In my earlier posts on Iliad 4, I emphasized the opening scene, where Zeus toys with the other gods and entertains the idea of ending the conflict, and one part of the so-called epipolesis, where Agamemnon goes around ‘rallying’ the troops to start the war. I barely discussed the intermediary scene where the gods rekindle the war by prompting Pandaros to break the truce made in book 4 by shooting at Agamemnon.
The structure of the book ends up looking something like this:
Structure of Iliad 4
1-72 Divine Assembly, Articulation of Local Plan
72-222 Rekindling of the Conflict, Wounding of Agamemnon
233-421 Epipolesis
422-544 Battle Scene
As with earlier books, we find the action splits into smaller parts, often 3 or 4, in an analogy to the way we can break down each line of dactylic hexameter into smaller, yet still sensible parts. Each part of this book could conceivably function alone or in a different order. The first section connects us to larger narrative arcs (e.g., the Trojan War and its causes); the second creates a join between the mythical narrative and the particular story of the Iliad (indeed, providing a kind of bridge from Zeus’ “plan” in the cosmic sense to end the race of heroes and the ‘local’ Iliadic plan of having the Greeks lose to appease Achilles’ slighted honor); the third section, building on the wounding of Menelaos in the second, serves chiefly to recharacterize Agamemnon as a leader in the war and to introduce us to warriors who have not spoken much so far, but who will be primary players later (e.g. Idomeneus, Diomedes); and the final martial chaos of the book provides a bridge to the battle and aristeia of book 5.
There’s a lot in this book I haven’t talked about. From the perspective of some of my recent posts attempting to imagine how Homeric heroes think (or are managed etc.). The example of Pandarus being induced to shoot Menealos and break the truce–thus providing some moral case against the Trojans–is interesting. I’d like to spend more time thinking about what Athena says and the figure she dons to persuade him, but that’s probably for the next time I go through the Iliad.
Every time I read Iliad 4 I find myself struck by Hera’s offer to Zeus after he suggests that they just have peace made between the Trojans and Greeks. On one level–if we are thinking about the overlapping motivations of mortals and gods–Hera’s response reflects the deep enmity that either side of a human conflict might feel. Just as at the end of the Odyssey there is no resolution to the cycle of vengeance between Odysseus and the suitors families, so too is there no way to resolve this war without the destruction of Troy (or the Greeks, in an alternate timeline). This is the terrible logic of violence, the inevitable outcome of revenge-fueled ‘justice’: arms are merely put aside until the next opportunity for slaughter. The Odyssey’s final dea ex machina dramatizes this; but before we can get there–or, more properly, to the reconciliations of Illad–by first witnessing the depths and consequences of holding a grudge.
So, we get to Hera’s response to Zeus.
Homer, Iliad 4.51-61
“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”
Here, Hera shows that she is so vengeful that she is willing to give up cities that were sacred to her for the destruction of the city of Troy. Any casual reader might note that these are the very cities that have brought some of the largest contingents to Troy! Ancient scholiasts note variously that this scene provides an explanation for Hera’s anger that does not include the judgment of Paris: these are the cities that started all the problems with Helen to begin with!
Schol. bT Ad Hom. Il 51-2 51
“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”
Others (see the bibliography below) have written well about the tension here between a “savage” goddess and the emerging concerns of the Iliad. In particular, there is a thematic arc between this book and book 24 where Hera argues against having Achilles give Hektor’s body back to his family for burial. In each scene, Hera represents that primal vengeance we often associate with chthonic deities like the Furies. In book 4, Zeus doesn’t make Hera relent, but by the end of the epic, Apollo stands to argue against her, and Zeus makes a judgment against her.
Fresco depicting Hierogamia, the sacred wedding of Hera and Zeus, witnessed by winged Iris, personification of the rainbow. Many ancient Greek cities and towns celebrated this event as a sacred rite. Pompeii, House of the Tragic Poet (VI 8, 5, atrium 3) 45-79 CE
From the perspective of Hesiod’s Theogony, where Zeus stabilizes the divine realm by ensuring that each god has their own honors and place in his universe, this horse-trading of favored cities could be seen as an echo of the conflict between Agamemnon and Achilles: Hera is offering to effect a redistribution of honor through the sacrifice of a favored city. Potential strife is averted through the offer of an exchange of one geras (that token of honor and esteem) for another. There is also an argument I have read suggesting that the cosmic aspect of this exchange of cities provides an explanation for the absence of these cities in the time of the epic’s audience. Such an argument suggests that while Zeus does not agree to take these three cities immediately, but their later obliteration supports the larger motivation of Zeus’ plan to rid the earth of the race of heroes.
But the rights of the gods are more or less fixed. Their world cannot change, so there’s more going on here. From a perspective that makes Iliad 24 a crucial resolution of the epic’s themes, book 4’s dispute is anticipatory: it perpetuates the violence for the audience to experience on the way to the realization that this kind of conflict is not merely unsustainable but it is fundamentally dehumanizing in that it makes people into things and obliterates families and cities. In my own reading of the Iliad in the light of modern violence, the poem itself attempts to re-humanize, to prompt its audience to recognize the folly and the damage of war and the endless, unendurable logic of comeuppance.
In this reading, Hera’s speech should shock audiences into thinking about vengeance and divine caprice. The peril of vengeance is clear; but Hera’s caprice may hint at a theological shift: Zeus’ playfulness and the malice of other gods might just convince some mortals that we need to rely on ourselves to make our lives better, since the gods are certainly not on our side.
A Few things to read
Van Erp Taalman Kip, A. Maria. “The gods of the « Iliad » and the fate of Troy.” Mnemosyne, vol. 53, no. 4, 2000 Ser. 4, pp. 385-402.
O’Brien, Joan V.. The transformation of Hera: a study of ritual, hero and the goddess in the Iliad. Greek Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches. Lanham (Md.): Rowman and Littlefield, 1993.
O’Brien, Joan. “Homer’s savage Hera.” The Classical Journal, vol. LXXXVI, 1990-1991, pp. 105-125.
Synodinou, Katerina. “The threats of physical abuse of Hera by Zeus in the Iliad.” Wiener Studien, vol. C, 1987, pp. 13-22.
Judgement of Paris. Fragment of an Attic black-figure hydria, 520–510 BC. The name of each character is inscribed above his/her head. Louvre
“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]
Helen ‘appears’ for the first time in the Iliad in book 3. What does she look like?
A few years ago, there was a bit of a to-do about the ethnicity of Homeric heroes. While some sketchy applications of DNA testing are eager to establish continuity between the people of antiquity and modern populations, others rightly argue that so many of our ideas about race, color, and identity have little to do with the ancient world and everything to do with our own. (See also the discussion on Pharos.)
But questions about DNA and color concepts are separate issues from myth and epic. Sure, the images and values of the ‘real’ world shape fantasy, but there is no direct accord cross-culturally between what people look like and how they imagine their heroes. Consider, e.g., the over-representation of blonde characters in American media in comparison to actual culture or the difference in skin tones in Bollywood from the general population. Racism and colorism shape representation, rendering the reality of genetics and appearance less important than the grammar of idealized bodies.
How did the Greeks imagine their heroes? This is nearly unsolvable because who the Greeks are and what their heroes do for them changes by time and location. We can start, though by looking at some of the language. Greek poetry describes Helen as xanthê and kuanopis. An insensitive and simplistic reading of these facts might claim that she was “blonde” with “blue eyes”. Not only is the situation far more interesting and complicated than this, but I am pretty sure that even if we accept these two words as applying to Helen they would not be equivalent to the appearance these two terms denote in modern English.
Let’s start with the barest fact. What Helen actually looks like is never stated in Homer. When the Trojans look at her, they say she has the “terrible appearance of goddesses” (αἰνῶς ἀθανάτῃσι θεῇς εἰς ὦπα ἔοικεν). This, of course, is not terribly specific.
Elsewhere, she is “argive Helen, for whom many Achaeans [struggled]” (᾿Αργείην ῾Ελένην, ἧς εἵνεκα πολλοὶ ᾿Αχαιῶν, Il. 2.161) she has “smooth” or “pale/white” arms (῏Ιρις δ’ αὖθ’ ῾Ελένῃ λευκωλένῳ ἄγγελος ἦλθεν, 3.121), but this likely has to do with a typical depiction of women in Archaic Greece (they are lighter in tone than men because they don’t work outside) or because of women’s clothing (arms may have been visible). Beyond that? In the Odyssey, she has “beautiful hair” (῾Ελένης πάρα καλλικόμοιο, 15.58) and a long robe (τανύπεπλος, 4.305).
Black-figure Belly Amphora with the Reclamation of Helen and Herakles and Kerberos. c 540 BCE; Walters Art Museum
If anyone is looking for a hint of the ideal of beauty from the legend who launched a thousand ships, they will be sorely disappointed. Why? I think the answer to this partly has to do with the nature of Homeric poetry and with good art in general. Homeric poetry developed over a long duration of time and appealed to many different peoples. To over-determine Helen’s beauty by describing it would necessarily adhere to some standards of beauty while alienating others.
In addition, why describe her beauty at all when the audience members themselves can craft an ideal in their mind? As a student of mine said while I mused over this, Helen “cannot have descriptors because she is a floating signifier”. She is a blank symbol for desire upon which all audience members (ancient and modern, male and female) project their own (often ambiguous) notions of beauty. To stay with the ancient world, think of that seminal first stanza in Sappho fr. 16:
Some say a force of horsemen, some say infantry and others say a fleet of ships is the loveliest thing on the dark earth, but I say it is [whatever] you love
As long as beauty is relative and in the eye of the beholder, any time we disambiguate it by saying that it is one thing and not another we depart from an abstract timeless idea and create something more bounded and less open to audience engagement. I think that part of what makes Homeric poetry work so well is that it combines a maximum amount of specificity within a maximized amount of ambiguity.
Outside of Homer, Helen is described with a little more detail, but in each case the significance of the signifier is less than it appears. In Hesiod, she has nice hair again (῾Ελένης ἕνεκ’ ἠυκόμοιο, Works and Days 165; this is repeated a lot in the fragmentary Hesiodic Catalogue). In fr. 9 of the Cypria she is merely a “Wonder for mortals” (θαῦμα βροτοῖσι·). Much later she has “spiraling eyebrows/lashes” (῾Ελένης ἑλικοβλεφάροιο, Quintus Smyrnaeus, 13.470). (N.b. there is a scholion glossing heliko- as “dark-eyed” when it is used in the Iliad).
If we want to learn more about Helen, she has additional features outside of epic poetry in lyric. I would be bold enough to claim that the more personal and erotic character of the genre is a better explanation for this specificity than anything else.
In lyric (e.g. Mesomedes, κυανῶπι θεά, θύγατερ Δίκας,) Helen is “cyan-eyed”, but if we look at the semantic range of this nominal root—which describes dark stones and eyes of water divinities—I think we can argue fairly that this indicates a dark and shiny, even watery texture (like lapis lazuli). I suspect this is about the sheen of eyes rather than their hue.
Eustathius remarks that the epithet κυανώπιδα is common (κατὰ κοινὸν ἐπίθετον) and is often used for dark sea creatures, describing as well his hair (Ποσειδῶνα κυανοχαίτην, Ad Hom. Il 1.555.23). Indeed, nymphs in general are “dark-eyed” in lyric (καὶ Νύμφαι κυανώπιδες, Anacr. fr. 12.2) and water deities remain so in Homer (κῦμα μέγα ῥοχθεῖ κυανώπιδος ᾿Αμφιτρίτης, Il. 12.60). Outside of Homer marriageable women also receive this epithet, including Helen’s sister Klytemnestra (Hes. Fr. 23a κού[ρην Τυνδαρέοιο Κλυταιμήσ]τρην κυανῶπ[ιν· cf. fr. 23.27 and for Althaia, 25.14, Elektra (169).
From Robert Beekes. Etymological Dictionary of Greek. Leiden: Brill, 2010
So, in lyric, Helen has dark pools for eyes. But what about her hair? At Sappho fr. 23 Helen is described as “xanthai” ([ ] ξάνθαι δ’ ᾿Ελέναι σ’ ἐίσ[κ]ην; cf. Stesichorus Fr. S103: [ξ]α̣νθὰ δ’ ῾Ελένα̣ π̣ρ[ ; Ibycus, fr. 1a.5: ξα]νθᾶς ῾Ελένας περὶ εἴδει ). But it is important to note that in this context there is a first-person narrator speaking (“I liken you to fair Helen…”). Note as well that there is something formulaic in these lyric lines: the epithet seems to begin the phrase each time.
When it comes to Hair color, xanthus is used in Homer to describe heroes, but not Helen (Menelaos is Xanthus, for example). A byzantine etymological dictionary suggests that the core meaning of this root has something to do with fire (Ξανθὴν, πυῤῥοειδῆ) and argues that the hair “symbolizes the heat and irascibility of the hero” (αἰνίττεται, τὸ θερμὸν καὶ ὀργίλον τοῦ ἥρωος, Etym. Gud, s.v.). But outside the Iliad and Odyssey the adjective is applied to goddesses: both Demeter (H. Dem. 302) and Aphrodite (Soph. fr. 255) are called Xanthê. Modern etymology sees this as anywhere from yellow to brown. But this is altogether relative again. “Light hair” in a group of people who are blond is almost white; among black/brown haired people, light hair can merely be a different shade of brown.
Again, from Beekes 2010:
In the second book of Liu Cixin’s “Three Body Problem Trilogy” The Dark Forest, one of the main characters Luo Ji creates an ideal woman to love in his mind and goes so far as to converse with her, to leave his actual girlfriend for her, and then to go on a trip with her. When he consults a psychologist about this, his doctor tells him his is lucky because everyone is in love with an idea–where the rest of the world will inevitably be disillusioned when they realize this, Luo Ji will never suffer this loss.
Trying to make Helen look like an actual person is not only impossible, but it is something which Homeric epic avoids for good reason.
“For poets certainly tell us that they bring us songs by drawing from the honey-flowing springs or certain gardens and glades of the Muses just like bees. And because they too are winged, they also speak the truth.”
When I start working on Homer with students, one of the first things I do is discuss what the epics are. I think this is important because they are fraught with historical weight thanks to their inclusion in multiple canons; but they also present ample opportunities for confusion because they derive from very different aesthetic principles than a modern novel or movie.
The hardest thing for me to come to terms with over the years has been that the epics are different things to different people over time. They are diachronic objects, even if we insist that they came together in the form we have them at a particular time and place. They have been changed by the aesthetics of editors and readers in distinct periods–they have their origin in performance and flexibility, in orality and ritual, yet for the majority of history, they have been read. So, any fair approach to the Iliad or the Odyssey needs to understand that the epics have been different interpretive objects to different audiences over time and that the assumptions that attend them in each period set up distinct expectations based on often unarticulated aesthetics.
There are so many things to say about the “Homeric Question” that it could (and does) fill many books. The variations on the questions include how and when were the epics ‘written’ down; whether they are ‘by’ the same ‘author’; what the importance is of the oral tradition as opposed to the written one; if we have the ‘same’ versions of the texts discussed in antiquity, and so on. (And each of these topics is complicated in turn by how we define or gloss the words I put in scare quotes.)
I am not even going to try to answer all these questions, instead I want to give a brief overview of what I see as the (1) primary tensions governing the Homeric problems, (2) the transmission models that have produced the texts we possess; (3) the stages I think are important for shaping these diachronic objects; and (3) more or less correlative stages of reception. In a later post I will expand more on what I think all of this means for teaching Homer.
I think there are five primary tensions that warp the way we think and talk about our Homeric problems: (a) Ancient Biographical traditions; (b) notions of unity vs. disunity (Unitarians vs. Analysts); (c) prejudices inherent in the dichotomy of orality vs. textuality; (d) cultural assumptions about authorship (tradition vs. the idea of monumental poets); (e) and the impact of Western chauvinism in forestalling the adoption of multicultural models. ‘Homer’ was an invention of antiquity: there’s no good reason to think that one ‘author’ in the modern sense is responsible for the Homeric epics (a); instead, we have ample reason to believe otherwise, from the scattershot madness of ancient biographies (see Barbara Graziosi’s Inventing Homer and the discussions in Gregory Nagy’s Homer the Preclassic; for much more positivistic textualist accounts, see M. L. West’s The Making of the Iliad or The Making of the Odyssey) to all the evidence we have for composition in performance (start with Milman Parry’s Studies in Homeric Verse Making and Albert Lord’s The Singer of Tales).
The fact remains, however, that after Plato (and certainly by the time of Aristotle) most authors in antiquity treated Homer as an author responsible for the creation of the Iliad and the Odyssey with little compunction for challenging the attribution. (But prior to Aristotle, there was much more given to Homer than a mere two epics.) While there are echoes and whispers to the contrary (and, indeed, an entire scholarly tradition from Alexandria through to Modern Germany trying to shoehorn Homer into the shape of an author), it really isn’t until the end of the 18th Century and the publication of F.A. Wolf’s Prolegomena ad Homerum that scholars stopped worrying about which island Homer was from and started really questioning the nature of the text they received.
By the end of the 19th century, (b) Homeric studies had split into camps that argued that the epics we have are products of editors stitching them together (Analysts) or that the epics are Unitary creations of a genius (or two; Unitarians) and the Analysts were clearly winning: such is the confusion, the repetitions, the omissions, and (apparent) inconsistencies of the Homeric texts (that word there is important). It was really the revelation of oral-formulaic theory and the articulation of composition in performance that broke this logjam.
Oral-formulaic theory shows that long, complex compositions can be created without the aid of writing and helps us to understand in part that the aesthetic ‘problems’ of the Homeric epics are features of their genesis and performance context and not problems. (So, features not bugs of epic poetry.) Homeric scholarship, however, spent nearly a century establishing that this was actually the case leading us to the profound issues of the 20th century (c+d), first, resistance to oral formulaic theory (on which see Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy or John Miles Foley’s How to Read an Oral Poem) and then second, debate over how oral the Homeric epics are. One of the favorite canards for the textualists to toss about is that oral-formulaic poetry posits “poetry by committee.” From this perspective, only an individual author could have produced the intricacies of meaning available in Homeric epic.
I contend that this is nonsense that misunderstands both oral formulaic theory and language itself. But who has time to argue that? The fact is that Homeric poetry as we have it comes to us as text and this text is oral-derived but has been edited and handled for centuries (ok, millennia) by people who think it is all text. No matter how we reconstruct its origins, then, we must treat it as a diachronic object that was textualized, that was treated as a text from a single author by editors for 2000 years, and whose inclusion in the canon has shaped both what we think verbal art should be like and what we think the epic is. (Nevertheless, since our culture is literate, literary, and prejudiced towards textualized ways of thinking, as redress we need to learn more about orality and performance based cultures.)
A final aspect of Homeric epic that I believe we have far underestimated, due to racist fantasies like the “Greek miracle,” is its multiculturalism. The world of archaic Greece (and before) was heavily engaged with people from other language groups and cultures. Since the decipherment of the Gilgamesh poems, scholars have seen deep thematic and linguistic parallels between the remains of the ancient Near East and early Greek poetry. A lot of this is detailed well in M. L. West’s The East Face of Helicon; Mary Bachvarova’s From Hittite to Homer is revelatory in providing even more material from ancient Asia Minor. The Homeric epics we have are products of different cultures, different audiences, and often competing linguistic, political, and class ideologies over time. They are not the font and origin of culture; rather, they are a fossilized cross-section of intercultural change.
The Venetus A Manuscript offers a similar image (lower left of Folio 100 verso
Transmission Models and Stages for the Epic
There are three primary transmission models that present different dates for the textualization of the Homeric epics.
1000-800 BCE Homer at the Origin of Culture (Barry Powell and Friends)
800-510 BCE Dictation Theories (Richard Janko; Minna Skafte Jensen; see Jonathan Ready’s recent book for an overview)
800-c. 280 BCE: Evolutionary Model (Gregory Nagy)
I lean really heavily toward the third option with one caveat, it still requires a bit of magical thinking or at least a suspension of disbelief. We don’t know how or when the epics we have were put down in writing, although it is clear from textual evidence that they went through ‘sieves’ or ‘funnels’ in Athens prior to the Hellenistic period and in Hellenistic libraries (and I will talk about Power and Publishing in a later post.)
To my taste, the two earlier models require equally magical thinking with somewhat more dismissiveness: the first requires an ahistorical and unlikely narrative for the adoption of writing in Greece and the promulgation of texts. It insufficiently considers the material conditions for the textualization of the epics and the adoption of the new technology for a performance form. (Like most arguments, it is driven by an ideology that encourages that magical thinking.) The second is easier to accept, but it does not account for motivations for dictation or the material conditions for preservation and dissemination. As Jensen observes, if the text were in fact written down during the 6th century, we have no evidence for its wide dissemination as a monumental text nor its use in literary reading apart from performance. The third option is the hardest to accept because of its complexity; but once accepted, it provides the most dynamic models of meaning-making available to Homeric interpreters.
The process and moment of epic textualization is an aporia–it is an unresolvable problem. Even if it were resolved, it would not change the history of the reception of the text. Rather than worry overmuch about the method and time of textualization, I think it is more useful to think about the impact of the epics being different things over time. So, I like to break the stages of these diachronic objects down as follows (and, to be clear, we have evidence for people engaging with the texts in the following ways.
Stages of performance, textuality, and fixity
Oral composition and Performance ?-5th century BCE
Canonization, Panhellenization 8th Century BCE through 323 BCE
Episodic engagement and occasional monumental performance, ?-4th Century BCE
Textualization, 6th-4th Centuries BCE
Editing and Standardization, 323 BCE-31 BCE (?)
Passage Use in Rhetorical Schools 280 BCE-? (5th Century CE? 12th century CE)
Creation of Synoptic Manuscripts we have, 9-12th Century BCE
These stages, to my mind, represent the full range of metamorphoses for the diachronic objects we currently possess, on a scale from least to most certainty. We have Byzantine manuscripts–they provide us with the texts we translate from to this day. We only have partial evidence for everything before that.
Reception Models
“What is lacking in Homer, that we should not consider him to be the wisest man in every kind of wisdom? Some people claim that his poetry is a complete education for life, equally divided between times of war and peace.”
Quid Homero deest, quominus in omni sapientia sapientissimus existimari possit? Eius poesim totam esse doctrinam vivendi quidam ostendunt, in belli tempora pacisque divisa, Leonardo Bruni de Studiis et Litteris 21
I think it is important to distinguish between models for transmission and reception of the Homeric epics, even if they overlap to a significant extent. The former is about what we can say about where our physical texts came from; the latter is about how versions of the epics have been used by audiences over the years.
The main thing I want to emphasize here–and which I will elaborate on more in a later post–is that for most of the history of the transmission of the Homeric epics only a small percentage of people would have read them from beginning to end as we do today. Ancient performances would have been more frequently episodic (that is, performance of specific parts or scenes). Even in the case of monumental performances, audience engagement over several days would be effectively episodic as people tuned in and out of the performance.
The more I think about the evidence we have for the use of Homer in antiquity, I convince myself that a majority of Hellenistic through Byzantine era readers were primarily engaging with excerpts and passages for rhetorical training rather than reading through the whole beginning to end (with the exception of editors and scholars who dedicated their lives to thinking about the whole).
So, when I think of what people have done with these objects over time, I split them into post-performance era stages of reception
Panhellenic Authority
Hellenistic/Greco-Roman Authority/Literary Model
Renaissance Model/Authority
Modern Canon
Each of these periods has different assumptions about what the Homeric epics do in the world and in response prompt different questions from the epics on the part of interpreters. Not to be lost in this periodization is the implication that as early as Aristotle (if not a century before that), the Homeric epics as cultural objects do something different for the communities that praised them than they did during their first singing(s). So, when we talk about the Homeric epics, I think it is useful to acknowledge that nearly every interpretive engagement is anachronistic. We should not forbid this, but instead be careful to identify the layers of historical notions piled upon them.
In addition, I think if we look at the stages of transmission and reception together, one really important detail to consider is whether audiences were engaging with the Greek as ‘native’ speakers or learners and when they were working only with translation. This likely changed over time, but my sense is that most people who engaged with Homer in antiquity were reading it as a learned dialect, either an extension of their native Greek or as part of a language learned during their education. Translations like those of Livius Andronicus’ Odyssey were literary events of their own and should be treated that way.
With the Renaissance, I think we can safely say that most Western European encounters with Homer were with passages or translations (Petrarch famously mentions putting Homer into Latin). Whole there were certainly excellent scholars in every nation who read Homer in Greek, I think the story of Homer in the modern canonization is of an idea in translation.
Iliad 12, from the Venetus A Manuscript (via the Homer Multitext Project)
Some things cited/Some things to read.
Bachvarova, Mary R. 2016. From Hittite to Homer: The Anatolian Background of Ancient Greek Epic. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Dué, Casey. 2018. Achilles Unbound: Multiformity and Tradition in the Homeric Epics. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies.
Foley, J. M. 1988. The Theory of Oral Composition: History and Methodology. Bloomington.
———. 1999. Homer’s Traditional Art. Philadelphia.
———. 2002. How to Read an Oral Poem. Urbana.
González, José M. 2013. The Epic Rhapsode and His Craft: Homeric Performance in a Diachronic Perspective. Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies.
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.
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).
“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”
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.
“As the son of crooked-minded Kronos was watching them, he felt pity
And he addressed Hera, his sister and wife:
“Shit. Look, it is fate for the man most dear to me, Sarpedon,
To be overcome by Patroklos, son of Menoitios.
My hearts is split in two as I rush through my thoughts:
Either I will snatch him up still alive from the lamentable battle
And set him down in the rich deme of Lykia,
Or I will overcome him already at the hands of Patroklos.”
“Then queen, ox-eyed Hera answered him
Most shameful son of Kronos, what kind of a thing have you said.
Do you really want to rescue from discordant death
When it was long ago fated for this man because he is mortal?
Do it. But the rest of the gods will not praise you for it.
I’ll tell you something else, and keep this in your thoughts:
If you send Sarpedon alive to his own home,
Think about how one of the other gods won’t want
To send their dear son free of the oppressive conflict.
For around the great city of Priam there are many sons
Of the immortals fighting, and you will incite rage in those gods.
But if this is ear to you, and your heart does mourn,
Let him stay in the oppressive battle indeed
To be overcome by the hands of Patroklos, Menoitios’ son.
Then when his soul and and his life leaves him,
Have death and sweet sleep take him until
They arrive at the land of broad Lykia.
There, his relatives and friends will bury him
With a tomb and a marker. This is the honor due to the dead.
“So she spoke, and the father of men and gods did not disobey her.
He was shedding bloody teardrops to the ground,
Honoring his dear son, the one Patroklos was about to destroy
Far off from his fatherland in fertile Troy.”
Sarpedon’s body carried by Hypnos and Thanatos (Sleep and Death), while Hermes watches. Side A of the so-called “Euphronios krater”, Attic red-figured calyx-krater signed by Euxitheos (potter) and Euphronios (painter), ca. 515 BC.
They found Odysseus, dear to Zeus, swarmed
by Trojans, like when light-brown mountain jackals
crowd round an antlered deer a man’s struck
with an arrow. The deer bolted from him,
scooting while its blood was warm and knees limber.
But when the fast arrow does the deer in,
flesh-eating jackals snarf it down in a glade’s
shade. But a god leads a lion against them,
a hungry one: jackals scurry, lion sups.
Just so, round wise and deft Odysseus
many able Trojans swarmed, but the hero,
flashing his spear, saw off the cruel day.
Ajax with his tower-like shield came
and stood before him. The Trojans scurried pell-mell.
475. crowded round an antlered deer: Odysseus is likened to a deer, but he is not pathetic. The demonstrable force of the comparison is not that; rather, it is their similar suffering. It [the simile] likens him to the dying deer in order to emphasize the danger [he, Odysseus, is in].
