Tag: Essays

99 Homeric Problems

~ Joel ~ 2 Comments

…and I Can’t Solve One of Them

“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.”

Λέγουσι γὰρ δήπουθεν πρὸς ἡμᾶς οἱ ποιηταί, ὅτι ἀπὸ κρηνῶν μελιρρύτων ἢ ἐκ Μουσῶν κήπων τινῶν καὶ ναπῶν δρεπόμενοι τὰ μέλη ἡμῖν φέρουσιν ὥσπερ αἱ μέλιτται. καὶ αὐτοὶ οὕτω πετόμενοι, καὶ ἀληθῆ λέγουσι, Plato, Ion

“Aristotle records the claim that Homer was born from a demon who danced with the Muses.”

 ᾿Αριστοτέλης δὲ ἱστορεῖν φησιν † λητὰς ἔκ τινος δαίμονος γεγενῆσθαι τὸν ῞Ομηρον ταῖς Μούσαις συγχορεύσαντος. Vitae Homeri [demon = daimon = a god]

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.

Venetus A marginal image of the kosmosKosmos
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.

  1. 1000-800 BCE Homer at the Origin of Culture (Barry Powell and Friends)

  2. 800-510 BCE Dictation Theories (Richard Janko; Minna Skafte Jensen; see Jonathan Ready’s recent book for an overview)

  3. 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

  1. Oral composition and Performance ?-5th century BCE

  2. Canonization, Panhellenization 8th Century BCE through 323 BCE

  3. Episodic engagement and occasional monumental performance, ?-4th Century BCE

  4. Textualization, 6th-4th Centuries BCE

  5. Editing and Standardization, 323 BCE-31 BCE (?)

  6. Passage Use in Rhetorical Schools 280 BCE-? (5th Century CE? 12th century CE)

  7. 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

  1. Panhellenic Authority

  2. Hellenistic/Greco-Roman Authority/Literary Model

  3. Renaissance Model/Authority

  4. 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.

Venetus A Book 12Iliad 12, from the Venetus A Manuscript (via the Homer Multitext Project)
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.

Graziosi, Barbara. 2002. Inventing Homer. Cambridge.

Graziosi, Barbara, and Johannes Haubold. 2005. Homer: The Resonance of Epic. London: Duckworth.

Jensen, M.S. 2011. Writing Homer: A Study Based on Results from Modern Fieldwork. Copenhagen.

Lord, Albert. 2000. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Nagy, Gregory. 2004. Homer’s Text and Language. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Nagy, Gregory. 2009: Homer the Preclassic.

Ong, Walter J. 2012. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. 3rd ed. London: Routledge

Parry, Milman. 1971. The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry. Edited by Adam Parry. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Ready, Jonathan. 2011. Character, Narrator and Simile in the Iliad. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Ready, Jonathan. 2019. Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics. 2019.

Scodel, Ruth. 2002. Listening to Homer: Tradition, Narrative, and Audience. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

West, M.L. 1997. The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

———. 2001. Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad. Munich: De Gruyter.

———. 2011. The Making of the Iliad. Oxford.

———. 2014. The Making of the Odyssey. Oxford.

Whitman, Cedric H. 1958. Homer and the Heroic Tradition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wolf, F.A. 1795. Prolegomena Ad Homerum. Edited by Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and James E.G. Zetzel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

From Politics to Poetics: Repairing Achaean Politics in Iliad 2

~ Joel ~ 7 Comments

The second book of the Iliad can be split into three basic sections: the so-called diapeira (Agamemnon’s testing of the troops); the assembly speeches following the rush to the ships in response to the ‘test’ (the protest of Thersites, followed by the speeches of Odysseus and Nestor); and the Catalogue of Ships). Each of these scenes contributes critically to the some of the major themes I have noted to follow in reading the Iliad: (1) Politics, (2) Heroism; (3) Gods and Humans; (4) Family & Friends; (5) Narrative Traditions.. But the central themes I emphasize in reading and teaching book 2 are politics and narrative traditions.

Color photograph of a relief sculpture. A semi-nude figure is dragging another by his hair.
Antalya Archaeological Museum. Ancient Roman sarcophagus of Aurelia Botania Demetria ( 2nd century AD ): Achilles striking Thersites.

The first half of book 2 essentially addresses the political problems set into play in book 1: Agamemnon tests his men to see if they are still dedicated to the mission and they run away. Thersites appears to channel some of Achilles’ dissent from book 1 and to act as a scapegoat for that political fracture. When he is literally beaten out of the assembly by Odysseus, it opens up space for Odysseus and Nestor in turn to refocus their efforts, reemphasize their collective goals, and reconstruct Agamemnon’s authority. (Disclosure, I have written on Agamemnon’s test and the debates around it and have some opinions.) I have included a bibliography on Thersites below. I will provide a later post about Agamemnon’s so-called test.

The result of this series of events is clear if you trace the similes of in book 2: the Achaeans start compared to images of clashing and conflict and end up compared to unified forces of nature directed against a common goal. This resolves in part some of the political tension in book 1, but does not address Achilles’ absence fully. The actions of the Achaean assembly are sufficient to return the coalition to war with a unified front, but insufficient to winning there. As part of the larger political theme, this helps to illustrate that the political resilience of the Achaeans, despite their bloody internecine conflict, resides in the multiple leaders who work together.

The unity at the end of the assemblies translates in part to a throwback to the beginning of the war in the performance of the Catalogue of Ships. Strictly speaking, a catalogue of all the participants in the war begins in a very different narrative, not recited nine years after its beginning. I suspect that the Catalogue was a popular motif in antiquity and was integrated into our Iliad both as a recognition of this and as a reflection of its audiences geographical knowledge and political realities. I think this interactive map of the catalogue is really fascinating and worth playing around with. Here’s a list of all the contingents with some links

In addition to being a fascinating reflection on the interaction between mythical space and the lived geography of antiquity, the catalogue is also evidence of how our Homeric epic engages with other versions of its own story and the larger Trojan War narrative in general. The catalogue clearly predates the action of the epic–figures like Philoktetes are listed as being elsewhere or dead (Protesilaos)–and the contents help us to understand the political dynamics: as Nestor puts it in book 1, Agamemnon is powerful politically because he rules over more people.

But the catalogue is also a lesson in how epic narrative works. Every figure is a potential story, a genealogy or a tragedy waiting to be unveiled. At the same time, the catalogue is an opportunity to silence other traditions by leaving them unmentioned, something Elton Barker and I examine in Homer’s Thebes.

Previous generations of scholars might have bracketed the catalogue as being imported from another poem or tradition. I think its position in this book following the reconstitution of the experimental Achaean polity is a brilliant ‘literary’ response to the particular challenge of creating an authoritative Trojan War poem. It makes sense to have a retrospective overview of the war at this point: The test itself raises the question of the stakes of the war; Odysseus and Nestor remind us of its beginning and the anticipated length; and the catalogue itself returns us from the theme of Achaean politics to the war in general. The inclusion of ‘traditional’ material both appropriates other narratives and instrumentalizes them. In effect, the larger mythical storyscape becomes a footnote to the story being told. And the catalogue is re-tunes the audience for the confrontation with the Trojans in book 3. In addition, this use of narrative material extraneous to the timeline of this particular plot also sets the audience up for even more surprising ‘flashbacks’: a duel between Paris and Menelaos (after 9 years!) and Helen’s description of the Greek heroes from the walls of Troy (the so-called Teikhoskopia).

a map of Greece with labels where all the contingents in the catalogue of shops come from
By Pinpin (talk · contribs) – Inspiré de la carte "ACHAEANS and TROJANS" du site de Carlos Parada, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2830268

Often left out of discussions of the Catalogue are the Trojans, who get their own list at 2.816-877. As Eunice Kim has recently argued, there is an art and message to this section that helps us to understand Hektor and the Trojans in general. So, make sure you read it to the end! Hilary Mackie’s book Talking Trojan, also has a nice treatment of this section and Benjamin Sammons’ The Art and Rhetoric of the Homeric Catalogue provides a great overview and fine bibliography on this type of poetry in general.

Book 2 touches upon other themes as well. Zeus’ intervention to send Agamemnon a false dream at the beginning of book 2 engages with questions about his “plan” as well as notions of human will and divine fate (so, Gods & Humans) and the inset heroic narratives of the catalogue provide many different ways to think about local heroes and larger traditions (Heroism).

Some guiding questions

What does the Diapeira do and how does it respond to the conflict of Iliad 1?

How do we understand Thersites’ dissent and its treatment?

How would you characterize Nestor and Odysseus in this book?

What are the impact(s) of the catalogue of ships?

Bibliography on Thersites

n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know.

BARKER, ELTON. “ACHILLES’ LAST STAND: INSTITUTIONALISING DISSENT IN HOMER’S ‘ILIAD.’” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, no. 50 (2004): 92–120. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44696692.

Brockliss, W. 2019. “Out of the Mix: (Dis)ability, Intimacy, and the Homeric Poems.” Classical World 113: 1–27.

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

Robert Kimbrough. “The Problem of Thersites.” The Modern Language Review 59, no. 2 (1964): 173–76.

Lowry, E. R. 1991 Thersites: A Study in Comic Shame.

Marks, Jim. 2005. “The Ongoing Neikos: Thersites, Odysseus, and Achilleus.” AJP 126:1–31.

Postlethwaite, N. “Thersites in the Iliad.” Greece & Rome 35: 83-95.

Rockwell, Kiffin. “THERSITES.” The Classical Outlook 56, no. 1 (1978): 6–6. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43933965.

Rose, M. L. 2003. The Staff of Oedipus: transforming disability in ancient Greece. Ann Arbor.

ROSE, PETER W. “THERSITES AND THE PLURAL VOICES OF HOMER.” Arethusa 21, no. 1 (1988): 5–25.

Rosen, R. M. 2003. “The Death of Thersites and the Sympotic Performance of Iambic Mock-ery.” Pallas 61:21–136.

Stuurman, Siep. “The Voice of Thersites: Reflections on the Origins of the Idea of Equality.” Journal of the History of Ideas 65, no. 2 (2004): 171–89. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3654205.

Thalmann, W. G. 1988. “Thersites: comedy, scapegoats and heroic ideology in the Iliad.” TAPA 118:1-28.

Thomson, R. G.. 1997. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York.

Williams, B. 1993. Shame and Necessity. Berkeley and Los Angeles

Major Themes for Reading and Teaching the Iliad

~ Joel ~ 3 Comments

Five Threads to Unravel; Melodies to Follow

Anyone who knows me would be unsurprised that I generally set out to start talking about the Iliad and take rather long to get to the point. Once, probably in 2003 or so, my wife asked me to tell her what the epic was about. After 45 minutes or so, she interrupted me and asked me what point of the poem I was talking about. She was somewhat unamused that I had not yet finished book 1.

Anyone who knows the Iliad well should not find this surprising. The epic is filled with action; but even the ‘simple’ scenes are full of associated meanings, replete with potential resonances, and deeper meanings based on what one knows (or think they know). On top of this there are thousands of years of interpretive traditions and engagements that are labyrinthine enough to make Reddit seem linear.

So, one of the things I find to be useful when teaching Homer or guiding people through the Iliad is to focus on a handful of themes. By nature of both the structure of the poem and the character of its plot, the Iliad presents a series of interwoven themes that ebb and flow as the epic progresses to its end.  To return to the musical composition analogy I use in another post, I think it is helpful to imagine certain melodies or movements introduced early in the epic and reintroduced for new meaning and contrast as the plot moves us from one notional position to another. The repetition here is far from simple iteration: each return to familiar language and ideas is a repetition with difference: the audience and the characters are changed by the events that unfold, and the combination and reintroduction of themes in the changing contexts has a complicating if not generative effect.

I hope to highlight activations of these themes in posts on each book, but before I start on that project, I want to summarize them and anticipate their major movements. As a note, there are sub-themes I consider more like contributing motifs (e.g. ransom, xenia, mourning) or imagery (e.g. water, fire, laughter); and some of the themes I emphasize may be better posed as subordinate in some way. I think readers and teachers are free to identify and explore other themes as well. The five themes I like to emphasize are (1) Politics, (2) Heroism; (3) Gods and Humans); (4) Family & Friends; (5) Narrative Traditions. I will give brief introductions to each in this post and follow up with additional references when I focus on these themes in subsequent posts.

  1. Politics

“Really, may I be called both a coward and a nobody
If I yield every fact to you, whatever thing you ask”

ἦ γάρ κεν δειλός τε καὶ οὐτιδανὸς καλεοίμην

εἰ δὴ σοὶ πᾶν ἔργον ὑπείξομαι ὅττί κεν εἴπῃς· Homer, Iliad 1

As everyone knows from the beginning of the Iliad, the epic is not about the Trojan War, it is a story set within it. It is, according to its own proem, a tale of how Achilles’ rage brought ruin on his own people. The Iliad is intensely political in that it asks questions about where authority should come from, who should wield it, how they should wield it, and what the consequences of dysfunctional politics may be. The primary ‘melody’ in this movement is of the conflict between Agamemnon and Achilles, but this reverberates through questions of how the war is prosecuted by the Greeks, how they maintain their coalition, and how their experimental polity compares to the governance of Olympos and and the politics of the city of Troy.

There has been a lot written about the political conflicts among the Greeks but much less on Trojan politics and even less on divine political arrangements. I have argued more than once that to really get into the political questions of the Iliad, we need to understand that the epic explores politics on three separate stages (the Greeks, Trojans, and Gods) that are both comparative and contrastive.  The major political treatments of the Greeks occur in books 1, 2, 4, 9, 19, and 23. (People often miss that the Funeral Games of Patroclus are an attempt by Achilles to explore different allocations of goods and power). Trojan politics are really emphasized in books 2 (briefly in the catalogue of ships), in the contrast of assemblies in book 7, in the depiction of Hektor in books 6, 8, 12, 13, 18, 22 (especially in his engagement with Polydamas). The politics of the Gods are explored in assemblies/exchanges in books 1, 4, 8, 15, 16, and 24.

  1. Heroism

“Homer made Achilles the best man of those who went to Troy, Nestor the wisest, and Odysseus the most shifty.”

φημὶ γὰρ Ὅμηρον πεποιηκέναι ἄριστον μὲν ἄνδρα Ἀχιλλέα τῶν εἰς Τροίαν ἀφικομένων, σοφώτατον δὲ Νέστορα, πολυτροπώτατον δὲ Ὀδυσσέα. Plato, Hippias Minor

“May I not die without a fight and without glory but after doing something big for men to come to hear about”

ὴ μὰν ἀσπουδί γε καὶ ἀκλειῶς ἀπολοίμην, ἀλλὰ μέγα ῥέξας τι καὶ ἐσσομένοισι πυθέσθαι. Homer, Iliad  7 [Hektor speaking]

It is really hard to talk about the Homeric epics without talking about “heroism”. I start by explaining to students that, rather than evoking notions of virtue and self-sacrifice, in epic poetry a “hero” can mean three things: (1) a person in their full bloom of strength (in accord with the etymology shared with the name Hera); (2) a member of the generation before ours, the race of Heroes as described in Hesiod’s Works and Days; or (3) a figure who follows a narrative pattern of withdrawal and return (see Oedipus, Perseus, etc. Note, I am not using the language Campbell’s Hero’s Journey.). Homeric heroes, as Erwin Cook describes them, are not savior figures, but are instead figures who suffer and cause suffering. These three ideas are oversimplifications as well: there is a religious/cult aspect to heroes outside the worlds of the poems, explored well by scholars like Greg Nagy.

I think that the Iliad emphasize that heroes are dangerous to communities and that the Iliad and Odyssey together work in concert to provide an etiology for the destruction of the race of heroes, a justification for their absence from our world, and an exploration of how we value human beings across sub-themes like words/deeds, community/individuals, destruction/construction, mortality and immortality, etc. There is almost no book of the Iliad that doesn’t address heroism in some way, but the chief ones follow Achilles and Hektor with some interludes treating characters like Aeneas (5 and 22), Sarpedon (12 and 16), or Lykaon (21). For Achilles and Hektor, see especially  Books 1, 6, 9, 11, 16, 22,  and 24

  1. Gods and Humans

“Whenever the poet turns his gaze to divine nature, then he holds human affairs in contempt.”

ὅταν δὲ ἀποβλέψῃ εἰς τὴν θείαν φύσιν ὁ ποιητής, τότε τὰ ἀνθρώπινα πράγματα ἐξευτελίζει Scholion to Homer

As Barbara Graziosi and Johannes Haubold argue in their book Homer: The Resonance of Epic, the Homeric epics are part of a sequence with Hesiodic poetry that traces “cosmic history” from the foundation of the universe to the lives of archaic Greek audience. Part of this movement in Homer is to establish metaphysical ‘baselines’, the differences between gods and human beings, and what to expect from the human lives. The Iliad helps to explain why the worlds of gods and humans should be more separate, explores the relationship between divine will and human agency, and also provides a backdrop for the shared beliefs and customs of the Greeks that we might call ‘religion’ today.

The depiction of the gods can be difficult because they are at once characters in the narrative and reflections of actual Greek beliefs. Ancient and modern critics have been troubled by the less-than-positive depiction of the gods (Xenophanes and Heraclitus famously complained about it). But the general literary view is that the gods provide the framework for underscoring the importance of human behavior. Gods can misbehave, they can cheat, and lie and commit adultery because they are immortal. They don’t face the same level of consequences that human beings do because they have virtually limitless opportunities to screw up and try again. In line with the theme of heroism, the treatment of mortality and immortality in the Iliad helps audiences to understand that human lives have meaning because they are limited.

Interactions between the gods and humans happen throughout the epics, but some of the most critical moments are when the gods intervene in human actions or reflect on them in  Books 1, 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 24. Of chief importance among these are the speeches of Zeus, the discussion about the death of Sarpedon, and the final divine assembly in book 24 that (re-)establishes the primacy of burial and mourning rites.

Color photograph of a Greek Vase with black figures of women engaged in weaving activities
Lekythos, ca. 550–530 BCE. Attributed to the Amasis painter. Scenes of weaving, upright loom. Terracotta, H. 17.15 cm The Met

  1. Family & Friends

Throughout the themes I have already discussed, the sub-theme or motif of violence is dominant. Indeed, one way of thinking about the Iliad is that it is a prolonged invitation to think about war and when to fight. The answer I think it gives is that we should fight to defend the people we love and for little else. Sub-themes within this are women and children in Homer and the relationship between Achilles and Patroklos. Indeed, just as violence could be its own theme, so too could the treatment and experience of women in Homeric epic. I generally discuss these topics as a group because they orbit around Homeric treatments of heroes, politics, and violence. The place of friends and enslaved women is central to the political questions of book 1, but we see them both especially in the depiction of Trojan families. Book 6 is a powerful opportunity to think about life during wartime for non-combatants, as are the laments of books 18 and 24.

  1. Narrative Traditions

One of the topics I have long been most interested in is how Homeric epic relates to other narrative traditions. (This is the motivating question at the core of the book I wrote with Elton Barker, Homer’s Thebes). I provide an overview of some of these issues in my post on Centaurs, but I think the question of how Homeric epic appropriates from and responds to other mythical narratives is key to understanding its composition, the date of its composition, and its eventual pre-eminence. A simple place to start is with the stories Homeric heroes tell (the paradeigmata), but there are moments of engagement with other traditions in nearly every line of Homeric epic. How we think about these engagements–whether they are allusions, intertexts, or something else–are important questions in current Homeric scholarship that also reflect how we think about the making of meaning and storytelling in general. One of the things I really like to emphasize is that the Iliad seems very conscious not just of other story traditions but of its own status as a story to be used as a (counter-)model for their lives.

Color image of a Greek black figure vase unrolled to show women weaving
Lekythos, ca. 550–530 B.CE. Attributed to the Amasis painter. Scenes of weaving, upright loom. Unrolled. The Met. Accession Number: 31.11.10

Some resources for thinking about Homer and History.

There are some good sources that give us a start on the Homeric epics’ relationship with history. I like the multiple perspectives provided by the edited volume Archaeology and the Homeric Epics,. Readers will find some disagreement in major scholarly approaches, but most counsel caution: see Kurt Raaflaub’s article “Homer, the Trojan War, and History,” Trevor Bryce’s “The Trojan War: Is there Truth Behind the Legend,” Susan Sherratt’s “The Trojan War: History or Bricolage?”, Korfmann’s, Latacz’s and Hawkins’ “Was There a Trojan War?”

Managing Achilles

~ Joel ~ 3 Comments

Narrativization and Mind-reading in Iliad 1

Achilles—like most of us—attributes motivations to others. He interprets the world and his misinterpretations often have disastrous effects. During a famous scene in book 1, I think we can see a strategy for managing and redirecting this tendency.

Iliad 1.202-204

“Why have you come here, child of aegis-bearing Zeus?
Is it so that you may see the hubris of Agamemnon, Atreus’ son?
But I declare this and I think it will happen this away:
He is going to destroy his own life soon because of his arrogance.”

τίπτ’ αὖτ’ αἰγιόχοιο Διὸς τέκος εἰλήλουθας;
ἦ ἵνα ὕβριν ἴδῃ ᾿Αγαμέμνονος ᾿Ατρεΐδαο;
ἀλλ’ ἔκ τοι ἐρέω, τὸ δὲ καὶ τελέεσθαι ὀΐω·
ᾗς ὑπεροπλίῃσι τάχ’ ἄν ποτε θυμὸν ὀλέσσῃ.

When people think about Greek myth—and heroes in particular—they often bring up the concept of hubris, that excess of behavior, be it a specific act of outrage or a general demeanor, that is often mischaracterized as a kind of character ‘flaw’. (See this brief post about why the tragic flaw is a misunderstanding.) And while any reasonable reader can certainly see the thematic patterns of excess and arrogance as significant to the Iliad, the word itself appears sparingly in the epic. Of its four occurrences, two appear in Achilles’ exchange with Athena as he briefly considers just killing Agamemnon during the conflict in book 1.

One of the topics I am probably too obsessed with in my re-reading(s) of the Iliad is the extent to which characters are narrativizing their lives. What I mean by this are those scenes where it is either clear or arguable that we as audience members might imagine Homeric characters as acting under the influence of stories. This is what I think happens in book 9 when Achilles is seen singing the stories of famous heroes and then reinterprets Phoinix’s story of Meleager.

In addition to clear moments where external stories are implicated in the shaping (or misshaping) of the Iliad’s tale, I think we can also take some cues from moments of clear theatricality. Here, I don’t mean excessive behavior or histrionics, but those moments where the observation of a character’s action is shown to be determinative in the viewer’s subsequent behavior. This is ‘dramatic’ in the sense that it provides a show to be watched and interpreted by others; but it is also meta-mimetic, in that it inspires a change of action in the viewer, either in mirroring or reflecting on the action being seen.

In this later category, I have in mind Achilles’ lamentation for Patroklos that inspires similar emotions and actions from the epic’s internal audiences (both other Achaeans and the gods) or the final scene between Priam and Achilles that builds on those earlier exchanges, where Achilles and Priam feel pity and through sympathy identify with each other’s essential humanity, even if only briefly. In my current reading of this movement, Achilles’ extreme position as an elevated hero renders all of his actions larger-than-life with corresponding consequences. The epic strains to show the damage of Achilles self-absorption and how hard it is for him to see in others the suffering he recognizes in himself. While he weeps for Patroklos in book 19, he still primarily laments his own loss; when he identifies with Priam in book 24, he has a fleeting moment of self-transcendence, a humanizing instant. The epic’s point—I think—is both that such moments are possible and necessary to transcend our selfish violence but also that they are very hard to achieve, and nearly impossible to do so if everything about your own identity leads you to center yourself and your experiences to the detriment of all else in the world.

In re-reading the Iliad again, one of the things I am contemplating is the extent to which everyone ‘manages’ Achilles’ feelings and expectations. When Athena arrives, he asks her a direct question and makes it very clear what he thinks is going on. Athena’s response is a careful study in effective ‘de-escalation; another way to put it, is that she ‘manages’ Achilles by using his concepts and words and then forestalls the satisfaction of his rage by redirecting him:

“I have come for the purpose of slowing your anger, if you’ll consent,
From the sky. Hera, that white-armed goddess sent me,
Since we both love you and care about you in our hearts.
But, come, lay off the conflict, don’t draw your sword to hand.
But rebuke him with words about how it will turn out.
For I am declaring this and this is what will happen:
At some point you’ll get three times as many glorious gifts
In exchange for this outrage. But you, hold back. Listen to me.

ἦλθον ἐγὼ παύσουσα τὸ σὸν μένος, αἴ κε πίθηαι,
οὐρανόθεν· πρὸ δέ μ’ ἧκε θεὰ λευκώλενος ῞Ηρη
ἄμφω ὁμῶς θυμῷ φιλέουσά τε κηδομένη τε·
ἀλλ’ ἄγε λῆγ’ ἔριδος, μηδὲ ξίφος ἕλκεο χειρί·
ἀλλ’ ἤτοι ἔπεσιν μὲν ὀνείδισον ὡς ἔσεταί περ·
ὧδε γὰρ ἐξερέω, τὸ δὲ καὶ τετελεσμένον ἔσται·
καί ποτέ τοι τρὶς τόσσα παρέσσεται ἀγλαὰ δῶρα
ὕβριος εἵνεκα τῆσδε· σὺ δ’ ἴσχεο, πείθεο δ’ ἡμῖν.

Athena doesn’t mince words to start: she tells Achilles’ what she is there to do (stop his wild behavior) and explains the authority behind her actions (Hera and herself). She uses direct imperatives to avoid any confusion and mirrors the structure of his speech: he makes a prediction (or a threat) and she makes a promise that he will receive more later. Only after using these strategies does she return to Achilles’ own language (hubris), using a demonstrative to acknowledge his views, without specifying the behavior that qualifies as such.

Achilles Restrained by Athena, Johan Tobias Sergel (c. 1740-1814)

The reason I think this is a moment of narrativization is that Achilles expects a reaction from the gods for a certain kind of behavior: cosmic offense against the gods (i.e., hubris) is punished by divine will. To my reading, Achilles complains of a cosmic wrong to his being that is analogous to stories of myth. He sees Agamemnon as an arrogant mortal striving against a heroic demigod and articulates his expectation of divine recompense at Athena’s arrival. (We may even imagine him as anticipating the comeuppance himself and then reassigning the role to Athena when she appears).

We should not underestimate the importance, then, when Athena characterizes the issue as one of strife (eris). Achilles presents the situation using one kind of a mythical script: mortal commits hubris receives divine punishment. But Athena restates the experience using a different script: mortals involved in eris over a distribution of goods. Her promise that Achilles will receive three times more his lost compensation assures Achilles that Agamemnon has done wrong, but her framing of the situation shifts it from one story pattern to another.

Returning to Painful Signs: Posts on the Iliad

~ Joel ~ 6 Comments

This site has been the quietest in its existence over the past few months. We have spent some time thinking about what to do with it and to what extent it is an artefact of a time that has passed. Antiquarians don’t give up the old easily.

But we do change the way we see them. I spent a good part of the past few years posting about the Iliad on Substack, exploring how to use social media more for good than stoking the fires of discontent. I enjoyed the rhythm of the posts, the opportunity to revisit old friends (those Homeric ones), and taking seriously the responsibility of discussing scholarship and sharing new work with an emphasis on enthusiasm and inclusion, rather than critique and disdain (both of which had taken over too much of my public work).

I enjoyed and and it seemed to enjoy some success as well. But then it became harder and harder to justify reconciling staying with Substack with my aims and values. My break conveniently coincided with a professional move that has arisen from and influenced in turn the way I view my work in the world.

As part of staying engaged and returning to the question of what this form is and what it can do, I am going to be resurrecting Painful Signs here, on the o.g. site. I will be tinkering with design at times, but primarily just recopying and updating posts on the Iliad starting from the beginning. I won’t promise any strict posting schedule, but I like to find a rhythm and inhabit it. So, let’s see what happens.

PS: I am giving a series of five Roundtable by the 92nd St Y talks on the Iliad called “The Homeric Iliad: Or, The Meaning of Life and Death” running once a week, starting Monday, October 27th, 12-1 PM. If you can’t catch the sessions live, recordings will be available.

 

https://roundtable.org/live-courses/literature/the-homeric-iliad-or-the-meaning-of-life-and-death

The Plan

With the exception of inevitable Odyssey posting thanks to the gravity of the upcoming Nolan movie, I plan on focusing almost exclusively on the Iliad. I am going to publish more than once a week (no promises) three or four basic kinds of posts: (1) essays meant for people teaching or learning about the Iliad in translation; (2) book-by-book reading questions; (3) revised essays, thoughts on epic from other sources; (4) random posts on scholia, certain passages, the the bric-a-brac that Homer geeks thrive on. (Also, no promises I will stick just to those four categories).

The Plan, for real

Continue reading “Returning to Painful Signs: Posts on the Iliad” →

A Note On Leaving Substack

~ Joel ~ 6 Comments

This is a post on why I am leaving my substack site. I am publishing it on Substack and here, for users who do not want to contribute to that site’s metrics.

This decision has been a longtime coming. Jonathan Katz wrote about the platform’s Nazi problem over 18 months ago, and while the site does have official language banning hate, it has remained a top location for white supremacists, alt-right historians, and darlings of the trump administration like Curtis Yarvin. Substack has explicitly refused to address these issues and its founders have argued in response to user protests, somewhat incoherently, that “demonetizing publications” won’t “mak[e] the problem go away”. Recently, Substack sent a wide push alert promoting a Nazi blog.

Substack is a startup that relies on user content and promotion to generate (shared) revenue. Many writers have complained that the benefits are fleeting over time. Others have complained about the way the platform encourages different kinds of writing and an emphasis on metrics. I donated any funds generated to charity and have written at my own pace, promoting by half measures. I stayed as long as I did because I liked the format and regretted the idea of giving up a space because it was also promoting horrible ideas.

Open discourse and freedom of speech are wonderful ideals. But our world is far from ideal. What do we mean when we talk about free speech? Ancient Athens offers us parrhêsia, what a modern free speech advocate might call “frank and open debate”—for criticizing your friends in private and also for expressing unpopular opinions in public for the benefit of the state. In addition, “equal access to public speech” (Isêgoria) promises that each citizen be given that opportunity. Both kinds of speech should bring with them responsibility (to speak for the benefit of the people) and accountability (for what the speech does in the world). This ideal also requires that people have common starting grounds in relation to power.

Our recent spate of protests has led to the limiting phrase of “time, manner, and place” to allow University administrations to exert greater control over ideas expressed on their campuses. We should take a cue and apply this to hateful ideas as well: Nazism, white supremacy, and all of the other horrors allowed (or often espoused) by free speech absolutists belong in the past, treated as admonitory, and in controlled circumstances where people are given the option to engage with them.

As anyone who remembers the “cancel culture” panic of yesteryear can attest to, the people who cried most loudly about it, were those whose traditional power was being contested, almost entirely because other people were exercising their freedom. Now that we face an actual canceling of culture in the form of domestic concentration camps, a mafia state onslaught against higher ed, and an expansion of militarized police straight out of dystopian fantasy, those voices are coincidentally, if not suspiciously, silent.

But there is a connection between the attack on education and diversity and the platforming of hate: our power structures are aiming at undermining the thinking and reasoning skills that make it possible to be critical of the non-stop production of bad information. There’s an additional link between these efforts and the support for ‘AI’ and LLM generated pabulum: the intentional deadening of the human heart and mind.

I should have known better and earlier. In my recent book Storylife I call near the end for a major shift in education to address how narrative shapes us

Our vulnerability to narrative is increased when we do not learn about its power, when we are not taught how to engage with it directly. We need to be taught to develop the tools to engage with story intentionally rather than passively allowing it to shape us. From primary school education on, we need to emphasize rich and complex engagement with narrative. This means focusing less on standardized testing and more on reading and discussing stories together. (And “story” here is inclusive of narrative in all its forms, visual, aural, moving, and static.) This means emphasizing media literacy alongside the history of ideas. This means teaching about cognition, psychology, and evolution much earlier in education and framing STEM fields as subject to discourse too, not just as instruments to make us better partners for computers or more effective gears in production machines

We need to be able to exercise the judgment that recognizes that some speech does demonstrable harm to our fellow people and our shared human enterprise. Leaving is an exercise of this freedom. My apologies for taking so long to make this decision. The cause is partly a naïve hope that things would change and a denial that they were as bad as they are. The posts from this site have been downloaded and will be re-released on my old website sententiaeantiquae.com book-by-book starting in September. I hope you’ll join me there.

 

 

Becoming Nobody: A Classics Nostos

~ joegoodkin ~ Leave a comment

A reflection on almost 400 Odyssey shows across all 50 U.S. States and More

In book 9 of Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus famously recounts the story of how he came across Polyphemus the cyclops, who trapped the trespassing Odysseus in his cave. The titular hero tells the cyclops that his name is οὔτις, or “Nobody.” When Odysseus stabs Polyphemus in the eye with an olive tree trunk, the other cyclopes hear Polyphemus’ distress and run to help him. Polyphemus proclaims that “οὔτις (Nobody) blinded him,” the cyclopes think Polyphemus is a delusional lunatic, and Odysseus is eventually able to escape the cave and be back on his way.

This isn’t the only time in the poem that Odysseus takes on an alternate identity: He routinely uses other names and backgrounds as he tries to find his way back to the island of Ithaka and reestablish himself as the ruler of his household, a journey that spans twenty years from the time he left to fight the war at Troy to when he becomes the final Greek warrior to make it home.

But of these alternate identities, it’s the Nobody trick that feels the most telling and significant. There’s a piece of being a traveling storyteller (as Odysseus is) that makes you aware of both who you are and who you aren’t, something in you that is devoid of identity, which comes untethered when you are away from home. It’s both a freedom and a burden.

I know this feeling. For over twenty years I’ve traveled the world performing an original 24 song one man folk opera of the Odyssey. And I think I’m the only person since, well, Homer’s time, who can say that. 

I’ve played in all 50 US states. I’ve played in Athens and Rome. I’ve played in lecture halls at formal educational institutions like Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, and Cambridge, and I’ve played in a muddy field in Jackson, Mississippi. I’ve played for audiences of elite academic specialists and I’ve played for high school freshman English classes. I’ll let you decide which of those is scarier. 

In total I’ve played my Odyssey almost 400 times. I’m a guy who goes around telling stories about a guy who goes around telling stories.

In this essay, I’d like to share my journey to create my bardic folk opera and what I’ve learned in sharing my work with audiences around the world.

Like Odysseus’ nostos, it’s been anything but a straight line.

παλίντροπος άρμονίη: “ a harmony of opposites”

I remember staring at those words my senior year of high school in the book “Myth of the State” by Ernst Cassirer, drawn to them, frustrated I couldn’t sound them out, break them down, understand them. They were magical. My life had no antecedent for interest in Ancient Greek and I had no idea why, but the words called to me.

So I chased that feeling and took Ancient Greek my first semester at University of Wisconsin-Madison, followed by classes in Classical Mythology and Greek Archaeology my second semester. Quite suddenly (and altogether accidentally) I was a Classics major, a major I previously had no idea existed.

I read Homeric Greek in my fourth semester language class. Like those Greek words my senior year of high school, I vividly remember my initial engagement with the Iliad though I still struggle to describe to my audiences what I felt as this text washed over me and I saw and experienced the poetry for both how it was organized and what it meant.

Sometimes I call it being surrounded by a living breathing organism. Sometimes as being inside the words and feeling a landscape around them. Sometimes as having my head and heart explode at the same time (in a good way I mean…). Sometimes as having my brain rewired. 

All these are good approximations of my first encounter with Homer in Greek but maybe the best way to describe what I felt was connection. Connection to humanity. Connection to the tens of thousands of voices that sang these stories as songs three thousand and more years ago before they were texts, voices which left their residue in and around the words that finally got written and passed down for two and half millennia, improbably landing in front of me, a twenty year old undergrad in an upper Midwest public university who took Ancient Greek because of two words he saw in a book in a public high school in west suburban Chicagoland. 

It was a connection unfacilitated by intellectual calculation.  Academic analysis came later and fleshed out my understanding of perhaps exactly what I was connecting to and how but that initial flash was a pure emotional reaction to a force embedded in the text that was above or below or beside cognition. The text was acting on me and the result was emotional and visceral connection.

For the rest of college, I chased that feeling. I read Homer in translation. I read more Homer in Greek both for class and on my own. I took as many Greek classes as my schedule allowed and loved them all, but none lit me up in quite the same way Homer did. I took the equivalent of two years of Latin in 8 weeks the summer between my sophomore and junior years and survived it (screw you, Wheelock!) but found it didn’t do the same thing for me that Greek did. 

More significantly, I took a Comparative Literature class in which we read the Odyssey and a number of what I would learn were called “receptions,” works inspired by or in response to the original, as well as works that shared some of the themes of the epic. 

The primary theme we considered in that class was the relationship between home and identity. We read (in translation) the Aeneid and the Argonautica. We read Ulysses the novel by James Joyce and Ulysses the poem by Lord Tenneson. We read Omeros by Derek Walcott. We watched movies about journeys to or the search for home: Planet of the Apes (Spoiler alert: they were home all along!), the Wizard of Oz (Spoiler alert: there’s no place like home!), and Waterworld (Spoiler alert: uh… jetski biker gangs are even worse than Scylla and Charybdis?).

It was, in retrospect, ahead of its time: in the year 2024 there are many classes that engage ancient sources alongside modern receptions, receptions in literature, film, music, and other media, but in 1997 this type of framing and syllabus was rare.

What the class did was open my mind and heart to the idea that epic was a tradition not a fixed artifact. And that tradition is open for all to participate in. The stories of the Odyssey and Iliad originated as ephemeral oral performances and for a very long time there were no definitive versions. The truth of the stories was (and is) the sum of all the performances and in particular how tellings inspire retellings.

And the connection that I felt, the connection in which I wanted to participate, was a connection to this chorus of voices that told and retold this story and the audiences that collaborated on the meanings of the tellings.

So after I graduated college in 1999 with a BA in Classics, I went wading in the wine dark sea of epic tradition and wrote my own original 24 song bardic retelling of the Odyssey. I performed it for the first time in my parents’ living room on March 17, 2002, to a score of family and friends.  The journey from performance number one in March of 2002 to performance number 366 (yes, exactly a leap year’s worth of shows) on November 8, 2023, in Stillwater, Oklahoma, the 50th and final US state, could fill 24 books and then some with stories and adventures that rival Odysseus’ in nature and variety but one of the questions I’ve been asked after almost every one of those performances is: 

Why the Odyssey? 

My initial experience with Homer was through the language in the Iliad.  But I chose the Odyssey as the source for my first folk opera (and waited until 2018 to create my Iliad song retelling, The Blues of Achilles). Why?

That same shock of human connection I got from feeling the dactylic hexameter of the Iliad wash over me, I got from thinking about the experiences of the characters in the Odyssey. Thinking about what they were going through and why. Thinking about why a culture found these characters and experiences important enough to preserve in songs and then texts that preserved songs.

Did I identify with Telemachus? Sure. In some ways. But even when I was Telemachus’ age, I felt a pull towards Odysseus. 

A lot of attention is paid to the word πολύτροπον, that untranslatable epithet that modifies ἄνδρα (“man”) in the first line of the poem. But what struck me as more intriguing than πολύτροπον was the whole third line of the epic:

πολλῶν δ᾽ ἀνθρώπων ἴδεν ἄστεα καὶ νόον ἔγνω

“He (Odysseus) saw the cities and knew the mind of many men”

From the very beginning, Odysseus is presented as a seeker, a collector of experience. Why? How does he use it and what does he get out of it? Why does he want to hear the Sirens’ song? The tension between his desire for experience and his wish to get home moved me even before I was a traveling bard and got to feel it firsthand as the itinerant bards who told Odysseus’ story surely did as well. 

Current cultural norms are not kind to Odysseus. And I should say that any scorn heaped on his behavior and performance as a leader is fair and apt. But I think that the power of the story and its timelessness lie not in the morality of the characters (certain aspects of morality presented in the poem are clearly culturally determined) but in the power of the text’s portrayal of human behavior with respect to identity, which is complicated (or one might say πολύτροπον) for all of us.

I suspect that some of our discomfort with Odysseus is that we understand there is a little bit of him in all of us. Hopefully not the killing or getting people killed but the tension between our stated beliefs and our behaviors, how that resonates or doesn’t resonate with our identities, how we fit or don’t fit into the homes and societies that formed and produced us.

And nothing will make one feel this tension like becoming Nobody out on the wine dark sea.

A final thought: 

My odyssey is a story of chasing things that moved me even when I wasn’t sure why. It’s one of reintegrating text into its vestigial form of experience to explore how musical elements impact storytelling. It’s one of trying to create the very feeling of connection that inspired me: connection to my own identity and myriad connections between humans who attend my performances, listen to my songs about Nobody, and take the feelings from these performances forward in their own lives to create more connection. 

To participate in this far-reaching chain of human connection, to be even the tiniest part of it, is humbling and beautiful. Becoming Nobody allowed me to become Somebody.

Joe Goodkin is a modern bard who performs original music based on epic poetry and other subjects.  He can be seen and heard at http://www.joesodyssey.com http://www.thebluesofachilles.com or http://www.joegoodkin.com and emailed at joegoodkin@gmail.com about bookings or anything else. He has written about his work on SA before.

Escape Politics and Have Lunch on Your Own Time

~ sententiaeantiquae ~ Leave a comment

Plutarch, On Exile 604d

“There’s that quote of Diogenes when he said, “Aristotle has lunch on Philip’s schedule, but Diogenes does it on his own time,” since there’s no political affair or officer, or leader to trouble the daily habits of his life.

For this reason, you will discover that few of the wisest and most thoughtful people have been buried in their own countries–and that most of them did this by choice, raising an anchor on their own and finding a new safe harbor for their lives, either leaving Athens or retreating there.”

τὸ τοῦ Διογένους “Ἀριστοτέλης ἀριστᾷ ὅταν δοκῇ Φιλίππῳ, Διογένης, ὅταν Διογένει,” μήτε πραγματείας, μήτε ἄρχοντος, μήτε ἡγεμόνος τὴν συνήθη δίαιταν περισπῶντος.

Διὰ τοῦτο τῶν φρονιμωτάτων καὶ σοφωτάτων ὀλίγους ἂν εὕροις ἐν ταῖς ἑαυτῶν πατρίσι κεκηδευμένους, οἱ δὲ πλεῖστοι, μηδενὸς ἀναγκάζοντος, αὐτοὶ τὸ ἀγκύριον5 ἀράμενοι, μεθωρμίσαντο τοὺς βίους καὶ μετέστησαν οἱ μὲν εἰς Ἀθήνας, οἱ δὲ ἐξ Ἀθηνῶν.

Bonaventura Peeters the Elder, “Dutch Ferry Boats in a Fresh Breeze”

Translation, Authority, and Reception 3: Epic Interventions

~ imaanansari19 ~ Leave a comment

Editor’s Note: This is the third of a four-part essay on  reception of minoritized translators of Classical Epic Poetry by Imaan Ansari.

Sexism emanates from the canon itself, since the notion of “Homer” as more than one author rarely elicits the conversation that the group may include female Hellenists. Furthermore, three especially canonized texts, the Iliad, Aeneid, and Odyssey, all begin with a similar structure in translation: a discussion of a man and a muse. Of course, female characters and their presence in each story deeply impact the course that the narrative takes. For instance, Dido in the Aeneid is a powerful Queen who prolongs Aeneas’ stay in Carthage before he reaches the Western Land, Hesperia. In the Classical world, power is finite. Why does Dido and Aeneas’ relationship usher in both Dido’s downfall and not, immediately, that of Aeneas? Because Aeneas is the one who makes the decisions, and has control, when they are together.

Classicist John L. Moles cannot prove that Dido is morally culpable for having sex with Aeneas since he subjects Dido to more scrutiny and blame than he does Aeneas, and since he fails to acknowledge the ambiguity concerning whether they are married. The example encapsulates how something ambiguous within the ancient text itself is treated using a double standard. Sexism does exist in the text itself in terms of blame and the translator, Moles, perpetuates the point of view of antiquity. According to Moles, Dido commits a misdemeanor by having sex with Aeneas because she knowingly does so out of wedlock.[1]

Moles clarifies that Dido is not at fault for falling in love with Aeneas; however, he places blame on her for how she responds to that love. Moles construes the passage which follows the cave scene to be Vergil’s demonstration of a moral shift in Dido’s mentality, most probably dictated by love.[2] The line of which Dido is the subject, coniugium vocat, hoc praetexit nomine culpam (Vergil, Aen. 4.172) describes, to Moles, her fatal flaw. Moles interprets the word culpa as representing Dido’s hamartia.[3] Moles explains that Dido hides the state of Aeneas’ and her relationship by calling it a marriage. Moles believes that the implications of the verb vocat, the act of attributing a name, extend to Dido’s intention to justify her sex with Aeneas by saying that they are married. Moles construes the verb that follows, praetexit, to mean that Dido consciously hides truth even though she herself knows, at some level, that they are not married. By isolating line 172, following the censored cave scene, Moles sees “shamelessness” in Dido, a trope of Greco-Roman tragedy often attributed to the woman in an “emotional entanglement.”[4] Moles aligns himself with Vergil’s word choice of nomine, here being a name that Dido imposes on her relationship with Aeneas, to say that even Vergil saw Dido and Aeneas as unmarried, and that Dido uses the label of marriage to justify sex.

Moles does not attribute equal blame to Aeneas and Dido for the misconduct in the cave (even if we grant his assumption that they are not married). He incorrectly places the entire burden of the culpa on Dido by citing the “illicit nature of her love-making with Aeneas.”[5] Although Aeneas and Dido have sex with each other in the cave, Moles refers to Aeneas as a sort of accomplice in Dido’s illicit activities. Moles makes the assumption that Dido initiated, and roped Aeneas into, sex even in his English sentence structure; the word “her” in the phrase is the English equivalent to a Latin subjective genitive, in conjunction with “love-making.” Aeneas corresponds to a Latin ablative of accompaniment, contextualizing the fact that Dido is the focus of Moles’ blame, since she governs the “love-making” out of which Aeneas stems as almost an afterthought.

Because Vergil leaves out the scene in which his audience understands that Dido and Aeneas have sex, Moles can only speculate about who is more at fault. Moles defaults to the (sexist) point of view that women are deemed “shameless” for having sex (outside of marriage), rather than questioning why women are conventionally blamed (and men are not).[6] Why should women harbor the shame within a relationship, and be regarded as shameless if they act outside of that norm, while the actions of their male counterparts are judged with less scrutiny? Moles describes Dido as “over emotional,” undermining her conversation with Anna, consideration of Sychaeus, and careful deliberation over whether to engage in the relationship in the first place.[7] By calling her “over” an acceptable threshold of emotional expression, Moles imposes a standard on Dido to which he does not hold Aeneas. Of course, this is an article considering Dido’s fatal flaw, yet Moles makes no effort to determine that of Aeneas; just as Dido is the focus of Moles’ article, she is the target of his blame.

Moles dismisses evidence which suggests that Aeneas and Dido are married by imposing his own criteria of what constitutes a “proper” marriage. The first issue with his argument is the word “proper” in and of itself, since Moles bases his definition of marriage on “Roman law and social practice.”[8] Moles uses Aristotle’s analysis of Greek tragedy to understand Vergil’s storyline and attribute a fatal flaw to Dido, but he makes the mistake of applying Roman standards to two people in Carthage, who have sex many years before Rome is established. Of course, under the assumption that the Aeneid is propaganda for the first Roman emperor, Augustus, the text may then be accepted as intentionally anachronistic.[9] There remains a disconnect between Moles’ argument and the chronology of the epic, since, although both Rome and Carthage may overlap in terms of societal norms, Moles invalidates Aeneas and Dido’s marriage with standards that do not yet preside over their kingdoms or daily lives.

Moles also makes the point that a married couple must live together and that Aeneas and Dido are “not yet cohabiting.”[10] However, once Dido enters her bedroom for the last time before committing suicide, she picks up Aeneas’ sword and stares at the bed in which they slept together. The fact that Aeneas left his belongings in Dido’s room demonstrates that he stayed with her for an extended period of time, suggesting that they are at least “more married” than Moles credits them. Moles equates Dido and Aeneas’ relationship to a one-night-stand by remarking that “they have only made love once.”[11] However, Dido’s tears upon seeing the empty bed and Aeneas’ possessions, without his presence, imply that they slept and spent time with each other beyond Moles’ assertion. Moles would actually strengthen his argument by asserting that Dido and Aeneas may have had sex more than once because under his framework, Dido would be even more culpable for repeating illicit affairs. Instead, he speculates on the events in the cave, which Vergil himself does not narrate, thus, Moles stretches Vergil’s intention for the meaning behind his text. The way in which Moles crafts this argument, to demean Dido and suggest that she exclusively exhibits a fatal flaw, demonstrates how he reduces her to a “trope” or a “token” scorned female character.

Emily Wilson and her newly published translation of Homer’s Iliad. [15]

This idea of a “token” or “the only” female extends into media reception of female translators. Emily Wilson is adamant that she is not the first woman to have translated the Odyssey, so much so that one will encounter that fact in her Twitter bio.[12] Recently, Emily Wilson published her translation of the Iliad, joining Caroline Anderson, another woman to have published a translation of the epic. Emily Wilson is technically the first woman to have translated the Odyssey into English, however, this title of “the first,” tends to minimize both the contributions of women to the Classics and the interactions between women and ancient texts. For instance, Anne le Fèvre Dacier translated the Odyssey into French prose in as early as 1708, but is rarely recognized as “the first female translator or classicist” by Western media, perhaps because she did not write in English.[13]

Wilson’s activism in raising awareness for female translators extends profoundly into the Classical texts that she translates herself, namely, humanizing the enslaved women who sleep with the suitors during the Odyssey. These women are executed by Telemachus at Odysseus’ order (Homer, Od, 22.471-473). The translation of these women from Greek to English perpetuates the brutality and disdain with which they were treated. On International Women’s Day in 2018, Emily Wilson exposed the choices that best-selling male English translations of the Odyssey make about how to render the enslaved women. The wrongdoings and shortcomings of male classicists are often ignored, perhaps because of perceived male domination in the field.

Wilson turned straight to best-selling translated works by authors such as Fagles, Lombardo, and Fitzgerald, all of whom used slurs to describe these women. Wilson embraces alternative knowledge sharing in order to correct these injustices with a wider audience.[14] By choosing Twitter as her platform, she joined a movement of scholars working to demystify Classics as a field—one that younger generations and marginalized groups can, in fact, access. This mission is in keeping with Wilson’s attitude to raise awareness for issues in the Classics, such as gender inequality, in tandem with extending appreciation and involvement in Classical literature to youth. She holds herself and other translators by demonstrating that translation and identity are inextricably interwoven.

The New Yorker presents Wilson as risking her reputation in order to give voice to a more important movement that is women’s rights in the Classics. Dan Chiasson, the contributor of this piece, points out that some of the men whom Wilson critiques cannot respond as they have since passed away. For instance, ten years prior to the publication of her Twitter thread, Robert Fagles died. Fagles, arguably but according to Chiasson, is the classicist whom Wilson most directly calls out. Returning to the scene of the hanged slave women, Wilson believes Fagles to have conflated the death of these women to a forgettable, inconsequential event; Fagles presented what Wilson calls a “childish half-rhyme” between the words “cozy… grisly” to describe the circumstances and appearances of the enslaved women.[16] The mentality of blame the victim–or, at least, disregard the victim–is exacerbated here. Wilson acknowledges the dilemma posed by the heroism and homecoming of Odysseus; certain translators take it upon themselves to regard Odysseus as the focus, protagonist, and essence of the entire Odyssey, however, such a view minimizes the presence of other characters. For example, since Odysseus requests that the enslaved women be hanged, Telemachus obliges. The personhood of these women gets lost, not only in translation, but within the scene itself.

Classical reception makes it deeply vital for translators to have the implications of their words in mind, since their audience is different from that of the original canonized work, intended to be received by, in the case of the Odyssey, a more patriarchal society. It is imperative today that translators understand the platform that they are given: to relay words of the past into the framework of the now. The social justice, inclusivity, and awareness for which Wilson campaigns and champions in translation need institutional recognition.

 

Imaan Ansari is a high school junior at Trinity School in New York City. Her parents immigrated to the US from India, so her experiences as a woman of color and as a first-generation American influence her passion for investigating and amplifying the contributions of minority groups to the Classics. Imaan has taken Latin for six years. She is also fluent in Hindi and Urdu, and aspires to study Sanskrit. At school, Imaan serves on the Student Senate, fulfilling roles such as Chair of Finance, overseeing the student budget, and Speaker, communicating the Senate’s initiatives to students, faculty, and staff. Imaan is the Editor-in-Chief of Diversion, the Modern Language magazine, and the Editor-in-Chief of Symposium, the Classics publication. She is the President of Classics Club and also leads a free peer Latin tutoring service. Outside of Classics, Imaan enjoys playing golf, as captain of the Varsity team, and has been playing violin in various orchestras for over ten years

notes

[1] Moles, J. (1984) “Aristotle and Dido’s ‘hamartia,’” Jstor. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/642369 (Accessed: 13 August 2023).

[2] Ibid., 51.

[3] Ibid., 48.

[4] Ibid., 51-52.

[5] Ibid., 52.

[6] Ibid., 52.

[7] Ibid., 50.

[8] Ibid., 52.

[9] ​​Lavocat, F. (2020) “Dido meets Aeneas: Anachronism, alternative history, counterfactual thinking and the idea of fiction,” JLT Articles. Available at: http://www.jltonline.de/index.php/articles/article/view/1111/2549 (Accessed: 22 August 2023).

[10] Moles, J. (1984) “Aristotle and Dido’s ‘hamartia,’” Jstor. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/642369 (Accessed: 13 August 2023).

[11] Ibid., 52.

[12] Bao, J. (2019) “Emily Wilson: Not the first woman to translate the Odyssey,” 34th Street Magazine. Available at: https://www.34st.com/article/2019/10/emily-wilson-penn-classical-studies-translation-the-odyssey-macarthur-foundation-genius-grant-fellowship (Accessed: 22 August 2023).

[13] Hepburn, L. (2022) “Anne Le Fèvre Dacier: Homer’s first female translator,” Peter Harrington Journal – The Journal. Available at: https://www.peterharrington.co.uk/blog/anne-le-fevre-dacier-homers-first-female-translator/ (Accessed: 22 August 2023).

[14] Chiasson, D. (2018) “The classics scholar redefining what Twitter can do,” The New Yorker. Available at: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/rabbit-holes/the-classics-scholar-redefining-what-twitter-can-do (Accessed: 13 August 2023).

[15] https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/09/25/arts/facetime-with-homer-emily-wilsons-new-translation-iliad-brings-zoomer-generation-vibe-classical-war-epic/

[16] Wilson, E. (2018) “@EmilyRCWilson scholia,” Emily Wilson. Available at: https://www.emilyrcwilson.com/emilyrcwilson-scholia (Accessed: 13 August 2023).

Escape Politics and Have Lunch on Your Own Time

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Plutarch, On Exile 604d

“There’s that quote of Diogenes when he said, “Aristotle has lunch on Philip’s schedule, but Diogenes does when he wants to,” since there’s no political affair or officer, or leader to trouble the daily habits of his life.

For this reason, you will discover that few of the wisest and most thoughtful people have been buried in their own countries–and that most of them did this by choice, raising an anchor on their own and finding a new safe harbor for their lives, either leaving Athens or retreating there.”

τὸ τοῦ Διογένους “Ἀριστοτέλης ἀριστᾷ ὅταν δοκῇ Φιλίππῳ, Διογένης, ὅταν Διογένει,” μήτε πραγματείας, μήτε ἄρχοντος, μήτε ἡγεμόνος τὴν συνήθη δίαιταν περισπῶντος.

Διὰ τοῦτο τῶν φρονιμωτάτων καὶ σοφωτάτων ὀλίγους ἂν εὕροις ἐν ταῖς ἑαυτῶν πατρίσι κεκηδευμένους, οἱ δὲ πλεῖστοι, μηδενὸς ἀναγκάζοντος, αὐτοὶ τὸ ἀγκύριον5 ἀράμενοι, μεθωρμίσαντο τοὺς βίους καὶ μετέστησαν οἱ μὲν εἰς Ἀθήνας, οἱ δὲ ἐξ Ἀθηνῶν.

Bonaventura Peeters the Elder, “Dutch Ferry Boats in a Fresh Breeze”