In her influential and inspiring volume, Wai Chee Dimock models thinking about literatureâliterary forms and literary linkagesâacross âdeep time.â 1 It is very much in that spirit that I meditate in this current essay on epic past, present, and future. In light of the 60,000-foot view I offer, we can dispense with a lengthy anatomy of the genre of âepicâ or even a watertight definition of the term. By âepicâ I simply mean works like the Iliad and Odyssey , the Aeneid , the Chanson de Roland and Nibelungenlied , the Mahabharata or Gilgamesh , the topic of Dimockâs chapter in this volume. To frame the questions I pose, I will err in the direction of inclusivity, and run roughshod over distinctions that have been made between âepic and romanceâ and âprimary and secondary epic,â to name but two. And while I look back to the standard and traditional epics, epic in the sense I mean, it need not be restricted to verse, indeed, not even to sung or written texts. Other media are possible. Finally, in the spirit of this volume, I am eager to think about works from traditions far from Europe, even in cases where proper scholars of those traditions might well insist on calling the genre of such works by another name. In a global perspective, one would of course want to recur to all these elided distinctions as well as look back at what weâve known as the rather standard âepic traditionâ and that Iâve invoked in order to rethink the tradition itself from external perspectives. While the present essay cannot hope to achieve such an ambitious goal, I want to move toward such a project, since the last thing we want to do is leave the apparent âcenterâ unquestioned in its seeming centrality.
Let me start with the older epics we know. Let me try to bring to mind the time of traditional telling and retelling of stories orally that predated the written texts of the Iliad and Odyssey , a pattern of tale-telling and oral transmission attested in many other cultures. Tales were no doubt told about this or that exploit, possibly about hunts for beasts now extinct 2 and perhaps even of the battles between Homines sapientes and the last of the Neanderthals. Indeed, given some geneticistsâ interpretation of the genomes of Homo sapiens and the Neanderthals, 3 who knows if there was not a Paris and Helen or Jason and Medea story from 50,000 years ago, albeit one with issue?
Lest the reader be alarmed, I will not attempt to reconstruct any such speculative tale. My point is that while we can guess that stories were told as soon as human linguistic capacity reached the threshold for story-telling, what was retold, and reshaped and refined over generations in the retelling, served not merely to record the past. In creating memory it gave it meaning to the retellers and their listeners. It was through the sum of memories that different peoples established the very meaning of the communities of which they were a part.
So far I have been galumphing about like a latter-day Herder or Wolf . 4 My purpose here is simply to set a beginning, a time when transmitted stories constituted the memory bank of a community and in turn gave it meaning as precisely that community and no other one.
Whatever the state of affairs when what we recognize as epic first arose, it is entirely proper for us to ask how epic has evolved, and how it has been received by later listeners, and at a certain point readers, in a multitude of very different settings. For the purpose of this survey I will highlight a few of those moments, as Greek epic was retold in the Roman world, as the Mediterranean met the Germanic, and the âold worldâ the so-called ânew.â I will adduce in passing some examples of the ways practitioners of the tradition reshaped it to fit these novel situations, ways we might regard as relatively conservative but which also reveal productive tensions. In this slide-show of sorts, I will at least pose a question about what is happening in this tradition today, when travel, migration, and instant communication constitute the way of our world.
âLet us begin with Zeus, whom we men never leave unspokenââso begins Aratus â Phaenomena . 5 And since the Zeus of epic is Homer , it is with Homerâs Iliad , or the Iliad ascribed to Homer, that we begin. The Iliad takes us, as it long ago took those who heard it in forms approximating the version we know as Homerâs, to the city of Troy, in what is now the northwest corner of Asian Turkey, or Asia Minor as it was once called. Greeks have been besieging the citadel now for nine years, all because the Trojan prince Paris, once a guest in Menelausâ home, ran off with Menelausâ wife Helen. But as this hosting itself suggests, this is not a struggle between nations that have no familiarity. Indeed, there are linkages of guest-friendship across the battle lines that have been drawn, and in some cases consanguinity. Perhaps the most famous example would be that of Glaucus and Diomedes, who are related through their grandfathers Bellerophon and Oeneus (Il. 6.119-236). Indeed, they are about to fight when, through a vaunt of Glaucus, Diomedes realizes they are related. Instead of fighting, they exchange arms (which has some humorous dimensions). Glaucus eventually dies at the hand of Ajax.
The Greek fighting force is itself composedâas we know from the famous catalogue of book 2âof contingents from many different places, from settlements on the Greek mainland as well as islands. Crete, Rhodes, and Ithaca are but three of the more well-known of these islands. Achillesâ troops, the Myrmidons, are regarded as somewhat stranger, but all are Danaans. Aiding the Trojans are troops from all over Asia Minor, from Lydia, Pelasgians from Larissa, Thracians, Paphlagonians, the Halizones âfrom Alybe far away,â Mysians, Phrygians âfrom Askania far away,â and Karians (as listed in 2.819-end). Thereâs also âthe proud Hippomolgoi, drinkers of milk,â and the Abioi, âmost righteous of all menâ (perhaps Scythians?) at the beginning of Book 13. Whatever difference in tongues we might posit must have existed in a reality that would correspond to such a story is not significant in the Iliad .
There are peoples even more far-flung, and of course there are Penthesilea and her fellow Amazons, but one does not really leave the pale until we hear of the Ethiopians, referenced in both the Iliad and the Odyssey . Zeus himself tarries 12 days among them, these blessed âmost distant of menâ (eskhatoi andrĂ´n), in the first book of the Iliad, and in the Odyssey reference is made to Poseidonâs attendance at one of their feasts. They are, tellingly, hosts of Olympians and other gods (e.g., Iris [Iliad]) rather than companions of mere mortals, and their placement at the ends of the earth makes them boundary figures in more than one sense. At the risk of citing an over-used phrase, one might say that they fall into the category of the âgood to think with.â
The Ethiopians were not at the muster at Troy, withâas appears now and again, though with a regularity that we must count it as a trope in itselfâa singular exception. In this case, it is Memnon. Memnon was known as the âking of the Ethiopiansâ and his liminality is marked already by his semi-divine parentage: he is the son of Eos, the dawn, and Tithonos. His uncle was Priam, so of course he came to Troyâs defense. He was slain by none other than Achilles himself. He shared another distinction with Achilles: his armor also was made by the god Hephaistos.
Not all of this is in Homer , of course, and I have crossed a line into another epic , now lost: the Aithiopis sometimes ascribed to Arktinos of Miletus and dated to the seventh, possibly the eighth century BCE. The Aithiopis belonged to the so-called epic âcycle,â of which the two epics we call Homeric are the only fully preserved examples. The Aithiopis was post-Homeric in more than one sense; in terms of the sequence of the âstory,â it took up where the Iliad ended, and covered incredibly important âterritory,â narratively speaking: from the arrival of the Amazons and their subsequent routing, then the arrival of Memnon and Achillesâ victory over him, to the death of Achilles himself and the argument between Ajax and Odysseus over the slain heroâs armor. How much further it went, we cannot for certain say, nor can one say whether the appearance of both the Amazons and Memnon marks an interest in exotica characteristic of a new stage of the Greekâs sense of placement in the world that we will see more of in Herodotus . For we must remember that the âexâ in both âexoticâ and âexotericâ refers to the âoutside.â
Before visual maps, the naming of peoples and their distribution in catalogues and through epithets was the only way to suggest to audiences what existed, and especially who resided, beyond their own territories. While the Iliad brings peoples to the citadel of Troy, the Odyssey , as one of the poems about the Greeksâ home-comings (nostoi), runs a different course, tracking the travels of Odysseus back to Ithaca. If the first narrative of travel, that of Odysseusâ son Telemakhos, sticks to familiar Greek territoryâTelemakhos leaves Ithaca to visit Sparta, where he is hosted by Menelaus reunited with HelenâOdysseus, once he has passed by Thrace, enters topography that would be exceptionally hard to map. Where does Kalypso live, where Circe? Where do the Lotos Eaters have their home, where Polyphemus and the other Kyklopes? (Hard to map, but as easy to describe in Homeric Greek as Ithaca itself.) All of these figure in Odysseusâ own narration to the Phaeacians. Indeed, where is Phaeacia to be sited? All these places, even more, all these peoples, seem to inhabit a moral geography more than a literally Mediterranean one. As such, these various peoples, whether imaginary or not, define what it is to be Greek, and, ultimately, what it is to be Odysseus, by virtue of being something else, just as Penelope appears prominently as in a negativeâin other words, she is not-Helen and not-Klytaemnestraâbefore we actually spend a great deal of time with her, narratively speaking, in the second half of the Odyssey. It seems worth noting that in that same portion of the poem, Odysseus tells other stories, each a subtle variant on the other and each crafted carefully to meet his needs in different situations. In each of them, he feigns to be a traveler from a very real place, Crete. He is, in other words, presenting a sort of not-Odysseus, although not quite in the same way. (Homer has Odysseus trade on an old calumny among the Greeks, namely, that all Cretans are liars. He is of course lying, for he is not Cretan; the more Cretan he.)
One could quite easily include in this unfolding sequence the Argonautica of the third-century poet Apollonius Rhodius . A highly wrought account of Jason âs trip with his Argonauts to Colchis, on the distant eastern littoral of the Black Sea, to recover the âgolden fleece,â the Argonautica offers depictions of many lands and many peoples exotic to the Greeks. It is on this trip that he meets the beautiful sorceress Medea , who commits heinous crimes to assist Jason in his theft and then flees with him. Even though the theft is represented as the recovery of lost Greek goods, Apolloniusâ...