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Poetic Authority and Oral Tradition in Hesiod and Pindar

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Poetic Authority and Oral Tradition in Hesiod and Pindar CHAPTER SIX POETIC AUTHORITY AND ORAL TRADITION IN HESIOD AND PINDAR Ruth Scodel Elsewhere, I have discussed the distinction Homer makes, especially in the Odyssey, between the songs of bards and other storytelling.1 This argument rests especially on three recent insights that appear to point in quite opposite directions. First, Andrew Ford shows in Homer: the Poetry of the Past how the Odyssey evades the reality of the transmission of poetic tradition as well as that of bardic contests. The Muses simply replace poets’ teachers; the narrative content of per- formance has no naturalistic source.2 S. Douglas Olson has shown in Blood and Iron how richly the same epic depicts the workings of everyday oral tradition, its considerable interest in how news gets around.3 Third, Louise Pratt argues convincingly that the truth-claims of early Greek poetry need to be interpreted relative to their rhetor- ical functions in context. While only fables are truly fiction, for most poetic narrative historical accuracy is not the primary concern.4 Homer, then, shows how people in reality create and spread kleos, but he seems to want to avoid facing the obvious implication that poetic performances depend on what earlier storytellers have trans- mitted. The proem to the Catalogue of Ships perfectly demonstrates this peculiarity in its distinction between the Muses, who see and hear everything, and poet and audience, who only hear the kleos and know nothing (Il. 2.484–93). So in asking why Homer does not acknowledge openly that his stories depend on tradition, I looked at what distinguishes bardic performances from other storytelling prac- tices in Homer, and concluded that the most important distinctions 1 R. Scodel, “Bardic Performance and Oral Tradition in Homer,” American Journal of Philology 119 (1998): 171–94. 2 A. Ford, Homer: the Poetry of the Past (Ithaca, 1992) 90–130. 3 S. D. Olson, Blood and Iron: Stories and Storytelling in Homer’s Odyssey, Mnemosyne Supplement 148 (Leiden, 1995), 1–23. 4 L. Pratt, Lying and Poetry from Homer to Pindar (Ann Arbor, 1993). 110 are the self-interest of the narrator and the social pressures of par- ticular narrative contexts. The Homeric poems demonstrate an extra- ordinary awareness of how self-interested narrative practices can be. Both the Odyssey and the Iliad are full of embedded narratives. Most are clearly “true” for their tellers. Still, they are told for a purpose, and both external and internal audiences evaluate them within their context. The Apologos of Odysseus is clearly fictionally “true”—the narrator elsewhere alludes to its events in his own voice. At the same time, as Glen Most has shown, it is an extended paradigm of hos- pitality, intended to ensure Odysseus’ return.5 Speakers of exempla often cite their sources for their stories, whether tradition or personal memory, to bolster their authority. Their most important authority, however, is the occasion itself. Although as argu- ment the example supports the point a speaker makes on a specific occasion, the exemplum often makes transparent the Russian for- malist understanding that, in narrative, the end determines the begin- ning, that the tellers’ purposes are primary, the explicit cause-and-effect within the narrative secondary. The external audience of Achilleus’ speech to Priam at Il. 24.602–17 is likely to realize that Niobe eats because Priam must eat. That does not make the story “untrue,” though, even if the audience has never heard such a story before, because Priam truly ought to eat. Once the audience treats a nar- rative as socially embedded, the criteria for judging the narrative are explicitly social: the audience considers the relationship between teller and hearer, whether the teller seeks his own advantage or a com- mon good. Odysseus’ various lies are all purposeful narratives, and the external audience is not offended that they are false because the hearer sympathizes with Odysseus’ purposes (the lie to Laertes being a possible exception). Bardic poetry, in contrast, although it is rich with meaning, does not address the immediate situation. The Muse (Od. 8.73), the poet (Od. 1.347), or a member of the audience (Od. 8.492–98) may select the subject of song, but the song itself is not constrained by the situation of its performance. Homer seems anx- ious not that the audience may question the referential truth of the narrative, but that they may suspect ulterior motives in it. This awareness of the self-interested quality of narrative causes special problems for the authority of the Greek poet, since the overt 5 G. Most, “The Structure and Function and Odysseus’ Apologoi,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 119 (1989): 15–30..
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