Penelope and the Pigs: Indic Perspectives on the "Odyssey" Author(s): Stephanie W. Jamison Source: Classical Antiquity, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Oct., 1999), pp. 227-272 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25011102 . Accessed: 22/05/2011 05:20 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucal. 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Inwhat follows I am going topursue these comparisons and questions unapologetically, in an attempt to showwhat Indology has to offer students of Homer and other traditional literature. The short answer is that it is possible to find in Old Indian literature parallels, striking similarities, to elements inGreek literature-parallels thatmay bespeak a common Indo-European inheritance and that can help illuminate aspects of the Greek elements that are puzzling when examined in isolation. Iwill focus here especially on Penelope and her remarriageand on the relation of this planned remarriage toOdysseus' return.These questions have, of course, been much treated in recent literature on the Odyssey, both from a traditional philological perspective and from the perspectives of modern psychological, feminist, and narratological theory, among others.Without denying the ingenuity of these treatments or the insights they afford, instead of looking forward some thousandsof years to theworldview of thenineteenth-century psychological novel or the twentieth-century self-referential structural narrative, I propose looking backward the same temporal distance, to the traditional ritual and ceremonial structures that the Greeks inherited (and adapted) from their Indo-European ancestors, structuresalso to be discerned in the literatureof their linguistic cousins in India. Versions of this paper have been presented on almost embarassingly numerous occasions, beginning with the J.W. Poultney Memorial Lecture in the JohnsHopkins Department of Classics, April 1994. It was this invitation that provided the impetus for the research that led to the present work, and I am happy that thememory of that generous-minded scholar presided over its creation. Needless to say, I have benefited from discussion on all the occasions when I have presented some portion of this work, and I would also like to thank Hayden Pellicia, as well as W. G. Thalmann of this journal and its anonymous readers, for close reading and informative suggestions. ? 1999 BY THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. ISSN0278-6656(p); Io67-8344 (e). 228 CLASSICALANTIQUITY Volume 18/No. 2/October 1999 I do not want to overburden the specificity of the following essay with too heavy a general introduction, but in the hopes of attracting an audience of Hellenists aswell as of Indologists and Indo-Europeanists, Iwill try to provide some context for the approaches to be found in the body of the text. I should not need to introduce themethod of genetic linguistic comparison, which has resulted in the establishment of the Indo-European language family including among its branches Indo-Iranian andGreek-and the reconstruction of itsmother language, Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor of both Indo-Iranianand Greek. The extension of thismethodology to the genetic comparison of poetic formulations and themes likewise has a long scholarly history, over a century and a half. I know of no better general discussion or set of extended demonstrations of the application of theComparative Method to poetic texts thanC. Watkins 1996, and Twill make no attempt to duplicate this here. However, Iwould like to issue some reassurances about how poetic compar ison based on linguisticmodels proceeds-and, more important,doesn't proceed. Genetic linguistic comparison seeks to eliminate from its purview similarities due to (a) universal tendencies and (b) chance. Genetic poetic comparison does the same. In order to eliminate universals, both types of comparison look for salient and peculiar details, often details thatdo notmake sense in the synchronic system inwhich they are currently found, rather than broad, general agreements thatmight be found between any two languages or literary texts. In order to eliminate chance, we look for structured, systematic sets of similarities rather than isolated facts. An example already discussed in the secondary literature' illustrates these principles. Iliad 3 contains a famous scene, much discussed by Homerists, in which Priam questions Helen about the identity of theGreek warriors, while they both stand on thewalls of Troy (theTeikhoskopia). The scene does notmake much sense in context and has given rise to some fanciful interpretations.However, it has its exact counterpart in Indic epic, where another abducted heroine (Draupadi) is questioned by her abductor (the equivalent of the Trojans) about the identity of their pursuers, her husbands (the equivalent of theGreeks). Here we have the salient and peculiar detail. Inboth traditions,but most clearly in the Indic, thiscolloquy between abductee and abductor about the former's legitimate husband and his supporters fits into a ceremonial "patternof abduction,"which can be called theCounter-wooing. It is one of the steps in a legal reabduction, such as was being attempted by Menelaos and the other Greeks. Here we have the structured set of similarities. Thus, genetic comparison must be highly constrained and should not be pur sued irresponsibly. Moreover, even if we can identify an element in a Greek text, an element with a counterpart in ancient India, as an Indo-European inheritance, this does not mean that it sits in the Greek text inert and undigested. Suggesting 1. Cf. Jamison 1994. JAMISON:Penelope and thePigs 229 thatpoets use traditionalmaterials does not mean that they do not skillfully shape thesematerials towards their own ends; it is, of course, one of the pleasures for the audience of such literature to notice the way traditionalmaterial has been deployed, sometimes upholding and sometimes changing, even subverting its original purpose. Or, as Iwill suggest later, an alert audience can recognize such material even when disguised, and this recognition will provide resonance to apparently straightforwardnarrative. In other words, comparisons should not be reductive, but productive. With these methodological generalities out of the way, let me now briefly sketch the relevant resources in Old Indian literature, for those unfamiliar with these texts. For a Homerist themost crucial texts in Sanskrit are the great epics, particularly themassive sprawl of theMahabharata, as well as the less discursive andmore polished Ramayana, which in its current form is probably somewhat later than the other. The Mahabharata is the story of a ruinous intra-familialwar, which also incorporates narratives and disquisitions on every subject imaginable in ancient India. The standardmeasure of the size of this text is that it is "eight times the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined," in its present form (or one of its present forms).2 Unfortunately, it is nowhere near the oldest Sanskrit we have; its language is markedly less archaic than that of the Vedic texts. Dating any Sanskrit text is an unpleasant task thatmost Sanskritists shirk, if possible, but the text, again in itsmore-or-less present form, is usually considered to have taken shape in the comfortably commodious period between 400 BC and 400 AD. However, it is clear that much of the text is much older and simply continued to be retold and linguistically updated over the course of centuries. We will examine a number of aspects of the Mahabharata, but let me empha size a particularly important feature of it. In India it is known as a dharma-text, or text of customary law. The episodes in this great drama often exist in part to exemplify or work out legal principles. As such it takes its place among the other dharma texts, the numerous law codes preserved, of which themost famous, though not the oldest, is the Code of Manu, the Manava Dharma Aastra. In other words, epic narrative occurs in a legal context, is explicitly concerned with the socially sanctioned or unsanctioned nature of the action depicted. Reading the Mahabharata with this in mind enriches our understanding of it; I would suggest that reading Homer in the same way does too-but for our Homeric texts we have far less Greek legal material preserved. Reference to the more extensive Indic materials may sometimes illuminate the Greek, which also preserves many traces of Indo-European customary law. In what follows we will refer often not only to the legal maxims of Manu, but also to the earlier dharma siitras (non-versified legal texts) such as Gautama, 2. The text used here is that of theCritical Edition (Poona Edition) 1933-1966.