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‘Tell your woman’—Homer in English
2w ago00:07:10Tap to summarizeOdyssey 11.152-224Odysseus’ encounter with his mother begins in the same hideous way in which, one presumes, all his encounters with the souls of the dead and gone begin. All that is said is that she came up and drank the dark animal blood. Who knows what the performer mimes or enacts. But if we let our imaginations work, we see a sad old woman squatting down or on all fours, lapping up spilt blood like a dog, or perhaps she cups her hands and draws from the pool. Either way there’s blood dripping down her face, and maybe staining her motherly hands as well, the while she talks to her son. Or where does the blood go in an insubstantial thing? What does it become? Clearly it is up to the performer how far forward in our imaginations to bring the clumsily gory possibilities, but it is Homer himself who has prescribed the bloody ritual, overseen by Odysseus’ sword, as a precondition of any dialogue. Homer has no interest in hiding the deadness of the dead; he wants the disquieting sensual ambience, a slightly farcical macabre, to frame and colour his scene.Homer seems to suggest that the quaff of blood causes the instant recognition of Odysseus in his mother (αὐτίκα δ’ ἔγνω), but it seems she must have been aware of who he was to have been hanging around already, first in line for a drink. Odysseus had to fend her off with his sword, remember, so Teiresias could go first. Perhaps among human souls, Odysseus’ mother was an exceptionally thirsty one. I don’t think this would be a profitable comic implication, however. It seems rather that Homer has gone out of logic’s way to emphasise, at least here, a kind of unawareness in the psyche prior to the tasting—or ingestion?—of fresh blood. It is not even human blood in the communion, but sacrificed blood of the flock. It seems there is no life after death, properly speaking; the souls have no strength, even to communicate, except with fuel they cannot procure by themselves. Teiresias is exceptional among them in being able to prophesy truth. The others seem able only, when prompted, of memories and renewing old interests or old stories. We shall see, however, that Odysseus’ mother, who remains nameless after her introduction as ‘Anticleia’ (Od.11.85)—she’s simply ‘Mother mine’, μῆτερ ἐμή—may prove uniquely and movingly capable. But there is no question of an Homeric theology or a consistent eschatology, beyond the proximate needs of the story; the rules of engagement Teiresias expounds have been preemptively broken by the insertion of Elpenor who has already spoken first, against Circe’s instructions, and without a hint of blood on his ghostly lips. Homer has therefore created an air of ambiguity about the rules, which is generally a feature rather than a bug in horror films.‘How’d you get here?’ says Mum, like anyone who meets a traveler in Homer; ‘you must have had some ship! There’s that cosmic Ocean in between. Are you fresh from Troy, or did you manage a stop-in at home?’ (I paraphrase.) Odysseus tells her his story, as would any other soul over there. There’s no lack of self-pity: ‘always clinging to sorrow I’ve wandered …’ (αἰὲν ἔχων ἀλάλημαι ὀϊζύν, 11.167). No, he’s not had a chance to go home. He’s been forced to come here to consult the soul of Teiresias. He’s not come down—or over, or up beyond the sky—in order to see his Mum. (It must be said, Hades lives in a dark place, like the adjacent land of the Cimmerians, but in Homer it does not seem that we are prompted to imagine an ‘under’ world; on Achilles’ shield the stream of Oceanus encircles the cosmos, and seems, therefore, to be celestial. Hades is somewhere beyond its farther bank.) Now, is there a joke in this? Dionysus, in one of his manifestations anyway, is famous for braving Hades’ realm precisely in order to rescue his mortal mother Semele. Such a motive must surely resonate with humanity in general, as well as Greek speakers, both of whom tend to miss their mothers. To be sure, our Odysseus does not know beforehand that his mother is dead. But Homer rather moots this point, in the sense of making it irrelevant, by going out of his way to show that even if he’d known about her plight, Odysseus would not have attempted a voyage to Hades to find his mother—if not to rescue her, at least to meet her one last time—like Dionysus to save his mother, or Orpheus his Eurydice—before he would do so to consult Teiresias:On there came the soul of my mother, dead and gone,Daughter of Autolycus Great-Heart—Anticleia.I left her behind alive, when I went to sacred Ilium.Now, I burst into tears soon as I saw her, and pitied her in my life’s breath:But no way was I for letting her in early—no matter the density of my grief—To get near the blood, until I heard from Teiresias. (11.84-89)The man had ‘burst into tears’ upon seeing Elpenor’s ghost as well, but there was no scruple then about remembering his mission or following Circe’s orders. There is a bloody-minded determination that rules and characterises this hero. There is not sentiment or romance. It seems to me that Homer makes him look a bit ridiculous, all in all. Wait your turn, Mum. I’m not here for you.Of course we have no idea if Odysseus is an avatar of Dionysus, or whether Homer’s story about the sea journey south to Hades is instead the original for Dionysus’ descent to his mother. It does seem odd that the parody or sendup should appear before the religious tale, but there is no use in presuming about the mysteries of history—especially when there are more lacunas than continuous or contiguous wholes in the data—or the unpredictable twists of religious and cultural development. Few in the ancient world seem to have registered the Odyssey as comedy, with the conspicuous and notable exception of Aristotle (Poetics 1453a36). But perhaps we should consider that from our position, and more importantly our disposition, not a single joke would seem to have been told in the entire Judaeo-Christian corpus. The cultural sway of that corpus perhaps prevents us from best assessing what’s actually there, in the wrinkles of the flesh. If there’s jokes, we’re not in on them. What can I do but bear witness to what I experience in Homer’s Invisible Realm, rather than dismiss the macabre, the surreal, and the flat-out ludicrous, as unsuited to the ceremonies at the altar to that stately unicorn the professors call ‘epic’?Let us look again at Odysseus’ responsive self-pity:For I have not yet come near her, Achaea, nor yet have I set footOn my own mother earth, no; always clinging to sorrow I’ve wandered,From the very first I began to follow radiant AgamemnonTo Ilium of the fine foals, so I might do battle with Trojans. (11.166-9)I hope my reader will correct me if I’m wrong, but this may be the first hint at an expression of regret from Odysseus about his decision to go to Troy. To be sure, there has been plenty of sadness in Odysseus’ story so far, perhaps even second-guessing. There has been the mourning over the men lost, several times repeated, a general air of mourning settled upon the whole voyage. The debacle in the Cyclops’ cave seems told in a tone, meanwhile, in equal parts confessional and proud. It was foolish and fateful for the rest of his journey, but in the consequence Odysseus announced himself by his name: no regrets, I should have thought. At the banquets in Phaeacia, tales of brave Ulysses, among other famous Achaeans, have been sung to men in their cups; they are evidently fascinating and entertaining in the Scherian theatre, these exploits of foreign heroes in foreign lands. Clearly they have been rather more complex experiences for Odysseus himself, also in audience. But I should not characterise that experience as one of regret. He sobs uncontrollably, until finally Alcinous demands his identity and Odysseus’ cover is broken. His tears are then compared to those of a widow fallen over her Trojan husband, as spears prod her in the back to join the chain of the enslaved. (One responds to this simile differently if one thinks of the newly widowed Andromache, or the newly re-widowed Helen.) At the very least, Odysseus is ‘going through’ something he must have to, in order to cope with hearing his story, where the experience of his many victims, and possibly one in particular, are made present to his consciousness as though he were reliving trauma in therapy. He goes so far as to bribe the singer to sing the slaughter after the Horse, the very episode of his butchery which traumatises him. But that does not suggest by itself, of necessity, that he feels regret. His seeking the means for a good cry seems to answer a larger and less focussed need, like choosing to see a tragedy. Grand releases of psychic energy, from diverse people of diverse backgrounds, explode in the stands at a home game. I suppose that’s why we go?But when confronted by the soul of his dead mother, there is a glimpse of an almost nihilistic resignation to futility. Odysseus says he has been united with grief ‘from the very first’ he followed Agamemnon, so he ‘might do battle with Trojans.’ ‘From the very first’ (ἐξ οὗ τὰ πρώτιστα) takes us to the very beginning of a catalogue of consequent events, the beginning before the beginning that he makes to his Phaeacian audience with his first stops after leaving Troy. The phrase recalls the opening of the Iliad (I.6), when Homer asks the goddess to begin singing from the time when (ἐξ οὖ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα) first Agamemnon and Achilles ‘stood apart, paired in strife.’ One suspects that for the first time Odysseus, as a consequence of this encounter with his mother, sees his decision to follow Agamemnon and fight his war as the moment that began his catalogue of pain and grief. This catalogue now goes much further back th...
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Homer’s Harmonia: In the Beginning ... was the Musical Word
Apr 2201:02:16Tap to summarizeLet’s take stock of what’s been said. I was stopped short in this performative journey through the Odyssey by the problem of how to think and talk about Persephone. Perhaps there is a significance hidden to me in such a blockage. Homer himself gives us next to nothing about the goddess, apart from her epithets such as ἐπαινή ‘dreaded’ or ἀγαυός (‘noble’? ‘handsome’?). While I feed happily off internal reverberations, it does seem, as in the case of Persephone, that there are definite allusions to figures and stories beyond and behind the stage of Homer’s foreground. This has led me to consider, in the first case, that allusion is itself, in species, a kind of musical resonance, like memory; and then to focus on the figure performing solo on Homer’s stage like Odysseus, without a musical instrument, wielding a staff, and the ways he conjures presences in the course of his storytelling. The most obvious of these is when he takes on the persona of a protagonist, and speaks hexameters in his or her voice. At least as visible, however, must be the use of his body and especially his staff. There may be evidence that the Homeric poems were composed for such a thespian performer, a rhapsode or rhabdode—the latter variant means ‘staff-’ or ‘wand-singer’—rather than a bard playing a sort of lyre, a tableau described several times in Homer.The depiction of these bards strongly suggests that Homer’s own artwork participates in a musical tradition. Today let us focus on Homer’s harmony. Insofar as musicology studies such historical transmissions, including in the relation of written notation to physical and auditory performance, there should be insights there, in musicology, to be mined in the investigation of the transmission of Homer. Something, at any rate, must free us from the cultivated opacity of the preferred academic debate which surrounds orality and literacy, with its lingering whiff of the noble savage. I suppose the distinction between orality and literacy is one that makes us feel intellectual, without having actually to think. There is in fact reason to believe that alphabetic writing arose in Greek as a musical notation, literally a way to record Homeric μουσική, for which a syllabary such as the Mycenaean was inadequate.Please also note, however, that there is no reason whatsoever, and never has been, to believe that Homer was an oral poet serving in some sort of tradition of oral poetry, no matter that all academic authorities you may see, hear, or read, will usually now assume these things as given, and to be historical facts. These authorities will even soil their intellects by pronouncing certain dates for ‘Homer’ measured in Centuries B.C.E., though they have no background in scientific chronology, and are wont to invent a whole swath of an ancient Greek timeline, ominously called a ‘Dark Age’, by denying the stratigraphic facts of empirical archaeology. Instead they assign dates to artefacts in the Greek Mediterranean (outside of Cyprus! by reason of some code of the guild) by coordinating with the notoriously unscientific, jury-rigged, humanly motivated construct called Egyptian chronology. This coordination is the only source of a Greek Dark Age of hundreds of years, separating the Mycenaean ware and writing in Linear B, dated via Egypt, from the immediately contiguous and even overlapping archaic strata in Hellenic-speaking lands.But surely the most damning deficit in the present oral orthodoxy about Homer has to do with its direct neglect of Homer’s text as we have received it from the Alexandrian Greeks. This text is visibly and manifestly a musical score, as surely as Homer’s artwork was universally described in the ancient world as music (μουσική) and, within Homer himself, as song (ἀϝοιδή). The entire stream of Homer’s composition is, in the descendent manuscripts, divided visually into what we now call lexical words and word-like groupings, and each of these ‘words’ is marked with an accent which notates a pitch contour of both a rise and a fall; different ancient grammarians have indicated that the interval of this contour may have been either a fourth or a fifth. Usually the whole ‘contonation’ takes two or at most three syllables to complete, limited to the last three syllables of the word, although the accent sign only marks the syllable within which the rise in pitch begins. Note that the fall goes unmarked except in the case of those vowels marked with a circumflex, in which case the whole uprise and downfall, a ‘contonation’, happens over the length of that vowel. But the comparison with Vedic strongly suggests that the down-glide also occurred in Greek, on the unmarked syllable or syllables immediately following the marked rise. I have shown how either the rise or the fall in pitch becomes dynamically prominent, or ‘stressed’, depending on the duration of the syllable on which the falling pitch lands. Hence amidst each word-level pitch contour there arises a most prominent syllable which can dynamically accent a beat in the underlying dactylic feet, LONG-short-short, so that syncopation can break up the reinforcement of that beat and create musical rhythm, rather than the robotic metronome of metrical scansion. Punching the metrical downbeats, what classicists call ‘scanning’, gives you this:ἄνδρά μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλάwhile intoning the pitches and stresses gives youἄνδρά μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλάIn a comparable way, English stresses occasionally syncopate the iambic pentameter to turn monotony into rhythm. Nor sháll deáth brág thou wander’st in his shade.There emerges out of my work, for Homeric and classical Greek as well as Latin, a Law of Tonal Prominence. Let’s illustrate it by example. These are the opening three words of the Iliad:μῆνιν ἄ[ϝ]ειδε θεά,First off, the digamma is there in brackets because it does not appear in our inherited texts, but the presence of its -w- sound in Homer’s composition has been inferred from a number of angles, such as comparison with Indo-European cognates, fitting the Alexandrian syllables to the dactylic hexameter, and saving Homer from hiatus, the clashing of vowel upon vowel. This latter avoidance was anciently ascribed to Homer, but in our present text his second word is guilty:ἄ-ειδεFortunately we can reconstruct a form:ἄϝειδε (pron. a-wei-de)I have suggested that avoiding hiatus is not the expression of some esoteric aesthetic or grammarian’s fetish, but a feature sprung from the concrete reality of singing:The ‘avoidance of hiatus’ is in fact the way grammarian philologists register a phenomenon that was actually caused by a cantor’s need, and desire, to articulate and voice the vowel of any sung syllable with a distinct, specific, initial consonant. It is not about separating vowels like naughty sheep, but articulating them as the bearers of melody in song.The story of the digamma illustrates that language is something we inherit, but that even among the attentive and the reverent, something gets lost in the transmission; and at the best of times, even without the damage of catastrophe or upheaval, we nevertheless fail to pass on our language unchanged. One witnesses more changes the longer one lives, in real time, and increasingly they become topics of whining conversation among peers in age. Sounds change, meanings change, accents shift. British and American stress habits coexist though we speak the same language. Where Americans disappear the first ‘o’ in LAB-ra-TO-ry and stress the second, the British do the opposite to their ‘o’s when they stress the antepenult, lab-OR-a-try, while both conserve the spelling ‘laboratory’.Tracing the history of such changes is a forensic work with uncertain results. The consensus is that the Proto-Indo-European accent was similar to the Vedic one, a tonal contonation like the one we find in Homer, rising and then falling in pitch, within a syllable or on adjacent syllables. But there is evidence in some Greek forms of an historical stress accent in Greek, earlier than Homer, which weakened unstressed vowels. All the same, the pitch accent in Homeric and later Greek appears to have the same nature as the Vedic tonal accent, which does not result in the weakening of adjacent vowels. And unlike the descendants in Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, the Vedic accent was not recessive, that is, tied to the last syllables of a verbal unit. Instead its high pitch point appeared to be free to occur anywhere in a polysyllable.The upshot is that when the ancestor of a Greek word was accented too early, the onset of the accent would have had to be shifted forward to become Hellenised. That is, the Greek accentual habit, whatever its source in the mysterious workings of the will or the brain or culture, imposed its ways on inherited words. But its influence was not tyrannical; if the inherited onset of the contonation already occurred within the final three syllables of a word, it was allowed to maintain its place rather than be forced to recede. Hence we have attested μητήρ, μητέρος, ‘mother’ or ‘mother’s’, rather than recessive μήτερος. Such inherited accent places are said to be ‘lexical’ in that they belong to the lexeme itself and are not forced, as when singing the finite verbs, by the Greek recessive proclivity. The circumflex in μῆνιν is lexical in this sense, although it happens to conform to the recessive rule. In most of the Greek dialects only the verbal forms, with few exceptions, show a recessive onset of the accent (the part with rising ...
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The Haunted Text: Music, Allusion, and Stagecraft in Homer’s Odyssey
Mar 2501:04:40Tap to summarizeThe idea of ‘the haunted text’ began while confronting the problem of Persephone in the Odyssey, which in terms of the circulatory system of the Singing Homer idea proved to be an arterial blockage. Persephone made the blood run cold. In this your singer has proved far less doughty than Odysseus himself on his journey. The end in sight was an essay on Homer’s Persephone, which is still a ‘part 3’ for the future. But as these things go, my little tale has grown in the telling, and the lessons learnt from this interlude will continue to shape the nature of the effort in this publication. The material on Persephone is looking increasingly like a footnote rather than a conclusion. I shall continue to do a rhapsodic reading of Homer and to revise my translation in each post. But the attempt to come to grips with the problem of allusion in Homer has led to a broader meditation on all kinds of musical reverberation. The ambition of my accompanying notes has turned into producing what the scholars call a ‘commentary’ on Homer, focusing on the point of contact with the Homeric performer; as I say in this talk, to meet him on his stage. My own work in progress has come round to seeing Homer’s script for his performer as also a ‘work in progress’.To come, on our ongoing mission, once the three parts of this therapeutic talk are delivered: we return to passages from Homer’s Odyssey in English—we are about to meet Odysseus’ mother, whose soul is patiently waiting—with voicing of the Greek text, linear prose translation, and actor’s notes. Let’s go!Singing Homer is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit homerist.substack.com/subscribe
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‘The Cheerless Place’: Homer in English
Mar 500:06:19Tap to summarizeOdyssey 11.90-151‘Why ever, you wretched man, did you leave the light of the SunAnd come to see the corpses and the cheerless place?’ (Od.11.93-4)One of Teiresias’ jobs is what the screenwriters call ‘exposition’, filling in the essential things in the background or foreground which the audience will need to know in order to make sense of the plot. A certain generation will always call this the Morgan Freeman role. But I find Teiresias’ brief entrance to be a jolt of tactility and perspective. There is a fuss of stage business, where Teiresias asks Odysseus to put up his absurdly threatening sword so he can drink blood; there follows the enacted sheathing and the old man’s imagined stooping and drinking of fresh animal blood from a trench, like a wildebeest at the watering hole. In a world already peopled with gods and monsters, this is nevertheless farcical and surreal. A stately man introduced wielding a golden sceptre is immediately on all fours lapping up gore like a jackal.Note especially that phrase, ‘cheerless place’; it might register these days as a bit of a cliché, when it comes to describing hell or the underworld or a haunted cemetery, but no one, that we know of, had really described these things before. Teiresias’ ‘cheerless place’ (ἀτερπέα χῶρον), a land absent of sources of pleasure or delight, including the delights of dance and song, therefore deserves to strike the imagination with all the sombre awe with which it evidently struck the likes of Virgil and Dante and then Milton. It is a place foreign, or immune, to poetry, and yet a wellspring. There is now, forever, such a place in the landscape. And it continues to live in the cultural imagination and to be perversely productive of poetry and art, first of all in the tale of the wanderings of Odysseus and eminently here in the speech of Teiresias. If the ‘cheerless place’ is an idea not original to Homer, he is nevertheless, in our literary history, the source of its apostolic touch. The elements of Teiresias’ comparatively brief and pithy speech echo and resound, backwards and forwards in the Odyssey—literally re-sound—so that it becomes a true crux for both Odysseus’ tale to the Phaeacians and the whole of Homer’s poem.It would seem that Teiresias needs to establish his authority with Homer’s audience, rather than let it be assumed, as he later might amongst the likes of Oedipus and Antigone on the Athenian stage. He does this first by already knowing, without being told, who Odysseus is—‘he knew me’ (ἐμὲ δ’ ἔγνω) says the teller—as well as the answer to his own opening question above, why’d you leave the light of the sun for the cheerless place? He knows what Odysseus means to ask about:‘It’s a return home you’re after, sweet as honey, brilliant Odysseus …’ (100)That shows he’s at least a little mantic, if not quite divinely omniscient. Teiresias also knows that Odysseus is at risk of destruction by Poseidon, in anger for the blinding of his son the Cyclops. That is a past and done deed for Odysseus and ourselves in audience, hence a credential of the prophet’s awareness.But what comes next establishes Teiresias’ authority within the poetic world of the Odyssey: He warns Odysseus that when they reach the Thrinacian Isle, he must restrain himself and his crew from harming the cattle and flocks of Helius the sun who graze there.‘Now, if you would leave them be, unharmed, and focus on returning home,You might even still make it to Ithaca, though suffering crappy things;But if you harm them, I read the signs of destruction at that time,For both your ship and crew.’ (110-13)This episode is in Odysseus’ future; he first hears about it now. We, however, have known since the opening lines of the poem (1.8-9) that this encounter does not end well. Odysseus will fail to restrain his men and lose both ship and crew, although to be clear, Homer blames the men’s failure squarely on their own (σφετέρηισιν) folly, not their leader’s weakness. The effect here in the Odyssey’s theatre is to certify, by internal validation, Teiresias’ acumen as a prophet. He knows how to read the signs (τεκμαίρομαι—his name, Τειρεσίας, may well mean ‘portent reader’); we are confident because, with respect to the sun’s cattle at least, we already know how that story ends. By grounding Teiresias’ credibility in this way, reaching back to the very framing of the poem, Homer primes us to take heed of the revelations about to come. We are on the edge of our seat for words from Teiresias which, it turns out, will haunt the rest of the Odyssey like a recurring refrain, and as much as any other of its musical features, turns the story into a song.Spoiler alert: Odysseus is going to kill Penelope’s suitors, provided he manages to get home. Teiresias is in no doubt. But he leaves it open—not yet plotted by Homer, perhaps—whether he kills them ‘by stratagem, or openly with the sharp blade …’ (120). There’s still options, all suspense has not been lost. But that victory will not be the end of the story. For what follows from Teiresias’ mouth, and is therefore to follow in Odysseus’ life, nothing has yet prepared us. Note that Teiresias is no longer predicting, or entertaining choices and possibilities, but giving directions in the imperative voice; if he still has in mind Odysseus’ return home, it would have to be in some extended sense, beyond Ithaca and wife and child. That presents a significant shift of horizon for the arc of the Odyssey as we generally experience it. All roads lead to the cheerless place, no doubt; but is there anything going to distinguish Odysseus’ odyssey? What shall be written on his tombstone?‘Travel, then, afterward—grab an oar that fits you well—Until you reach those men who do not know the sea,Men who do not even eat food seasoned with salt:Nor do they actually know about ships with purple cheeksNor well-fitted oars, which become the wings for ships.’ (121-5)Extraordinarily evocative are ‘those men who do not know the sea’; one knows the very heart of such men and their pragmatic wives. They sing Thracian harvest songs. But what does one do with men who do not season their food with salt? Do such people exist? Google searches suggest hunter-gatherers, but it becomes obvious that Teiresias intends people who engage in agriculture to sustain themselves. Surely salt is a non-negotiable necessity of human metabolism and survival? Can anyone reading me help with this?‘Grab an oar.’ (It’s what I feel like saying to those just starting the Odyssey.) Not for nothing has been Odysseus’ interview, just concluded, with the ghost of Elpenor. His lost crewman had asked Odysseus to pile him a tomb, a monument to the Unfortunate Man (σῆμα … ἀνδρὸς δυστήνοιο, 75-6), on top of which he is to affix Elpenor’s oar ‘with which I used to row when I also was alive and with my comrades.’ (79) The oar planted on top of the mound (sēma) is itself a symbol (sēma) of the labour of the buried man’s bones and, at the same time and intrinsically, of the necessary team, his crew of oarsmen, with both of which Elpenor’s ghost identifies.It is not clear whether Homer equivocates on the word sēma, as we would have to, between ‘tomb’ or ‘burial mound’ and ‘sign’ or ‘symbol’. A ‘tombstone’ may well unite these ideas for us as well, although our sense, aside from crucifixes or other religious symbols, would depend on the epitaph, the legible and intelligible writing on the tomb. Homer does not knowingly refer to writing of this sort, the sort in which his own poem has come to be notated and transmitted. Such a notation, including the accent marks, is a particular deployment of an independent set of symbols used to represent the sound, including its emphases, of a spoken language. Such sounds would need to be decoded by someone familiar with the language, into groupings we have come to call ‘words’, ‘phrases’, ‘clauses’ and ‘sentences’, for example, before they could have any meaning, and therefore become signs for something more than their associated sounds.What is clear is that sēma can mean ‘symbol’ in Homer without any reference to a tomb. When in the Iliad a champion among the foremost Achaeans must be chosen to face Hector mano-a-mano, they each somehow put a mark or sign (σημαίνω, Il.VII.175 ff.) on a lot, before dropping it in a helmet. When the helmet is shaken and one falls out, the lot is taken round the circle, one by one, until the man who recognises the sign (sēma) acknowledges he made it. (It was Ajax.) These must have been pictograms, what the corporations call ‘logos’, except that they are private; they have no meaning beyond ‘I made this’, while even that meaning is only apparent to the maker. Hence it is a non-communicative sign and, one might say, almost insignificant.Elsewhere in the Iliad, when Bellerophon is sent to Lycia, after having secretly been accused, by his host’s wife, of making unwelcome advances, he is to carry with him a folded tablet (πίναξ πτυκτός) inscribed with ‘baleful signs’ (σήματα λυγρά). These signs, which are said to be many and deadly (θυμόφθορα πολλά), evidently instruct the recipient to kill their bearer. (Bellerophon does not, after all, suffer the fate of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. see Iliad VI.160 ff.) Now, these signs could well have been pictograms, like skulls and crossbones. But then how to make their intent unambiguous, and why were there so many of them on the tablet? The endlessly intriguing fact is that the manyness of the signs, and the fact that they are inscribed on a folded tablet, suggest that they were the writing of spoken language, and that Homer had actua...
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Elpenor’s Oar: Homer in English
Jan 3000:06:31Tap to summarizeOdyssey 11.20-89[Part 2 of ‘The Haunted Text’, on Persephone herself—perhaps the ultimate ‘background’ figure of those named in Homer’s foreground—will resume when she herself prompts the interrogation. For now we return to the banks of Oceanus, to sing a bit of Homer.]Odysseus says that he and his men came to the place Circe had pointed out. He does not describe it again. We should recall what Circe had said, but it must be acknowledged that a performer takes the path of prudence in not revisiting her words, as they seem a little difficult to embody coherently on a stage:There’s a small headland there, and a grove of Persephone—Tall poplars and willows that lose their fruit—That’s the spot, first off, to put the ship in—by Oceanus, Deep-Eddies;But go by yourself into Hades’ place, the mouldy house. (Od.10.509-12)Even though it’s supposed to be very dark outside in the Cimmerians’ land, it seems possible to imagine the grove and the trees; but what sort of thing is Hades’ mouldy house? Does it have a door and windows, inner rooms and porticoes? A δόμος needs to be some sort of building. The following vista somehow unfolds inside, as though one had entered an IMAX theatre:Now, there, into Acheron Pyriphlegethon flows,Along with Cocytus, which is a branch from the water of Styx.And there’s a cliff and the coming together of two thunderous rivers … (10.113-15)The performer does not put us in mind of this fantastic and dimly lit landscape. Instead, as is his wont, he focalises his body and his prop. Recall that Odysseus the character has received a sword from a Phaeacian lad in Book 8, in compensation for his rude challenge to the hero in the lists. I suspect that one purpose of this gift of a sword, which he straps over his shoulder and forgets, was plausibly to equip Odysseus the narrator, who was about to take the stage, with the rhapsode’s prop, the magic staff, which of course Homer’s performer had already in hand. I have pointed out a running joke in the Odyssey, where a line from the Iliad, ‘he drew the sharp sword from by his thigh,’—invariably followed in that poem with a masculine martial exploit—is in this poem followed by some incongruous action which tends to make the armed man look awkward or silly. Circe had instructed Odysseus to ‘draw the sharp sword from by your thigh/And sit …’ (10.535-6). Not ‘attack’ or ‘spill the blood of your foe,’ but sit … to guard already spilt sacrificial blood from a thirsty queue of ghosts. Now, at or within Hades’ door, he follows Circe’s instructions to dig a trench for that sacrifice, but innovates in the means, which she had not thought to mention.… but me, I drew my sharp sword from by my thighAnd dug a trench as much as an arm’s length over here and over here … (11.24-5)The lines seem designed for an actor’s gesture with his prop, blocking and animating a stage. But to dig a trench with a sword? Recall the demand on King Arthur from the Knights who say ‘Ni!’, that he must cut down the mightiest tree in the forest with a herring. I suppose in life as well as in performance art, one has to make do with what is to hand.… and they gathered,Souls out from Erebus below, of the corpses of the dead and gone.There’s brides and lusty boys, much-endured old men,Tender virgins whose life’s breath is new to sorrow,Many wounded by copper-tipped spears,Men slain by Ares wearing equipment covered in human gore:These began coming in numbers, from one side and the other,In a supernatural uproar: the yellow-green fear got hold of me. (10.36-44)I think it bears repeating, and then contemplating and diagnosing, this vision of the dead streaming forth from some hidden location behind the screen of reality, where they are thought to remain in some sort of half-aware relation to our history and consciousness. I suppose there is nothing unusual about this idea by now, nothing that offends our sense of realism or plausibility, at least when we are telling stories or saying prayers. One accommodates this parallel reality, at least at certain times, when it comes to grandparents and parents and children and dead presidents and saints, and of course beloved pets. But I find myself wondering, would there ever have been such things as ghosts without ghost stories? Our susceptibility to stories and storytellers, to their ability to conjure the absent and make it act and speak before our eyes, may well be of a piece with our susceptibility to the belief, or even the perception, of ghosts. The dead, after all, are merely one species of the absent and missed. Of course this passes onward to the fear of their noxiousness or malevolence as independent agents, who might attend you even if they don’t know you; the success of horror films and stories bespeaks this extension of the realm of the dead beyond a space of sanctuary for the beloved and the missed. Odysseus describes a terrifying sensurround experience (θεσπεσίηι ϝἰϝαχῆι); his response describes the one in the movie theatre at a horror show: ‘the yellow-green fear got hold of me.’ It is not finally clear how they make the sound that terrifies him. Perhaps with their feet? Perhaps they moan and clank in their armour, like Marley’s ghost? We learn later on—from Teiresias—that they cannot speak articulately or thoughtfully until they drink of Odysseus’ blood sacrifice.From T. S. Eliot—who may be the man in the hat in front of the bicyclists—quoting Dante—‘I had not thought death had undone so many.’ The sentiment morphs into David Bowie’s ‘I never thought I’d need so many people …’ A vision of the dead becomes at once a vision of the almost burdensome immensity of human population. Bowie’s doomed cityscape (Five Years) and Eliot’s vision of a busy London Bridge (The Waste Land) are of a piece with the earlier infernal visions in that the realisation that these people had stopped living is at once a taking in of their sheer number. Odysseus’ vision here, which inspired so many different kinds of poet across the ages, may in fact be the origin of them all. My only hesitation when it comes to Homer’s originality, is the hint at parody and sendup which runs through the veins of the Odyssey, including in this episode of Odysseus in Hades, whose undercurrents are felt despite our lack of objects for their direction (outside the Iliad). Perhaps, for example, there were stories and perhaps also rites due to Orpheus, or about him, to which Homer was responding in a somewhat parodic way, but there is no evidence for their priority. There seems to be only genuine sentiment running through Homer’s lines. We do not know how the brides and grooms came to their presumed sudden end—must have been horrible—nor the virgins new to sorrow. But they all died untimely, like men killed in battle, and evidently keep the semblance with which they died; the soldiers’ ghosts’ equipment is still covered, rather gratuitously, with real gore.The odd ones out are the old men who have endured much (πολύτλητοι); they must be wearing their endurance in their posture and gait. Perhaps they also died at a wedding, like the people killed by drones in Afghanistan? It does not seem that we are shown people who died of old age, or disease. There are no old women mentioned, for example, nor cripples, nor others who might not elicit the sought-for poignance in the sense of lost opportunity and bloom. These are sad songs in a comedy, not tragic eruptions into the score. The ghosts are Homeric psyches who lust for the blood from which they have been forever separated. We are supposed to think that they would fear Odysseus’ sword, which stands brandished in their way. ‘Wot are you gonna do, kill me?’Odysseus draws his sword anyway, and repeats, in his own assertive voice, Circe’s command that he will not let the ‘corpses’ powerless heads’—which sound like ‘skulls’, but must be recognisable, like zombies’ faces—approach the sheep’s blood before he can question Teiresias. The rule is immediately broken, however, when the ghost of Elpenor shows up first. He does not take a drink, but starts right up talking in response to Odysseus’ question. No explanation is given for his ability or privilege in line, unless it can be found in the fact that he’s not yet been acknowledged in death, but lies there ‘unwept and without a funeral’ in Circe’s house. But this seems, rather, to be an explanation of why he is dead at all. Elpenor tells the story of his drunken misadventure. Odysseus’ question of him had served as a chance to repeat a joke which doesn’t, perhaps, improve with age: how’d you get here so fast, the quickest way to Hades? ‘You beat me here on foot, though I came with my black ship.’ (11.58)Elpenor’s presence in the story, at first blush anyway, seems in every way a contrivance. Unkind people would call him an insertion. My own sense is that the poet of the Odyssey, who is scripting a one-man show on a bare stage, is someone who embraces both the imaginative challenges placed upon him by the conditions of his art, and a performer who must be more a medium than an actor, a necessarily multilayered vehicle who will not be shy to indulge things ‘meta’. This layering will include breaking what we call the ‘fourth wall’; we have seen this already in his use of the figure of Mentor, who is at times the performer’s alter ego rather than an assumed character. (I here anticipate the rich examples to come at exciting moments.) I have suggested that in Elpenor’s case, the manner of his death, which he now recounts in his own voice, stands as a sort of parable for an ‘epic movement’. Instead of retracing his steps down the long staircase, he falls straight through the roof, which resu...
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The Gospel according to the Cimmerians—Homer in English
Dec 2900:01:34Tap to summarizeOdyssey 11.1-19And so the journey begins. Well, begins again. There is a new breath filling the sails, a second wind. It is in fact the breath of Circe, ‘dread goddess of intelligible voice.’ Her entrance into the story has been literally pivotal; it sends Odysseus and his remaining men southward, toward the invisible place where the dead people go, and to the ministry of yet another divine mistress.Olympian Athena at this moment is nowhere to be seen; Calypso, the island-bound and hence earth-bound Titan’s daughter, is as yet an unknown. Circe, the Sun’s daughter also seemingly island-bound, has been Odysseus’ bedmate for a year; now she sends him on to dread Persephone beyond the visible horizon. In the Odyssey the latter seems to be permanently ensconced beyond and beneath the earth. Athena stands out in Odysseus’ list as belonging to the sky or Olympus, always having to descend from there and return, when she is finished intervening in his life. Persephone seems to be the least visible of these beings, both to us and as a fact of the story.The prospect of encountering the walking dead blows new life through the sonority of now familiar lines, invoking the launching of a ship and standing its mast. The ship herself is as animate in Greek as Circe: ‘the wind and the helmsman directed her.’ Even in English a ship is rarely an ‘it’. She and her men are on a wind-blown heading to Hell. One line rings a tad strangely this time: ‘Helius went down and all the lanes grew shadowed.’ (Od.11.12) ἄγυια is properly ‘street’. We speak of ‘sea lanes’ but these are abstract cartographic impositions upon the fluid. The lexicon suggests ‘paths of the sea’—which are what, exactly? Neither the wind nor the pilot are driving a road. The metaphor rather drives home the alienness of liquid depths to both the human and the buoyant. The sea is a roadless watery abyss.Singing Homer is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.At the border of Oceanus, the river of ‘deep currents’, there be men. There are six lines about the Cimmerians in the Odyssey:ἔνθα δὲ Κιμμερίων ἀνδρῶν δῆμός τε πόλις τε,ἠέρι καὶ νεφέληι κεκαλυμμένοι · οὐδέ ποτ’ αὐτούςἠϝέλιος φαϝέθων ἐπιδέρκεται ἀκτίνεσσιν,οὔθ’ ὁπότ’ ἂν στείχησι πρὸς οὐρανὸν ἀστερόενταοὔθ’ ὅτ’ ἂν ἂψ ἐπὶ γαῖαν ἀπ’ οὐρανόθεν προτράπηται,ἀλλ’ ἐπὶ νὺξ ὀλοὴ τέταται δειλοῖσι βροτοῖσιν. (11.14-19)There one finds the Cimmerian men, their country and city,Hidden in mist and cloud: not ever upon themDoes shining Helius peer with his rays,Neither when he moves toward starry heaven,Nor when back to earth from heaven he turns his forward way,But a deadly night is stretched over wretched mortals.They have a country and a city (δῆμός τε πόλις τε), these Cimmerians. It is not clear how they have managed these things, how they grow food for themselves or what they get up to without any sun. What would they argue about in court or at the assembly? What outlet or venue might there be for fighting men (ἄνδρες) to display? It is not that the sun never rises there, it seems, but that it is forever obscured by thick fog and cloud. The land of the Laestrygonians saw very short nights, so that a busy shepherd could earn two wages, bringing home the cattle and taking out the flocks (10.84-5). It seems we have moved from somewhere far in the north not to the opposite pole, but southwards toward the equator. Evidently the view south in illo tempore presented something at the same time spectacular and gloomy, not an horizon but a barrier of some kind, beyond which was held to be the Invisible Realm (Ἀϝίδης, Hades) where the dead and gone go to hide. At its border, the farther shore of the stream of Oceanus, dwell people with a name, who could hardly see for looking … or be seen. We proceed through gradations of invisibility, and meet Cimmerians on the way.What might it serve Homer’s vision that there be people who dwell there on the edge, however implausibly, in the valley of the shadow of death? Circe does not mention this possibility in advance; perhaps that is a first hint that following her instructions for a ritual engagement with the dead, will not be without its last-minute adjustments, like Neil Armstrong’s moon landing. (‘Rocket’ is not, despite the proverbs, one of the hard sciences.) Certainly there would be some anxiety about unforeseen events or hindrances to the playbook in such a frankly scary environment. Odysseus and his men take no chances engaging with these Cimmerians, as they might otherwise have been expected to do, to see what they could get from them. They disembark there, one assumes near the town, and proceed along Oceanus’ banks to the grove of Persephone.Apparently this is a grove consecrated by the Cimmerians, like the grove of Athena in which Odysseus lays low on his way to the town of Phaeacia. One presumes (though one does not know) that within the Phaeacians’ town, there is a temple to Poseidon. They are descendants of Poseidon, after all. There is evidently a tension between Poseidon and Athena which plays out in the opening of the Odyssey, a tension which devolves in this instance upon the fate of the figure of Odysseus. Perhaps this tension is reflected politically in the location of these sacred sites, one within the walls and one a suburban grove. In historical Athens the situation is reversed, with Athena’s house on the Acropolis and Poseidon’s temple away in Sounion. One honours the one god centrally, but covers one’s bases by keeping the opposition at arm’s length, which is also of course within arm’s reach. But within the Acropolis is also the famous house of Erectheus, still extant; the latter was a founding hero who historically comes to be associated with a cult of Poseidon. It is striking that when Athena leaves Odysseus on the Phaeacian king’s doorstep, she heads off to the house of Erechtheus, called out by name, in a place called Athene (7.81). Whether for Homer also this refuge-seeking of Athena’s represents some kind of reconciliation with Poseidon, or only a resort to her own city’s founder, is a matter lost to time. But their historical practices seem to suggest a place for Poseidon within the Athenians’ acropolis. We may speculate, by analogy, that Hades himself is a central divinity in the Cimmerian polis, while his consort Persephone haunts her grove on Oceanus’ banks. I therefore venture to infer, merely from the fact that there is a grove of Persephone apart from the Cimmerian town, that they acknowledge a tension between her and her husband. Circe does not appear to rate the town and its Cimmerians, only the grove.Herodotus knew of Cimmerians in eastern lands who were expunged by the Scythians. These were indeed a people who had disappeared, but left mementos of their existence in the names of certain landmarks, like the ‘Cimmerian walls’ or the ‘Cimmerian Bosporus’. The Bible knows a corresponding people as Gomer. But there is no mention in classical Greece of Cimmerians living anywhere to the south across the sea. Here is an opportunity to point out what is not obvious even to professional historians: that there is no good topographical reason to connect any of the places named and described in Homer to places so named by classical Greek authors (or ourselves). Homer’s Aegypt has no pyramids to speak of. But beyond that, the place Herodotus calls Aegypt (Egypt), applying Homer’s name, has never been called this by the peoples who are native there. To this day, local peoples have somewhat accommodated themselves to inherited imperial naming, like the dwellers in the ‘Arctic’ or around the ‘Gulf of Mexico’.Efforts continue, but fail, even to identify the places Homer names which are supposed to be within Greece itself. The situation is such that it seems to me most likely that the places were named from the poems, rather than the other way around. With the exception of Athens, which is a place which proves to have been a significant bottleneck or filter in the transmission of Homer’s music, I believe the Greek place names for towns domestic and foreign were assigned by migrants from parts northern who ventured south into a decimated land, bringing with them the Homeric poems and its names, either on their lips or in their hands. To be sure, there was a significant servant population of some kind, who already used Greek amidst the bureaucracy of the Mycenaean citadels. These stock-keeping scribes wrote in Linear B, which was a syllabary inadequate to record Homer. There is clearly a puzzle here: its solution must be allowed to involve the catastrophic breakdowns of societies, sudden migrations of populations into devastated regions (sometimes misinterpreted as ‘invasions’), and changes in coastlines, topography, and even cardinal points before any satisfaction will be had. It is a salient fact that Greek speakers do not speak a language closely related to the other Indo-European languages presently surrounding them.There must be a programmatic interest for Homer in the Cimmerians, for he tells us next to nothing about them, save that they have a country and some sort of recognisable city, and that the perpetual noxious weather and dark of their circumstances oppresses them and leaves them wretched. But Odysseus does not encounter deserts, as we define them; and when he encounters a deserted isle, overrun by goats, he breaks into a reverie about how admirably it might be developed if humans could make their way there, across from the land of the Cyclopes. His world seems ...
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Beyond Oceanus
Nov 1601:15:11Tap to summarizeOn Odyssey 10.503-74 (end)This one might take a few sittings.I neglected to mention, when it was appropriate and to my point, that poplars and willows are riparian trees. The headland the ship of Odysseus is supposed to meet once he’s crossed through Oceanus, is described as λάχεια, which I sheepishly render ‘small’, but nobody really knows what the word means. The trees form a grove of Persephone there. The men will head off from Circe’s Isle over the salt sea, but the place they will put in is either the far bank of a river or a lake shore. The Oceanus is a fresh water stream. Of some kind.Jno Cook’s book and site are here.My paper on the Polar Bear is here.A recording of this passage in my English translation is here: A full performance of Homer’s hexameters in Greek awaits at the end of this post:Singing Homer is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit homerist.substack.com/subscribe
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The Ballad of Elpenor, Pt.1—Homer in English
Nov 600:06:49Tap to summarizeOdyssey 10.503-74We’ve already had two members of Odysseus’ crew named, amongst a number of occasions where they speak in chorus. Sometimes we get the convention that ‘one on this side’ and ‘one on t’other’ says what follows, even though it is but a single speech enacted by a solo performer. There was Polites (‘Citizen’), the one Odysseus cared (or worried) most about (κήδιστος), who could not resist responding to the sound of a goddess’ voice. And there is Eurylochus (‘Broad-Ambush’) the antagonist, an annoying coward who nevertheless, like Thersites in the Iliad, speaks discomfiting truth to power. Now we meet young Elpenor (‘Man of Hope’), who seems most unfortunately to be used by Homer, or his present narrator Odysseus, to make some sort of point. The thing is, poor Elpenor makes this point by dying.Who are you Elpēnor?What is it that you’re here for?Why did Homer make you liveTo break your neck on Circe’s floor?Who are you, sweet Elpēnor, and wherefore?Circe has just given Odysseus assurance he needn’t worry about finding a guide to reach Hades. From where she is, apparently, it only takes a steady push from Boreas, the north wind, to get your vessel there. Hades must be somewhere to the south. But Circe does not predict or describe any sort of sea-crossing to which we have been used so far, such as crossing over the ‘deep’ (πόντος) or the ‘sea’ (θάλασσα); this is to be a crossing through a creature Homer calls Oceanus (Ὠκεανός):Let’s not have your need for a guide on ship concern you,But stand the mast, furl the white sails,And sit back: the breath of Boreas, you see, will carry her.But whenever it is, by ship, you cross through Oceanus,There’s a small headland there, and a grove of Persephone—Tall poplars and willows that lose their fruit— (Od.10.505-10)If they’ve been identified correctly, these are riparian trees. We are of course in the habit of using ‘ocean’ to refer to the biggest bodies of salt water in our environment. But no part of this decadent usage can have anything to do with the referent Homer intends. Oceanus is a stream or river, not an ocean, evidently running fresh water. On the shield of Achilles, it is described as a river which is set into the shield’s outermost rim, as though it ran right ’round the cosmos inscribed within.Needless to say, we do not presently observe any such seemingly liquid ring around the world. It will therefore take some effort of imagination to realise what Homer may be describing or referring to.Homer describes the constellation of the Bear as at the pole of the world and the centre of the shield. It spins upon itself and never sets, as only a constellation at the pole would appear to do. But this is an impossible configuration according to the dogmas of modern astronomy, which see the earth’s present motions and attitudes as the only ones of which it was capable in human memory. In particular, a back-calculation of the present precession of the equinoxes will never result in the north pole, presently pointed at the star Polaris in the Little Bear, being located within the Great Bear. (For Homer it was simply ‘the Bear’; Ursa Minor only became a ‘thing’ in later times. The Phoenicians are supposed to have taught it to the Greeks, likely because it had replaced the Bear as the asterism to navigate by.) Current theories attribute the precession to multi-body gravitational dynamics, and so to be somewhat variable, but if we take ancient measurements seriously, as we ought, it has slowed down significantly. It is reasonable to wonder if a sudden displacement of the pole within the chronology of human history may not have left a remnant wobble in the earth’s equilibrium, from which it is gradually recovering.Note above how the artist has replaced the Bear at the centre with the sun’s chariot surrounded by the zodiac. This is a symptom of the post-Copernican religious egoism, which Homer cannot be seen to violate. The obvious falseness of Homer’s description to their present sky at night was not lost on ancient authors. Aristotle picks out Homer’s use of οἴη ἄμμορος, ‘alone without a share’, used to describe the Bear’s unsinking property, as an example of ‘metaphor’. Elsewhere I have drawn out the implications of Aristotle’s comment:… not just Aristotle but his whole audience feels that the only way currently to understand this line of Homer’s, readily evoked by its two opening words, is as an illustration of what the philosopher means by ‘metaphor’. Metaphor is the only option, by settled opinion, clearly because what the line literally means cannot be true! There is no dispute here, expressed or implied, about what that literal meaning really is; that would defeat the purpose of an illustrative example of metaphor. So here lies the key element in this tidbit from Aristotle: it leaves no doubt that the literal, non-metaphorical meaning of Homer’s phrase is that the Bear alone did not set …Much later Strabo, in the Roman era, tried to defend Homer’s veracity by claiming that what Homer really meant by the Bear (ἄρκτος) must have been the ‘Arctic Circle’, or the ‘Bear’s Circle’ (ἀρκτικὸς κύκλος). One cannot navigate by the Arctic Circle, however, without going ’round in circles. One needs a fixed point. In our skies there is but one. Calypso asks Odysseus to keep the Bear to his left as he pushes off in his raft. If the Bear was a polar bear, her instruction has shown him how to head due east.Always remember that Classicists, mythologists, astronomers, archaeologists, historians, biologists, and all manner of non-professional folk presume an awful lot about the layout of the earth and the sky in Homeric and other ancient times. (Within ‘Homeric’ we might also distinguish between the time of the telling and the time of the action.) Mainly the presumption is that nothing has changed in these things, except very slowly, which is an absurdly false one when it comes to the earth and the sky; it is a presumption in the modern uniformitarian ‘sciences’ as well, where only presently observable processes, mostly gradual, are allowed to be responsible for the manifold phenomena confronting us. These include miles-high mountains, miles-deep trenches, and vast canyons all on a supposedly gravitating sphere; the diversity of biological genera living and dead; ‘Ice Ages’; and the planet Venus. There are seashells and the bones of Amphitrite’s salt water creatures at the tops of the Himalayas. These presumptions should therefore be characterised as reflecting one or more of the developmental neuroses, or to sensory-cognitive after-effects comparable to those of brainwashing.If we are to take Homer seriously—and what has there been written since, which should more demand our attention and discernment than the educator of Greece and Rome—then we must take his usage seriously. Homer’s comedy is serious business, unlike whatever can be meant by ‘epic’. Other musical geniuses, not only Beethoven and Bach but also Pindar and Sophocles, are allowed to remain eruptions into the timeline of human consciousness. But academic types don’t care for geniuses, especially ones they don’t themselves produce and nominate. The poet whom Pindar and Sophocles no doubt considered the greatest genius of them all is made out to be, at a deeply formative level, a product of an oral tradition. Such a tradition is entirely an invented postulate of the modern academy. It depends on the concept of a ‘metrical formula’, which in turn depends on ignoring all the marks of accentuation introduced into Homer’s text by the Alexandrian scholars of the Hellenistic era—a time when the Bear was not at the pole.Metre is not prosody. Metre was originally performed by the feet, as the chosen name for the metrical unit, ‘foot’ (πούς), still attests. Prosody is accent (προσῳδία), ‘applied song’, performed by the voice. When these Greek accents, sharply rising and heavily falling in pitch, are applied to a metrical pattern, they produce rhythm as well as melody. The graphic accent marks demonstrate prima facie that the text of Homer, which the Alexandrians preserved and restored, was understood by them to be a musical score. If you ignore all the notes in a modern musical score, all you’ll find left are pitch-free metrical formulas. Beethoven and Homer instead generated scores that were demonstrably all three of the following: metrical (look to the time signature), rhythmic (look to the note durations and the bar lines), and melodic (look to your singing heart and the twist in your spine).It should be clear that I find that neither Homer’s compositions nor the truth have been well served either by modern Homeric Studies or by modern science. What depresses is the extraordinary arrogance of academic closed shops, like the oral theory of Homer or gravitational cosmology. There is more than is dreamt of or realised in their philosophies, in the word-music of Homer. It may be that Homer was in some way connected, more or less intimately, to a tradition of versifying. He certainly paints more like a connoisseur than a neophyte. But how could we ever know who or what constituted such a tradition? The ‘oral tradition’ variegating now for generations like obsessive worldbuilding, is entirely based on the concept of the metrical formula: a notion that multitudes of phrases were transmitted in packets like so many clichés, to be available prepackaged to an improvising performer without, miraculously, becoming frozen or opaque in meaning over the passage of time.Words carry meaning, and hence the transmission of phrases is meaningful tradition. But metre is not what the words con...
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The Quickest Way to Hades
Oct 2200:38:10Tap to summarizeOn Odyssey 10.408-502An especially happy discovery of these attempts at video presentations of my performance notes for Homer’s Odyssey, is that one can, with a little post-production, present a Greek text simultaneous with its performance. (The other is the experience of trawling the internet for the stimulus of images to lose oneself in.) Once one gets the hang of the Greek alphabet, I hope the experience can become like following along with a score while listening to a piece of music. (Some of you have already been doing this, following along, with my six-volume Greek/English edition of the Odyssey, Homer Odysseia.) I find that the awakening of the analytic mind, when it is presented with a composer’s (or compositor’s) stream of symbols and notation, does no harm to the hearing, but rather can enhance one’s awareness of form and metabolism in the unfolding composition. Others may disagree, and close all books and other avenues of distraction while listening. In either case, taking on board the notion that ancient texts should all be approached for what they were, musical scores for the production of meaningful sound by the voice, does far more than enhance a private experience. From my recent book:We did not use to know how the prosody of Greek words interacted with Greek metres. With the arrival of the new theory of the Greek accent, now we do. The ignoring of the seemingly irrelevant accent marks in texts seems to have led not to the realisation that all we could know, sadly, about the sound and performance of Greek poetry was its metre, but to the delusion that metre was all there was to know.Not knowing how the once painstakingly recorded accents worked, led to a non-benign, positive kind of ignorance in classical scholarship, which has fostered and continues to peddle notions of metrical composition and metrical poetry. These are patent absurdities now force-fed on students. Ancient metres can instead be compared to the time signatures we find in the modern musical notation; they sit to the left, while we all know that the music is to be found in what follows to the right of the time signature, in the pitch patterns and stresses, the notes of melody and the punctuating bar lines. The independence from the metre of the accentual patterns in Greek allowed for the phenomenon of syncopation, the source of the sense of rhythm in all things musical. Syncopation with its rhythmic counterpoint in turn brings new attention to moments of cadence, where accents and metrical downbeats conjoin through the words expressing them.So do enjoy Homer’s syncopations. They are lost on classical scholars, who scan ancient verses like metrical robots, and spin spiders’ webs of metrical traditions with no evidence from history or payoff in the form of compositional insight. The dactylic hexameter is not a metrical prison, but a template or matrix of musical freedom, as real words complete with their pitches and stresses—not metrical phrases—bring life to the metrical matrix in the telling of a story.The quickest way to Hades is to miss out on Homer’s cheated expectations, when he draws his sword from by his thick thigh. That comic drop, and its opening eyes, are what he’s after.Here is my original post, with complete recordings of the passage in Greek and English: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit homerist.substack.com/subscribe
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‘Flesh beyond reckoning ...’—Homer in English
Oct 1600:09:08Tap to summarizeOdyssey 10.408-502Odysseus learns from Circe that he must travel to the Underworld, the house of Hades Invisible—his name seems to mean ‘invisible’ or ‘unseen’, ἀϝίδης—and the home of his consort the awesome Persephone. Not for the first, but only the latest time in the Odyssey, the woman and wife appears to be in charge of house and realm. For a number of reasons, a first-time listener might be taken by surprise, even shock, at this disclosure on the bed of Circe. We have so far been encouraged to think that the arrival on this bed has been a significant one, a destined one, even a kind of climactic achievement; perhaps one that might put any sort of further homesickness into perspective. But no, the need for home reasserts itself into the blissful consciousness; and without warning, this triggers the revelation from Circe that she must pass along the soul of her mortal pilgrim wanderer to the ministry of a goddess even more dread. Not only is sexual union with the wise goddess no sort of transcendence over one’s origins, it seems, nor even a substitute for that home; no, he must head back; but it turns out Odysseus cannot even think of reaching his humble Ithaca (and the woman living upstairs there) unless he first travel to the undiscovered country where the dead end up—like the farm upstate where all the good dogs go at the end of their service—to consult Teiresias’ ghost. At no point heretofore was it in any way evident that such a journey would be necessary, just to get back home. One should have thought that favourable winds would have done the trick. Hence we might be justified in thinking that the revelation of this necessity is the practical takeaway from the wisdom gained from sleeping with the goddess. There is no journey home except via death and the dead. Apparently he must hear an oracle from among them, whose content nobody yet knows, and no spoilers.None of this is on our horizon when we begin the passage: Odysseus is on his way to the ship to persuade the remaining crew, at Circe’s encouragement, to store their stuff and come join the party at her house. These are men who have never ventured from the ship and shore since they arrived on the isle, together with Eurylochus, the man who had led the first expedition but never entered Circe’s door; he had hid himself outside instead, and saw nothing of men turning into pigs, only men disappearing within, to suffer who knows what. So we are dealing with two levels of possible initiate here, the most of them simply neophyte, while one of them is positively ignorant and prejudiced, and positively fearful. Odysseus finds them crying away, ‘pouring down a lusty tear.’ When he approaches them, we are treated to one of the great similes, applied to all the men without distinction:‘As when the farmyard calves—around the herd cows,Come back to the dung pile when they’ve had their fill of pasture—All jump around together as they face them: and no longer do the pensContain them, no, but with constant mooing and lowing they run around them,Their mothers: so did those men, when they saw me with their own eyes,Pile on me in tears: and it felt to them, in their life’s breath,That they were there! As if they’d reached their father’s earth and the city that belonged to themOf rugged Ithaca, where they were fed and they were born.’ (Od.10.410-17)‘ … no longer do the pens/Contain them …’ Amidst all the richness, this is the bit that sticks out, at least for me. The pens into which we place and segregate domestic animals seem to have emerged as a metaphor for any number of kinds of social constraint. Everything from being ‘pigeonholed’ in school, socially or academically, to the fateful constructs of class and caste, seem to be kinds of constructed pens. Even in democracies so radical that they recognise ‘personhood’ in a foetus, the subsequent children are nevertheless denuded of rights and separated into classes by age and aptitude. Many of us continue to mark our anniversaries by reunion, in memory of our time together in those pens. Every corporation, institution, or work force seems to segregate into the junior, senior, and executive, the officer and enlisted, and so on. The Cyclops pens off his lambs and kids by their state of development. Once Circe has fed Odysseus her spiked pottage, she says,“Off with you now, to the sty, lay out with the rest of your comrades.” (10.320)It is as though the penning them in the sty is as much a part of Circe’s control over humans as her turning them into pigs. They are put in their proper place. Later we shall meet a swineherd who pens himself in on purpose, builds his own pen for a steading. Perhaps we are also to think of the wall built around a city, as is described on our first sight of Phaeacia, as a kind of enclosure. So when in the simile the young calves burst out their pens, there is a rather wonderful sensation of freedom. It is at the same time a restoration of their natural rights, to be reunited with their mother cows, who have been separated from them to go to pasture for the sake of the production of milk and the fattening of meat. The repatriation restores the benefits of nature and nurture to its exploited and deprived children.‘Repatriation’ is an oddly fitting word for what is described. In Odysseus, his men at the shore see not only their mother, as the calves their dams, but their native land, its polity and its rocky pasture. For the moment, Odysseus is their home, and return home means restoration to Odysseus. They evidently believe that their comrades have been destroyed; after they repeat in their own voice the sentiment of the simile, that their joy at Odysseus’ return is such as if they had arrived in Ithaca, they ask him to recount the tale of their compatriots’ death. It must be noted, for all that it slips one’s attention, that Odysseus himself is the source both of the simile describing their welcome and the loving words of his men. How strange when one turns the narrative upon the teller: Odysseus is building himself up like a demagogue. I am your mother. I am your home. I am your nation.The self-idolising sits alongside the humbleness of the image he paints. For the nursing cows, home is a dung heap. My teacher and his partner used to keep a dairy herd; she would always complain about the Ladies’ habit of waiting till they got home to the milking stalls to have a shit. It meant a lot of mucking out for her, and it seemed to her that the cows timed their releases spitefully. They’d had all those hours in the fields to do their manuring! Every human habitation is never far from its dung pile, even if the stuff is nowadays piped ‘away’. To long for home is to long for the aroma of your native dung pile. How is this a thing to wish for, over abundance and a goddess’ attentions on a wooded isle?Rise and follow me, says Odysseus, although not so they would become fishers of men. (These would instead be the Laestrygonian giants, 10.124.) It always pays to note the changes when Homer’s speakers appear to repeat lines they were instructed to say. At first Odysseus repeats Circe’s imperatives about storing their tackle in caves by the shore. She herself just adds (to paraphrase) ‘then come back—and bring your friends.’ But Odysseus here himself adopts the imperative voice, as he stands forth as demagogue and saviour, who claims he can restore the lost boys to his men’s sight:“But yourselves—look sharp, all of you together, and follow me!So you may see your comrades in the sacred house of Circe,Drinking and eating: for they’ve got an unending supply.” (425-7)Odysseus says that he (and he alone?) can guide his initiates to the eternal feast under the goddess’ roof. He will drink the wine new with them in her house.But there is a gadfly buzzing to annoy the reverie. His name is Eurylochus. The men in Odysseus’ entourage only seem to earn a name when they serve the narrator’s ends. What a strange creature this is, then, from the perspective of the self-heroising narrator. Could Freud or Jung make sense of his role? Or is he a comic Satan? Odysseus drops an intriguing detail when he is deciding whether to execute the man summarily, for his apparent democratic resistance and speaking truth to power; here is another instance of ‘drawing the sword from by his thigh’ to do an unmanly thing:Whether I draw my tapered sword from by my thick thigh,Cut off his head with that, introduce it to the ground—Even if he was my in-law, pretty close kin— (439-41)The little aside—and revelation—that Odysseus’ enemy is actually his in-law, plays like a line from situation comedy, in the midst of a rumination on summary beheading. Eurylochus is Odysseus’ kin by marriage (πηός). Could that make him, in the stagecraft of Odysseus’ psyche, an avatar of Penelope herself? Or is he just the first ever comic deployment of the useless in-law? The former may be a possibility to consider when we assess the contra speech in re the proposition that they all trek to Circe’s house, the speech that immediately turns the people’s would-be saviour murderous.Here is what Eurylochus had said:“Ah my losers, where are we going? Why do you desire these evils?To make the descent to Circe’s room—she who’ll turn the lot of usInto pigs or wolves, or else she’ll make us lions,Who’d guard her big house for her, even by force?Just like the Cyclops did—when they arrived in his inner court,Our comrades, and with them followed that Mr. Bold, Odysseus;For that’s on him! Due his outrageous recklessness, they also were lost.” (431-7)Note ‘make the descent’ (καταβήμεναι): presently they are speaking on the seashore, s...
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