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Introduction Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-67711-0 - Homer: Odyssey Books XVII-XVIII Edited by Deborah Steiner Excerpt More information INTRODUCTION 1. HOMER AND HIS POETIC MEDIUM1 (a) The Iliad and Odyssey According to ancient tradition, a poetic genius by the name of Homer from some- where in the region of Ionia, and blind by many accounts, composed both the Iliad and Odyssey. Some sources assign his activity to the period of the fall of Troy (dated in antiquity to the twelfth century), others to some 500 years afterwards. The poet was credited with a variety of compositions, and Herodotus is the first extant author to mention either the Iliad or Odyssey by name. Modern scholars have variously rejected, altered and refined these heterogeneous ancient views. There is now reasonable con- sensus that the two poems are the products of a tradition of oral hexameter poetry developed over the course of the Dark Ages and reaching back to Mycenaean times. The Iliad and the Odyssey as we have them were composed in the period of the eighth to the early seventh century, quite plausibly in Smyrna or Chios, where the ancient biographical tradition records the poet’s presence. ‘Homer’ himself and his author- ship of two epic poems may be nothing more than a fiction that originated some time after the works’ composition. According to one modern reconstruction, the cor- poration of rhapsodes from Chios, the Homeridae whose role it was to perform the Homeric epics and who are first visible in the second half of the sixth century, would retrospectively have created ‘Homer’ as putative ancestor to their ‘guild’.2 Where ancient and modern views coincide is in recognizing pronounced differ- ences between the Iliad and Odyssey in their subject matter and sensibility. While the two poems, both monumental in scale (the Iliad runs to 15,689 lines, the Odyssey to 12,110), focus on the period of the Trojan War and its immediate aftermath, revolve around a single hero whose exploits and emotional affinities they describe, present their protagonist enacting a bloody revenge against those who have done him and his f©loi wrong, and foreground contention between members of the elite, the Odyssey incorporates material not just from the heroic sagas also basic to the Iliad, but from folk-tales and mariners’ stories.3 Sharply divergent goals motivate each poem’s hero (klov for Achilles, n»stov for Odysseus), and where the Iliad rarely looks beyond the battlefield and war camp, the Odyssey moves between exotic lands and the domestic sphere (see section 2). These differences are variously explained. In Ps.-Longinus’ much quoted view (On the Sublime, 9.12–13), Homer composed the Iliad ‘in his prime’, while the Odyssey is the poem of his old age. Other ancient scholars assumed two poets, and many modern readers adopt their view. However we imagine a solution 1 In parts 1 and 2 of the Introduction, I have deliberately limited citations of the secondary literature from which many of my points are drawn. 2 West 1999. 3 For these see Page 1973, Crane 1988,Holscher¨ 1988. 1 © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-67711-0 - Homer: Odyssey Books XVII-XVIII Edited by Deborah Steiner Excerpt More information 2INTRODUCTION to the authorship puzzle (for purposes of convenience, I assign both works to a single individual called ‘Homer’), one point remains undisputed: as philologists, archae- ologists and historians have shown, the Odyssey we possess postdates the Iliad. This can be demonstrated on both ‘objective’ and internal grounds. The Odyssey uses lan- guage and syntax that belong to a later linguistic stratum than those of the Iliad (see p. 5) and its broader geographical scope and western orientation reflect historically more recent colonizing ventures and trading networks; indicative too is the promi- nence of Egypt in the Odyssey, perhaps a reflection of increased contacts between the Greeks and Egyptians during the reign of the late seventh-century pharaoh Psammetichus I. ‘Posterity’ is further visible in the Odyssey’s internal chronology and design. The poem emphatically presents itself as ‘an epilogue’ (as Ps.-Longinus termed it) to the earlier work insofar as it describes the heroes of the Trojan War returning home, avoids repeating material covered in the existing poem, and supplements that com- position with episodes absent from but important to its story (e.g. the tale of the Trojan Horse, the funeral of Achilles). It will be an assumption of this commentary that the complementary relations between the poems reflect more than their participation in a common poetic tradition: although the point cannot be proved, it is highly probable that the author of the Odyssey was thoroughly acquainted with a version of the Iliad and that his poem is conditioned by and a response to the traditional tale as presented in that work. While the poet borrows from what might have been recognized as the Iliad’s most successful innovations, apparent too in the Odyssey is the agonistic impulse shaping early song composition and performance (acknowledged at Il. 2.594–600, and on display in the competing narratives of Helen and Menelaus in Od. 4). Books 17 and 18 include several passages illustrating how the later poem challenges Iliadic values, revises its version of events and demotes some of its episodes to a lower social plane.4 In his exchange with Eumaeus at 17.286–9,Odysseus,inhisbeggar’s disguise, applies to the stomach and its impetuous demands language that the Iliad’s proem (likely to be one of the best known parts of that work) used to describe Achilles’ heroic wrath, while the tussle between the parasite Irus and Odysseus in book 18 offers a burlesque reworking of the boxing match at the funeral games of Patroclus in Iliad 23, substituting, among other innovations, a blood sausage for the high-status horse and goblet that were the prizes on that more elevated occasion. The Odyssey should be viewed in relation not only to the Iliad, but also to the larger tradition of heroic poetry to which both belong; while other epic compositions earlier than or contemporary with Homer’s are lost to us, audiences in later archaic, classical and Hellenistic times were familiar with a more expansive body of epic poems relating other parts of the Trojan saga and its heroes’ adventures prior to and following the war. The poems of the so-called Epic Cycle, which postdate the Homeric compositions, but include themes and subjects narrated in earlier epics, preserve some of these incidents 4 For the close and sometimes polemical relations between the songs, see particularly Nagy 1979: 15–58, Pucci 1982, Pucci 1987. © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-67711-0 - Homer: Odyssey Books XVII-XVIII Edited by Deborah Steiner Excerpt More information 1. HOMER AND HIS POETIC MEDIUM 3 and Homer can presume his audience’s knowledge of the events and characters given fuller treatment elsewhere (see, for example, the passing reference to Jason’s voyage on the Argo at Od. 12.69–70 and the mention of Heracles’ dealings with Iphitus at 21.22–33;theOdyssey also alludes to matter included in the Iliou Persis, Parva Ilia and Memnonis).5 Set within this broader repertoire, Homer appears less the singular genius of the ancient picture than a master practitioner who deploys an existing poetic medium with particular brilliance and capacity for innovation and whose superiority over rival composers the early sources already recognized (see Aristotle, Poetics ch. 23). (b) Oral composition, the Kunstsprache and formulas Current understanding of the medium in which Homer composed still depends to a large degree on the work of Milman Parry who, in a series of publications from the 1920s on, profoundly reshaped earlier Homeric scholarship.6 Before Parry, readers had chiefly focused on the inconsistencies and redundancies apparent in the Iliad and Odyssey (e.g. Penelope’s coquettish self-display to the suitors in book 18,so strikingly at odds with her fidelity to her husband up to that point, or Theoclymenus’ ‘revised’ version of his prophecy at 17.160–1n). Where the so-called Analysts posited the existence of many independent, shorter songs or ‘lays’ composed by various poets of different dates, who would have altered and corrected their predecessors’ accounts, and whose works were then cobbled together by a less than skilled final ‘redactor’, the ‘Unitarians’ countered with a single poet of consummate artistry whose occasional slips could be argued away.7 Parry’s fundamental contribution was to identify the Iliad and Odyssey as products of an oral tradition of hexameter poetry, a technique of composition developed and refined over hundreds of years by illiterate bards who preserved and transmitted their common heritage. This heritage consists of a repertoire of story patterns and motifs (e.g. the return of the hero, disguise and recognition), themes or ‘type-scenes’ (recurring units of action, such as a sacrifice, feasting, the departure of a ship, and descriptions of phenomena and objects),8 and formulaic phrases (see p. 6). In Parry’s view, this traditional phraseology and narrative stock had been devised for a very specific purpose. Thus equipped, and schooled through listening to other bards performing the extant repertoire, the oral poet could compose ex tempore, fashioning an original song each time he performed by using pre- existing elements, which he would expand, curtail, reorder and modify at will and in accordance with audience expectations and demands. Parry’s insights, reinforced by 5 See West 2003a: 13. As West notes, by the end of the seventh century, the Lesbian poets knew not only the Iliad, but also the Cypria, Iliou Persis, Nostoi, or poems including much of the same material.
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