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Home , Little Iliad

The after the : Ties That Bind

Elizabeth Minchin*

In his 2013 book The Martin West divides the poems of the Trojan cycle into two categories on the basis of their structure.1 There are the poems that stand as Einzellieder, that is, as poems that are “organically unified” and address a “self-contained story”, such as the Iliad and the Odyssey.2 And there are poems that are not unified in this way, such as the Cypria (a collection of episodes that belonged in that span of time that preceded the events of the Iliad), the Little Iliad (“a concatenation of potential Einzellieder”), and the post- Homeric invention, the (“two narrative plots that … do not harmonize well”).3 Of these Einzellieder, as Margalit Finkelberg has argued so well, the Homeric poems saw themselves as different from other songs in that tradition; Homeric poetry distanced itself from the cyclic poems.4 Indeed, the Iliad and the Odyssey claimed special status within the Greek tradition.5 It is against this backdrop that I consider the relationship between those two Einzellieder that have survived into our own world, the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Iliad is set in the tenth year of the . It tells the story of the quarrel between and and the subsequent anger of Achilles and its consequences. The Odyssey, on the other hand, tells us of ’ return to his homeland after the sack of . Indeed, we first engage with the story of the hero’s return only a matter of weeks before he lands on Ithaca—in the tenth year of his nostos. There is a great gulf, in terms of the fabula, that lies between the two epics, a gulf in which occur significant events in the story of Troy (in outline: the deaths of Antilochus, Memnon, Achilles, and Ajax, the sack of Troy, the departure of the Achaean heroes for their homeland, and the achievement of a homecoming for many). Even the outlook of each

* I thank participants at the anu’s 2013 Seminar for their comments on the paper from which this chapter developed—especially James O’Maley, who challenged me to think about the absence of from the Odyssey. 1 For the term ‘cycle’: West (2013) 1; on the formation of a Trojan War cycle: West (2013) 16–20; for a table showing stages of development: West (2013) 25–26. 2 West includes in this category also the Sack of Troy: West (2013) 18–20 and 57. Cf. Aristotle, Poetics 1459a–b. 3 West (2013) 166 (Little Iliad), 290 (Telegony). 4 Finkelberg (2011) 200. 5 Finkelberg (2011) 206.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi: 10.1163/9789004360921_003 10 minchin epic is fundamentally different. The Odyssey is a song about the suffering and sorrows of war, like the Iliad, but also about the rewards of peace and the importance of home;6 it concludes not in lamentation, as does the Iliad, but on a happier note. It should be easy to make the case, therefore, that the Odyssey has only a token connection with the Iliad-story. And yet the epics have always been linked in our minds. No other early epic matches these two poems in length.7 The epics are similar too in respect of their organic unity, as I noted above, in their proportion of character-speech, in the poets’ use of extended similes, in the oversight of mortal events by the gods on Olympus,8 and in their depiction of the nobility and the fragility of mortal men.9 Furthermore, the hero of the Odyssey was already a well-defined character to audiences who knew the Iliad. On reading these two poems, therefore, we are left with the distinct impression that the Odyssey-poet has made an effort to engage with, even mesh with, the monumental work of his predecessor.10 In this chapter I shall not discuss whether both epics were composed by the one singer—that elusive figure whom we call Homer;11 nor shall I discuss those phenomena of oral traditional epic that are common to both poems, such as formulaic language or the script-based composition that we identify with type- scenes. My purpose here is to consider from a narratological standpoint the means—the devices—by which the Iliad reaches out to further storytelling and the extent to which the Odyssey takes up that invitation. In short, I shall consider the way in which and the degree to which the Odyssey frames itself with respect to the Iliad.

6 Rutherford (1991–1993) 53–54. 7 Burgess (2005) 345. 8 Rutherford (1991–1993) 40–41. 9 Griffin (1977) 43, 45; and see Gainsford’s summative description of the epics: they are “uniquely long, uniquely elevated, uniquely excellent” (Gainsford [2016] 110). 10 On the relative dating of the two epics, see Janko (1982) 188–189: the Odyssey is ‘slightly more advanced’ than the Iliad. For commentary: Burgess (2001) 52–53 and n. 23. Whereas Burgess’ approach, like West’s, is from the perspective of the epic cycle, mine, a narrato- logical approach, focusses more closely on the two poems as successful stories. 11 This (unanswerable) question is not germane to my argument in this paper. For the record, however, I work from the assumption that the Iliad and the Odyssey were the work of different poets; and see further below.