UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles The Aesthetics of Equality in Early Greek Poetry A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Classics by Ben Radcliffe 2019 © Copyright by Ben Radcliffe 2019 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The Aesthetics of Equality in Early Greek Poetry by Ben Radcliffe Doctor of Philosophy in Classics University of California, Los Angeles, 2019 Professor Alex C. Purves, Chair This dissertation asks how Homer, Hesiod, and Theognis envision egalitarian alternatives to the conditions of social stratification that prevail in the fictional worlds of early Greek poetry. I track moments when characters relegated to the lower ranks of their societies—beggars, plebian rabble-rousers, and masses of common soldiers—stage challenges to the social and narrative primacy of the texts’ protagonists, who invariably belong to the aristocratic or propertied classes. Even though these challenges fail on a narrative level, their rich aesthetic content invites readers to reflect on how each text’s poetic priorities could be subverted, reinforced, or transformed in a flattened social landscape. I draw on the work of contemporary philosophers and political theorists to model how egalitarian subjectivity—ways of organizing and belonging together—can surface in diverse venues, including forms of collective militancy, ii ethical self-fashioning, and aesthetic expression. By locating a space of political contestation in sensory experience, this approach supplements the forms of deliberative politics that are more familiar to Classical Studies scholarship. It thereby offers a novel way of giving voice to the minor characters who pose a challenge from below to the fundamental social premises of early Greek poetry. iii The dissertation of Ben Radcliffe is approved. Kathryn Anne Morgan Giulia Sissa James I Porter Alex C. Purves, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2019 iv For my parents v TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements vii Vita viii Introduction 1 Chapter 1. The Aesthetics of Violence in the Iliad 54 Chapter 2. Comrades and Candor in the Odyssey 111 Chapter 3. Utopian Poverty in Works and Days 171 Chapter 4. Song, Beauty, and the Logic of Reaction in the Theognidea 223 Bibliography 262 vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The members of my dissertation committee, Kathryn Morgan, Giulia Sissa, and James Porter, offered invaluable criticisms and suggestions that shaped this project from the beginning. I would like to express my gratitude to them and to my committee chair and advisor, Alex Purves, for her generosity as a mentor, her inspiring ability as a reader, and for reminding me, at crucial moments in the writing process, how scholarship can matter. For formative seminars, ideas, and guidance, I am grateful to the faculty of the UCLA Department of Classics, especially Bob Gurval, Francesca Martelli, Mario Telò, Brent Vine, David Blank, and Amy Richlin. Thanks as well to Bryant Kirkland and Adriana Vazquez for encouragement and professional advice in the last two years. This dissertation was shaped by many of my fellow graduate students in the Department of Classics. For their friendship and comradery, thanks especially to Jasmine Akiyama-Kim, Andre Matlock, Elliott Piros, John Tennant, Ashleigh Fata, Zachary Borst, Ana Guay, and Irene Han. I am indebted to each of them for their commitment to unorthodox research and for blending Classics with urgent issues in contemporary politics and philosophy. The UCLA Graduate Division provided me with a Dissertation Year Fellowship that was indispensable for finishing this project. My love and gratitude to my parents, to my brother, and to Derek and LiHe, for their encouragement and their curiosity. And to Elliott: for walking with me through forests and mountains. vii VITA Ben Radcliffe attended Stanford University from 2009 to 2013, where he graduated with a B.A. in Classics, ΦΒΚ, with distinction and honors, and a minor in Linguistics. He attended the University of California, Los Angeles, from 2013-2019, earning an MA in Classics in 2015; he expects to receive a PhD in 2019. He has presented papers at the Society for Classical Studies and the Classical Association of the Middle West and South. viii πάντα τὰ ἐν ταῖς αἰσθήσεσιν ἐκείνου τε ὀρέγεται τοῦ ὃ ἔστιν ἴσον, καὶ αὐτοῦ ἐνδεέστερά ἐστιν everything in sensory experience reaches out for that pure equality—and falls short of it (Plato, Phaedo 75b) Introduction Songs and festive dances resound from the royal palace on Ithaca at the start of Odyssey 23. A bard strums his lyre and inspires men and women to strike the floor with their echoing feet; neighbors listening to the noise suppose that it means a wedding. Penelope, it seems, has finally acceded to her suitors’ demands and chosen one of them to replace her long-absent husband: ὧδε δέ τις εἴπεσκε δόμων ἔκτοσθεν ἀκούων· ἦ μάλα δή τις ἔγημε πολυμνήστην βασίλειαν· σχετλίη, οὐδ’ ἔτλη πόσιος οὗ κουριδίοιο εἴρυσθαι μέγα δῶμα διαμπερές, εἷος ἵκοιτο. ὣς ἄρα τις εἴπεσκε, τὰ δ’ οὐκ ἴσαν ὡς ἐτέτυκτο. (147-51) Someone listening outside of the palace would say, “someone has married the many-suitored queen —a wretched woman! She wasn’t patient enough to keep the great house of her wedded husband until his return.” They would say this, but they didn’t know what had really happened. The wedding, of course, is a ruse.1 The festivities have been staged by Odysseus to forestall the discovery of what he has actually committed in the confines of his great house—the massacre 1 Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. On the false wedding, see Segal 1996: 219 (regarding the irony of the performance and its tensions with the values of heroic kleos); Newton 1987: 16-17 (on parallels with dancing among the Phaeacians); Seaford 1994: 80 (on the relation of the wedding to the endings of the Odyssey 1 of Penelope’s suitors and their supporters. Odysseus’ blood-soaked partisans wash themselves and take to dancing in halls that were moments before heaped with corpses. The macabre device keeps the Ithacan public in ignorance just long enough for Odysseus to reunite with his wife and father and gather his supporters for the inevitable struggle with the kin of the murdered suitors. By confirming Odysseus, once again, as a master of dissimulation, the sounds of the decoy wedding feed into the text’s broader fascination with disguises, illusions, phantasms, and the deceptive power of aesthetic impressions. But it is striking that the narrator gives the anonymous persons listening outside (τις…δόμων ἔκτοσθεν ἀκούων) an opportunity not merely to be deceived but to evaluate the sounds critically and construct a narrative around them. The listeners are ignorant about what really happened but surprisingly perceptive about what could have happened: at the end of Book 21, Penelope did (apparently) decide that Odysseus had perished;2 she did resolve to marry one of her suitors that very night; and if not for the fantastical intervention of her husband, the sounds of song and dance might very well have signaled the end of her equivocal status as the wife of a missing king. What the listeners discern and the poem’s compositional history). Peradotto captures the paradox of the anonymous listener’s judgment: “faithful Penelope’s name is in public disgrace, subject of a tale till then merely possible, now actual, but false” (1990: 157). Lynn-George (1988: 22-23) discusses how the false wedding resonates with the funerals that it has deferred and with the imminent reunion of Penelope and Odysseus. 2 It is notoriously unclear whether Penelope recognizes the beggar as Odysseus, but she is never explicitly said to recognize him. See Vlahos 2007; Scodel 2002a; Winkler 1990: 155-60; Murnaghan 1987: 128-35, 1986; Emlyn- Jones 1984; Russo 1982; and Scodel 2001: 323 n. 27 for further references. 2 in the noise of merriment is not simply a false appearance but the semblance of the plot as it might have been.3 This moment of dramatic irony turns out to be more complicated than it first seems. It invites us, as an audience, to grapple with how the plot impacts figures at the margins of the story-world who do not share our degree of epistemic and emotional involvement in the text. The anonymous listeners—Odysseus intends the performance for “passersby or neighbors” (23.136)—dream up a storyline that turns out to be far happier for Ithaca than the savage reality that has been instituted by Odysseus’ violence. The massacre of the suitors is a social and demographic cataclysm that wipes out a whole generation of the island’s youth, “the foundation of the city” (as Odysseus readily admits, 23.121), and sets in motion a further cycle of factional violence.4 Even before this bloody denouement, the restoration of Odysseus to the chieftaincy of Ithaca—the telos of the Odyssey—was always an ambivalent issue for the Ithacan populace (the dēmos, broadly construed5). It is an outcome that individual figures piously hope for, but as a collectivity the Ithacans fail to offer material support for Telemachus and Penelope, and on his return to the island in Book 13, Odysseus does not seek the support of the dēmos against the suitors. 3 Regarding the broader thematic functions of Odysseus’ disguises and dissimulations, Murnaghan 1987 remarks that “any account of disguise implies the plausibility, or even the probability, of the vision of reality that disguise falsely projects” (129-30). This observation could be applied to the falsely projected reality that the anonymous listeners discern at Od. 23.147-51. 4 I refer to the final conflict between Odysseus and the relatives of the suitors in Book 24, which would have resulted in the wholesale slaughter of the latter if not for the intervention of Zeus and Athena, who mandate a peaceful settlement.