From Homer to Tragedy

The Art of Allusion in Greek Poetry

Richard Garner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781138974739
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317694717
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: Literature

The role of poetic allusion in classical Greek poetry, to Homer especially, has often largely been neglected or even almost totally ignored. This book, first published in 1990, clarifies the place of Homer in Greek education, as well as adding to the interpretation of many important tragedies.

Focussing on the dramatic masterpieces of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and how these writers imitated and alluded to other poetry, the author reveals the immense dependence on Homer which can be seen throughout the corpus of Attic tragedy. It is argued that the practice of the art of allusion indicates certain conventions in fifth-century Athenian education, and perhaps also suggests something in the way of public, political, and historical self-awareness. Invaluable to anyone interested in the reception of Homer in the classical age, and to students of comparative literature and linguistic theory.

1

Introduction: The Lyric Background

Poetic allusions – this is part of their power both to charm and to frustrate – cannot be proved or disproved. At first this elusiveness seems disastrous to the critic. Upon reflection, however, the problem seems less threatening: little that readers value in poetry responds reliably to the arid analysis of axiom and corollary, or even to the more pragmatic pins and tools of dissection that serve so well to examine the earthworm or affix the butterfly to the board once it can no longer fly. Metaphor, for example, illuminates its object with a light in which, but for the poet’s rearrangement of our world, we would not have thought to place the familiar object. And once the new perception occurs, who will say how far the poet intended it to extend, where the boundaries are that should limit the insight the unexpected comparison provides?

Yet even metaphor has an anatomy; confronted with a new juxtaposition of this and that, one need not be simply reduced to ineffable aesthetic delight. In fact, the basic workings of metaphor can be explained fairly simply and with fair precision. And this is particularly fortunate, for they are very like the elements which operate in poetic allusion. Thus this introduction will make its initial explanation of poetic allusion in terms of the mechanics of metaphor – mechanics perhaps more familiar to the reader.

Though the ultimate subject of this book is Greek tragedy, this introduction takes its examples from Greek lyric. Such a course has several advantages. Lyric allusions tend to be simpler than tragic ones. Moreover, having been treated more thoroughly by other scholars in recent years, they provide immediate access to a range of recent opinion and method. Finally – and this ultimately makes it almost necessary to begin from lyric – during the classical age young Athenians were taught lyric poetry as part of their education, adults entertained themselves with it at dinner parties, and the tragedians, whose works are the basis for this book, had lyric poetry as part of their traditional and professional heritage. Playwrights may have learned the art of allusion from their predecessors working in smaller forms. May, perhaps, possibly …

What of certainty? To say that poetic allusions cannot be proved or disproved is to claim at once too much and too little. The reference to earlier poetry is beyond doubt in the following verses of an elegiac poet (it may have been Simonides):

The man from Chios said one thing that is best:

Such as are the leaves’ generations, so also are men’s.

The elegist quotes, using in his next lines a single line that we recognize as a line from the Iliad (6.146). And even if the poet did not have our Iliad, he has selected the line as something unique from some body of verse and incorporated it into his own. The example is extreme – so much so, in fact, that it risks not being an example of allusion at all: it is plain and direct, not so much allusion as metrical citation.

Of course, whereas the memorable is often in some way unique, the unique is often not memorable at all. Many Homeric lines, for example, contain the sole Homeric occurrence of a given word. Yet a later poet could not expect words such as πλήν (Od. 8.207) or δίς (Od. 9.491), words which had become (or may well always have been) entirely common and part of everyday speech, to stimulate reflection in his audience. The frequency of non-allusive use has robbed words such as these of any power to suggest their original poetic context, unique though it may have been. This, then, is the other extreme, and although the occurrence of words such as πλήν and δίς has been called allusion by some, in this study, it will not.¹

Between these two extremes – on the one hand, citation explicitly noted by the second poet and, on the other, words or phrases too common to arrest the attention of his audience – lie literary allusions. This in-between nature is part of their fundamental resemblance to metaphor. If they are to work, allusions must be sufficiently close to what they refer to, just as the metaphor must suggest some comprehensible resemblance in order to be effective. It will do the poet little good to write of the deep night of steamed asparagus if it is impossible to see why or how asparagus may be said to partake of evening. But the opposite is equally unsatisfactory: the reader’s pleasure derives from juxtaposition across a distance worth leaping. To say that the wild strawberries were cherries in the grass is a metaphor of sorts; it may mean that the strawberries were as red as cherries – or perhaps as shiny? As edible? Attractive to birds? The problem is that one red fruit is so much like the other that in seeing the strawberry as cherry too little is gained.

All these aspects deserve more detailed explanation. And that had better be done with examples from Greek poetry. The following discussion makes use of terms and models developed by a great many scholars working on metaphor and allusion. My hope is that the multiplicity may be beneficial in two ways: first, readers may find those terms and explanations most agreeable and comprehensible to themselves; second, bringing the various approaches and terms together may help to clarify a similarity of process which all of them envision.

GENERATIONS OF LEAVES: MIMNERMUS

In the first Greek example above, the poet quoted a line from the Iliad on men and the generations of leaves. Mimnermus fr. 2, another elegiac poem, has always been recognized as depending on the same Homeric lines:

(vv. 1–8)

We – like leaves the many-flowered season brings forth

in spring, when suddenly they grow in rays of sun –

for a small measure of time, in the flowers of our youth

take delight, knowing from the gods neither ill

nor good. But standing by us are black Fates,

one with the end that is painful old age

the other – death. Brief is youth’s

ripeness, sunlight scattered across the ground.

Mimnermus’ poem continues for eight more lines, cataloguing various horrors of old age, but this first half will be our main concern. Several times in the Homeric poems men are compared to leaves, but Mimnermus’ opening lines have been modeled closely on the passage from which the elegiac poet cited above had quoted:²

(Iliad 6.146–9)

Such as are the leaves’ generations, so are men’s.

Some leaves the wind casts down, others the forest

Brings forth in flourish, and the time of spring appears.

In the fifth line, however, Mimnermus’ poem takes up a new Homeric parallel. Two fates stand by – one, old age; the other, death. The words echo Achilles’ great speech in reply to the embassy in Iliad 9. He too has two fates, διχθαδίας ϰῆρας, with the end of death, θανάτοιο τέλος (Il. 9.411). But, having carefully designed his phrases to recall this key passage of the Iliad, Mimnermus has also made a significant change. For Achilles, each fate has some attraction: early death will bring noble fame, ϰλέος ἐσθλόν; the alternative is a long, albeit undistinguished, life amid the comforts of home, ἐπὶ δηρòν δέ μοι αὶὼν (Il. 9.415). Mimnermus, by contrast, acknowledges nothing pleasant about either fate.

If, in fact, Mimnermus has made two allusions to the Iliad, how do they work? Like metaphor, we have said; so that must be explained.³ (In the discussion which follows Mimnermus will, at times, drop from sight, but only so long as is necessary to provide new ways of analyzing his poem.) A metaphor breaks the flow of a statement with something which cannot be understood literally; it forces the audience to go outside the message to interpret it. If I write, “the wild strawberries were in the grass” or “the strawberries were ripe,” the reader can accept the facts and proceed. But “the wild strawberries were cherries in the grass” or “the strawberries were rubies against an emerald field” cannot be accepted at face value. Comprehension requires a decision as to why strawberries are like cherries or rubies. The literal object under consideration is frequently called the “tenor,” the thing to which the metaphor suggests some comparison, the “vehicle.” What the tenor and vehicle share in common has been called the “ground” or, with more precise limits, the “neutral term(s).”⁴ In our example strawberries are the tenor, cherries or rubies the vehicle. The ground – and this will be very important throughout – is notoriously hard to specify completely and precisely. Here it at least includes being small, shiny, and red.

Tenor, vehicle, and ground describe static elements of the metaphor. But there are dynamic elements as well, for metaphor forces active interpretation. The failure of the message on a literal level, the puzzle which a metaphor presents to be solved, is often called the gap or a tension. The interpretation or solution, which explains how the image of the vehicle can be applied to the tenor, bridges that gap or releases the tension. The element which alerts the audience to the problem, whether it is simply a single seemingly inappropriate word or a more complicated product of words oddly combined, has been called an ungrammatically, an impropriety, or a deviation from the norm. An ungrammaticality interrupts the narrative flow; sometimes, it is literally incorrect – cherries are not rubies; fruits are not gems. Such an intrusion invites interpretive thought; through reference to the vehicle, a new and more complex understanding is reached. The tenor has been enriched in the mind of the interpreter so that the ungrammaticality no longer seems ungrammatical, the impropriety no longer improper.⁵

The models for the elements and workings of metaphor apply equally well to allusion. The primary text will be the tenor; the text it alludes to, the vehicle; whatever the two texts share in common is the ground. Some ungrammaticality signals to the audience that an allusion is being made, thus creating a gap. Comparison of the two texts leads to an interpretation bringing tenor and vehicle into some relationship, just as in the solution of a metaphor.⁶ There are many complexities in this process; more details will be added in due course.

We are now in a position to talk about Mimnermus 2 more precisely. The means, or ungrammaticalities, by which the reader is referred to Mimnermus’ vehicle, the Iliad, are various. The second allusion, to the two fates of Achilles, is easier to analyze. The description of the two fates at first sounds familiar, but the blunt second alternative, death without any positive compensation, throws the expected contrast out of balance. Once attention is arrested, the similarity of the Mimnermus passage to Achilles’ words in the Iliad, that is, the ground, directs the reader to associate the tenor with its vehicle. Moreover, an added pointer sending the reader to the Iliad for a reference which will bridge the gap is the first allusion itself, for that has already raised expectation for the theme of mortality as treated in the Iliad. Such pointers could be broadly considered ungrammaticalities; it may be more useful to have another term for instances in which something more general in the context (such as the previous allusion here) helps to precipitate or trigger the recognition of allusion: since the term “trigger” has already been similarly used in studying allusion in Greek poetry, it will be retained here.⁷

But what has been the ungrammaticality to signal the first allusion, the reference to the generations of leaves? Partly, the mere familiarity of the lines. We began with a direct quotation of Iliad 6.146 in an elegy which proclaimed the line the best, and a glance at either the beginning or end of this book, to the dedication or Appendices E and F, will confirm the popularity of the passage.⁸ The near quotation of this passage, then, is a sort of ungrammaticality to alert the reader. It is somewhat like using quotation marks to label a borrowed phrase in the middle of one’s sentence. The words are set apart as different from merely our own – they refer to language borrowed or used in some marked way. Moreover, Mimnermus’ allusion is more likely to be identified because the conventions of Greek poetry lead the audience to have higher expectation of an allusion in the opening lines of a poem or a strophe than at other points in the verse. Thus, habit dictates that in first lines the audience will be particularly alert for anything out of the way which might suggest allusion. (Here I merely assert a convention which is demonstrated in some detail throughout the book. The passages I rely on as proof are collected in Appendix A.)

The real work – for the above has merely indicated how the allusions in Mimnermus are initially signaled, how the tension is set up – is to see how an allusion may be integrated interpretively. With metaphor, as with simile, it is up to the interpreter to decide how far the comparison goes, and much will depend on the context in which the metaphor or simile occurs.⁹ Here is the difficulty of establishing the ground. What makes a comparison effective may depend not only on suggestive similarities, but also, sometimes, on pointed differences – even on the two together. In the Iliad, missiles hurled thick and fast in battle are compared to snowflakes. Some interpreters will limit their understanding to the shared speed and quantity of objects falling throug...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: The Lyric Background
• 2 Slices from the Banquet: The Tragedies of Aeschylus
• 3 Sophocles and Euripides: The Early Plays
• 4 Sophocles and Euripides: The Middle Plays
• 5 Sophocles and Euripides: The Last Plays
• 6 Generations of Leaves
• Appendices
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index