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.”
As I write about in today’sPasts Imperfect , it is really hard to think about the importance of audiences and performances for making meaning with epic poetry. In addition to anthropological fieldwork, one of the best things we can do is listen to artists and performers, especially those who are breathing life into old poems today.
I reached out to four people who have been performing Homer in different ways over the years and here are some of their reflections.
Joe Goodkin has been performing songs based on the Iliad and Odyssey for years
When I read the Iliad as an undergrad at University of Wisconsin-Madison and learned that the text almost certainly originated in song performances by generations of itinerant bards, I wondered at how those performances looked and sounded.
I didn’t have to get far into that other Homeric epic, the Odyssey, to get a good idea.
“[The suitors] were sitting calmly, Listening to the poet, who sang how Athena cursed the journey of the Greeks As they were sailing home from Troy. Upstairs, Penelope had heard the marvelous song. She clambered down the steep steps of her house… In tears, she told the holy singer, “Stop, Please Phemius. You know so many songs, Enchanting tales of things that gods and men Have done, deeds that singers publicize. Sing something else and let them drink in peace. Stop this upsetting song that always breaks My heart, so I can hardly bear my grief.” [WILSON, 1.325-341]
In book 8, Odysseus experiences another bardic performance.
“So sang the famous bard. Odysseus With his strong hands picked up his heavy cloak Of purple and he covered up his face. He was ashamed to let them see him cry. Each time the singer paused, Odysseus Wiped tears…” [WILSON 8.85…]
What is lost when musical elements like pitch and rhythm are removed from a text? When a story goes from a live dynamic performance to being a fixed artifact? When it is taken out of the collective environment of audience and performer to the solitary environment of a reader? What can examining and experiencing epic’s generative format of performance help us better understand about the texts we read?
Just a few years after I graduated with a BA in Classics, I set about exploring these questions by (re)setting Homer’s Odyssey to song. The result was a 24 song contemporary bardic folk opera called Joe’s Odyssey. I went into detail about my process and the first decade of performing my Odyssey in this 2016 article for Eidolon, On Being a Modern Bard.
After over twenty years and almost four hundred performances of Joe’s Odyssey (and having added a song version of the Iliad called The Blues of Achilles), I can speak to what I’ve experienced and observed about the musical and performance aspects of epic and how these experiences have broadened my understanding and appreciation of Homeric texts.
First of all, musical elements of performance like dynamics, tempo, pitch, and rhythm activate audience emotions in different ways than text alone because they are processed in different parts of the brain. In “How Your Brain Listens to Music” by Larry S. Sherman and Dennis Plies, the authors observe that while language comprehension takes place critically in Wernicke’s Area, “the cerebellum is essential for understanding changes in tempo when listening to the beats in a piece of music.” Additionally, “major and minor chords are processed by different areas of the brain… where they are assigned emotional meaning…” Maybe most tellingly, “the areas of the brain that process music are both directly and indirectly connected with parts of the brain that influence our emotions,” in particular with the limbic system, in contrast to the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for language processing.
What are the ramifications of these missing musical components for how the epic texts we have today relate to the performances that created them? I liken it to the difference between taking in ancient statuary in its current bleached pure white form and not with the bold coloring that was often part of the original presentation. The human voice and other musical elements enter the brain via different paths than text and this has consequences for the capacity to evoke emotion and meaning. Taking away these elements fundamentally changes the way an audience receives and processes a story and there are features of the text that are legacies of rhythm and pitch but do not harness their power and impact. In my performances, I have experienced that reintroducing musical elements creates (or recreates) powerful emotional reactions in audiences that complement and sometimes even supersede textual meaning.
Second of all, taking in a story in a group in real time amplifies the opportunity for human connection and empathy around the characters and their experiences. Seeing someone react to a story emotionally is powerful and has consequences for other listeners, which we see in the Odyssey: it is Alcinous’ observation of Odysseus’ emotional reaction to the bard’s song that leads to the opportunity for Odysseus to tell his own story. These vivid “second generation” reactions to stories (reactions to the reactions of other audience members in real time) do not exist in a text-only format with the same intensity they do in performances. I have witnessed this phenomenon firsthand in audiences, in particular in the discussions that follow my performances.
Third of all, a performance environment has the effect of lessening differences and foregrounding commonality. At a time when the divisions of society at large are evident in the field of Classical studies and in the online world of social media, sitting in a room face to face with other humans, taking in a story and reacting to it has the potential to help negotiate differences and find common ground. I have performed epic for almost every conceivable type of audience from many walks of life and in doing so I have seen that Homeric epic in performance provides opportunities for audiences to transcend differences and experience a shared humanity. When we take in epic in our silos, these opportunities disappear or are more easily muted. More than once I have performed my Odyssey in the company of and at the invitation of individuals with whom I know I disagree strongly about a wide range of issues, but we have been able to, even if briefly, experience connection in the performance of, discussion about, and shared enthusiasm for Homer. Just like Achilles and Priam are able to, even if briefly, set aside their differences and share in a meal and their humanity.
As someone for whom reading Homer in Greek was a transformative and emotional experience, I am grateful that we have these durable texts so many millennia after they were composed and written down. I also think it is important to remember that they are necessarily incomplete artifacts and present us with only some of the information ancient audiences received. My experiences reintroducing these missing aspects to modern audiences have allowed me (and I hope my audiences) to feel more of the power and humanity of these stories and understand to an even greater degree how and why their creation, telling, and retelling, echo through time.
“After [Odysseus] finished, all were silent, spellbound,
Sitting inside the shadowy hall”
Odyssey 13.1-2 (trans. Emily Wilson)
BIO:
Joe Goodkin is a Chicago-based singer/songwriter with a BA in Classics from UW-Madison. He has performed his original song retellings of Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad over 450 times in all 50 US States, Canada, Greece, Italy, The Netherlands, England, Scotland, and Ireland. He has released 13 albums of original music under his own name and the name Paper Arrows, most recently a collection called Consolations and Desolations produced by founding Wilco drummer Ken Coomer. His Classics-related musical work has been supported by awards and grants from ASCAP, the SCS, and CAMWS.
Bill George has been bringing the Odyssey to the stage since the ‘end’ of the COVID pandemic
Odysseus (Bill George) introduces the audience to his epic survival of the ten year Trojan War.
Coming out of Covid, I was angry about any number of things. As a theatre artist, pain is an important motivator for me, and love, but the pain of two years of isolation with little more than computer screens to connect to family, friends, co-workers, I longed to be in a gathering with others, to feel their breath, hear their voices, share a laugh or a cry – the mysterious and vivifying feast of community. Not in a huge crowd, but in an intimate small circle, with the wonders of nature all around – fire, water, the earth and sky. I needed to connect to my ancestors, the dead, and even the generations ahead if that were possible. The big questions had fallen upon me – what does it mean to be a man? a woman? how can we heal as a people from this endless fighting and waywardness?
I thought I might be able to exorcise those demons from out my soul, or at least some of them some of the way, through a rendering of the story of The Odyssey, and I began a two-year investigation of the text, four or five translations, and went in search of Odysseus, the man.
It’s necessary to be brief here, so suffice it to say there are treasures within Homer’s miraculous text that are not immediately apparent, ones that require not just a working of the text for them to appear, a clearing away of the debris, but a working of the audience as well, so they might be able to see.
For instance, to speak to one point of just one dimension: time. When reading a text, one can stop, put it down, come back to it in a day or a week or a year…but in live performance time’s a monster always breathing down your interpretive neck. I’m told that The Odyssey grew from an oral tradition, and that makes sense—its shape, the way it moves, its tidbits along the way to please the audience. To do a solo performance of it these days requires a raft of old and new techniques to hold today’s audience: rhythm changes, creative use of space, changes in vocal qualities, employment of various narrative styles or modes. But more to the point, any good performer will tell you that theatre is much more than the recitation of a text. The text is, as they say, only the tip of the iceberg.
Our perception of time here in the West is cut into small pieces. We’re always in such a damn hurry, deeper perceptions must struggle to surface from our unconscious. Originally, in order to get to the spirit of the work, I toyed with the idea of doing a rendition over six hours long—but fairly quickly realized that, even if I could manage it, it was just too much to ask of present day audiences. Still, if I’d been able to practically command an audience over such a lengthy engagement…it wouldn’t be just a question of the audience getting “more” with the longer performance—more words, more story; they could experience something exponentially different: authentic ceremony. By virtue of the ripping of our time expectations, which, in part, is what the work asks for, the performance would be empowered to move past “story” towards a living act of sacrament—a genuine calling and meeting with the gods and demi-gods, with the spirit of Odysseus and humanity itself.
An English Literature degree from Lehigh University in hand, Bill studied for his MFA with the great Paul Baker at the Dallas Theater Center and went on to several years of study with the master, Paul Curtis, founding genius of the American Mime Theater in New York City. Co-founding People’s Theatre Company in 1976, he, his wife Bridget, and colleague Lorraine Zeller-Agostino went on to found Touchstone Theatre in 1981. Then, striking out on his own in 1990 to explore “theatre of transcendence”, Bill began Kingfisher Theatre, returning to Touchstone full-time in 2003. Now, roughly fifty years since the creative journey began–newly minted in 2022 as Touchstone’s first Ensemble Member Emeritus–he and Bridget, with their two children, Anisa and Sam, have established a cultural center, Little Pond Arts Retreat, as a refuge for artists and all who are interested in the intersection of creativity, spirituality, and harmony with Nature. It is here where Kingfisher Theatre continues and Bill has his home.
Jay Leeming has been performing parts of the Odyssey to all sorts of audiences
For some years now I have been telling the Odyssey aloud to audiences in theaters, elementary schools, and colleges. I tell the story in the traditional way, which is to say I tell the events of the epic in improvised language created anew for each performance. I do not memorize the words, but the events of the story. Despite the lengthy history of memorized performances of Homer, there is no doubt that this is how the epic was first brought to life. This experience has completely changed my relationship with the Odyssey, transforming the single brilliant path of Homer’s language into a wider landscape that can be traversed in almost endless ways.
There’s a radical difference between reading a story in a book and hearing it aloud. One of the most important differences is that improvised language can respond to the moment in a way that scripted language cannot. Homer’s description of the island of the Lotus-eaters, for example, remains the same in all circumstances; but my description of that same island changes in response to the mood of the audience, the performance location, and even the season of the year. From the silences, gasps, and laughter of the audience I learn when to follow the story into laughter and when to let it sink into sorrow. In this way the audience teaches me about Homer in a way that no written text can.
Surprisingly, this experience does not distance me from the Odyssey as we know it but puts me into deeper relationship with it. Time-honored Homeric phrases such as “when they had put aside desire for food and drink,” for example, take on new resonance when used to maintain the audience’s attention while I figure out what to say next. This returns these phrases to their true function, so that they become necessary both to story and storyteller alike.
This intimate relationship with the Odyssey in performance can also lead to surprising discoveries. Homer steps lightly over the first meeting of Odysseus and Circe, for example, but early on I could tell audiences felt something was missing. Looking closer, I realized that Circe’s exclamation that “Surely you must be Odysseus!” (X.330) presupposes an undescribed story by Odysseus that he is actually someone else—an insight that would not have occured to me without the promptings of a live audience.
In addition, moments in the text which once felt carved in stone now reveal themselves as choices no doubt made in response to a particular audience at a particular time, choices that can be questioned, honored, or changed. Does the audience want to hear about two encounters with man-eating giants, or are they content with one? (Exit Laestrygonians.) Can the audience handle a detailed description of the sacking of Ismarus (IX, 39-61), or does the story feel grim enough already? The requirements of live performance are beautifully ruthless, and often alter the story in ways I never could have predicted.
To tell the Odyssey aloud can be a giddy, frightening, and joyous experience. On stage there’s no book to turn to, no numbered pages to guide the journey but only the images which arrive and then depart again like the waters of some thousand-year-old river which lives only in its flowing. That flow of images feels like the story’s true home, and it is accessible to all of us. Open your mouth and let the story jump out: begin, O Muse, where you will.
Filmed excerpts of Jay’s Odyssey performances (6 minutes total):
Lynn Kozak has moved from the classroom to performing Homer in bars
Do you love the Iliad? Like real-deal fan-person geeking-out, crying on tiktok, love, love the Iliad? Maybe not. But I do. Just thinking about it, I can feel it in my body. Call to mind one of my favourite deaths, living rent free in my head, and there’s that hollow tingling, all through my chest, deep in my guts, that slight choke creeping up into my throat. Then I hear the gently scolding direction — ‘keep the emotion out of your voice!’ If you say the words, if you tell them well, they’ll know how to feel.
In 2018, I performed the whole Iliad in a Montreal bar. It was a live, serial, improvised translation-performance in English, with a different director and around an hour of text each week. It took me 29 weeks. The next year, I performed a version of the Odyssey’s Apologoi, with about two hours of text in a single performance. Someday, I hope, I’ll get to back to performing Homer—I’d love to try to do the whole thing in a long weekend, like so many scholars have suggested rhapsodes used to do it.
When you’re telling an audience the Iliad, you begin to understand how much you just want to get the story across. You know what it was like? All those Achaians, marching, their bronze armour glinting? It was like seeing a terrible forest fire raging down from the peaks of the mountain… you know how they sounded? Like every kind of water bird suddenly gathering in a meadow, honking, shrieking, quacking—can you hear how loud they were as they marched?
Different words and phrases come and go; are they moods? Different narrators’ voices? Do you remember the Achaians? You know, the ones with the awesome shinguards (especially in Iliad 3, and 7!)? No, wait, remember the Achaians, and their great hair (especially in Iliad 2, but also in 7!)? You remember the Achaians. Yeah, I know you do. But performing I realise that I’m as fickle as the narrator I’m playing. The narrator wants “nice shinguards” for this bit, but I say “great hair”, no idea why I’ve got hair on the brain.
Sometimes these gaps open between me and the narrator; but other times I feel like we’re one and the same. That poet performer had an audience and I’ve got an audience and we’re telling the same story, and, damn I can see it too, I can see what they saw, and I can tell it, maybe like them. But no, not like them—I can’t do metre. Sure, I improvise, too, but that means I tell the audience I’m not sure I want to translate that that way, or I can explain Homeric language, or even something like supplication. But I also get stuck and forget where I am (did that ever happen to them?) or worse, once I skip a bunch of lines between two lines that are the same, and I don’t even notice (did anyone notice?). Don’t even ask about the catalogue. And sometimes I don’t want to say what I have to say—I value myself more than a tripod.
And of course you don’t stay the narrator—helpful formulae pivot me in and out of characters. Now I’m Agamemnon! Now I’m Achilles! Now I’m Odysseus. Oh god, I’m still Odysseus. I look forward to being both Atreidae—Agamemnon all puffed up, my inner Chicago-guy, mustached, plain-speaking and brash; Menelaus, a mensch, empathetic, even in his most violent warnings. The gods become more interesting. In truth, each character that I become becomes my favourite in the moment.
I get to change the space we’re in, transforming the bar all around us, week to week. Sometimes the great wall of Troy is there, now here. Time, too, feels funny. After one performance, someone asks, ‘what happened with that fight between Achilles and Agamemnon?’ In performance, especially this serial performance, I go weeks without mentioning them (weeks 4, 5, 8, 9, 13…), and when it is mentioned, it’s fast— blink (or yawn, or go to the bathroom, or get another drink), and you miss it.
The Iliad is a gift; performing it reveals as many endless new facets as performing any other performance text does. For me, what I love the most, is how the text inhabits me, pushes out every conscious thought for an hour or so as somehow this story, this ancient story, this story that’s so brutal and beautiful and awful and awesome in the way English doesn’t even allow, deinos, this story becomes all that’s happening in my voice and in my body, between me and a hundred other people. I can’t wait to tell it again.
Lynn Kozak works on archaic and classical ancient Greek literature, as well as its receptions, translations, and comparisons with contemporary texts. After their monograph, Experiencing Hektor: Character in the Iliad, released in 2016 with Bloomsbury Academic (Experiencing Hektor open-access) compared the Iliad’s serial poetics to those of contemporary North American narrative television, they have also continued to work in television and media studies. From January-August 2018, Kozak translated and performed the whole Iliad in weekly serial instalments, as part of an FRQSC-funded project “Previously On…The Iliad”; all performances are available to view on youtube. They also performed a version of the Apologoi from the Odyssey as part of the 2019 Festival Interculturel du Conte.
Suggested Further Reading from LK
King, B. & Kozak, L. (2022) “#Patrochilles: Find the Phallus,” in The Routledge Companion to the Reception of Ancient Greek and Roman Gender and Sexuality, edited by Kenneth Moore, Routledge, pp. 41–57.
Kozak, L. (2023) “Happy Hour Homer: On Translating and Performing the Iliad Live in a Bar,” in This is a Classic, edited by Regina Galasso, Bloomsbury Academic, Literatures, Cultures, Translation Series, pp. 51–8.
Macintosh, F., & McConnell, J. (2020). Performing epic or telling tales. Oxford University Press.
Macintosh, F., McConnell, J., Harrison, S., & Kenward, C. (Eds.). (2018). Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century. Oxford University Press, USA.
Ready, J., & Tsagalis, C. (Eds.). (2018). Homer in performance: rhapsodes, narrators, and characters. University of Texas Press.
Ready, J. L. (2023). Immersion, Identification, and the Iliad. Oxford University Press.
Scodel, R. (2009). Listening to Homer: tradition, narrative, and audience. University of Michigan Press.
78 “When Alexander arrived in Troy and gazed upon the tomb of Achilles he stopped and said “Achilles, how lucky you were to have Homer as your great herald!” Anaximenes, who was present, said, “but I, lord, will tell your tale.” “By the gods”, Alexander responded, “I’d rather be Homer’s Thersites’ than your Achilles.”
94 “When some of his friends were encouraging him to wage war against the Amazons, Alexander said “it will not bring me honor to conquer women, but it will bring me dishonor if I lose to them”
104 “When Diogenes the Cynic was asking Alexander for a drachma he said “this is not a kingly gift.” When he then said, “give me a talent”, Alexander responded “That’s not a Cynic request.”
“I was recently explaining to you that I am in sight of my old age—but now I fear that I have put old age behind me! There is some different word better fit to these years, or at least to this body, since old age seems to be a tired time, not a broken one. Count me among the weary and those just touching the end.
Despite all this, I still am grateful to myself, with you to witness it. For I do not sense harm to my mind from age even though I feel it in my body. Only my weaknesses—and their tools—have become senile. My mind is vigorous and it rejoices that it depends upon the body for little. It has disposed of the greater portion of its burden. It celebrates and argues with me about old age. It says that this is its flowering. Let’s believe it, let it enjoy its own good.
My mind commands that I enter into contemplation and I think about what debt I owe to wisdom for this tranquility and modesty of ways and what portion is due to my age. It asks that I think about what I am incapable of doing in contrast to what I do not wish to do, whether I am happy because I don’t want something or I don’t want something because I lack the ability to pursue it.
For, what complaint is there or what problem is it if something which was supposed to end has ended? “But,” you interject, “it is the worst inconvenience to wear out, to be diminished, or, if I can say it properly, to dissolve. For we are not suddenly struck down and dead, we are picked away at! Each individual day subtracts something from our strength!”
But, look, is there a better way to end than to drift off to your proper exit as nature itself releases you? There is nothing too bad in a sudden strike which takes life away immediately, but this way is easy, to be led off slowly.”
Modo dicebam tibi, in conspectu esse me senectutis; iam vereor, ne senectutem post me reliquerim. Aliud iam his annis, certe huic corpori, vocabulum convenit, quoniam quidem senectus lassae aetatis, non fractae, nomen est; inter decrepitos me numera et extrema tangentis.
Gratias tamen mihi apud te ago; non sentio in animo aetatis iniuriam, cum sentiam in corpore. Tantum vitia et vitiorum ministeria senuerunt; viget animus et gaudet non multum sibi esse cum corpore. Magnam partem oneris sui posuit. Exultat et mihi facit controversiam de senectute. Hunc ait esse florem suum. Credamus illi; bono suo utatur. Ire in cogitationem iubet et dispicere, quid ex hac tranquillitate ac modestia morum sapientiae debeam, quid aetati, et diligenter excutere, quae non possim facere, quae nolim †prodesse habiturus ad qui si nolim quidquid non posse me gaudeo.† Quae enim querella est, quod incommodum, si quidquid debebat desinere, defecit? “Incommodum summum est,” inquis, “minui et deperire et, ut proprie dicam, liquescere. Non enim subito inpulsi ac prostrati sumus; carpimur. Singuli dies aliquid subtrahunt viribus.”
Ecquis exitus est melior quam in finem suum natura solvente dilabi? Non quia aliquid mali est ictus et e vita repentinus excessus, sed quia lenis haec est via, subduci.
“After that, [Hippokrates] had a son named Peisistratos. Then the Athenians on the coasts were in strife with those who lived inland and Megakles, the son of Alcmeôn, was the leader of the first group, and Lykourgos the son of Aristolaidos was the leader of the inlanders.
Peisistratos, because he had designs on a tyranny, led a third faction; after he gathered his partisans and claimed to be a defender of the heartland-Greeks, he enacted the following plans. He wounded himself and his mules and then drove his wagon into the marketplace as if he had fled enemies who wished to kill him as he was traveling to the country.
Because of this, he asked the people for a bodyguard under his power, since he had previously earned good repute as a general against the Megarians when he took Nisaia and displayed many other great accomplishments. The Athenian people, utterly deceived, permitted him to choose from the citizens men three hundred men who were not spear-bearers under Peisistratus but club-carriers: for they followed behind him, carrying clubs. Once these men rebelled with Peisistratos, they occupied the acropolis.”
“Public leadership comes from persuading people through argument. But manipulating a mob in this way differs little from the capture and herding of stupid animals.”
“Once Peisistratos accepted this argument and agreed to these proposals, they devised the dumbest plan for his return that I can find, by far, if, even then, those in Athens, said to be among the first of the Greeks in wisdom, devised these things. (From antiquity, the Greek people have been set apart from barbarians by being more clever and freer from silly stupidity).
In the country there was a Paianiean woman—her name was Phuê—and she was three inches short of six feet and altogether fine looking. After they dressed her up in a panoply, they put her in a chariot, and adorned her with the kind of scene which would make her a completely conspicuous sight to be seen. Then they drove her into the city, sending heralds out in front of her, who were announcing after they entered the city the words they had been assigned, saying something like “O Athenians, receive Peisistratos with a good thought, a man Athena herself honored beyond all men as she leads him to her own acropolis.”
They went everywhere saying these things. And as soon as the rumor circulated among the people, they believed that the woman was Athena herself: then they were praying to the woman and were welcoming Peisistratos!
After he regained the tyranny in the way I have narrated, Peisistratos married the daughter of Megakles in accordance with the agreement they made. But because he already had young sons and since the family of the Alkmeaonids were said to be cursed, he did not wish to have children with his newly wedded wife, and he was not having sex with her according to custom…”
What Stop Making Sense Can teach Us About the Iliad
This post is a continuation of my substack on the Iliad.. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis.
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 onIliad 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.
112 “When Antagoras was about to cast a capital vote against someone he cried. Someone asked him “Why do you vote to condemn and cry?” He responded “It is necessary by nature to give our sympathy; the law demands my vote.”
211 “Demosthenes used to say that the laws are the sinews of democracy”
῾Ο αὐτὸς ἔφησε τοὺς νόμους δημοκρατίας νεῦρα.
229 “Demosthenes used to say that the laws are the soul of the state. “just as the body dies when bereft of the soul, so too the city perishes when there are no laws”
“Kleostratos the drunk, when someone asked him in admonishment “Aren’t you ashamed to be drunk?”, responded “Aren’t you ashamed of admonishing a drunk?”
