly possible for different genealogical traditions in Greece to attribute offspring to different parents. Deukalion, as the survivor of a flood, makes senseas a son of an Okeanid.
Of course, this means we have no universal choice for his mother. Personally, I kind of like the choice of Pandôra…even if it it comes from a locum funditus corruptum. But the sensible choice, seems a compromise. If Klumene is Prometheus’ mother, then the Okeanid Hesione can be Deukalion’s mother, giving him all that association with the ocean.
Of course, this is not the end of it: in the Works and Days 159a, Epimetheus is made the father of Deucalion and Pyrra….
Works Consulted
R. L. Fowler. Early Greek Mythography. Volume 2: Commentary. Oxford, 2013.
R. Merkelbach and M.L. West. Fragmenta Hesiodea. Oxford, 1967.
289 “Erasistratos [the doctor] used to say that medicine was philosophy’s sister: one treats maladies of the spirit, the other treats those of the body.”
