As Elton Barker and I emphasize in our work on Homer, we think poetic rivalry was a formative feature of the generation of epic poetry in performance over time. The culture projected within the Homeric world is deeply competitive and rivalry between the Homeric poems through the main figures Achilles and Odysseus is clear as well. But we also argue that agonism should be seen as a primary force in the way Homeric poems relate to other traditions as well, particularly those surrounding Thebes.
Thebes comes to the fore in book 4 when Agamemnon reviews his troops and exhorts them to battle in the so-called Epipolesis. By the time he gets to Diomedes, he leans a little more into the language of reproach and attempts to shame Diomedes by comparing him to his father.
Hom. Il. 4.387-393; 396-400
There, stranger though he was, horse-driver Tydeus was not frightened, alone among many Cadmeans. But he challenged them to contests and won victory in all easily. Such a guardian was Athena for your father! But the Cadmeans, drivers of horses, were angered and, as he departed from the city, they set up a close ambush of fifty youths; there were two leaders…. But Tydeus let loose on them a unseemly fate: he slew them all and only one man he sent to return home: he sent Maion, trusting in the signs of the gods. Such a man was Aitolian Tydeus; but he fathered a son weaker than he in battle, but better in the assembly
After he does this, Sthelenos, the Patroklos to Diomedes’ Achilles, objects strongly. Asserting that he and Diomedes actually sacked a city when their fathers failed to do so.
Homer, Iliad. 4.404-110
Son of Atreus, don’t lie when you know how to speak clearly. We claim to be better than our fathers: we took the foundation of seven-gated Thebes though we led a smaller army before better walls because we were relying on the signs of the gods and Zeus’ help. Those men perished because of their own recklessness. Don’t put our fathers in the same honour’’
This response contains a few curiosities for Homeric epic. For one, instead of valuing the past, it directly contests the past as matching up to the present. For another, it assumes audience knowledge of a multigenerational war tradition around the city of Thebes to make sense of this. As we talk about in our book, Homer’s Thebes, the sacks of Thebes and Troy are positioned as a cosmic pair in ending the race of Heroes. For the particular stance of the Iliad, however, it is important to raise up the heroes of its epic: Diomedes and Sthenelos were heroic enough to take care of Thebes when their fathers could not; and yet, despite that, Troy is so much of a bigger deal that Diomedes and Sthenelos are merely role players on a much larger team.
But what of the tradition they are referring to? We have broad and deep evidence for narratives around Thebes from early iconography (8th century BCE) through extant and fragmentary dramas on the Athenian stage. But there is also a tradition of epic poetry more-or-less contemporaneous with Homer and Hesiod. Pausanias, the later travel writer, even claims that the Thebais was best, after the Iliad and the Odyssey (see below). The primary texts that may be targets of Homeric play here, are the Thebais and the Epigonoi.
Take these fragments with healthy skepticism, however. It is likelier that Homeric poetry was competing with Theban narratives in general rather than particular poems. And, of course, we always run the risk of a scholarly circularity with these fragments as well: they have been largely preserved in scholarly traditions commenting on and explaining the canonized texts of Homer and the Greek Tragedians. In our work, Elton and I don’t believe that we can accurately reconstruct Theban narratives from extant Homeric poetry, since the Iliad and the Odyssey strive so far to establish themselves as authoritative narratives.
The remains of an ancient epic called the Thebais that was attributed to ‘Homer’ by multiple sources in antiquity (although most scholars today, following Aristotle, agree that ‘Homer’ = Iliad and Odyssey or something like that). This epic seems to have told the Theban tale from the cursing of Polyneices and Eteocles by Oedipus through the events of the Seven Against Thebes.
Thank you for reading Painful Signs, Or, Joel’s Substack. This post is public so feel free to share it.
Pausanias, IX 9.5
“The epic called Thebais was composed about this war. Kallinos, when he comes to mention this epic, says that Homer composed it. Many authors of considerable repute have believed the same thing. And I like this poem especially, after the Iliad and Odyssey at least.”
The Seven Chiefs against Thebes, 1826, history painting by Angélique Mongez
Fragments of the Thebais
Fr. 1 (found in The Contest of Homer and Hesiod)
“Goddess, sing of very-thirsty Argos, from where the Leaders [departed for Thebes]”
῎Αργος ἄειδε, θεά, πολυδίψιον, ἔνθεν ἄνακτες
Fr. 2 (Found in Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists)
“Then the god-bred hero, blond Polyneices, First placed before Oedipus a fine silver platter, A thing of god-minded Kadmos. And then He filled a fine golden cup with sweet wine. But when he noted that lying before him were the Honored gifts of his own father, a great evil filled his heart. Quickly he uttered grievous curses against both Of his own sons—and he did not escape the dread Fury’s notice— That they would not divide their inheritance in friendship But that they would both have ceaseless war and battles.”
Fr.4 (Found in Scholion to Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, 1375)
“When [Oedipus] noticed the cut of meat, he hurled it to the ground and spoke: ‘Alas, my children have sent this as a reproach to me…’ He prayed to King Zeus and the other gods That they would go to Hades’ home at each other’s hands.
As early as Herodotus (4.32) it was doubted that the epic that told the story of the sons of the Seven Against Thebes was by Homer. Instead, it was attributed later to a man named Antimachus from Teios. We have two lines most people agree on, and a handful of uncertain lines.
Fr. 1 (From the Contest of Homer and Hesiod)
“Now, Muses, let us sing in turn of the younger men” Νῦν αὖθ’ ὁπλοτέρων ἀνδρῶν ἀρχώμεθα, Μοῦσαι
Fr. 4 (From Clement of Alexandria)
“Many evils come to men from gifts”
ἐκ γὰρ δώρων πολλὰ κάκ’ ἀνθρώποισι πέλονται.
Fr. 6 (Dub. from the Contest of Homer and Hesiod)
“So then they divided the meat of bulls and wiped clean The sweat-covered necks of horses, since they had their fill of war.”
n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know. If there is anything you’d like to read that you don’t have free access to, let me know.
Barker, E.T.E. . 2009. Entering the Agon: Dissent and Authority in Homer, Historiography and Tragedy. Oxford.
Barker, E. T. E., and J. P. Christensen. 2006. “Flight Club: The New Archilochus Fragment and its Resonance with Homeric Epic.” Materiali e Discussioni per l’Analisi dei Testi Classici 57:19–43.
———. 2008. “Oedipus of Many Pains: Strategies of Contest in Homeric Poetry.” Leeds International Classical Studies 7.2. (http://www.leeds.ac.uk/classiscs/lics/)
———. 2011. “On Not Remembering Tydeus: Diomedes and the Contest for Thebes.” Materiali e discussioni per l’analisi dei testi classici 66:9–44.
———. 2014. “Even Herakles Had to Die: Epic Rivalry and the Poetics of the Past in Homer’s Iliad.” Trends in Classics: Homer and the Theban Tradition, ed. Christos Tsagalis, 249–277.
Christensen, Joel. 2018. “Eris and Epos: Composition, Competition and the ‘Domestication’ of Strife.” YAGE.
Cingano, E. 1992. “The Death of Oedipus in the Epic Tradition.” Phoenix 46:1–11.
———. 2000. “Tradizioni su Tebe nell’epica e nella lirica greca arcaica.” In La città di Argo: Mito, storia, tradizioni poetiche, ed. P. A. Bernardini, 59–68. Rome.
———. 2004. “The Sacrificial Cut and the Sense of Honour Wronged in Greek Epic Poetry: Thebais frgs. 2-3D.” In Food and Identity in the Ancient World, ed. C. Grotanelli and L. Milano, 269–279. Padova.
Collins, Derek. . 2004. Master of the Game: Competition and Performance in Greek Poetry. Hellenic Studies 7. Washington DC.
Book 4 of the Iliad moves away from the dominant interests of book 3 in providing a kind of ‘flashback’ to the beginning of the Trojan War to the beginning of the violence in this poem. Where book 3 introduces the duel between Paris and Menelaos, book 4 turns back to Agamemnon’s leadership and the beginning of proper Iliadic violence. To ‘begin’ yet again, the scene returns to Zeus with the other gods on Olympos pondering not destroying Troy. Of course, the notion of preserving Troy is impossible, but this motif reinforces Zeus’ position as the ringmaster. As Bruce Heiden explores in a series of articles (see the bibliography before), Zeus’ speeches both outline the plot to come in the epic and provide guidelines for where the books break and how performances of the whole song may have been structured.
In my view on the reading and teaching and my general sense of the five major themes, book 4 is most engaged with the themes of politics, the relationship between gods and humans, and the positioning of Iliadic content and themes in and against other narrative traditions.
Zeus’ ‘stage-managing’ of the plot is an important part of the theme of divine will vs. human agency. Book 4 takes pains to (more firmly) establish the Trojans as oath-breakers, responsible for the conflict (as if we needed more reasons!). The initial argument between Zeus, Athena, and Hera, moreover, anticipates similar re-articulations of the plot in book 8 and echoes of theomachy in books 5, 8, 13, 14, and 15.
The central framing mechanism of book 4 is the so-called Epipōlēsis (ἐπιπώλησις) . The epipolesis (perhaps best translated as “the inspection of the troops” or something like that) is one of those episodes named specifically by ancient scholars. It denotes Agamemnon’s actions in book 4 when he goes around exhorting Idomeneus, the two Ajaxes, Nestor, Odysseus, and then finally Diomedes and Sthenelos. Elton Barker and I have written about this scene a few times, but I think Rachel Lesser puts it well when she argues in chapter four of her Desire in the Iliad that the epipolesis “may be the only scene in the Iliad where Agamemnon practices effective leadership.”
Indeed, along with actions in book 11, where Agamemnon enjoys his own aristeia, book 4 is one of the chief places where he is characterized both as a leader and as a brother (when Menelaos is wounded). But part of what makes this sequence interesting is that Agamemnon is at times somewhat inept at his task. Odysseus gets annoyed with him; the Ajaxes just nod and go on their way. But when he lays into Diomedes to shame him for not fighting (when he is on his way, he tells a story about Dioemdes’ father Tydeus that doesn’t make a lot of sense for the world of Homer. In this paradeigma, Agamemnon provides another example of a Homeric hero trying to make sense of his experiences through stories from the past and coming up short. As I see it, these are moments where the epic itself models the problems of paradigmatic thinking by exploring the limits of different stories’ analogical value. ( This is covered a little in the post Speaking of Centaurs.)
But as Elton Barker and I talk about in Homer’s Thebes and our article “On not Remembering Tydeus”, this moment is also central to the Iliad’s appropriation from other traditions in order to establish itself as the best story in town. Note how Sthenelos, in responding to Agamemnon, argues that he and Diomedes are better than their fathers:
“Son of Atreus, don’t lie when you know how to speak truly. We claim to be better than our fathers: we took the foundation of seven-gated Thebes though we led a smaller army before better walls because we were trusting the signs of the gods and Zeus’ help. Those men perished because of their own recklessness. Don’t put our fathers in the same honor.”
This scene is somewhat unique in an epic that privileges the past as a place where men were greater than they are today. It capitalizes upon Sthenelos and Diomedes’ status as warriors who actually sacked Thebes to question whether the good old days were anything but merely old.
So, when reading book 4, pay close attention to how these speeches fulfill multiple tasks: they supercharge the plot, provide essential opportunities to characterize individual heroes, and give us a glimpse into how the Iliad pillages other traditions to foreground its own interests.
Some guiding questions for book 4
What does Zeus’ speech at the beginning of the epic do?
What is the cumulative effect of Agamemnon’s epipolesis (his rallying of the troops?)
What is the impact of the exchange between Diomedes, Sthenelus, and Agamemnon?
Brief Bibliography on the epipolesis and Agamemnon
n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know.
Christensen, Joel P., and Elton T. E. Barker. “On Not Remembering Tydeus: Agamemnon, Diomedes and the Contest for Thebes.” Materiali e Discussioni per l’analisi Dei Testi Classici, no. 66 (2011): 9–43. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41415488.
Haft, Adele J. “Odysseus’ Wrath and Grief in the ‘Iliad’: Agamemnon, the Ithacan King, and the Sack of Troy in Books 2, 4, and 14.” The Classical Journal 85, no. 2 (1989): 97–114. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3297409.
Hawkins, Anne Hunsaker. “Confronting Mortality: The Iliad’s Androktasiai.” Literature and Medicine 17, no. 2 (1998): 181-196. https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.1998.0022.
Holmes, B. (2007). The Iliad’s Economy of Pain. Transactions of the American Philological Association137(1), 45-84. https://doi.org/10.1353/apa.2007.0002.
Andrew Porter, Agamemnon, the pathetic despot: reading characterization in Homer. Hellenic studies series, 78. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. 264 p.. ISBN 9780674984455 $24.95 (pb).
Ready, Jonathan L. “Toil and Trouble: The Acquisition of Spoils in the Iliad.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 137, no. 1 (2007): 3-43.
“But when each of them were lined up with their leaders,
The Trojans went forward screeching and cries just like birds,
With the sound like the call of cranes near the sky.
Those birds that flee the winter and its endless rain
And fly with a cry over the ocean’s streams
Bringing death and murder to the Pygmies.
The Achaeans went forward exhaling rage in silence,
Eager in their heart to stand in defense of one another.”
This opening simile offers a somewhat surprising transition from the catalogs that end book 2 on the way to the action of book three. As I discuss in earlier posts about book 3, it is a fascinating book that continues some of the themes and concerns that emerge in book 2: a (re)introduction of the Trojans (starting with their catalog) and a (re)starting of the Trojan War. In my reading of the way the Iliad works as a coherent narrative that engages with and communicates the larger interest of both the Trojan War and the tradition of epic performance, book 3 presents episodes that evoke the character of the war’s beginning while still working within the narrative arc of the story of the rage of Achilles
1-111 Beginning, Proposal of a Dual [request for Priam to be fetched]
112-263 Teikhoskopia (“viewing from the walls”): Helen describes the Greeks
264-376 Duel
377-461 Aphrodite and the Reunion of Helen and Paris
The sequence of events laid as laid out here takes the audience almost in reverse from the war to the meeting of Helen and Paris. One could imagine the debate between Helen and Aphrodite and Helen’s begrudging acceptance of Paris as the Iliad’s take on blaming Helen, Paris’ character, and the shared conspiracy of divine will and human frailty. In this, the book offers one narrative arc that begins with Hektor upbraiding and shaming his brother and ends with Paris’ rather pathetic “aw shucks” return to the scene of their ‘crime’ (i.e., the bedroom). At the same time, if we think about the wide angle lens approach, this arc also allows us an early meeting between Menelaos and Priam and a view of the Greeks from the Trojans’ perspective. Book 3 situates the audience in space between Troy and the Greeks (anticipating book 6 in a way) and while also integrating potentially ‘famous’ episodes from the fuller war into its narrative.
National Archaeological Museum of Naples, Fresco from Pompeii
Given these primary functions of book 3, what sense can we make of the opening simile? It compares the sound of the assembled Trojan armies (and their allies) to the cry of migratory cranes who bring “death and doom to the Pygmies” during the winter. A simple reading of the simile might see the Trojans as moving away from their home and bringing death to the Greeks. For moving us into the action, this interpretation suffices, but I don’t think it is enough.
Fortunately, two of my favorite pieces of Homeric scholarship address this passage and in very different ways. Hilary Mackie, in her Talking Trojan: Speech and Community in the Iliad [substack.com] (1996), opens with this simile to suggest that unlike the Achaeans, the Trojan use of language “suggest[s] a lack of social order” (14). She contrasts the depiction of the Greeks following the simile as one of cohesion (16) and recalls the similes from book two that marks the Achaeans in mutiny or chaos as resolving into an eventual reimposition of order through the scapegoating of Thersites (17). Mackie relates this passage to the assertion from book 2 that the Trojans and their allies have many different languages (2.802-806) and for that reason must rely on captains to command only their own troops (19). She concludes that this passage extends a process of “underselling the Trojan army” (21) and suggests “when the Trojans march out at the beginning of Book 3, they are still dominated by undifferentiated clamor (klaggê). With their mixed languages, the Trojans cannot function as an articulate group.
I have always appreciated this argument insofar as it helps modern audiences understand differences between Trojan and Achaean politics (something Mackie also goes on to discuss). But I do worry if this interpretation against a linguistic pluralism may lean too much into the Iliad’s own attempt to downplay the strength of the Trojans (who have managed to hold the mighty Achaeans off for ten years!). I fear, in addition, that some might misinterpret such an argument as implying that the Iliad is essentially against heterogeneity. (And I don’t think this is Mackie’s argument at all. See Shawn Ross’ paper on language and Panhellenism in the Iliad for a perspective from contemporary audiences.)
A Pygmy fights a crane, Attic red-figure chous 430–420 BC, National Archaeological Museum of Spain
The other example of Homeric scholarship that engages with this opening is Leonard Muellner’s “The Simile of the Cranes and Pygmies”. I am deeply fond of this article because my first Greek teacher and many decade mentor and friend, Lenny, wrote it; but beyond that, it is one of the finest works on Homeric similes from the 20th century. Lenny uses this article to argue both that similes are not less traditional than other parts of Homeric epic (contra someone like Shipp or others who claim similes are ‘later’ than other parts of the Iliad or Odyssey) and also to show how a ‘device’ like this “continually enhances and preserves the epic’s expressive and evocative power” (61).
Lenny delves into the grammar of this simile by walking his reader through how other bird similes operate in the Iliad, emphasizing in part the group nature of this comparison and their place high in the sky, where predators usually roam , marking these birds as “deadly” and their “shriek [is a] war cry” (75). There is something of an inversion in this role, as Lenny notes, because cranes are not typically predatory birds in similes and this is the only extant example of massed birds compared to an attacking army. The second half of the essay examines this peculiarity.
National Archaeological Museum of Florence, Froicoise Vase
One argument Lenny provides is based on the context of book 3 and the character of the Trojan(s) who fight in the book. He notes that soon after this passage, Paris is criticized by his brother for not being a fighter, for being a dancer/lover instead, a theme that pervades the book and is emphasized again at the end when Paris is returned to his bedroom. Cranes, in the language of Greek poetry and myth, are birds who dance. In this light, the cranes reflect the unaccustomed place of the Trojans themselves in the Iliad: “in an unaccustomed role, in an unaccustomed locale: shrieking high above the river-plains, they descend like predators upon the Pygmies” (90).
The information about the Pygmies is less clear: Lenny notes a tradition from Egypt where a tribe of people called pygmies where known for “the god’s dances” (100). There was a tradition of the war of cranes and pygmies in art outside of Homer [substack.com] that may or may not be related to this. I suspect that the inversion of the cranes (as Trojans) going across the ocean to battle a non-bellicose foe may be significant to the resonance of the image here. At its most extreme/absurd, we can imagine something of a dance battle, a conflict resolved in a different dimension and a world far away.
Works Mentioned
Mackie, Hilary Susan. Talking Trojan: speech and community in the Iliad. Greek Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches. Lanham (Md.): Rowman and Littlefield, 1996.
Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward. And then remember this. The Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural.
Karis Nemik, Andor, episode 12
If you spend a little time learning about Greek myth and ancient epic, you’ll encounter the Epic Cycle, a term for a group of poems around that told the story of the Trojan War from the very beginning (the wedding of Peleus and Thetis?) to the very end (Odysseus’ return home and its aftermath). Recent years have seen dozens of articles and books on the topic. As a Homerist, I have had to engage with this scholarship a great deal.
And my central problem is this: I think the Epic Cycle, as we talk about it, is a scholarly fiction.
I watched the Disney+ series Andor and found myself agreeing deeply with a general opinion of its excellence–the plot is exciting, the characters are moving, and the themes of the rebellion both advance those of the original movie and complicate them. The rebels here are conflicted–some are aggrieved, some are true believers, and some are more venal. Together, they dramatize the cost of resistance and the seductive dangers of that complacency that makes us all complicit in oppression.
But watching Andor and enjoying it–after also cheering for The Mandalorian, Obi-Wan, and the Book of Boba–has made me think repeatedly about the relationship between canon and fixity and what it means to be an audience to an expanding universe. As a Homerist who comes from the end of Gen X (I was born in 1978), watching the explosion of the Star Wars universe has made me think a lot about the epic cycle and secondary narratives.
The making of a canon
It is impossible for my children to imagine what Star Wars meant when I was their age. One of my first memories is seeing The Empire Strikes Back in a drive-in theater with my parents and being terrified by Darth Vader. Anyone who can remember prior to 1999 knew of Star Wars as an unfinished but finished trilogy: there were always rumors that George Lucas would return to a galaxy far away and long ago, seeded especially by the numbering of the first movie as IV, but for a decade or so it seemed like it would never happen.
To be a fan of Star Wars prior to the return of the movies was to rewatch VHS cassettes and read authorized novels and wait for random viewings of the super strange Ewok adventures, The Battle for Endor and Caravan for Courage. Part of what made Star Wars moving was its boundedness and the promise of more. As a child, I would weep at the end of Return of the Jedi because I didn’t want it to end. As an adult, I have written about our uncomfortable relationship with narrative closure, how we want it to come but we also dread it because it is the end of a world and is, in some way, an echo of our own deaths.
Episodes and Universes
There are two ways of thinking about entries or episodes in a narrative universe. For Star Wars what became canon were the movies–but the more episodes added to the list, the less stable the canon became. There’s a danger of surplus narrative and how we refer to the whole changes two. I think people mean two different things when they talk about the epic cycle. One is general, expansive: the cycle refers to the full range of narratives associated with the Trojan War. The other is an imagined canon of episodes.
So, the classic Trojan Cycle described by Proclus include the Cypria, Aithiopis, Little Iliad, Iliou Persis (Sack of Troy), Nostoi (also called, according to some, The Return of the Atreids [ἡ τῶν Ἀτρειδῶν κάθοδος], and the Telegony. We have only a handful of fragments for most of these poems Some scholars have also suggested different ‘cycles’ which would focus around heroes (a cycle of epics about Herakles, for example, the Calydonian Boar Hunt or the Argo) or centering around cities other than Troy (where a Theban cycle might include the Oidipodeia, Thebais, Epigonoi, and perhaps even the Alkmeonis). This is the one I don’t think is real.
The larger a canon is, the less effective it is in exerting authority. I think that the original Star Wars trilogy exerted a centripetal force on its audiences, pulling them together to a narrative center. As the universe expands–or as the canon multiples–its force is more centrifugal, moving audiences into clusters. This is one way I think comparing a modern entertainment ‘universe’ to Trojan War narratives is useful: the Iliad and the Odyssey were panhellenic texts that persisted in applying aesthetic pressures on other traditions and their audiences. But the narrative world of the Trojan War included countless other stories and spanned many different kinds of genres.
Often when we talk about the authority of the Homeric poems, we are talking about the cultural position they occupied in Archaic and Classical Greece as performance narratives connected to political power. This authority transformed as they moved into fixed texts and aesthetic objects for Hellenistic readers and later. Over time, they became quasi-sacred. But other stories set in the Trojan War world existed prior to our epics and kept on spinning out from a notional but fictive center: local, epichoric traditions preceded the Iliad and Odyssey and persisted well into the Christian era. The discrete episodes filled out the Universe and allowed audiences to live within them: the static nature of the canonized object is mitigated by the fluidity of ongoing traditions.
This comes clear often in accounts of ritual and local practices, like those observed by Pausanias who puts Penelope’s grave in the Peloponnese, not far from that of Aeneas’ father Anchises. What’s different, I think, about ancient Trojan War narratives is that these local or epichoric narratives developed prior to the canonized epics and continued long after. As Irad Malkin has shown in The Returns of Odysseus, as Greeks spread across the Mediterranean, they took their stories with them, adapting their myths of people like Odysseus to accommodate their new realities.
When I first watched the Mandalorian, I was simultaneously charmed and critical: prior to the new movies, you could not imagine two characters with more commercial potential than a Boba Fett analog and a baby Yoda. People my age loved Boba Fett because his action figure looked so cool. (I used to sleep with Boba as a toddler, I confess.) These characters are also tangential to the canonized storyline, they allow the space to create a new story while also still drawing on the nostalgia and cache of the center. This is part of the thrill and peril of expanding narrative traditions: the cameo of a main character in a peripheral story can be fun, but when the canon limits overmuch, the story becomes campy and over allusive (which explains, in part I think, why Rogue One works well but Solo does not).
The cultural forces of capitalism that produced the Mandalorian are, of course, different from those that perpetuated Trojan War narratives in Archaic and Classical Greece, but they remain somewhat analogous cultural forces. Both rely on audience interest and respond to changing cultural trends.
Audiences and Change
When we talk about the market forces that influence the expansion of the Star Wars universe, we are talking in part about audiences. Discussions of the epic cycle–and Homer in general–too often forget that ancient performers responded to their audiences as well. Audiences exist through time and time creates different kinds of audiences. When we talk about interpreting or making sense of cultural objects, we emphasize the intention of creators because it is so difficult to talk about the multiplicity of audiences. But I have been thinking about audiences as palimpsest. A palimpsest is a manuscript that has been cleaned and repurposed for a new text, and yet the old text can often be seen underneath it. Christos Tsagalis has used it productively as a metaphor for how oral traditions work. Yet this model is still about the object and not the people who view it. We change as individuals over time and our relationship to a text or cultural object changes from one generation to another.
I took dates to the rerelease of the original three movies in high school. When The Phantom Menace was released, I was there on the first weekend with roommates and my future wife (who purchased Star Wars legos while waiting to see the movie and assembled them during the film). And despite the exhilaration of the opening chyron and the music, I left disappointed. The second trilogy is cluttered, confused and confusing, and tries too hard to fill in the blanks of the later/earlier films. The second trilogy is both shaped and trapped by nostalgia.
Part of the problem is the difference between a backstory that is unexplained and a forced explanation. The “clone wars” as referenced in Star Wars are nebulous and strange: we know they were in the past and bad. When we get to them in the later trilogy, they lose the menace and strangeness. What was a detail in service of another narrative fails in certain ways when it is fleshed out because it does not and cannot exist on its own terms.
The later Star Wars films have a secondariness in that they both serve to fill out a preexisting story and they also attempt to establish intertexts and references to the earlier films that prevent them from truly being their own. This is part of the challenge of judging narratives that develop in the shadow of a canon: we love them because they continue the larger story, but also begrudge them for not being the originals they imitate. Indeed, when authors like Jasper Griffin critique the poems of the epic cycle–without actually having access to them–for their fantastic content or their derivative nature, they are judging them by aesthetic standards, by rules, that they can never actually attain.
But changing some of the boundaries creates new space: consider the effectiveness of different kinds of Trojan War narratives on the tragic stage. Similarly, the later film Rogue One and the television series inhabit a familiar and attractive world but have their own stories to tell. They are compelling because they do not rely on their audiences fully knowing the original trilogy, but merely being familiar with the general ‘rules’ and characteristics of the Star Wars universe. They are free to respond to contemporary concerns and to establish new narratives. Further, with the television shows especially, they benefit from different generic boundaries: the pacing of episodic television lends itself to different kinds of stories from a 120 minutes space opera.
What I am trying to say, I guess, is that the process of canonization limits narratives that try to do the same thing as the canonized object but provides space for those that forge into new genres or plots. In addition, the further from the canon that narratives go, the more space they have to respond to changing audiences. Once Lucas released Star Wars into the world as a billion dollar intellectual property, others were able to escape the canonicity, to use the familiar world to tell new stories.
Mykonos vase (Archaeological Museum of Mykonos, Inv. 2240). Decorated pithos found at Mykonos, Greece depicting one of the earliest known renditions of the Trojan Horse[/caption]
Homer and Trojan War Narratives
The relationship between the later narratives of the Star Wars universe and the original trilogy has made me think a lot about the relationship between the Iliad and the Odyssey and Trojan War narratives. This analogy fails at a certain point because the Homeric epics likely had many different versions of their own narratives and were engaged with and responding to epic performance of all kinds (and not just Trojan War and heroic poems). But the main point I take with me is the willingness of audiences to engage in the expansion of narrative worlds and how narratives in the expanded Trojan War universe change based on new genres and new audiences.
One of the things I regularly emphasize about the limits of our own ability to understand ancient epic because we know so little about what ancient audiences knew or how they experienced epic. Think here of the difference between someone like me for whom Star Wars was canonical and my children who love Grogu and have always known who Luke Skywalker’s father was. They don’t labor under the same aesthetic weight either: they do not judge Phantom Menace by the standard of Star Wars because they don’t remember a time before when these films did not co-exist. The difference between the expanded Star Wars universe material and the second trilogy is that between inhabiting/exploring a world and concretizing/freezing it.
When it comes to the cultural position of the Homeric epics, we make the mistake of assuming the Iliad and the Odyssey always had the same monumental status as they gained by the end of the 5th century BCE. I have had exchanges recently with the Assyriologist Seth Sanders who has been somewhat perplexed by Classicists’ tendency to see “cycles” in ancient near eastern literature. He has remarked on how the development of fixed–or ‘charismatic texts’–occludes the varied and continuing nature of oral traditions and living narrative mythscapes. As a comparison, he points out the possibility that some texts from the Hebrew bible were transmitted as “monuments”. In calling it this, he notes he is adapting the art historian Alous Reigl’s notion of monumentality as a dialogic dynamic between a cultural artifact and an audience for whom that object defines something of their community’s past or authoritative identity.
The impulse to tell the whole story is a feature of post-canonization. Audiences yearned for more Star Wars and eventually got them. But the narrative satiety that resulted was disappointing until the limits set by the canon could be exceeded. As the Iliad and the Odyssey became canon, the Trojan War mythscape moved to another genre with different boundaries (tragedy) and different narrative traditions. There was no cycle telling the later tale until scholars of a post-canonized period felt the need for it.
The Fictive Epic Cycle
Imagine a future scholar of narrative, say in 3023, trying to make sense of the Star Wars universe. The collapse of time might very well lead them to believe that the nine movies of three trilogies were always part of an authoritative cycle. But the content and contemporary responses to the later movies would likely perplex them. The collection of stories about the Trojan War are from a much longer period in time than the mere forty years that spans the release of the Star Wars movies. We know less about the alleged poems origins than we do about their contents, but they are not centered in the same cultural space and time.
But to step back for a moment: what is the epic cycle? The ‘Epic Cycle’ most often refers to the Trojan War poems recorded by Proclus (2nd or 4th Century ce) in his Chrestomathia (appended to the Venetus A manuscript; 10th Century ce, Codex Marcianus Graecus 822) and summarized by the later Photius (9th Century ce, Patriarch). The limited fragments of these poems are conventionally dated to the 7th through 6th centuries bce. The phrase Epic Cycle refers both to the mythical events spanning from creation to the end of the race of heroes and in the same way as Proclus, in isolating a specific group of poems that tell the story of the Trojan War. There are many similarities between Proclus’ summary and the work of the mythographer Apollodorus; but there is not a one-to-one correspondence between the events of the Trojan War myths and the poems of the cycle.
Rudolf Pfeiffer suggested that kuklos meant everything that was composed by Homer, everything that was attributed to a heroic world set in the story of the Trojan War. Gregory Nagy suggests that there’s some relationship between the etymology of the name Homeros as “one who fits things together” and that the kuklos points to the whole. Marco Fantuzzi and Christos Tsagalis expand on this idea in their introduction to their 2015 handbook by suggesting that the term is “historically ambiguous” referring to the entirety of the sky, a ring composition, or anything that repeats and returns.
The dual notion of totality and repetition, I think, makes the or a kuklos an attractive concept but an impossibility in actuality. It is both a metonym and a metaphor. This reading works well if we consider kuklos as indicating potential entirety or completion rather than an actual one. In the world of performance, the terms kuklos and Homeros may rightly become signals of authority: to be Homeros is to be a singer who has the skills to bring the potential of the kuklos into reality; to assert that a story or song is part of the kuklos is to authorize it ex post facto as part of the tradition. It is both a nodding to a canon and an alteration of it.
I am only partly convinced that kuklos functioned in this way in performance traditions in Greece; I am certain, however, that it became something completely different in the hands of literate and literary scholars. There is a wider discussion of kuklika poems and kuklikoi poets among Hellenistic scholars (starting with Aristarchus of Samothrace, 3rd-2nd Centuries bce). But evidence for both the term kuklos and the practice of separating the kuklikoi poems from the Iliad and the Odyssey is often traced back to Aristotle who makes a few enigmatic references to Kuklos poetry (Elench. 171a10 7-11) and who also distinguishes Homeric epics from other poems by other poets based on assessments of quality (Poetics 1459a37). The poems (and poets) who appear in these scholarly traditions, however, do not align with Proclus’ summary. Scholars have explained this away by saying there were other cycles, e.g., those around Thebes, Herakles, or other topics.
Here is my summary of the principles to keep in mind.
There is no evidence of a series of epic poems that told the whole story of the Trojan War from the same performance tradition and period of the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey
All of our evidence comes from Aristotle and later. The evidence is from literary scholars treating the Iliad and the Odyssey as texts.
There is evidence of long narrative poems about other traditions (e.g. Thebais)
Our emphasis on the Epic Cycle is skewed by the gravity of Homer: We have more extensive fragments from Panyassis and Aristeas than we have for anything from the epic cycle
There is significant evidence of Trojan War narratives in other genres: lyric, elegiac, iconographic contemporaneous to or even prior to the epics we possess
The Epic Cycle is an initial creation of Hellenistic scholars trying to provide narrative and aesthetic frameworks for the Iliad and the Odyssey. This initial creation has been concretized by subsequent Classical scholarship, a process intensified by some of the scholarship of the past decade.
The positivistic assumption of the epic cycle as a stable set of texts and plots reasserts textual and literary aesthetics on a system that was much more fluid and dynamic (leading to a range of interpretive problems)
And, from this, a secondary list of things we can say about the epic cycle:
Everything we know about the epic cycle is subordinate to the Iliad and the Odyssey as canonized, monumentalized epics.
This subordination occurred either as part of trying to tell the whole story of The Trojan War or as evidence of the aesthetic superiority of the Iliad and the Odyssey
The fragments and their summaries were selected to facilitate point #2 and are likely secondary or tertiary selections rather than excerpts taken from whole poems at the hands of Hellenistic editors.
The privileging of Trojan War narratives as part of these efforts has suppressed the extent and importance of non-Trojan War epics: e.g. Thebais, Oedipodea, Heraklea
There are many moments while watching a show like Andor that invite audiences to think about its relationship to various narrative authorities–to the shape of the empire in the original trilogy to the future events of Rogue One. But it succeeds in part because its narrative is different enough. Successful expansions of narrative universes allow traditional narratives to respond to contemporary concerns, the way that Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos turns an ancient myth to an opportunity to reflect on plague and politics in contemporary Athens. Authoritative narratives exert a special gravity on their audiences; but audiences push back too: they make these stories into vehicles for their own lives. When the stories become too inflexible, they adapt them or make new ones.
The expanding Star wars universe allows this now too, and sometimes with discomfort. One of the subplots of Mandalorian Season 3 troubled me: the presentation of the New Republic’s amnesty program and the betrayal of Dr. Pershing by Elia Kane suggests that while the attempts of the New Republic to be progressive and inclusive are more just than the fascism of the Empire (and its descendants), they remain coercive and subject to the baser impulses of human nature.
This ‘both-sides’ approach to the struggle against fascism in an imaginary universe is a reflex of our own contemporary experiences and conversations. Such a thematic reflection would likely be lost on future audiences as they treat the Star Wars narratives as part of a canonized cycle of tales. In much the same way, Trojan War stories developed in particular times and places, in responses to their audience’s experiences and needs. Subsequent scholars imposed an order and created a systemized series of tales that never truly existed, to respond to their own needs for stability and closure.
Some things cited and some things to read
Alwine, A. T., ‘‘The Non-Homeric Cyclops in the Homeric Odyssey’’, GRBS 49 (2009) 323-333.
Arft, J., and J. M. Foley. 2015. “The Epic Cycle and Oral Tradition.” In Fantuzzi and Tsagalis, 78–95.
Barker, E.T.E. 2008. “ ‘Momos Advises Zeus’: The Changing Representations of Cypria Fragment One.” In Greece, Rome and the Near East, ed. E. Cingano and L. Milano, 33–73. Padova.
Barker, E. T. E., and J. P. Christensen. 2006. “Flight Club: The New Archilochus
Fragment and its Resonance with Homeric Epic.” Materiali e Discussioni per l’Analisi dei Testi Classici 57:19–43.
———. 2008. “Oedipus of Many Pains: Strategies of Contest in Homeric Poetry.”
Malcolm Davies. The Greek Epic Cycle. London: Bristol, 1989.
Fantuzzi, M., and C. Tsagalis, eds. 2014. The Greek Epic Cycle and its Ancient Reception: A Companion. Cambridge.
Margalit Finkelberg. The Cypria, the Iliad, and the Problem of Multiformity in Oral and Written Tradition, ‹‹CP›› 95, 2000, pp. 1-11.
Lulli, L. 2014. “Local Epics and Epic Cycles: The Anomalous Case of a Submerged Genre.” In Submerged Literature in Ancient Greek Culture, ed. G. Colesanti and Giordano, 76–90. Berlin and Boston.
L. Huxley. Greek Epic Poetry from Eumelos to Panyassis, Cambridge 1969.
Richard Martin. Telemachus and the Last Hero Song, ‹‹Colby Quarterly›› 29, 1993, pp. 222-240.
Jasper Griffin. “The epic cycle and the uniqueness of Homer.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 97 (1977) 39-53.
Ingrid Holmberg “The Creation of the Ancient Greek Epic Cycle”
Malkin, I., The Returns of Odysseus: Colonization and Ethnicity, Berkeley 1998.
Marks, J., ‘‘Alternative Odysseys: The Case of Thoas and Odysseus’’, TAPhA 133.2 (2003) 209-226.
Gregory Nagy. The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek poetry. Baltimore 1999.
Nagy, G., “Oral Traditions, Written Texts, and Questions of Authorship”, in: M. Fantuzzi / C. Tsagalis (eds.), Cambridge Companion to the Greek Epic Cycle, Cambridge 2015, 59-77.
Nelson, T. J., ‘‘Intertextual Agōnes in Archaic Greek Epic: Penelope vs. the Catalogue of Women’’, YAGE 5.1 (2021) 25-57.
Rutherford, I., “The Catalogue of Women within the Greek Epic Tradition: Allusion, Intertextuality and Traditional Referentiality”, in: O. Anderson / D. T. T. Haug (eds.), Relative Chronology of Early Greek Epic Poetry, Cambridge 2012, 152-167.
Albert Severyns. Le cycle épique dans l’école d’Aristarque. Paris: Les Belles Lettres 1928.
Albert Severyns. Recherches sur la Chrestomathie de Proclos. Paris: Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres, Liége, 1938.
Giampiero Scafoglio. La questione ciclica, ‹‹RPh››78, 2004, pp. 289-310.
Laura Slatkin. The Power of Thetis: Allusion and Interpretation in the Iliad. Berkeley 1991.
Michael Squire. The Iliad in a Nutshell: Visualizing Epic on the Tabulae Iliacae. Oxford: 2011.
Tsagalis, C., Early Greek Epic Fragments I: Antiquarian and Genealogical Epic, Berlin / Boston 2017.
Marco Fantuzzi and Christos Tsagalis. “Introduction: Kyklos, Epic Cycle, and Cyclic Poetry.” In M. Fantuzzi and C. Tsagalis (eds.). ACompanion to the Greek Epic Cycle and Its Fortune in the Ancient World. (Brill, 2014).
Martin L. West. The Epic Cycle: A Commentary on the Lost Troy Epics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Hephaistos Polishing Achilles’ Shield – THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES. Caskey-Beazley, Attic Vase Paintings (MFA), no. 082.[/caption]
This post provides a series of ancient texts that reflect on Helen and the Trojan War in different ways.
Part of the Iliad’s engagement with the broader mythological tradition of the Trojan War is the way it positions and characterizes Helen. She first shows up in book three and steals the show:
Homer, Iliad 3.146-160
The men who were near Priam, Panthoos, Thymoites Lampos, Klutios, and Hiketaôn, the descendent of Ares, Were Oukalegôn and Antênôr, two intelligent men. The council of elders sat there on the Skaian gates Slowed by old age, but still fine public speakers Something like cicadas who sit on the leaf Of a tree trailing along their lily-thin voices. When they saw Helen approaching the wall, They addressed each other with winged words:
“There’s no reason to criticize the Trojans and well-greaved Achaeans For suffering pain for so long for this woman. She has the terrible appearance of the immortal goddesses. But, even though she is like this, let her return in the ships, To prevent more pain from being left for our children.”
They also destroyed the famous, blessed, large city of Priam after leaving from Argos thanks to the plans of Zeus, taking on the much-sung strife for the beauty of fair Helen in that mournful war; Destruction climbed the ruined city because of golden-haired Aphrodite.
Now, I don’t long to sing of host-deceiving Paris or tender-ankled Kassandra, or the rest of the children of Priam and the nameless day of the sacking of high-gated Troy, Nor yet the overreaching virtue of heroes whom the hollow, many-banched ships brought as the destruction of Troy.
Fine heroes and Agememnon was their leader, a king from Pleisthenes, a son of Atreus, a noble father.
The learned Muses of Helicon might take up these tales well; but no mortal man, unblessed, could number each of the ships Menelaos led across the Aegean sea from Aulos, from Argos they came, the bronze-speared sons of the Achaeans…”
But there are several other traditions that provide a more complex context for Helen’s behavior. One of them attributes the misdeeds of Helen and her sisters to their father:
Schol. Ad Euripides’ Orestes 249
“Stesichorus says that when Tyndareus was sacrificing to the gods he overlooked Aphrodite. For this reason, the angry goddess made his daughters thrice and twice married deserters of husbands. The segment reads like this:
“Because when Tyndareus was sacrificing to all the gods He neglected only the gentle-giving Kyprian She was enraged and she made the daughters of Tyndareus Twice and thrice married deserters of husbands.”
A fragment of Hesiod agrees with this (fr. 176):
“Smile-loving Aphrodite Was enraged when she saw them: then she hung bad fame upon them. After that, Timandra abandoned Ekhemos and left; She went to Phyleus who was dear to the holy gods. And so Klytemnestra abandoned shining Agamemnon To lie alongside Aigisthos as she chose a lesser husband; In the same way, Helen shamed the marriage-bed of fair Menelaos…”
This passage provides an explanation for why the daughters of Tyndareus—Helen and Klytemnestra—were unfaithful: it was Aphrodite’s game from the beginning because their father did not worship her correctly. A few interesting aspects here: first, Helen is “thrice-married” because after Paris dies, she marries Deiphobus (although some accounts associate her with Theseus too). Second, Hesiod’s fragmentary poems seems to be in the process of cataloging women who leave their husbands.
The first woman in the tale is Timandra, who, according to only this passage, was a third daughter of Tyndareus who left her husband Ekhemos, a king of Arcadia. They had a son together, named Leodocus before she eloped with Phyleus. In another fragment from Hesiod (fr. 23) we learn more about the family of Tyndareus and Leda:
“After climbing into the lush bed of Tyndareus Well-tressed Leda, as fair as the rays of the moon, Gave birth to Timandra, cow-eyed Klytemnestra, And Phylonoe whose body was most like the immortal goddesses. Her…the arrow bearing goddess Made immortal and ageless for all days.”
Later on in the same fragment –after hearing about the marriage and children of Klytemnestra—we learn about Timandra:
“Ekhemos made Timandra his blooming wife, The man who was the lord of all Tegea and Arcadia, wealthy in sheep, A rich man who was dear to the gods. She bore to him Laodakos, the horse-taming shepherd of the host, After she was subdued by golden Aphrodite.”
This section of the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women seems to be mentioning only Leda’s children with Tyndareus and not those possibly fathered by Zeus (Helen, Kastor, Polydeukes). But we hear nothing of the future of Leda’s attractive daughter Phylonoe (also spelled Philonoe) other than that Artemis made her immortal.
But one of the earlier and more creative responses about the whole affair was a “shaggy” defense: it wasn’t her! It was someone who looked like her (Stesichorus)
“This is not the true tale: You never went in the well-benched ships You did not go to the towers of Troy… [It is a fault in Homer that He put Helen in Troy And not her image only; It is a fault in Hesiod In another: there are two, differing Recantations and this is the beginning. Come here, dance loving goddess; Golden-winged, maiden, As Khamaileôn put it. Stesichorus himself says that an image [eidolon] went to troy and that Helen stayed back with Prôteus…”
Herodotus tells this story too as part of a rhetorical tradition that practiced debating whether or not Helen was at fault. Here are two excerpts from this practice:
Isocrates, Helen 1-3
“There are some people who get puffed up if they manage to talk about something tolerably after they have themselves selected a strange and impossible subject. Men have also grown old claiming that it is impossible to say or disprove a lie or to speak two ways about the same matters. Others claim that courage, wisdom, and justice are the same thing, that we have none of these by nature, and that there is a single knowledge about them all. Others waste their time in conflicts which bring no benefit, which can only create more trouble for those who approach them.
I, if I saw that this superfluity had only just emerged in speeches and that these men were eager for honor in the novelty of what they discover, I would not be a surprised at them. But, now, who is such a late-learner that he does not know Protagoras and the sophists who were active at his time and that they left to us these types of things and speeches even more excessively composed than these? How could anyone overcome Gorgias who dared to say that nothing exists at all or Zeno who tried to demonstrate that the same things are possible and impossible or even Melissos who—although some things are countless in number—tried to provide a proof that everything is one!”
“Kosmos for a city is a good-population; for a body it is beauty; for a soul, wisdom. For a deed, excellence; and for a word, truth. The opposition of these things would be akosmia. It is right, on the one hand, to honor a man and a woman and a deed and a city and a deed worthy of praise with praise and to lay reproach on the unworthy. For it is equally mistaken and ignorant to rebuke the praiseworthy and praise things worthy of rebuke.
It is thus necessary for the same man to speak truly and refute those who reproach Helen, a woman about whom the belief from what the poets say and the fame of her name are univocal and single-minded, that memory of sufferings. I want, by giving some reckoning in speech, to relieve her of being badly spoken, and, once I demonstrate and show that those who reproach her are liars, to protect the truth from ignorance”
The debate about Helen’s character proceeded in part through etymology. Inn a choral ode from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, we find a folk etymology implied for Helen’s name. Where I have translated “killer”, the Greek has versions of the aorist of αἵρεω (εἶλον) which, without its augment looks like the beginning of Helen’s name (ἑλ-).
Aeschylus, Agamemnon 684-696
“Whoever pronounced a name So thoroughly true? Wasn’t it someone we’d not see Guiding the tongue with luck From a foreknowledge of fate? Who named the spear-bride, Struggled-over woman Helen? For, appropriately, That ship-killer [hele-nas], man-killer [hel-andros] City-killer [hele-ptolis], sailed From her fine-spun, curtains On the breath of great Zephyr and many-manned bands Of shield-bearers followed The vanished journey struck By the oars to the banks Of leafy Simois For a bloody strife.”
MET 56.171.18 black-figure amphora with Menelaos reclaiming Helen. c. 540 BCE
Ancient etymologies do not follow this Aeschylean play.
Etym. Gudianum
“Helenê. From attracting [helkein] many to her beauty. Or it is from helô, helkuô, she is the one who drags young men to her personal beauty. Or it comes from Hellas [Greece]. Or it comes from being born on the ground [helos].”
“Helenê: A heroine. From helô,helkuô, she is the one who drags young men to her personal beauty. Or it comes from Hellas [Greece]. Or it comes from being born on the ground [helos]. Or because she was thrown in a marshy [helôdei] place by Tyndareus once she obtained some divine prescience and she was taken back up by Leda. Helenê was named from pity [heleos].”
Modern linguistics show that Helen’s name is just really hard to figure out.
In Lakonia, Helen was original spelled with a digamma. (And this may have extended to Corinth and Chalcidice too Cf. R. Wachter Non-Attic Vase Inscriptions 2001, §251).
74 Von Kamptz 1958, 136 suggests that her name is a “cognate of σέλας” to evoke a sense of “shining”, as in her beauty. Cf. Kanavou 2015, 72
Vedic Saranyu: Skutsch 1987, 189; Puhvel 1987, 141–143 (The initial breathing in Greek often points to a lost initial *s but the digamma in certain dialects confuses this) The Vedic name means swift. The PIE root suggested here is *suel-.
Helen has variously been suggested as coming from a vegetation goddess (see Helena Dendritis, Paus. 3.19.9–10; Herodotus 6.61; cf. Skutsch 1987) or a goddess of light.
Helen ‘appears’ for the first time in the Iliad in book 3. What does she look like?
A few years ago, there was a bit of a to-do about the ethnicity of Homeric heroes. While some sketchy applications of DNA testing are eager to establish continuity between the people of antiquity and modern populations, others rightly argue that so many of our ideas about race, color, and identity have little to do with the ancient world and everything to do with our own. (See also the discussion on Pharos.)
But questions about DNA and color concepts are separate issues from myth and epic. Sure, the images and values of the ‘real’ world shape fantasy, but there is no direct accord cross-culturally between what people look like and how they imagine their heroes. Consider, e.g., the over-representation of blonde characters in American media in comparison to actual culture or the difference in skin tones in Bollywood from the general population. Racism and colorism shape representation, rendering the reality of genetics and appearance less important than the grammar of idealized bodies.
How did the Greeks imagine their heroes? This is nearly unsolvable because who the Greeks are and what their heroes do for them changes by time and location. We can start, though by looking at some of the language. Greek poetry describes Helen as xanthê and kuanopis. An insensitive and simplistic reading of these facts might claim that she was “blonde” with “blue eyes”. Not only is the situation far more interesting and complicated than this, but I am pretty sure that even if we accept these two words as applying to Helen they would not be equivalent to the appearance these two terms denote in modern English.
Let’s start with the barest fact. What Helen actually looks like is never stated in Homer. When the Trojans look at her, they say she has the “terrible appearance of goddesses” (αἰνῶς ἀθανάτῃσι θεῇς εἰς ὦπα ἔοικεν). This, of course, is not terribly specific.
Elsewhere, she is “argive Helen, for whom many Achaeans [struggled]” (᾿Αργείην ῾Ελένην, ἧς εἵνεκα πολλοὶ ᾿Αχαιῶν, Il. 2.161) she has “smooth” or “pale/white” arms (῏Ιρις δ’ αὖθ’ ῾Ελένῃ λευκωλένῳ ἄγγελος ἦλθεν, 3.121), but this likely has to do with a typical depiction of women in Archaic Greece (they are lighter in tone than men because they don’t work outside) or because of women’s clothing (arms may have been visible). Beyond that? In the Odyssey, she has “beautiful hair” (῾Ελένης πάρα καλλικόμοιο, 15.58) and a long robe (τανύπεπλος, 4.305).
Black-figure Belly Amphora with the Reclamation of Helen and Herakles and Kerberos. c 540 BCE; Walters Art Museum
If anyone is looking for a hint of the ideal of beauty from the legend who launched a thousand ships, they will be sorely disappointed. Why? I think the answer to this partly has to do with the nature of Homeric poetry and with good art in general. Homeric poetry developed over a long duration of time and appealed to many different peoples. To over-determine Helen’s beauty by describing it would necessarily adhere to some standards of beauty while alienating others.
In addition, why describe her beauty at all when the audience members themselves can craft an ideal in their mind? As a student of mine said while I mused over this, Helen “cannot have descriptors because she is a floating signifier”. She is a blank symbol for desire upon which all audience members (ancient and modern, male and female) project their own (often ambiguous) notions of beauty. To stay with the ancient world, think of that seminal first stanza in Sappho fr. 16:
Some say a force of horsemen, some say infantry and others say a fleet of ships is the loveliest thing on the dark earth, but I say it is [whatever] you love
As long as beauty is relative and in the eye of the beholder, any time we disambiguate it by saying that it is one thing and not another we depart from an abstract timeless idea and create something more bounded and less open to audience engagement. I think that part of what makes Homeric poetry work so well is that it combines a maximum amount of specificity within a maximized amount of ambiguity.
Outside of Homer, Helen is described with a little more detail, but in each case the significance of the signifier is less than it appears. In Hesiod, she has nice hair again (῾Ελένης ἕνεκ’ ἠυκόμοιο, Works and Days 165; this is repeated a lot in the fragmentary Hesiodic Catalogue). In fr. 9 of the Cypria she is merely a “Wonder for mortals” (θαῦμα βροτοῖσι·). Much later she has “spiraling eyebrows/lashes” (῾Ελένης ἑλικοβλεφάροιο, Quintus Smyrnaeus, 13.470). (N.b. there is a scholion glossing heliko- as “dark-eyed” when it is used in the Iliad).
If we want to learn more about Helen, she has additional features outside of epic poetry in lyric. I would be bold enough to claim that the more personal and erotic character of the genre is a better explanation for this specificity than anything else.
In lyric (e.g. Mesomedes, κυανῶπι θεά, θύγατερ Δίκας,) Helen is “cyan-eyed”, but if we look at the semantic range of this nominal root—which describes dark stones and eyes of water divinities—I think we can argue fairly that this indicates a dark and shiny, even watery texture (like lapis lazuli). I suspect this is about the sheen of eyes rather than their hue.
Eustathius remarks that the epithet κυανώπιδα is common (κατὰ κοινὸν ἐπίθετον) and is often used for dark sea creatures, describing as well his hair (Ποσειδῶνα κυανοχαίτην, Ad Hom. Il 1.555.23). Indeed, nymphs in general are “dark-eyed” in lyric (καὶ Νύμφαι κυανώπιδες, Anacr. fr. 12.2) and water deities remain so in Homer (κῦμα μέγα ῥοχθεῖ κυανώπιδος ᾿Αμφιτρίτης, Il. 12.60). Outside of Homer marriageable women also receive this epithet, including Helen’s sister Klytemnestra (Hes. Fr. 23a κού[ρην Τυνδαρέοιο Κλυταιμήσ]τρην κυανῶπ[ιν· cf. fr. 23.27 and for Althaia, 25.14, Elektra (169).
From Robert Beekes. Etymological Dictionary of Greek. Leiden: Brill, 2010
So, in lyric, Helen has dark pools for eyes. But what about her hair? At Sappho fr. 23 Helen is described as “xanthai” ([ ] ξάνθαι δ’ ᾿Ελέναι σ’ ἐίσ[κ]ην; cf. Stesichorus Fr. S103: [ξ]α̣νθὰ δ’ ῾Ελένα̣ π̣ρ[ ; Ibycus, fr. 1a.5: ξα]νθᾶς ῾Ελένας περὶ εἴδει ). But it is important to note that in this context there is a first-person narrator speaking (“I liken you to fair Helen…”). Note as well that there is something formulaic in these lyric lines: the epithet seems to begin the phrase each time.
When it comes to Hair color, xanthus is used in Homer to describe heroes, but not Helen (Menelaos is Xanthus, for example). A byzantine etymological dictionary suggests that the core meaning of this root has something to do with fire (Ξανθὴν, πυῤῥοειδῆ) and argues that the hair “symbolizes the heat and irascibility of the hero” (αἰνίττεται, τὸ θερμὸν καὶ ὀργίλον τοῦ ἥρωος, Etym. Gud, s.v.). But outside the Iliad and Odyssey the adjective is applied to goddesses: both Demeter (H. Dem. 302) and Aphrodite (Soph. fr. 255) are called Xanthê. Modern etymology sees this as anywhere from yellow to brown. But this is altogether relative again. “Light hair” in a group of people who are blond is almost white; among black/brown haired people, light hair can merely be a different shade of brown.
Again, from Beekes 2010:
In the second book of Liu Cixin’s “Three Body Problem Trilogy” The Dark Forest, one of the main characters Luo Ji creates an ideal woman to love in his mind and goes so far as to converse with her, to leave his actual girlfriend for her, and then to go on a trip with her. When he consults a psychologist about this, his doctor tells him his is lucky because everyone is in love with an idea–where the rest of the world will inevitably be disillusioned when they realize this, Luo Ji will never suffer this loss.
Trying to make Helen look like an actual person is not only impossible, but it is something which Homeric epic avoids for good reason.
My general argument in an earlier post, emphasizing that we need to understand the Homeric epics as objects that exist through time and different layers of reception only goes so far in helping current readers and teachers grapple with Homeric epic. Indeed, acknowledging that different audiences meaningfully engaged with the Homeric epics in very different modes does little to help first time readers make their way into the poems. A fear years ago, I posted somewhat problematic essays on how not to read Homer and on reading Homer. Those comments are somewhat more polemical and aimed at a particular cultural stance. Here, I hope to provide (1) more practical advice, followed by (2) some limited justification for that advice, before closing with (3) some recommendations for introductions to Homeric epic.
Some Practical Advice
Prepare by reading something else: Ancient audiences grew up with the names of heroes and the basic plots in their minds. Modern audiences who are less familiar with the characters, the pantheon, and their narrative traditions are at a bit of a loss. Try preparing by reading something else first, like an overview or one of Gareth Hinds’ graphic novels first. Don’t read epic as if it is a modern novel full of twists and surprises. Read it like you’re attending a new Spiderman film and you have seen earlier reboots and maybe read the comic book once as a kid.
Follow a ‘rule of three’: Epic is full of place names, people, and stories that show up once or twice. Some of these references are subtle intertexts; others are about vibes or flavor. Very few are really necessary to understand the overall tale. So, even given the work done on #1, don’t sweat all the details on your first or even second reading. If a name or idea does not come up at least three times, don’t worry about it. This doesn’t mean it isn’t important, it just means that it is less important than the others.
Focus on the story being told: These details aren’t insignificant, but they can distract from the major plot. Remember that the Iliad is not the Trojan War: there’s no Trojan Horse, there’s no judgment of Paris; Achilles doesn’t even die. When people come to Homer expecting the whole story, they are confused or disappointed. In fact, it may almost be better to know less than more when starting the epic for the first time. While there are nearly endless references to and echoes of characters, events, and stories that are not in the Iliad and recognizing such references may enhance one’s enjoyment of epic over time, the story in its telling can appeal to multiple audiences simultaneously. The way I explain it is this: someone with little knowledge of baseball or American football can enjoy the competition, provided they know the basic rules. A home-run or a hail-Mary are no more or less majestic and exciting if you know advanced statistics and the history of the game. Allow epic’s game to unfold, and if you return to it again, bring some new understanding each time.
Court anachronism: it is certainly the case that Homeric characters are not “just like us”; but, by the same token, modern comic book characters are not like us either. The enduring power of epic resides in its ability to function as a vehicle for audiences with very different experiences and worldviews.
Don’t Read Homer Alone! Accept polysemy: Once you have started to do #4, also acknowledge that this might not be enough: test your responses against other peoples’ responses (both your peers and contemporaries and people over time). Many authors will gladly remind you of how brutal, savage, and different the Homeric heroes (and their anticipated audiences) are. Don’t ignore this, but don’t be shackled by it either. Any work of art that exists through time requires you to move around it, to look at it from different angles, to ask what other people think of it, and to weigh your responses against those from different times.
Code Switch: Learn enough about Homeric aesthetics to understand where they matter: The epics we have are assuredly ‘oral-derived’ and they were performed in front of audiences in their earliest periods. “Aesthetics”, or the set of cultural assumptions about style, form, and value that inform interpretation and judgment, vary from culture to culture and over time. Homeric language developed over time in concert with its rhythmic shapes. Rather than be concerned with individual words, good interpretation of Homer looks at partial lines, phrases, and their adaptation (and in this there is likely more common with music than what we think of as poetry). In general, Homeric poetry tends to have more repetition than a modern author would be comfortable with; it also tends to be additive (paratactic) because it unfolds in real time and performance, giving the (deceptive) appearance of simplicity. This does not mean that the repetition is meaningless or mechanical. One of my favorite takes on this belongs to John Miles Foley who argues that oral poetry works like any other language, just more so!
Learn about Metonymy: Metonymy is often paired with metaphor; the latter is figurative language that says something is something else; the former, metonymy, uses a part of a thing to evoke the whole. The very nature of epic is metonymic: the Iliad evokes the themes and motifs of a vastly larger and expanding story-scape of nearly 20 years (and countless characters) through something like 58 days. This structural relationship should be understood as operative the parts of each epic as well.
Because of its existence through and over time and its adaptive, generative nature, Homeric language and narrative are filled with potential meaning. A single word or sequence of words can invoke entire story-traditions. Never assume, as I once did, that a simple simile (e.g. Hektor went forth like a snowy mountain) is just waiting to be extended or elaborated. Instead, imagine that the complex story was there first and then compressed. Epic, as made clear from the comparative studies of Milman Parry and Albert Lord, advances itself through expansion or contraction (suppression) of various themes and motifs).
When in doubt, read more Homer: In line with the ancient practice of “clarifying Homer through Homer”, many Homeric ‘problems’ can be resolved by looking at the practices within Homer, not adducing information from outside the epics. If things are really knotty, Homeric scholarship is deep and wide and chances are someone else has encountered the same problem you have.
Some Explanations/Justifications
Homer’s Early Audiences Engaged with Homer repeatedly, but rarely completely:
The more I think about it and the more I have learned over time, I am convinced that a majority of audiences prior to the Hellenistic period experienced Homeric epic episodically and rarely in full, ‘monumental’ performances. After the Hellenistic period, I think that most engagements in writing would have been with popular passages mined for rhetorical examples and equally rare in full readings of the epic from beginning to end. For me, this distinction between ancient and modern practices suggests that we should modify our approach to reading Homer to include both sampling of famous passages and iteration/repetition. In addition, the origin of the Homeric epic in performance contexts recommends a form of reading that includes other people as part of the interpretive process. Homeric poetry developed within communities of performers and audiences and to this day relies on a community of readers to return them to life.
Ancient Scholarly Practice was to Make Sense of Homer Through Homer
Ancient scholarly practice commends a practice of iterative re-reading epic. Since Homeric poetry was–and is–somewhat sui generis, questions of style and content can be best answered only with reference to the epics itself. Below I have marshaled a few quotations on the practice of “clarifying Homer through Homer”. Note, this practice of interpreting a text within its own terms through its own guidance became a foundational custom of Classical and Biblical philology (see, for example Martin Luther’s scriptura sui ipsius interpres [“scripture is its own interpreter”])
D Scholia to the Iliad (5.385)
“Aristarchus believed it best to make sense of those things that were presented more fantastically by Homer according to the poet’s authority, that we not be overwhelmed by anything outside of the things presented by Homer.”
“Since often in our conversations with one another about Homeric questions, when I try to show you that Homer interprets himself for the most part, and we consider from every angle in most instances based on our training more than [simply] knowing what he says, you have considered it right that I write up the things we have said rather than allow them to fall aside and disappear because we’ve forgotten them.”
“Because I think it best to make sense of Homer through Homer, I usually show by example how he may interpret himself, sometimes in juxtaposition, sometimes in other ways.”
This practice of analyzing Homer is multilayered as well; in keeping with Homeric poetry’s metonymic self-generation, its additive character and a scaffolding of shared characteristics from the level of the word all the way to the level of structure, the Iliad and the Odyssey in their entirety are assumed to be responsive to similar approaches. Indeed, Hellenistic scholars conceived of a scaffolded interpretive process
Dionysius Thrax, Ars Grammatica 1
“The art of grammar is the experience-derived knowledge of how things are said, for the most part, by poets and prose authors. It has six components. First, reading out loud and by meter; second, interpretation according to customary compositional practice; third, a helpful translation of words and their meanings; fourth, an investigation of etymology; fifth, a categorization of morphologies; and sixth—which is the most beautiful portion of the art—the critical judgment of the compositions.”
Regardless of the period of its reception, Homeric poetry is aesthetically different from our own, but it guides us on its use
Homeric poetry is a language that developed from multiple dialects, selecting for morphologies and syntax over time to create a dynamic and flexible language. The rhythmic shape of the dactylic hexameter line is a natural part of the Homeric dialect, but not in the sense of functioning as a rigid or restrictive form. As part of the song culture of ancient Greece, Homeric poetry was (and is) capable of conveying a full range of ideas and emotions like any other language. The one thing I would add to the “clarify Homer through Homer” sentiment above works best if we understand Homer as part of a much larger song culture that includes all poetry from ancient Greece.
As I note above, familiarity with ancient Greek poetry in general will help modern readers understand the structure and narrative flow of Greek epic. It accommodates, if not relies upon, repetitions and builds larger patterns out of doublets, rings, rising tricola (three-part statements with emphasis on the final) and more.
Moving from epic to lyric and back again also helps us to see that Homeric epic is structured around devices that invite comparison from ‘outside the frame’ to inside. Consider speeches, omens, and similes. Each one of these devices that together make up the majority of the Iliad, has an opening (a speech introduction, a ‘like this, so that’ or something like it) and a closing statement around content that needs to be understood within the framework provided. So, speech introductions and conclusions give us information about how to understand the nature of the speech framed, while omen scenes (see especially Odysseus description of the omen in book 2 [Iliad 2.299–330 ] the debate in book 12 [12.199–257] over the omen of the snake and the eagle at the Greek wall) demonstrate debate over interpretation and similes demarcate boundaries between the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’ that nevertheless invite us to collapse the two to make meaning.
It is my contention that Homeric poetry models and trains audiences on methods of interpretation, prizing judgment from without over the importance of detail within. This becomes clearest, I think, in moments where Homeric heroes try to use stories from their past to persuade their interlocutors. They make equivalences between the narratives they present and the actions around them that anticipate or echo similar moves made by external audiences. Phoinix makes this explicit when he speaks to Achilles in book 9 (see below, c) and Achilles himself acknowledges that his quarrel with Agamemnon will be an object of memory for years to come (below, b). But most importantly of all, when the epic asks its audiences to look outside of itself in book 18 at the cities on the shield Hephaestus makes for Achilles, the prize offered is for those who judge a quarrel most correctly.
In future posts, I will return to these questions again, particularly when assembling some notes on books 9, 18, and 19.
a. Phoinix Prefaces his tale of Meleager, 9.524–526: This is the way we have learned from famous stories of the men who were before, the heroes, whenever a furious anger overcomes someone. They are amenable to gifts and persuaded by words.” οὕτω καὶ τῶν πρόσθεν ἐπευθόμεθα κλέα ἀνδρῶν / ἡρώων, ὅτε κέν τιν’ ἐπιζάφελος χόλος ἵκοι· / δωρητοί τε πέλοντο παράρρητοί τ’ ἐπέεσσι.
b. Achilles on the Conflict, 19.64–65: “This was better for the Hektor and the Trojans: I think that the Achaeans will remember our strife for a long time.” ῞Εκτορι μὲν καὶ Τρωσὶ τὸ κέρδιον· αὐτὰρ ᾿Αχαιοὺς / δηρὸν ἐμῆς καὶ σῆς ἔριδος μνήσεσθαι ὀΐω,
c. Il. 18. 496–508: “The people where gathered, crowded, in the assembly where a conflict (neîkos) had arisen: two men were striving over the penalty for a man who had been killed; the first one was promising to give everything as he was testifying to the people; but the other was refusing to take anything; and both men longed for a judge to make a decision. The people, partisans on either side, applauded. Then the heralds brought the host together; the elders sat on smooth stones in a sacred circle as they held in their hands the scepters of clear-voiced heralds; each one was leaping to his feet and they pronounced judgments in turn. In the middle there were two talents of gold to give to whoever among them uttered the straightest judgment.”
Some reading recommendations
Elton Barker and I wrote a beginner’s guide to Homer a decade ago, so I am including that in the list. Some other books here are good too!
Bakker, E. J. 1997. Poetry in Speech: Orality and Homeric Discourse. Ithaca.
A great introduction to Homeric language from a linguistic perspective. It is a bit complicated for people who have no experience with epic, but it is a great next step.
Barker, E.T.E and Christensen, J. P. 2013. Homer: A Beginner’s Guide. One world
Elton and I wrote this during a six month period in 2011. It was torrid and crazy and I think it is still a decent text that introduces Homeric language and both epics in a slim volume
Foley, John Miles. 1999. Homer’s Traditional Art. Philadelphia.
It is hard for me to pick one book by Foley. It is a close race between his Immanent Art (1991) and How to Read an Oral Poem (2002) and this book. A great overview of how orality matters to understanding the Homeric epics.
Graziosi, B., and J. Haubold, 2005. Homer: The Resonance of Epic. London.
While not an introduction to Homer, per se, this volume is a great introduction to archaic epic, cosmic history, and the relationship between Homer and Hesiod. Barbara Graziosi also has a very good Homer: A Very Short Introduction(Oxford, 2016)
Nagy, Gregory. 1979/1999. The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek poetry. Baltimore.
This is a book that rewards, if not requires, rereading and introduces the broader mythopoetic world of ancient Greek heroes inside and outside of Homer
Schein, S. 1984. The Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer’s Iliad. Berkeley.
This is one of three books that sealed my fate as a Homerist
Many of us read the Odyssey for the first time because it is part of a certain kind of cultural inheritance in the literary canon. But we remain engaged with it, I think, because the character’s flexibility and adaptability. He is closer to us than some heroes, thanks to his physical vulnerability and his characteristic intelligence (instead of superhuman strength; and he goes through things. His journeys make for easy metaphors for our own; and his ability to persevere has made him an attractive model for philosophers and eventually theologians as well. He is a villain on the tragic stage; a rival in early rhetoric; and a sage by the Roman Empire. The Homeric Odyssey cannot contain everything the hero represents, but it does draw us in, asking the audience to wonder more about what could have happened if this hero’s life had been different in one small way…
Laura Jenkinson-Brown’s You are Odysseus finds new space for telling Odysseus’ story between the static audience engagement of reading and the immersive wandering of Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey. She sets out with a remarkable twist on how we engage with his story: what if we can intervene in some of his decisions? What if we can be author of a part of his tale? This may sound like a great leap from an ancient cliff, but it responds to the spirit of the Odyssey well. At the beginning of the poem, Zeus complains that “Mortals are always blaming us gods for their suffering / when they have suffering beyond their fate because of their recklessness” (1.30-32). His introduction offers a thematic framework that encourages audiences to ask how people make their own lives worse and how, in turn, it might be possible to make them better. You Are Odysseus takes the experience one step further.
I wasn’t surprised to find this book engaging and fun. L. Jenkinson-Brown has been the genius behind GreekMythComix for years, blending a heavy dose of facts with sharp and striking illustrations. As an educator, Jenkinson-Brown has a good sense of how to tell a story herself and makes great use of short, direct statements in often jarring collocations. Consider the effective coverage of the following graphic, which contains at a glance what it might take me a full lecture to convey:
One of the most interesting things about the way Jenkinson-Brown sets this up us that you can choose which character to read as, identifying as someone other than Odysseus. For the majority of us, the story traces the hero’s journey home, starting around the first event of Odysseus’ own story, the conflict between his men and the Cicones (told in Odyssey 9). Each episode is read addressed to the reader, numbered for their sequence in the overarching range of possibilities Jenkinson-Brown has sketched out.
What does choice in the Odyssey look like? Giving too much away would ruin any future experience, but let me give you a few samples. After Odysseus’ raft fails, the narrator gives the reader two choices
It is all too much. You resign yourself to the waves – and obscurity. Go to 143.
You’re not done yet – Zeus has decreed that you will return home! Go to 244.
The exhausted among us who are tempted to give into the sea’s embrace are treated to a few more paragraphs of regrets about Telemachus and Penelope before we’re invited to the epilogue (which contains an invitation to try again). If we choose to swim, we end up on the shore, talking to a sea bird, who may or may not be a god. Part of the fun of enjoying the Odyssey this way is that I know what kind of story to expect, and I find it in different pieces, refracted to me here, and reinvented for me there. But in the background is the Siren call of the story I already know as I search for it.
Another interesting aspect of this way of engaging with the tale is how the narrator can talk about the character’s gaze, thereby directing ours. After Odysseus has made the blood sacrifice to attract the souls of the dead, the reader is told that we start to feel “weak with panic” as our companions turn pale. The panic is punctuated by possible options:
I won’t spoil any surprises here. But if you know the Odyssey, you can guess some of what will happen next. I think it is that act of eliciting guesses though that commends this method of storytelling to me too. We know that ancient audiences were familiar with different details and variations of the big stories from ancient Greece. Some of the excitement from viewing this year’s version of a tragedy or listening to the most recent rhapsodic performance comes from discovering how the regular story would be told; but a certain degree of pleasure comes from suspense over which details of the story this accounting will tell.
Jenkinson-Brown is not shy about integrating other stories from myth, like the tale of the counterfeit Helen that comes as part of the episode involving Proteus, the old man of the sea. Such inclusions are far from disquieting, instead they remind of the way that others stories are always threatening to intrude on myth in Homer (and ancient Greece altogether). Jenkinson-Brown finds within this possibility the ability to tell of Odyssean counter-lives, not just the hero who gives up and never makes it home, but one who does make it home, but lingers in a hut like a hermit, waiting for something to happen, rather than striving to make it so.
Version 1.0.0
Don’t worry if it seems like this approach may go too easy on Odysseus—the Muse speaks to him directly and catalogues exactly how many of his people died and whose fault it was (just before the final members of his crew disappear). Jenkinson-Brown takes creative turns—as in the section entitled “The Tragedy of Odysseus”, which, in centering the enslaved women as the chorus reminds me of Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad before Odysseus sings outside his house about his desire to be “Odysseus again”. Just as in tragedy, there’s a recognition scene (here, Eumaeus misrecognizing Odysseus). The confusion ends up with multiple main characters deceased thanks to a certain scar not convincing anyone. Athena, that classic dea ex machina, appears to declare “he was not what he was / his choices all were wrong, / and now his story ends – / before an Epic tale, / a tragedy instead”. The epilogue is one of the collection’s finer points from the serious side of things. Jenkinson-Brown closes by making the point that Odysseus’ decisions are not simple, interwoven as they are with the tensions between mere survival and attempt to be some kind of a moral agent. The difference for us, however, is that thanks to Jenkinson-Brown’s work we can experiment with doing the whole thing again.
The combination of irreverence and seriousness keeps readers moving through the choices, uncertain. I don’t think there is a wrong way to read this book: each episode has some insights on its own; even where there are departures from Homer, they are instructive and intriguing. One could quibble about not being able to be one of the suitors or that certain of our favorite tales are left out. But the pleasure of reading through a fast-paced journey that manages to be knowledgeable and funny at the same time is undeniable.
This is easiest read on actual paper! But the prose is clear and direct, and the leaping from scene to scene makes has the effect of creating excitement and some confusion. There’s a knowing wit to the retelling as well, as when Odysseus is with Circe and we read “As your men drift off to find a comfortable place to sleep for the night – not the roof, you remind them – Circe slips her hand into yours and draws you aside.” The dark humor of the reminder, recalling Elpenor for those who know, stands strangely next to the nearly saccharine hand-holding. But there’s something about it that rings true in just that Odyssean ways of rendering lies that sound like the truth. The narrator frequently characterizes emotions, effectively emphasizing an interior experience, flipping the normal, distanced engagement with Homer on its head.
There are many ways I can imagine using this book in the classroom or with readers coming to Homer from different backgrounds. I think this approach could pair really well with Gareth Hinds’ graphic novel of the Odyssey for readers who don’t have the time or the practice to get through a translation for the first time. Then, again, it also provides enough information to support learning about the Odyssey on its own. I read through this one with my daughter (15) who has read Hinds’ graphic novel and has been listening to me drone on about Odysseus for years. She thinks Jenkinson-Brown’s approach is better than mine, and she has some experience! If she and I both like this book, there’s a good chance there’s something in it for you too.
This post is a basic introduction to reading Iliad 3.
Book 3 of the Iliad provides another great example of Homeric style: first, while the catalogue of Greeks and Trojans in book 2 set us up to expect the beginning of actual fighting, the book delays it further by introducing a duel between Menelaos and Paris. Second, the book introduces motifs or scenes that would not at all be appropriate in a logical sense to a war that has been ongoing for 10 years: it features an all-or-nothing duel between Menelaos and Paris (that fails), an introduction to some of the Greek leaders from the Trojan perspective, narrated by Helen (the so-called Teikhoskopia, or “viewing from the walls”), an introduction to Priam and Antenor, the elders of the Trojan people, a somewhat contentious exchange between Helen and Aphrodite about comforting Paris, and the subsequent, somewhat awkward sex-scene.
In my view on the reading and teaching and my general sense of the five major themes to follow in the Iliad book 3 emphasizes most epic’s dependence and divergence from narrative traditions, although politics and family & friends aren’t far behind. There’s a bit about the relationship of gods and humans in the exchange between Helen and Aphrodite (which could be taken psychoanalytically as an individual struggling with lust) that is crucial for larger questions about divine plan(s) and human agency.
But the dominant theme of the Iliad’s third book is the past. If the Iliad were prestige television like The Last of Us or, probably more appropriately, Band Of Brothers, book 3 would be a flashback episode. Epic narrative, however, seems to accommodate flashbacks primarily in micronarratives (cf. scenes like those of Philoktetes and Protesilaos in the Catalogue of Ships) and character speech, with the exception of a massive, stylized flashback like that of the end of book 2. In a way, the Catalogue of book 2 sets us up for thinking about the beginning of the war and questions of how we got here and who is involved.
There have been scholars who have seen book 2 as a pastiche of scenes from different epics or poems edited cleverly together. I think that this is partly right: it brings together images and ideas from a different timeline in the war and makes them somehow make sense to be told in this particular tale. The ordering is clever, but I don’t think we need to imagine the major scenes cut whole from other poems and stitched together like this. Instead, I think we can imagine popular song traditions and melodies deftly integrated into a much larger symphony.
Malcolm Davies (2007, 146) writes:
It is well known that the Iliad’s poet ingeniously constructed entire episodes in his composition by transferring them from portions of the Trojan War that precede his actual plot. Thus, the Catalogue of Ships, the Teichoscopia, the duel of Menelaus and Paris, the love-making of the latter with Helen, and the truce and building of the Achaeans’ defensive wall and trench, all owe their existence to this device, and have inspired various qualms as to the propriety of their featuring at so late a stage as the War’s ninth year
But what does all this mean for our understanding of this poem? There’s a neat bit near the beginning of the poem where we get a bit of a metapoetic reflection of epic composition, centered on Helen in particular.
Homer, Il. 3.121-128
Iris then went as a messenger to white-armed Helen, Looking for all the world like the wife of Antênor’s son, sister-in-law, The wife of the lord of Helikaon, Antênor’s son, Laodikê, The most beautiful of Priam’s daughters, Who found her at home. She was weaving on her great loom, A double-folded garment, in which she was embroidering The many struggles of the horse-taming Trojans and the bronze-girded Achaeans, All the things they had suffered for her at Ares’ hands.”
Helen is creating an image here and it is poetic, although she does not sing her narrative as other female figures do (as noted by a scholion). (For more on women and weaving in Homer, see this post and the included bibliography).
Schol T ad. Il 3.125b ex: “She does not sing like Kirke and Kalypso, for they live without suffering and calmly.”
Fredric Leighton, “Helen on the Walls of Troy” 1865
Helen is, as we will see from her comments in book 6, almost uniquely concerned about her future reception. But here she is taken for standing in a position similar to the Homeric narrator.
Schol. bT ad Il. 3.126-127: “The poet has shaped here a worthy archetype for his own poetry. Perhaps on this [s?]he is trying to show to those who see it the violence of the Trojans and the just strength of the Greeks.”
This is, of course, not a new or unpopular view, as clarified by George A. Kennedy (1986, 5):
“both the web itself and the subjects it depicts are in process. Helen is somehow like the bard, whose poem an audience is hearing or reading, though she is working in a visual medium, rather than in oral verse. Critics have reasonably concluded that her action should be regarded as somehow reflective of the poetic process. This view was already adopted in medieval scholia on line 3.126-7 which comment “the poet has formed a worthy archetype of his own poiesis.”
What I think is important here, is that before venturing to retell tales that belong in a flashback, the Homeric narrator provides this metapoetic breadcrumb for us to consider. As José González shows, following the work of Greg Nagy, in The Epic Rhapsode and His Craft: Homeric Performance in a Diachronic Perspective, stitching or weaving poetry together is a functional metaphor for what ancient audiences conceived of Homeric poets as doing. Derek Collins provides a nice bit from the scholia to Pindar in his Master of the Game:
Some say that, since the poetry of Homer had not been brought together in one collection, and since it was otherwise scattered and separated into parts, whenever they would sing it rhapsodically they would do something similar to sequencing or sewing, producing it into one thing.
But, as Andrew Ford argues, ancient rhapsodes didn’t merely edit pre-existing material: there’s good evidence for the term applying to new compositions, “remixes” (my words), and genres other than epic. So, part of the trickiness of book 3, is weighing how Homer engages with ‘traditional material’, whether or not the Iliadic appropriation of scenes from earlier in the war is more homage or revision, and how the details help to set us up for what comes later.
Helen, in this scene, is presented as creating a synoptic visual narrative of everything everyone had suffered on her part. And this anticipates what she does later on: she selects details in response to her audience’s questions to set the scene for the action to come. She tells us about herself, and the heroes and also provides a vehicle for characterizing Priam, Antenor, and Paris too. By engaging in narrative thus just as the epic begins the violence again, the Iliad tips its own hand: it is fitting together the major motifs of the Trojan War and creating a synoptic account of all the suffering in a singular creation of its own. Helen is our guide, but Homer’s creation.
Some guiding questions for book 3
What are the characterizing functions of the teikhoskopia (the “viewing from the walls”)? Whom do we hear about? What do we learn?
Why do we have a duel between Menelaos and Paris in the 9th year of the war? How does the outcome drive the plot of the Iliad?
What is the characterization of Helen in this book and how does it relate to the Iliad and the larger Trojan War?
Brief Bibliography on Helen and the Teikhoskopia
n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know. There will be a second post this week on Helen.
BLONDELL, RUBY. “‘Bitch That I Am’: Self-Blame and Self-Assertion in the Iliad.” Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-) 140, no. 1 (2010): 1–32. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40652048.
Blondell, Ruby. “REFRACTIONS OF HOMER’S HELEN IN ARCHAIC LYRIC.” The American Journal of Philology 131, no. 3 (2010): 349–91. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40983352.
Ebbot, Mary. 1999. “The Wrath of Helen: Self-Blame and Nemesis in the Iliad,” 3–20 in Nine Essays on Homer, ed. Carlisle and Levaniouk, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999.
Jamison, Stephanie W. “Draupadí on the Walls of Troy: ‘Iliad’ 3 from an Indic Perspective.” Classical Antiquity 13, no. 1 (1994): 5–16. https://doi.org/10.2307/25011002.
Lesser, Rachel H. “Female Ethics and Epic Rivalry: Helen in the Iliad and Penelope in the Odyssey.” American Journal of Philology 140, no. 2 (2019): 189-226. https://doi.org/10.1353/ajp.2019.0013.
Roisman, Hanna M. “Helen in the ‘Iliad’ ‘Causa Belli’ and Victim of War: From Silent Weaver to Public Speaker.” The American Journal of Philology 127, no. 1 (2006): 1–36. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3804922.
Rynearson, Nicholas C. “Helen, Achilles and the Psuchê: Superlative Beauty and Value in the Iliad.” Intertexts 17 (2013): 3-21. https://doi.org/10.1353/itx.2013.0001.
Scodel, Ruth. “Pseudo-Intimacy and the Prior Knowledge of the Homeric Audience *.” Arethusa 30, no. 2 (1997): 201-219. https://doi.org/10.1353/are.1997.0010.
Warwick, Celsiana. “The Maternal Warrior: Gender and Kleos in the Iliad.” American Journal of Philology 140, no. 1 (2019): 1-28. https://doi.org/10.1353/ajp.2019.0001.
Worman, Nancy. “The Body as Argument: Helen in Four Greek Texts.” Classical Antiquity 16, no. 1 (1997): 151–203. https://doi.org/10.2307/25011057.
“For poets certainly tell us that they bring us songs by drawing from the honey-flowing springs or certain gardens and glades of the Muses just like bees. And because they too are winged, they also speak the truth.”
When I start working on Homer with students, one of the first things I do is discuss what the epics are. I think this is important because they are fraught with historical weight thanks to their inclusion in multiple canons; but they also present ample opportunities for confusion because they derive from very different aesthetic principles than a modern novel or movie.
The hardest thing for me to come to terms with over the years has been that the epics are different things to different people over time. They are diachronic objects, even if we insist that they came together in the form we have them at a particular time and place. They have been changed by the aesthetics of editors and readers in distinct periods–they have their origin in performance and flexibility, in orality and ritual, yet for the majority of history, they have been read. So, any fair approach to the Iliad or the Odyssey needs to understand that the epics have been different interpretive objects to different audiences over time and that the assumptions that attend them in each period set up distinct expectations based on often unarticulated aesthetics.
There are so many things to say about the “Homeric Question” that it could (and does) fill many books. The variations on the questions include how and when were the epics ‘written’ down; whether they are ‘by’ the same ‘author’; what the importance is of the oral tradition as opposed to the written one; if we have the ‘same’ versions of the texts discussed in antiquity, and so on. (And each of these topics is complicated in turn by how we define or gloss the words I put in scare quotes.)
I am not even going to try to answer all these questions, instead I want to give a brief overview of what I see as the (1) primary tensions governing the Homeric problems, (2) the transmission models that have produced the texts we possess; (3) the stages I think are important for shaping these diachronic objects; and (3) more or less correlative stages of reception. In a later post I will expand more on what I think all of this means for teaching Homer.
I think there are five primary tensions that warp the way we think and talk about our Homeric problems: (a) Ancient Biographical traditions; (b) notions of unity vs. disunity (Unitarians vs. Analysts); (c) prejudices inherent in the dichotomy of orality vs. textuality; (d) cultural assumptions about authorship (tradition vs. the idea of monumental poets); (e) and the impact of Western chauvinism in forestalling the adoption of multicultural models. ‘Homer’ was an invention of antiquity: there’s no good reason to think that one ‘author’ in the modern sense is responsible for the Homeric epics (a); instead, we have ample reason to believe otherwise, from the scattershot madness of ancient biographies (see Barbara Graziosi’s Inventing Homer and the discussions in Gregory Nagy’s Homer the Preclassic; for much more positivistic textualist accounts, see M. L. West’s The Making of the Iliad or The Making of the Odyssey) to all the evidence we have for composition in performance (start with Milman Parry’s Studies in Homeric Verse Making and Albert Lord’s The Singer of Tales).
The fact remains, however, that after Plato (and certainly by the time of Aristotle) most authors in antiquity treated Homer as an author responsible for the creation of the Iliad and the Odyssey with little compunction for challenging the attribution. (But prior to Aristotle, there was much more given to Homer than a mere two epics.) While there are echoes and whispers to the contrary (and, indeed, an entire scholarly tradition from Alexandria through to Modern Germany trying to shoehorn Homer into the shape of an author), it really isn’t until the end of the 18th Century and the publication of F.A. Wolf’s Prolegomena ad Homerum that scholars stopped worrying about which island Homer was from and started really questioning the nature of the text they received.
By the end of the 19th century, (b) Homeric studies had split into camps that argued that the epics we have are products of editors stitching them together (Analysts) or that the epics are Unitary creations of a genius (or two; Unitarians) and the Analysts were clearly winning: such is the confusion, the repetitions, the omissions, and (apparent) inconsistencies of the Homeric texts (that word there is important). It was really the revelation of oral-formulaic theory and the articulation of composition in performance that broke this logjam.
Oral-formulaic theory shows that long, complex compositions can be created without the aid of writing and helps us to understand in part that the aesthetic ‘problems’ of the Homeric epics are features of their genesis and performance context and not problems. (So, features not bugs of epic poetry.) Homeric scholarship, however, spent nearly a century establishing that this was actually the case leading us to the profound issues of the 20th century (c+d), first, resistance to oral formulaic theory (on which see Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy or John Miles Foley’s How to Read an Oral Poem) and then second, debate over how oral the Homeric epics are. One of the favorite canards for the textualists to toss about is that oral-formulaic poetry posits “poetry by committee.” From this perspective, only an individual author could have produced the intricacies of meaning available in Homeric epic.
I contend that this is nonsense that misunderstands both oral formulaic theory and language itself. But who has time to argue that? The fact is that Homeric poetry as we have it comes to us as text and this text is oral-derived but has been edited and handled for centuries (ok, millennia) by people who think it is all text. No matter how we reconstruct its origins, then, we must treat it as a diachronic object that was textualized, that was treated as a text from a single author by editors for 2000 years, and whose inclusion in the canon has shaped both what we think verbal art should be like and what we think the epic is. (Nevertheless, since our culture is literate, literary, and prejudiced towards textualized ways of thinking, as redress we need to learn more about orality and performance based cultures.)
A final aspect of Homeric epic that I believe we have far underestimated, due to racist fantasies like the “Greek miracle,” is its multiculturalism. The world of archaic Greece (and before) was heavily engaged with people from other language groups and cultures. Since the decipherment of the Gilgamesh poems, scholars have seen deep thematic and linguistic parallels between the remains of the ancient Near East and early Greek poetry. A lot of this is detailed well in M. L. West’s The East Face of Helicon; Mary Bachvarova’s From Hittite to Homer is revelatory in providing even more material from ancient Asia Minor. The Homeric epics we have are products of different cultures, different audiences, and often competing linguistic, political, and class ideologies over time. They are not the font and origin of culture; rather, they are a fossilized cross-section of intercultural change.
The Venetus A Manuscript offers a similar image (lower left of Folio 100 verso
Transmission Models and Stages for the Epic
There are three primary transmission models that present different dates for the textualization of the Homeric epics.
1000-800 BCE Homer at the Origin of Culture (Barry Powell and Friends)
800-510 BCE Dictation Theories (Richard Janko; Minna Skafte Jensen; see Jonathan Ready’s recent book for an overview)
800-c. 280 BCE: Evolutionary Model (Gregory Nagy)
I lean really heavily toward the third option with one caveat, it still requires a bit of magical thinking or at least a suspension of disbelief. We don’t know how or when the epics we have were put down in writing, although it is clear from textual evidence that they went through ‘sieves’ or ‘funnels’ in Athens prior to the Hellenistic period and in Hellenistic libraries (and I will talk about Power and Publishing in a later post.)
To my taste, the two earlier models require equally magical thinking with somewhat more dismissiveness: the first requires an ahistorical and unlikely narrative for the adoption of writing in Greece and the promulgation of texts. It insufficiently considers the material conditions for the textualization of the epics and the adoption of the new technology for a performance form. (Like most arguments, it is driven by an ideology that encourages that magical thinking.) The second is easier to accept, but it does not account for motivations for dictation or the material conditions for preservation and dissemination. As Jensen observes, if the text were in fact written down during the 6th century, we have no evidence for its wide dissemination as a monumental text nor its use in literary reading apart from performance. The third option is the hardest to accept because of its complexity; but once accepted, it provides the most dynamic models of meaning-making available to Homeric interpreters.
The process and moment of epic textualization is an aporia–it is an unresolvable problem. Even if it were resolved, it would not change the history of the reception of the text. Rather than worry overmuch about the method and time of textualization, I think it is more useful to think about the impact of the epics being different things over time. So, I like to break the stages of these diachronic objects down as follows (and, to be clear, we have evidence for people engaging with the texts in the following ways.
Stages of performance, textuality, and fixity
Oral composition and Performance ?-5th century BCE
Canonization, Panhellenization 8th Century BCE through 323 BCE
Episodic engagement and occasional monumental performance, ?-4th Century BCE
Textualization, 6th-4th Centuries BCE
Editing and Standardization, 323 BCE-31 BCE (?)
Passage Use in Rhetorical Schools 280 BCE-? (5th Century CE? 12th century CE)
Creation of Synoptic Manuscripts we have, 9-12th Century BCE
These stages, to my mind, represent the full range of metamorphoses for the diachronic objects we currently possess, on a scale from least to most certainty. We have Byzantine manuscripts–they provide us with the texts we translate from to this day. We only have partial evidence for everything before that.
Reception Models
“What is lacking in Homer, that we should not consider him to be the wisest man in every kind of wisdom? Some people claim that his poetry is a complete education for life, equally divided between times of war and peace.”
Quid Homero deest, quominus in omni sapientia sapientissimus existimari possit? Eius poesim totam esse doctrinam vivendi quidam ostendunt, in belli tempora pacisque divisa, Leonardo Bruni de Studiis et Litteris 21
I think it is important to distinguish between models for transmission and reception of the Homeric epics, even if they overlap to a significant extent. The former is about what we can say about where our physical texts came from; the latter is about how versions of the epics have been used by audiences over the years.
The main thing I want to emphasize here–and which I will elaborate on more in a later post–is that for most of the history of the transmission of the Homeric epics only a small percentage of people would have read them from beginning to end as we do today. Ancient performances would have been more frequently episodic (that is, performance of specific parts or scenes). Even in the case of monumental performances, audience engagement over several days would be effectively episodic as people tuned in and out of the performance.
The more I think about the evidence we have for the use of Homer in antiquity, I convince myself that a majority of Hellenistic through Byzantine era readers were primarily engaging with excerpts and passages for rhetorical training rather than reading through the whole beginning to end (with the exception of editors and scholars who dedicated their lives to thinking about the whole).
So, when I think of what people have done with these objects over time, I split them into post-performance era stages of reception
Panhellenic Authority
Hellenistic/Greco-Roman Authority/Literary Model
Renaissance Model/Authority
Modern Canon
Each of these periods has different assumptions about what the Homeric epics do in the world and in response prompt different questions from the epics on the part of interpreters. Not to be lost in this periodization is the implication that as early as Aristotle (if not a century before that), the Homeric epics as cultural objects do something different for the communities that praised them than they did during their first singing(s). So, when we talk about the Homeric epics, I think it is useful to acknowledge that nearly every interpretive engagement is anachronistic. We should not forbid this, but instead be careful to identify the layers of historical notions piled upon them.
In addition, I think if we look at the stages of transmission and reception together, one really important detail to consider is whether audiences were engaging with the Greek as ‘native’ speakers or learners and when they were working only with translation. This likely changed over time, but my sense is that most people who engaged with Homer in antiquity were reading it as a learned dialect, either an extension of their native Greek or as part of a language learned during their education. Translations like those of Livius Andronicus’ Odyssey were literary events of their own and should be treated that way.
With the Renaissance, I think we can safely say that most Western European encounters with Homer were with passages or translations (Petrarch famously mentions putting Homer into Latin). Whole there were certainly excellent scholars in every nation who read Homer in Greek, I think the story of Homer in the modern canonization is of an idea in translation.
Iliad 12, from the Venetus A Manuscript (via the Homer Multitext Project)
Some things cited/Some things to read.
Bachvarova, Mary R. 2016. From Hittite to Homer: The Anatolian Background of Ancient Greek Epic. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Dué, Casey. 2018. Achilles Unbound: Multiformity and Tradition in the Homeric Epics. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies.
Foley, J. M. 1988. The Theory of Oral Composition: History and Methodology. Bloomington.
———. 1999. Homer’s Traditional Art. Philadelphia.
———. 2002. How to Read an Oral Poem. Urbana.
González, José M. 2013. The Epic Rhapsode and His Craft: Homeric Performance in a Diachronic Perspective. Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies.
