Odyssey 11.260-80

In Greek:

Odysseus (as Homer) has just told us the story of Tyro, whose ghost has come to meet him in Hades. The climax comes when he steps forward and speaks as Poseidon, in the moment after the god has himself climaxed with a sleeping Tyro, whose own speech climaxes thus for the performer on stage: “It’s me, I tell you: I, Poseidon the Ground-Shaker.” There are more sex acts to come in Odysseus’ revue, but none, shall we say, so verbally realised. In tonal Greek, with the accentually emphatic syllables in bold (note that these are often the long syllables which follow the acute sign):

αὐτὰρ ἐγώ τοί εἰμι Ποσειδάων ἐνοσίχθων. (Od.11.252)

A rising pair of successive long oxytones cascades down on εἰμι, ‘I am’. How does one top that, or even follow it?

I have been approaching the text of the Odyssey as a script for a solo performer, not without reward. Although the diction and rhythm of Homeric poetry are highly stylised, within those textures Homer appears to contrive extraordinary opportunities for a solo performer to immerse himself in emotive and vivid characterisation, most obviously in the speeches like that of Poseidon. But between narratives and similes, proems and invocations, the Homeric score presents a veritable buffet of styles and registers for an hexameter singer to engage. That the manuscripts preserve a script or a score, rather than (for example) the record of an improvisation of some kind, is demonstrated by certain seemingly scored elements in the poetry’s pitch patterns. Most famous is Odysseus’ use of the joke name Οὖτις to fool the Cyclops; the joke can only work if the accentual system adopted by Hellenistic scholars in their text of Homer is true to the poet’s original composition, whether or not that original itself involved a written score. The joke depends on there being an audible difference in tonality, and yet a similarity when communicating through a massive boulder sealing a cave, between οὖτις and οὔ τις, μή τις and μῆτις.

To be clear, the usual linguistic analysis has it that there is no difference between the members of these pairs in their phonemes or their syllables, nor indeed in the location of the accented syllable—that is, the particular syllable which is dynamically reinforced or stressed by the voice. It is the first syllable in each case. The only difference between οὖ and οὔ or μῆ and μή is whether the voice sharply rises in pitch and then emphatically falls (circumflex, ῀ ) over the course of the long vowel sound, or else rises only at the end of that long vowel (acute ´ ), to fall on the subsequent unmarked syllable. (Such a following syllable carrying heavy falling pitch becomes the emphatic one when it happens to be long, but in each of these cases the τις element is short, and the rising acute syllable is itself the emphatic one.) Since in English we do not distinguish between pitch patterns when we stress a syllable, but rise or fall or both willy-nilly, while we (typically) increase the volume and the length of the syllable, we cannot reproduce the actual joke in English. We have to reduce it to a spelling joke: that is, same sound but different spelling (in my rendering, ‘Nowan’ = ‘no-one’). But in a pre-Alexandrian text of Homer, written without accentual information and the separation of words, the spellings would have been identical: ΟΥΤΙΣ and ΜΗΤΙΣ. The only differences in the sounds represented by these letters arise from their tonal prosody. Hence the joke would only have emerged when the text was performed by someone who knew where and how to sing the Greek accents. Anyone else reading a written text of Homer before Aristophanes of Byzantium introduced the extant system of accent marks, would have been as confused by Odysseus’ trick on Polyphemus as a foreigner reading the ‘potato-potato, tomato-tomato’ song. ‘Let’s call the whole thing off.’

That is why it seems Christopher Nolan has had to cut this epically Odyssean and Homeric bit of wit in his film called The Odyssey. What a loss, but it is essentially a musical joke native to ancient Greek which cannot be reproduced. Indeed I shall expect Nolan, in a most general way across his traversal, not to have not been in on the joke—an observation made all the same without prejudice—when I go to see a matinée of his latest hero’s tale.

I have further demonstrated that Odysseus and Penelope each have distinctive accentual motifs in Homer’s Greek, respectively three straight long oxytones and three successive circumflexes, each of which makes itself felt as an intrusion, whenever it recurs, into the usual strong-weak (LONG-short-short) alternation of dactylic rhythm. In an audience that needs to distinguish readily and purely between a long rising oxytone (οὔ, μή) and a rising and falling circumflex (οὖ, μῆ) to register the music of Homer’s poetry—as we have shown above—a succession of three straight of either must have caused both a melodic and a rhythmic jolt inside an hexameter line. Such moments in the speech patterns of Penelope or Odysseus seem most naturally taken as intentional melodic gestures in a musical medium; they are, in effect, signature lines, functioning like leitmotifs in opera. Greek poetry, after all, and more besides, was referred to by its poets as μουσική or ‘music’. It was composed not only of ῥυθμός ‘rhythm’ but ἁρμονία ‘harmony’, whose elements were described in the very same way as the two adjacent elements of the Greek pitch accent: as ὀξύς (‘sharp’ ‘acute’ ‘rising’) and βαρύς (‘heavy’ ‘grave’ ‘falling’). It is not therefore metaphorical to call Homer’s poetry music; it was in fact analogous more to recitative than it was to Paradise Lost.

Since these leitmotifs of identical harmonic sequences do not always inhere in the same words, it is impossible to locate them within a theory of oral improvisation by means of purely metrical verbal formulas. The so-called metrical formulas of Homeric, or traditional, or even a purported Indo-European epic, ignore all the language’s pitch accents. Hence the prevailing modern dogma proposes a theory of Mozart which ignores all his notes! It is claimed, sometimes explicitly, that ancient Greek poetry does not inform its metres with the dynamic accents of its words to produce its poetic rhythms. It would be the only known language, the only known poetry, the only known music so to do. We must expose this entrenched absurdity. In the light of unambiguous evidence, the text of Homer, as we have it from the Alexandrian transmission, cannot therefore be approached any longer as an end product of a tradition of improvised composition via fixed verbal formulas, with no regard in the composing for words’ and phrases’ intrinsic pitch accents. It must instead learn at last to be registered as a score for histrionic, mimetic performance, which intentionally celebrates and exploits the infixed tonal nature of Greek expression to realise the individual character of both speaker and speech, even within a highly stylised medium. At moments of intense emotion, Odysseus and Penelope break out of the grooves of hexameter rhythm when they speak, and they each do this in highly distinctive, dynamically melodic ways.

Odysseus’ Catalogue of Women is admittedly a puzzle from the histrionic point of view. After such a rousing speech and interlude as that of Poseidon waking Tyro after sex in a river bed, how does one slip successfully into the faceless chant of the catalogue form? I have been wont to understand the catalogue form as the original for Homer’s and Hesiod’s poetry, the spring from which it sprung. Here again is the performance from the beginning of the Iliad’s Catalogue of Ships—just one ship’s worth—which I helped reconstruct about a quarter-century ago while tutoring at St. John’s College. The idea is that catalogues were lists, such as genealogies, or the sequence of events in plain prose which has come down to us as the ‘epic cycle’, which could have been rendered into dactylic hexameters so as to accompany an ancient round dance. A dactylic syrtós is extant in Greece today.

The round dance had the conjuring power of circle dance: it was a participatory experience in which the community of dancers felt their ancestors joining them, summoned within the circle by their full melodic names, which scholars call ‘noun-and-epithet phrases’. Odysseus’ invocation of Heracles, as son of Alcmene whose ghost he meets (266-8), takes almost a whole line: Ἡρακλῆϝα θρασυμέμνονα θυμολέοντα (‘Heracles, Bold-Spirit, Lion Breath’). The epithets are not predicates, not assertions about the man, but an extended overflowing of his name. The singer intoned such an extended name, savouring every syllable, to the rhythm of the dancers’ feet and the motion, rightward with regular retrogressions, of their bodies:

The experience for the dancer is not one of listening to poetry, nor is it for the singer one of selling them on his verses. This is not mimetic representation but ritual evocation and participation in the living presence of the past, like Odysseus present amongst Persephone’s parade of ghosts.

The path from cataloguing to storytelling is, however, spontaneous and straightforward, as straightforward as a relative pronoun. In a catalogue of women an entry will include her single name and, instead of a patronymic, the ascription of a filial or maternal or spousal relation to some man. One need only, optionally, elaborate with a relative clause, ‘she who …’ (ἡ …), usually at the beginning of the next line, and you’re off on a digression which can last as many lines as you please. In the case of Tyro, there are three such: ‘She who stated (ἣ φάτο …) that she was the offspring of blameless Salmoneus’; ‘She it was (ἣ ποταμοῦ ἠ...