“A person of learning always has wealth on their own.
Simonides, who wrote exceptional lyric poems,
Thanks to this, lived more easily with poverty
He began to go around Asia’s noble cities
Singing the praise of victors for a set price.
Once he had done this to make a wealthier life
He planned to make a seaward journey home.
For it was on Ceos people claim he was born.
He climbed aboard a ship which an awful storm
And its advanced age caused to break apart in the sea.
Some grabbed their money-belts, others their valuable things,
Safeguards for their life. A rather curious man asked
“Simonides, you are saving none of your riches?”
He responded, “Everything that is mine is with me”
Few swam free, because most died weighed down by a drowning burden.
Then thieves arrived and seized whatever each man carried.
They left them naked. By chance, Clazomenae, that ancient city,
Was nearby. The shipwrecked men went that way.
There lived a man obsessed with the pursuit of poetry
Who had often read the poems of Simonides,
He was his greatest distant admirer.
Once he recognized Simonides from his speech alone
He greedily brought him home, and decorated him
With clothes, money, servants. The rest were carrying
Signs asking for food. When Simonides by chance
Would see these men he reported “I said that all my things
Were with me: and you lost everything you took.”
Homo doctus in se semper divitias habet.
Simonides, qui scripsit egregium melos,
quo paupertatem sustineret facilius,
circum ire coepit urbes Asiae nobiles,
mercede accepta laudem victorum canens.
Hoc genere quaestus postquam locuples factus est,
redire in patriam voluit cursu pelagio;
erat autem, ut aiunt, natus in Cia insula.
ascendit navem; quam tempestas horrida
simul et vetustas medio dissolvit mari.
Hi zonas, illi res pretiosas colligunt,
subsidium vitae. Quidam curiosior:
“Simonide, tu ex opibus nil sumis tuis?”
“Mecum” inquit “mea sunt cuncta.”Tunc pauci enatant,
quia plures onere degravati perierant.
Praedones adsunt, rapiunt quod quisque extulit,
nudos relinquunt. Forte Clazomenae prope
antiqua fuit urbs, quam petierunt naufragi.
Hic litterarum quidam studio deditus,
Simonidis qui saepe versus legerat,
eratque absentis admirator maximus,
sermone ab ipso cognitum cupidissime
ad se recepit; veste, nummis, familia
hominem exornavit. Ceteri tabulam suam
portant, rogantes victum. Quos casu obvios
Simonides ut vidit: “Dixi” inquit “mea
mecum esse cuncta; vos quod rapuistis perit.
Wreck of a small boat in Nea Artaki, Euboea, Greece
Petronius, fr. 31 [Anth. Lat. 468 R. = 466 SB = fr. 34 B.=]
“Youth, depart your home for foreign shores–
You are meant for greater things.
Endure misfortunes! Then distant springs
The North wind, Egypt’s eternal lands
And those who see the sun rise and fall
will come to recognize you for who you are.
Be a greater Ithakan on unknown sands.”
linque tuas sedes alienaque litora quaere,
iuvenis; maior rerum tibi nascitur ordo.
ne succumbe malis; te noverit ultimus Hister,
te Boreas gelidus securaque regna Canopi
quique renascentem Phoebum cernuntque cadentem.
maior in externas Ithacus descendat harenas.
“Korinna was the daughter of Akheloodoros and Prokatia. She was from Thebes or Tanagra. She was a student of Myrtis and was nicknamed “Fly”. She was a lyric poet who is said to have defeated Pindar five times. She wrote five books along with epigrams and lyric nomes.”
“When Pindar was young and still flashing his wit all around, Korinna warned him that he was uninspired because he didn’t compose with myth, which was the proper focus of poetry, but instead relied on strange diction, metaphors, songs and rhythms, and all kinds of decorations for his work. Pindar took her seriously and composed his famous song:
“Shall we sing of Ismenos or gold-staffed Melia
Or Kadmos, or the sacred race of the Sown-Men
Or Dark-cowled Thebe
Or the super-bold strength of Herakles
Or the many-pained honor of Dionysus.”
When he showed the song to Korinna, she laughed and said that he needed to sow with one hand not the whole bag! In truth, Pindar had mixed up and bundled together a hodgepodge of myths and poured it into a song.”
“When Pindar was competing in Thebes he encountered unlearned audiences and was defeated by Korinna five times. When he was trying to refute his own lack of poetic ability [amousia], he used to call Korinna a pig.”
in the middle is a ‘Twist and Twirl’ coleus, surrounded by six ‘Figaro Yellow Shades’ dahlias. On the edges are two ‘Silver Sand’ silver bushes, two ‘Nicoletta’ plectranthus and two ‘Silver Falls’ dichondra.
“That’s plenty said about honors. Now we need to talk a bit about punishments. I have truly understood from your letters that you want to be praised for the clemency you have shown to those you have conquered. Well, I think that everything you do is done wisely! But, speaking for myself, I consider forgiving the punishment of crimes–which is what pardoning really is–is tolerable in other matters, but insidious in this war. There has been no civil war in our state to my knowledge that did not present some kind of future constitution regardless of which side won.
But in this conflict, I can’t be sure about what order the state will have if we win, but there surely won’t be any at all if we lose. This is why I advocated for harsh punishments for Antony and Lepidus too, not in as much for the sake of vengeance as to deter the other criminals among us from attacking the state right now and to offer a clear example for the future so that no one will be inspired to imitate such madness.”
Satis multa de honoribus. nunc de poena pauca dicenda sunt. intellexi enim ex tuis saepe litteris te in iis quos bello devicisti clementiam tuam velle laudari. existimo equidem nihil a te nisi sapienter. sed sceleris poenam praetermittere (id enim est quod vocatur ignoscere), etiam si in ceteris rebus tolerabile est, in hoc bello perniciosum puto. nullum enim bellum civile fuit in nostra re publica omnium quae memoria mea fuerunt, in quo bello non, utracumque pars vicisset, tamen aliqua forma esset futura rei publicae: hoc bello victores quam rem publicam simus habituri non facile adfirmarim, victis certe nulla umquam erit. dixi igitur sententias in Antonium, dixi in Lepidum severas, neque tam ulciscendi causa quam ut et in praesens sceleratos civis timore ab impugnanda patria deterrerem et in posterum documentum statuerem ne quis talem amentiam vellet imitari.
Relief with the punishment of Ixion (2nd century) in the Side Archaeological Museum (Side, Turkey).
This post is a continuation of my substack on the Iliad. Following the completion of book-by-book postsentries will fall into three basic categories: (1) new scholarship about the Iliad; (2) themes: (expressions/reflections/implications of trauma; agency and determinism; performance and reception; diverse audiences); and (3) other issues of texts/transmission/and commentary that occur to me. As a reminder, these posts will remain free, but there is an option to be a financial supporter. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis.
Socrates: Do you think that most of your audience members are in their right mind when you are working your performance on them?
Ion: Well, I know this especially well. For I am watching them every time from my platform as they weep and wondrous faces as they are surprised by the stories performed. It is really important that I pay close attention to them: if I make them mourn, then I will laugh a bit myself when I get my money. But If I make them laugh, then I will weep myself, because I have lost the money.”
Should Homer make us laugh? If we completely believe Plato’s depiction of the rhapsode Ion in the eponymous dialogue, then we might imagine that ancient audiences expected to experience fear, sorrow, surprise, and wonder during a response to Homeric poetry, but not laughter. Looking into the epics itself for clues isn’t much help: laughter in Homer seems especially cruel, as when the gods mock a shambling Hephaestus in book 1 or the Achaeans laugh at Oilean Ajax’s fall into manure during the funeral games.
British Museum 1893,0303.1, 450BC-420BC. Circe, Odysseus, and One of his Sailors as a Dog
There are some sweeter moments of surprise, as when Hektor and Andromache laugh when baby Astyanax cries out at seeing his father in full bloody armor, but even that scene is mixed with sorrow: Andromache’s laughter turns to tears as she thinks about her son’s future. Indeed, laughter in epic often marks things and people as out of place. In the Odyssey, laughter is serious business: Penelope’s laugh in the Odyssey, as Daniel Levine argues, is a mark of her confidence and superiority over the suitors; Telemachus similarly uses laughter to cloak his true intentions, according to Stanley Hoffer; the suitors’ laughter, on the other hand, has been seen to show their depravity and their lack of understanding of their situation.
These approaches to Homeric ‘humor’ focus on reconstructing from internal evidence the place and meaning of laughter within the epics. Laughter is assumed to be the province of other genres, ill-fit to the major themes of the Homeric epics and thus barred from proper audience responses. Yet, since when is humor ever really about propriety?
When Plato’s Ion declares that his audiences only pay him when he makes them cry, can we trust either the rhapsode or the philosopher to be covering the full range of responses to Homer in all sorts of performance contexts? Homeric matters were surely the objects of laughter in other poetic genres and other performance forms like Old Comedy? Epic parody was a genre in ancient Greece that seems to have had its own festivals and competitions. Why should we assume that the only responses to epic were tears?
“My Lover’s got humor
She’s the giggle at a funeral” -Hozier, “Take Me To Church”
The impetus for this brief survey is Richard Benson’s article on “Homeric Epithets that Seem to be Humorously Ironic.” This article’s title grabbed me because it enters into one of the defining debates of Homeric studies in the 20th century, namely the relationship between traditional diction/morphology and the ability for individual performers to craft contextually specific meaning. When Milman Parry first offered his overview of formulaic epithets in Homer, the focus was supposed to be on how large-scale poetic composition was possible without writing. Over time, opponents to oral-formulaic theory focused on imagined restrictions to ‘innovation’ and creativity, focusing in particular on whether epithets (think, swift-footed Achilles) could have contextual rather than purely functional meaning. The ‘epithet’ issue was used as a way to deny the compositional importance of oral-formulaic theory while also preserving a model of authorship and authority (the single genius) that is largely inappropriate to oral-derived poetics. (See earlier posts for more on oral-composition, etc, but the big names are Milman Parry, Albert Lord, John Miles Foley, and Greg Nagy; Ruth Scodel’s Listening to Homer is also an important entry in the discussion).
Boeotian black-figure skyphos, decorated with a scene of Odysseus being given a drugged potion by Circe, from the workshop of the Mystae Painter, from Thebes, Boeotia, late 5th century [reproduction]
Elton Barker and I walk through some of this history in Homer’s Thebes where we examine the irony of swift-footed Achilles in Iliad. At a basic level, all language is formulaic and repeated and all creative artists push these restrictions or work within them to create surprise, delight, or wonder. Homeric language is no less amenable to manipulation by a skillful performer than any other art form, it just works differently and relies on audience knowledge and familiarity with its conventions. In this, it is no more complex than opera, classical music, or modern comedy, which is so contextually and linguistically bound as to be practically untranslatable.
In his article, Benson goes through some of the history of the discussion of epithets, following an argument from James Arieti about the use of the epithet “godlike” for Paris at Iliad 3.16-37. He walks through four different ironic applications of epithets and identifies 33 ironic epithets in the Iliad and the Odyssey, with the majority appearing in the Iliad. A good deal of these uses are in character speech. Readers might disagree with all of the analysis and may look elsewhere for a more theoretical discussion of humor and Homeric poetry, but this article is a good introduction to thinking about epithets and irony in Homer.
When I read Homer with students, I emphasize honoring any responses on the first engagement. The goal is to imagine and explore what is possible in reacting to the epics. The next step is to evaluate to what extent a given response is plausible for ancient audiences. Audiences knew Homeric diction and habits far better than we do, the surprise of a misplaced or uniquely used term, or the accumulated irony of an epithet used in fast, awkward repetition, would have a very different impact on them than it does on us. Even more importantly, audiences with different beliefs about the gods, with different cultural backgrounds, with affinities for different genres, or audiences from different classes (aristocratic vs poor, enslaved vs free), genders, or abilities, might respond differently. Just so, it is ever more important for modern audiences to expand our sense of the possible when it comes to Homeric reception before deciding we know what was probable.
n.b. this is not exhaustive. please let me know if there are other articles to include.
Benson, R. D. (2021). Homeric Epithets that Seem to Be Humorously Ironic. Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, 29(1), 35–62. https://doi.org/10.2307/arion.29.1.0035
Brown, Christopher G.. “Ares, Aphrodite, and the laughter of the gods.” Phoenix, vol. XLIII, 1989, pp. 283-293.
Caleb M. X. Dance, ‘Laughing with the gods : the tale of Ares and Aphrodite in Homer, Ovid, and Lucian’, Classical World, 113.4 (2019-2020) 405-434. Doi: 10.1353/clw.2020.0037
Guidorizzi, Giulio. “The laughter of the suitors: a case of collective madness in the Odyssey / transl. by Lowell Edmunds.” Poet, public, and performance in ancient Greece. Eds. Edmunds, Lowell, Wallace, Robert W. and Bettini, Maurizio. Baltimore (Md.): Johns Hopkins University Pr., 1997. 1-7.
Halliwell, F. Stephen (2008). Greek laughter: a study in cultural psychology from Homer to early Christianity. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Pr.
Halliwell, Stephen. “Imagining divine laughter in Homer and Lucian.” Greek laughter and tears : antiquity and after. Eds. Alexiou, Margaret and Cairns, Douglas. Edinburgh Leventis Studies; 8. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Pr., 2017. 36-53.
Hoffer, Stanley E.. “Telemachus’ « laugh » (Odyssey 21.105): deceit, authority, and communication in the bow contest.” American Journal of Philology, vol. 116, no. 4, 1995, pp. 515-531.
Konstan, David. “Laughing at ourselves: gendered humor in ancient Greece.” Laughter, humor, and the (un)making of gender: historical and cultural perspectives. Eds. Foka, Anna and Liliequist, Jonas. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 13-29.
Donald E. Lavigne, ‘Bad Kharma: a « fragment » of the « Iliad » and iambic laughter’, Aevum Antiquum, N. S., 8. (2008) 115-138. Doi: 10.1400/210042
Levine, Daniel B.. Γέλῳ ἔκθανον. Laughter and the demise of the suitors. Univ. of Cincinnati, 1980.
Levine, Daniel B. “Penelope’s Laugh: Odyssey 18.163.” The American Journal of Philology 104, no. 2 (1983): 172–78. https://doi.org/10.2307/294290.
Miralles, Carles. “Laughter in the Odyssey.” Laughter down the centuries. 1. Eds. Jäkel, Siegfried and Timonen, Asko. Annales Universitatis Turkuensis. Ser. B, Humaniora; 208 – Annales Universitatis Turkuensis. Ser. B, Humaniora; 208. Turku: Turun Yliopisto, 1994; 1994. 15-22.
Siegfried Jäkel, ‘The phenomenon of laughter in the Iliad’, in Laughter down the centuries. 1, ed. by Siegfried Jäkel and Asko Timonen, Annales Universitatis Turkuensis. Ser. B, Humaniora, 208 – Annales Universitatis Turkuensis. Ser. B, Humaniora, 208 (Turku: Turun Yliopisto, 1994; 1994), pp. 23-27.
“If you put down a rotten foundation, already falling apart, not even a little shack can be built upon it, and the greater and more forceful thing you build upon it, the faster it will fall to the ground.
So you are depriving this dear person of life without any reason, a citizen of the very same state, both the larger one and the local one. Then, as you commit an act of murder and destroy another human being who did no wrong, you claim that “you have to stick to what was decided!” If it ever occurred to you to kill me, would you have to stick to your decisions then?
That kind of a person is scarcely persuaded to change his mind. But it is impossible to transform others today. So, now, I think I understand that proverb that used to confuse me, that “you can’t persuade or break a fool!”
May I never have a wise fool as a friend, there’s nothing harder to deal with. He says, “I have decided.” Well, people who are out of their minds decided too. But just as much as they believe that what isn’t true is solid, that’s how much hellebore they need to drink.”
“….the boundless grief shook from sleep
The young children whose hearts had previously felt no pain.
People were dying all over, mixed among one another.
Some faded away seeing their death alongside dreams. And their Deaths
Took some kind of shrill joy in their pitiful passing.
They were killed by the thousands like pigs lined up
For an endless banquet for friends in a rich man’s home.
The wine that was left over in their cups was mixed with
Bloody gore and there was no one at all who could have carried
An iron weapon out of the slaughter–and so the Trojans were dying.”
One of a series of designs (the Trojan War) by Jean Foucquet (1415–1485) from which tapestry hangings were woven, probably at Arras in the middle of the 15th century.
“Look at those crystal objects, whose very fragility increases their value!”
ideo istic crystallina, quorum accendit fragilitas pretium
Pliny the Elder, Natural History 13.65
“It is tested by its whiteness and its color, its fragility and whether it catches fire as soon as it nears a coal, and then it should not take the imprint of a tooth but break apart into pieces instead.”
Probatur candore ac pinguedine, fragilitate, carbone ut statim ardeat, item ne dentem recipiat potiusque in micas frietur.
Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy 2.7
“I want to tell you something amazing and I am barely capable of putting the idea into words. I believe that bad luck is better for people than good. Luck always deceives when seeming to grin with the appearance of happiness–yet fortune is always faithful in showing itself to be unstable by ever changing.
Good luck deceives while bad luck instructs. The first ties up the minds of people who enjoy things that only seem good, while the other frees us with an understanding of the fragility of happiness.”
Mirum est quod dicere gestio, eoque sententiam verbis explicare vix queo. Etenim plus hominibus reor adversam quam prosperam prodesse fortunam. Illa enim semper specie felicitatis cum videtur blanda, mentitur; haec semper vera est, cum se instabilem mutatione demonstrat. Illa fallit, haec instruit, illa mendacium specie bonorum mentes fruentium ligat, haec cognitione fragilis felicitatis absolvit.
“There’s that quote of Diogenes when he said, “Aristotle has lunch on Philip’s schedule, but Diogenes does it on his own time,” since there’s no political affair or officer, or leader to trouble the daily habits of his life.
For this reason, you will discover that few of the wisest and most thoughtful people have been buried in their own countries–and that most of them did this by choice, raising an anchor on their own and finding a new safe harbor for their lives, either leaving Athens or retreating there.”
Diogenes Laertius, Hippasos [Lives of the Philosophers, 8.6]
“Hippasos of Metapontum was also a Pythagorean. He used to say that the time of the transformation of the universe is specific and that the Everything is bounded and always moving.
Demetrius says that he left no written text in his work People of the Same Name. There were two Hippases. This one and another one who wrote five books about the constitution of the Lakonians. He was also Lakonian.”
Arrian’s Discourses of Epicetus [=Stobaeus IV. 44, 66]
“Everything heeds and serves the Universe: the land, the sea, the sun, and the rest of the stars, along with the earth’s plants and animals. Our body obeys it too whether in sickness or health, in youth and old age, when the Universe wants, through all our other changes as well.
For this reason it is logical that what is under our control–our judgment–should not be the only thing to resist it. The Universe is powerful and strong and it has planned better on our behalf by combining us with everything else it governs. To act against these forces, moreover, is illogical and it results in little more than a useless effort all while creating pain and suffering.”
