The Problem with the Prince: Agamemnon in the Ancient Exegetical Tradition on Homer

Elsa Bouchard

The Homeric poems are filled with issues pertaining to the rightful exercise of power. In both the Iliad and the Odyssey, these issues are openly addressed, most often in scenes rife with conflict and duress. The poems also abound in authority figures—kings, princes, counsellors, commanders of all sorts—who provide various models of political power, both on the human and the divine level. Among them, Agamemnon is by far the most controversial, especially so because his role in the Trojan War, the core event of the heroic cycle, is pivotal. Modern commentators of Homer are generally very critical of the commander of the Greek armies at Troy. Oliver Taplin, for example, has described him as ‘a nasty piece of work’ who ‘behaves like a rat’, and there is no denying that in many Iliadic scenes Agamemnon causes contemporary readers to feel intensely uneasy.1 Homer’s ancient audiences were more ambivalent. After all, the tradition unanimously accepted by ancient historians and scholars saw him as the main driving force behind what was considered the first historical gathering of the Greek states,2 a watershed moment in the self-representation of the Hellenes as members of a cultural community.3 Thus Agamemnon could arguably be cast as the first Panhellenic prince. Indeed, as we shall see in a moment, that is exactly what Isocrates, the most eloquent partisan of Greek unity, makes of him. However, next to this patriotic view of ‘the Great Commander’ stood a very different one, which was elaborated by a tradition of Homeric scholar- ship whose approach to the poems was much more critical. As early as the sophistic period, canonical poems (especially Homer’s) were scrutinized in an effort to identify and solve exegetical and grammatical ‘problems’ (ζητήματα).4 These pointed enquiries addressed a great number of different issues, including

1 Taplin (1990) 65. 2 See Thuc. 1.3.1–5. On Thucydides’ use of Agamemnon as a paradigm in his account of the Peloponnesian War, see Rabel (1984) and Zadorojnyi (1998). 3 Cf. Dowden (1992) 47–48. 4 See Gudeman (1927), Apfel (1938), Hintenlang (1961), Pfeiffer (1968) 69–70, Richardson (1975), Slater (1989) 40–42.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi: 10.1163/9789004365858_007 the problem with the prince 105 artistic merit, narrative plausibility, and the depiction of morally questionable behaviour. The result of this extensive ancient practice is that the Homeric scholia are teeming with zetemata, as well as with wide-ranging and often divergent responses to them, since a single zetema could attract numerous attempts to work out a viable solution. A large proportion of these zetemata focus on the behaviour of poetic char- acters in specific situations.The way that the problems are framed reveals many of the latent assumptions of ancient readers with respect to these characters.5 Unsurprisingly, Agamemnon is a hot topic in their discussions. Although they generally consider him the unequivocal leader of the Greek armies and abstain from questioning the pre-eminence of his position,6 the particular rights to which this position entitled him remain debatable for them. This paper offers an overview of the interpretations of Agamemnon in the ancient exegetical tradition. The discussion will take us from Aristotle, the first ‘problem-solver’, whose solutions are partly available to us in the fragmented remains of his treatise on Homeric Questions, to Porphyry, who stands at the end of this tradition. However, by way of a prolegomenon to the main dis- cussion, I shall first examine a curious passage in Isocrates that looks like an early example, albeit in a typically rhetorical form, of the same stance (both zetematic and apologetic) toward Agamemnon that we subsequently find in the later tradition of Homeric criticism. Next I shall consider a portion of Aris- totle’s account of the different types of monarchy in the Politics, an account in which Agamemnon’s status already appears somewhat problematic. It is true that these sources stretch over a fairly long period and belong to differ- ent genres (oratory, philosophy, and literary criticism); however, this makes it all the more remarkable to find the same concerns about Agamemnon con- stantly recurring at different times and in such a diversity of contexts. More- over, although none of these discussions can be described as belonging to the Princes’ Mirror genre,7 they all provide glimpses into the reception of the most well-known ruler in Greek mythology, a ruler whose status as an outstanding

5 See Nünlist (2009) 252–253, Bouchard (2010) 318–322. 6 As Sammons (2014) shows, there existed an alternative tradition, which can be traced in the Odyssey and in Attic tragedy, that apparently put Menelaus on a par with Agamemnon as regards the leadership of the expedition. However, this tradition is generally rejected by the poet of the Iliad, whose view of Agamemnon as the single headman was the most influential in the later Greek political reflection. 7 On the generic markers of the speculum principum, which is best exemplified in extant archaic literature by Hesiod’s Works and Days, see Martin (1984) 30–33.