“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]
Like many others, I spent the first year of the COVID pandemic in an fugue state, trying to maintain some semblance of the life that preceded March 2020 (work, family, relationships) while also living as a relentless voyeur of the things going on in the world: the early news reports of the virus, our rapid and misunderstood shutdowns, the #BlackLivesMatter protests in the wake of endless police violence and judicial exoneration, the spectacle of a president both incompetent and insufficiently concerned, and the added drama of a political campaign that was always going to be important, but whose urgency seemed newly inescapable.
At the time, I was preparing for the release of a book I had spent the better part of a decade researching and writing on psychology and the Homeric Odyssey. Much of the theoretical groundwork for this book rested upon cognitive approaches to narrative, perhaps best typified by the work of Jerome Bruner, Mark Turner, and the psychologist Michael White. The paralysis I felt made me think more about the trauma-studies side of my work, how narrative can be used to address traumatic experiences (but also how narrative can produce trauma on its own).
Observing the world as it changed from the vantage of social media while writing to promote The Many-Minded Man, led me to ask a basic question that has no clear answer: does knowing you’re being traumatized provide any benefit against the long-term impact of trauma? This may seem a histrionic question in isolation, but my thoughts were ranging to the cultural level: communities can suffer trauma together and it can fundamentally shift their identities, their relationships to power and language, and their ability to respond to future challenges.
I don’t believe I have sufficiently answered that that question for myself, partly because I went in a different direction. I found myself overwhelmed by the shifts that the stories we were hearing and telling about the world were taking and how they impacted our actions: from our public health response to COVID (which included a broad range of denial, quack-science, and conspiracy theories) and our shifting communal responses to state-sanctioned violence against black people, our real world responses with life-and-death consequences were (and are) informed by ways of viewing the world that can simply be framed as stories (to avoid, for a moment, the issue of fact and fiction).
For years in teaching myth, I had already used DNA as a metaphor for trying to get students to think about how the same kinds of stories were continually reused. My primary emphasis in teaching myth has long been to downplay any notion of which version of a story is ‘correct’ or ‘first’ and instead to encourage students to think about why some details may have been important in one context and not another. Why, for example, is the story of Oedipus in the Odyssey is rather different from the one canonized by Sophocles while still being recognizable the ‘same’? The answer I often have given only partly as an evasion comes from the Muses themselves, when they tell Hesiod at the beginning of the Theogony that “we know how to tell lies that sound like the truth but we can speak the truth when we want to”: fact and fiction are not meaningful categories of narrative. What matters it what a particular narrative says and what it does in the world.
So, for a long time, I had approached the category of myth—a field long dominated by patterns and repetitions—by asking students to entertain the idea that story patterns contain potential meanings like genes in strands of DNA that adapt to the needs of their audiences. Witnessing the impact of counter-narratives during COVID while also working on multiple tasks-forces at my institution where we learned about COVID mutation, transmission, and mitigation, I came to see our communication about the virus as a kind of narrative that was also changing through transmission and having an equal—if not greater—impact on the world. I was already primed to see story in everything, but the ‘new’ thing I saw was that narrative’s negative potential was as great as its redemptive power. This was not really a novel idea for me—I include chapters on the negative impact of Odysseus’ narrative power on marginalized people in the Odyssey in The Many-Minded Man. But I think even this was too limited.
COVID did not, has not ended. And the stories that were shaping our world in 2020 have certainly not abated. I started talking about some of the ideas that eventually showed up in Storylife with Heather Gold in Fall of 2021. We were discussing various possible books and I had offered up some pretty stale proposals when she asked me just to tell her what I had been thinking about. I started to tell her an idea about comparing the structure of Homeric poetry and mythical narrative to DNA and using biological analogies to decenter authorship and design to show how complex narratives can develop from basic structures. I told her that story functions like a virus and is always changing and has no agent driving it and added some examples I had written about before (especially the tale of Kleomedes the Astupalaian). And she, miraculously, asked me how long it would take me to write a proposal and sample chapter.
Storylife certainly would not have been written without the COVID pandemic; It might not have happened at all if I hadn’t gotten COVID too. My family avoided getting sick until the Omicron phase of COVID. We stayed pretty isolated for 2020 and 2021 once we found out my wife was pregnant with our third child. We kept our kids home from school when their classmates returned, saw very few people, and tried to avoid any exposure. I was the first to show symptoms and was sick the longest, needing the 10 days home to be able to leave the house and showing symptoms for months after (it was over three months until I stopped feeling the impact of aphasia daily; I went from running under an 8-minute mile with ease for over an hour to struggle to finish one under 10).
I wrote the sample chapter (most of what is now chapter 5) while recovering from a fever and convalescing at Homer. To be honest, I remember the story of writing the chapter that I told after far more than the actual writing itself. (But this doesn’t concern me overmuch: in retrospect, my recall of writing anything seems to be pretty limited. My unconfirmed theory is that the focused activity of writing itself may limit how memories of around it form.) I’ve joked before that the novel coronavirus should be credited as a co-author, but I definitely wrote other chapters in various degrees of health. Once the manuscript was accepted, I wrote in hour or two blocks carved out of the day—producing quickly, but still delivering the manuscript a half-year late.
I started Storylife as a provocation to address both our blinkered view of poetic creation and our willful denial of the impact that narratives have on our lives together. Nothing I have seen since I finished Storylife has changed my essential convictions. The most recent presidential election, our inaction on climate change, the assault on higher education, our inability to acknowledge the truth of the horrors unfolding around the world to support our interests—everything we do together is framed and mediated by narrative. Narrative is steroidal in the information age. It moves faster than we can handle, and twists the way we understand. But it also allows us to see a different world, to imagine something better. Story retains the potential to help us realize a far kinder world with grander expectations for lives of meaning and comfort for every human being. But we need to be the kinds of audiences who want to hear this tale.
Post-script: Communities write books
One of the central theses of the book is that we as human beings are cognitively disinclined to think in the aggregate and to see ourselves as part of collective endeavors rather than individuals sealed off to the world physically and psycho-emotionally. (This is cognitive and cultural too.) The ideas in this book were shaped by countless conversations, presentations, questions, objections, editing, and more. At some level, I can’t take credit for something so many others were involved in. Here are the other creators I can remember.
From the acknowledgements: –
Particular parts of the book were improved in talks given at the Greek Literature and the Environment Workshop, UCSB, the University of Chicago Rhetoric and Poetics, Homer Lecture, and work presented at the Brandeis Psychology department colloquia series… Some of the ideas and passages also appeared in pieces for The Conversation or Neos Kosmos.
I owe a debt to many for help with bibliography and subjects beyond my expertise, including Joseph Cunningham, Sophus Helle, Prasad Jallepalli, Dan Perlman Seth Sanders, Claudio Sansone and Mario Telo. I cannot thank Eric Blum, Becca Frankel, and Talia Franks enough for editing and bibliographical assistance. Among the many friends who have supported my flights of fancy over the years, I would be remiss not to thank Lenny Muellner, Mimi Kramer, Justin Arft, Elton Barker, Celsiana Warwick, Julio Vega-Payne, Anna Hetherington, Paul O’Mahony, Sarah Bond, and Larry Benn, all of whom read drafts of or discussed various parts of this book and provided needed encouragement. Special thanks are due to my editor Heather Gold who provided the focus and the framework to help turn a half-baked idea into a full manuscript. Elizabeth Sylvia also provided invaluable editorial support,, and Susan Laity’s careful eye improved the book’s prose and style immeasurably.
And, as always, my spouse, Shahnaaz, deserves the final word—my belief in the future and any confidence I have starts with her.
Dio Chrysostom, Oration 55.10 On Homer and Socrates
“Dear Friend, if we compare the fox with [Homer’s] lions and leopards and we claim that it either not at all or a just a little different. But, perhaps, you approve of those kinds of things in Homer, when he brings up starlings, or jackdaws, or ashes, or beans, lentils, or when he depicts people winnowing or these portions seem to you to be the worst part of Homer’s poems.
So you admire only lions, eagles, Skyllas and Kyklopes, the things he used to enchant dumb people, just as nurses tell children about the Lamia. Truly, just as Homer tries to teach people who are really hard to teach through myths and history, so Sokrates often uses a similar technique, at times he feigns joking because he might help people this way. Perhaps he also butted heads with myth-tellers and historians.”
“I hold three cities dearest to me of all:
Argos, Sparta and Mykene of the wide ways.
Destroy them whenever they are hateful to your heart.
I am not standing before them and I don’t care about them.
For even if I am jealous over them and I don’t want you to destroy them,
I do not deny you in my jealousy because you are stronger than I am.
But it is not right to render my labor useless.
I am a god too, and my lineage comes from the same place as yours.
Crooked minded Kronos fathered me as the most honored of the gods
Both in terms of my birth and because I am called your wife
And you rule among the immortals”
It is notable that the poet wants to place a probable cause for the anger on Hera and it is not that which the myth fashions, that she is angry at the Trojans because Aphrodite was honored ahead of her in the judgment over beauty, instead he says that she loves those cities over which the injustice against Helen occurred.
“Note [that she mentions this] that they are fighting alongside the Greeks on account of these cities, not because of the judgment about beauty offered by Paris, which Homer doesn’t know about”
“But when each of them were lined up with their leaders,
The Trojans went forward with screeching and cries just like birds,
With the sound like the call of cranes high in 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.”
Mackie, Hilary Susan. Talking Trojan: speech and community in the Iliad. Greek Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches. Lanham (Md.): Rowman and Littlefield, 1996.
Muellner, Leonard Charles. “The simile of the cranes and Pygmies : a study of Homeric metaphor.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, vol. XCIII, 1990, pp. 59-101.
Ross, Shawn A. “Barbarophonos: Language and Panhellenism in the Iliad.” Classical Philology 100, no. 4 (2005): 299–316. https://doi.org/10.1086/500434.
“So I was speaking, but [the Kyklops] did not answer me because of his pitiless heart.
But then he leapt up, shot out his hands at my companions,
Grabbed two together, and struck them against the ground
Like puppies. Brains were flowing out from them and they dyed the ground.
After tearing them limb from limb, he prepared himself a meal.
He ate them like a mountain-born lion and left nothing behind,
The innards, the meat, and the marrow-filled bones.”
“Nearly all the Greeks made use of the dog in sacrifice and some still do today, for cleansing rituals. They also bring puppies for Hekate along with other purification materials; and they rub down people who need cleansing with the puppies.”
“The Greeks in their purification bring out the puppies and in many places use them in the practice called periskulakismos [‘carrying puppies around’]”
“Here, each of these groups of youths sacrifice a puppy to Enyalius, god of war, because they believe that it is best to make this most valiant of the domesticated animals to the bravest of the gods. I don’t know any other Greeks who believe it is right to sacrifice puppies to the gods except for the Kolophonians. For the Kolophonians sacrifice a black female puppy to the goddess of the Crossroad. The sacrifices of both the Kolophonians and the Spartan youths take place at night.”
“Indeed, the ancients did not consider this animal to be clean either: it was never sacrificed to one of the Olympian goes, but when it is given to Hekate at the cross-roads, it functions as part of the sacrifices that turn away and cleanse evil. In Sparta, they sacrifice dogs to the bloodiest of the gods, Enyalios. In Boiotia, it is the public cleansing ritual to walk between the parts of a dog that has been cut in half. The Romans themselves, during the Wolf-Festival which they call the Lupercalia, they sacrifice a dog in the month of purification.”
“The land of my father is not nameless,
Sparta, nor my father Tyndareus. And, indeed, there is
a certain story that Zeus flew to my mother Leda
after he took the form of a swan, a bird,
when he completed this ‘bedding’ deceptively
under the pretext of fleeing an eagle, if the story is true.
I am called Helen. And I should tell you the evils
I have suffered. Three goddesses went to the folds
O Mt. Ida to Alexander about their beauty,
Hera, the Kyprian, and the Zeus-born maiden,
Because they wanted him to complete a judgement of their ‘form’.
My beauty–if misfortune is beautiful–
Is what the Kyprian offered, for Alexander to marry,
In order to win. After Idaian Paris left the cow-stall
He went to Sparta seeking my bed.
But Hera, miffed because she did not defeat the goddesses,
Made my bed with Alexander an empty thing.
She did not give me, but instead, she made
A breathing ghost like me, crafting it from the sky,
For tyrant Priam’s son. He seemed to have me,
And it was an empty thing, because he did not have me….”
When I started posting on the Iliad last year, I was a bit unsure I would finish the project of a few posts per book, designed both for first time and experienced readers of the Iliad. Once I finished the project in April, this year, I found myself a little worn out and at a loss about what to do next. I am happy with my plan to post less, but to emphasize new or less well-known scholarship on the poem. But I also don’t want to just abandon 83 posts!
I was chatting with my friend (and fellow Homerist) Justin Arft last week and he compared Painful Signs (favorably) to introductory books on epic and suggested I could repackage this project as a book. This compliment made me remember that books can be a pain and that they can’t be updated easily. Also, I wanted this project to be open and available to anyone interested in the Iliad.
This post provides a (somewhat) stable table of contents for the substack posts.
Major Themes for Reading and Teaching the Iliad: A summary of five themes emphasized in the substack: (1) Politics, (2) Heroism; (3) Gods and Humans); (4) Family & Friends; (5) Narrative Traditions.
h: The subject catalogue (“Schlagwortkatalog”) of the University Library of Graz. The card shown refers to a text by Hans Schleimer who made up the rules for this catalogue. Like this lists of posts, a thing of the past.
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.
