Performing Homer: The Voyage of Ulysses from Epic to Opera

Wendy Heller, Eleonora Stoppino, Wendy Heller, Eleonora Stoppino

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317082415
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, attributed to Homer, are among the oldest surviving works of literature derived from oral performance. Deeply embedded in these works is the notion that they were intended to be heard: there is something musical about Homer's use of language and a vivid quality to his images that transcends the written page to create a theatrical experience for the listener. Indeed, it is precisely the theatrical quality of the poems that would inspire later interpreters to cast the Odyssey and the Iliad in a host of other media-novels, plays, poems, paintings, and even that most elaborate of all art forms, opera, exemplified by no less a work than Monteverdi's Il ritorno di Ulisse in patria. In Performing Homer: The Voyage of Ulysses from Epic to Opera, scholars in classics, drama, Italian literature, art history, and musicology explore the journey of Homer's Odyssey from ancient to modern times. The book traces the reception of the Odyssey though the Italian humanist sources—from Dante, Petrarch, and Ariosto—to the treatment of the tale not only by Monteverdi but also such composers as Elizabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, Gluck, and Alessandro Scarlatti, and the dramatic and poetic traditions thereafter by such modern writers as Derek Walcott and Margaret Atwood.

Part 1

Epic theatricalities

1 Soundings of the lyre

Performing Homer in archaic Greece

Deborah Steiner

Wagner was not the first to imagine his composition as a Gesamtkunstwerk, a work of art that drew into its compass multiple forms of representation. Homeric epic is no less multifaceted; not only does the performer accompany his recitation by playing on the lyre, assuming first the role of one character and then of another, but within his poem he evokes and even supplies selections from a full range of other types of compositions and modes of instrumentation: funerary laments, wedding songs, paeans, the pan-pipe tunes that shepherds play, harvest songs, and even full-fledged choral performances complete with youths and maidens dancing.

But even as the poet samples these heterogeneous modes, he gives us notoriously few clues concerning the issues that continue to perplex readers of his works: how does the singer, the figure whom epic styles the aoidos, perform his own poetry; what were the venues for which these compositions were designed; what was the social (and gender) makeup of the audience that heard the bard recite; and what was the nature of the music that accompanied his performance? Here, epic sharply distinguishes itself from other early forms of song, which include abundant internal references to the performing poet (sometimes even supplying his name), its context, and audience. Or, to put the problem differently, virtually nothing that the Homeric poems say about performances of song corresponds to the structure of the Iliad and Odyssey—monumental works that would require some twenty hours of listening time were each to be recited in its entirety—or to what we think their settings may have been. While we have long since abandoned attempts to discover who might have composed these works (indeed, for many, “Homer” is simply a name invented long after the poems came into existence and whose author was not so much any historical person as the tradition in which he worked), scholars continue to puzzle at the “performative” questions that the poems raise.

After a brief review of existing responses to the unknowns surrounding early productions of epic song (by the second half of the sixth century at least, among the venues for Homeric epic was the Athenian Panathenaia, where professional rhapsodes would deliver portions of each song, one after the other), I wish to resort to one of the only stratagems available for hazarding some answers: depictions of individuals performing epic-style songs within Homeric poetry itself. While these have been endlessly scrutinized, my reading of just one such scene aims to bring out fresh facets of the episode. Drawing on several other musical “interludes” within the poems to explicate the passage, I highlight aspects of particular relevance to this volume: issues of performance dynamics, sonorities, musical traditions and instrumentation, and the agonistic impetus framing the song each time it was recited.

If we take our initial cue from the Homeric commentators of antiquity, for these scholars, scholiasts, grammarians, and antiquarians, the answer to the problems posed above seemed self-evident: Homer includes a self-portrait in the Odyssey in the person of the bard Demodocus, who entertains the Phaeacians with his two epic lays at the palace of Alkinous on Scheria in book 8. Like Phemius, the second singer in the song, who similarly performs his hero-centric tales for the suitors back in “real world” Ithaca, Demodocus looks rather like a court poet, a quasi-permanent fixture who comes at the bequest of the elite when the feast requires music and song. A third, more shadowy figure, described as a “singer man” (ἀοιδὸς ἀνήρ) also appears in the orbit of a palace. This is the individual whom Agamemnon, prescient, left behind in Argos to watch over Clytemnestra (Od. 3.267–68). But the adulterous Aegisthus prevails, and the guardian finds himself dispatched to a desert island, where he becomes the “prey and spoil of birds.” For all the best attempts of ancient scholars to identify this character (one Hellenistic author thinks he is Demodocus, whom Clytemnestra so respected that she ordered him banished, not killed),¹ he remains an enduring enigma.

But already apparent in Demodocus’s name (“received by the people”) is a gesture toward his more “demotic” role and to the second model we encounter in both the Iliad and Odyssey: that of the traveling musician-singer who goes from place to place, performing in return for food, shelter, and whatever additional remuneration he can garner. In Eumaeus’s list of the so-called dêmioergoi (“public workers”), the swineherd includes bards alongside seers, doctors, and carpenters (Od. 17.382–85), individuals characterized by an itinerant existence in which they hire themselves out for pay. The Thracian Thamyris, glimpsed in Il. 2.594–600 while en route from the home of Eurytus in Oechalia, is true to this second type, and the later Lives of Homer paint their protagonist as similarly peripatetic, rewarding those who pay him enough, and bringing calamity on those who deny him proper reception by slandering them in his verse. In the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, a hexameter composition conventionally dated to the sixth century, we get a tantalizing glimpse of “Homer” himself. In the mutually advantageous pact that the bard makes with a local maiden chorus on Delos, they will celebrate “the blind man who lives in rocky Chios” as the best singer; he, in return, will diffuse their praise “wherever I go as I roam the well-ordered cities of men” (174–75).

How, then, do we explain these co-existing representations and performance contexts? Recent scholars have proposed a variety of responses.² The notion of the “court poet” has, for good reasons, fallen out of favor, viewed now as an idealized representation internal to the songs and wistful bid for status on the poet’s part, or as an indicator of the other-worldly character of life on Scheria. The scenes featuring Demodocus and Phemius might also be kernels preserved from much earlier strata of hexameter poetry, reminiscences of Mycenaean times when performers would have been accommodated within the palace culture of the day. The simultaneous presence of the two models may also register an ongoing shift in the status of the poet, his transformation from an authoritative “maître de vérité” who transmits the truths he receives from the gods to a mere hired craftsman, plying his trade in a crowded and competitive market place.³ In this new performance economy, the setting for the songs’ delivery has also changed: in place of the palace milieu earlier assumed, the most widely accepted current view is that the sites for Homeric performances would most likely be funeral games (see Hes. Op. 653–56), grand marriage celebrations, and local and inter-community religious festivals held at sanctuaries.⁴

Occasions like these satisfy many of the necessary criteria for performances of the Iliad and Odyssey. First, the fact that these occasions drew diverse audiences at least partially explains the nuanced ideological orientation of Homeric poetry. The Iliad’s all but exclusive focus on kings and aristocrats and its largely dismissive depiction of the lower classes seem designed to play to an elite audience.⁵ But Agamemnon’s deficiencies as leader, his ill-founded arrogance and greed, would supply a cautionary example to contemporary basileis (local chieftains) and find a sympathetic hearing in the small-holder and peasant who might have suffered from a local “gift-gobbing” king (Hes. Op. 39). Even as the Odyssey casts its social net more widely, and includes in its narrative the rural population, the pastoralist and the countryside dweller who works his farm and tends his trees, its conclusion firmly restores the hierarchy and relations of dependency that the renegade suitors—traitors to their class—have upended. The scale of the Iliad and Odyssey offers a second strong argument for gatherings extending over several days. Performances of “extracts” of the poems (Demodocus’s first and third songs in Od. 8 provide a model for these) could take place at more informal occasions, in the homes of local aristocrats, but it is hard to imagine that a composer would create works as complex and tightly structured as the two Homeric poems unless they could be delivered in their entirety, over a series of successive days. Only a period of sanctioned leisure, such as religious festivals afford, would guarantee a public with the necessary time to spare. Moreover, both internal and external evidence suggests that Homeric epic views itself as performed “to the people (laos),” as it would be in sixth-century Athens, when the citizens of the polis would gather for the poems’ recitation at the Panathenaia.⁶

One recent and persuasive voice has been raised against this prevailing orthodoxy. As Oswyn Murray argues, each of the two poems may require a different approach.⁷ Wh...