A Short History of Greek Literature

Suzanne Said, Monique Trede

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134806577
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Historia
• Categoría: Historia antigua

A Short History of Greek Literature provides a concise yet comprehensive survey of Greek literature - from Christian authors - over twelve centuries, from Homer's epics to the rich range of authors surviving from the imperial period up to Justinian. The book is divided into three parts. The first part is devoted to the extraordinary creativity of the archaic and classical age, when the major literary genres - epic, lyric, tragedy, comedy, history, oratory and philosophy - were invented and flourished. The second part covers the Hellenistic period, and the third covers the High Empire and Late Antiquity. At that tine the masters of the previous age were elevated to the rank of 'classics'. The works of the imperial period are replete with literary allusions, yet full of references to contemporary reality.

Part 1 HOMER AND THE ARCHAIC PERIOD (EIGHTH TO FIFTH CENTURIES BC): The Primacy of Ionia

1 HOMER AND THE EPIC AGE (EIGHTH AND SEVENTH CENTURIES B C)

Homeric poetry

Homer

The Greeks attributed the origins of poetry to two mythical poets endowed with magical powers, Musaeus and Orpheus; for us however, Greek literature, and with it Western literature as a whole, begins with the Iliad and the Odyssey. The name of Homer, under which these poems have come down to us, has symbolised poetry for more than twenty-five centuries. All of Antiquity, from Xenophanes (sixth century BC) to Lucian (second century AD) believed that Homer was a real person who recounted real events: the great deeds of the Trojan War, traditionally dated at around 1200 BC.

Yet we know nothing of Homer himself. In the second century AD Lucian of Samosata included an interview with the poet in his True Stories. He asks Homer the questions which modern scholars are still asking today. Where was he born: in Chios, Smyrna, Cyme or Colophon? What does the name ‘Homer’ mean? Is it an allusion to the poet’s blindness (as has been suggested by those who see in it the etymology ho mè horon: ‘who does not see’)? The many works entitled Life of Homer written in Antiquity leave these questions unanswered. Thus both the Iliad and the Odyssey share with a number of other major works of world literature the privilege of having an author about whom almost nothing is known.

Indeed, doubt has even been cast on his existence. In the eighteenth century the so-called ‘Homeric question’ was posed by Abbé Aubignac in his Academic Conjectuers of 1715, by Robert Wood in England, by Vico in Italy and, even more clearly at the end of the century, by F.A.Wolf in Germany in his Prolegomena ad Homerum of 1795. According to these writers, the Iliad and the Odyssey date from a time when writing was unknown and the artistic unity that we admire so much in these poems is that of a later editor. Throughout the nineteenth century scholars were split into ‘Unitarians’ and ‘Analysts’ holding opposing views on the artistic integrity of the poems and the unicity of their author. The ‘Analysts’, aware of the existence of doublets and contradictions within the epic narrative, sought to separate the primitive poem, thought to be the work of Homer, from later additions (or interpolations) and to reconstruct a history of the text giving rise to the standard form we know today. By contrast, the ‘Unitarians’ stressed the integrity of composition that can be sensed throughout the poems and explained most of the doublets and narrative detours in terms of deliberate artistry. For them, Homer was the poetic genius who produced the harmonious ensembles that have been handed down to us, by combining elements of different origins and ages. The question of Homer’s identity thus merged with that of the genesis of the Homeric poems.

Given our lack of certain knowledge about the poet, it is necessary to follow the precept attributed to Aristarchus and to use Homer to illuminate Homer.

The Odyssey presents two bards, Phemius in Ithaca and Demodocus among the Phaecians. Accompanying themselves on the lyre, they recite and improvise epic poems for the pleasure of aristocrats gathered at a banquet. They seem to have a repertoire from which they pick elements at will, selecting a theme and changing it if they are asked to do so, which suggests that both singer and audience had an idea of the whole repertoire and that, at the time of the Iliad and the Odyssey, there was an already codified epic tradition, symbolised by the Muse whom the poet merely echoed. Homer’s poems are rooted in this poetic tradition, which was oral in nature. This alone enables us to explain the particularities of the Homeric style.

Oral poetry

Proof that the style of Iliad and Odyssey reflects their oral nature has been provided by Milman Parry. In his thesis on the traditional epithet in Homer¹ Parry examines verbal formulas consisting of name plus epithet designating gods or heroes, showing that in any given case, at a given point in the line, and under the same metrical conditions, only one name plus epithet formula can be used to designate a particular hero (or god). The exceptions to this principle of economy are very rare. Out of forty name-plus-epithet formulas in the second hemistich of the epic hexameter designating a god or hero in the subject case, only six are not unique. Thus with the same rhythmic schema

we find ‘Hera the cow-eyed goddess’ or ‘Hera the white-armed goddess’. In the same way two formulas refer to Aphrodite or Apollo; but such doublets are the exception. If one hero answers another or goes into battle, the same phrase half a line long is always used and the line is completed by a series of metrically equivalent subjects. A first hemistich ‘Then replied to him/…’ may be followed as necessary by ‘the blue-green goddess Athene’ or ‘divine Odysseus the enduring’, etc. Each of these subjects may itself be linked to various verbal expressions of the same metric value: ‘seeing her rejoices/ divine Odysseus the enduring.’

This explains the repetition of phrases such as ‘rosy-fingered Dawn’ or ‘swift-footed Achilles’, which are regularly employed, in the same metrical circumstances to refer to important characters. These phrases form a system of great simplicity and flexibility, suited to many different contexts: a hemistich can easily be completed with a phrase chosen for its metrical convenience rather than for its meaning.

This notion of formulaic unit which was defined in relation to diction, could then be extended to scenes² and themes. Such a system which has no equivalent in the epics of Virgil or Apollonius of Rhodes is typical of Homer’s poems. It is linked to the oral nature of heroic poetry: the traditional formulas provided the bards with aids to memory and improvisation.

Parry’s theses were confirmed by a modern, real-life instance. In Yugoslavia he and his student Albert Lord listened to an illiterate Serbian bard reciting a long poem, made up on the spot with a respect for versification. It was observed that this type of poetry implies the existence not only of a mythical heritage built up by preceding generations and orally transmitted, but also rhythmical patterns and formulas.

These discoveries put an end to the argument of the Analysts and Unitarians without settling it in favour of either. For while the Analysts; attempt to isolate an original text by Homer from the later additions was now impossible, it was equally pointless to try to emphasise the author’s originality. The oral tradition must have developed over at least three centuries (from 1100 to 800 BC) and it is impossible to reconstruct the history of the transformations which the epic underwent within that tradition. However, the subtlety of the poetic art of the Iliad and the Odyssey makes it equally impossible to suggest that these two epics are exclusively oral in character. For, although Homer may reflect a tradition, he also plays with it, deviates from it and does not hesitate to make innovations.

The existence of traditional elements cannot be denied; these are the typical scenes (combatants arming themselves, feasting, making sacrifices, fighting in single combat or swearing of oaths) and formulas from which the poet selects what he wants. However, one need only consider several arming scenes from the Iliad to gauge the freedom with which the poet plays with the formulas. The basic schema of the arming scene is given in Book III with the description of Paris’ gear: his greaves, breastplate, sword, shield, helmet and lance are all soberly mentioned (III, 330–8); Agamemnon’s weaponry is described with far more ceremony and pomp in Book XI. Images abound and the accent is on the magnificence of his breastplate and shield and their sumptuous decoration (XI, 17–46). The arming of Patroclus (XVI, 130–44) and Achilles (XIX, 364–91) similarly echo each other significantly.

Formulas too are subject to variation, since the same rhythmical pattern can be preserved when one or two words, or even a whole hemistich, are changed. Thus on eight occasions in the Iltad in the second half of the line after the formula ‘illustrious son of Atreus’, we find the words ‘Agamemnon, protector of his people’; but when Achilles pours invective on the king in Book I he cries: ‘Illustrious son of Atreus, you the most grasping of all’, thereby introducing a significant variation into the line. He returns to the usual phrase in Book XIX (cf. Line 146 or 199), when Agamemnon honourably makes amends.

The intentional refinement which can be discerned in these repetitions and variations and the lucidity and coherence of these two long poems— the Iliad contains 15,000 hexameters and Odyssey 12,000—leads today’s critics to believe that Homer’s poems were contemporary with the appearance of the alphabet and belong to a period of transition between a technique of oral composition and a truly literary technique using writing. Far from being a beginning, Homer can thus be seen as an end.

We can now attempt to identify the main stages in the transmission of Homer’s poetry. Following a long period of oral transmission the text was written down in Athens—if we are to believe the Alexandrian scholars—in the sixth century BC on the initiative of Pisistratus, in order to be recited at the Panathenaeic festival. It may be that the Homeridae of Chios—a clan of rhapsodes who claimed descent from Homer and are mentioned by Plato in the Phaedrus (252B)—acted as the guardians of the original text, but we do not know this. The first scholars to seriously edit the poems were the grammarians of the Alexandria library.

The first head of the Alexandrian Museum, Zenodotus (early third century BC) was Homer’s first editor. Aristophanes of Byzantium improved the punctuation of the text and Aristarchus, who died in Alexandria in 144 BC, wrote commentaries on the Iliad and the Odyssey in which he sought to distinguish Homer’s usage from Attic or Hellenic usage, thereby providing a starting point for the analysts’ researches into the stratification of the text. Lastly, it is also to the Alexandrians that we owe the division of the text into twenty-four Books.

Since that time Homer’s poems have been continually edited, commented on and imitated. Let us now consider the magical charm of the Homeric world.

Homer’s world

The coexistence of forms belonging to different periods and dialects— notably Ionian and Aeolian—was quickly noticed. Homer’s language is a composite which was never actually spoken anywhere; it is purely literary. The same thing is true of the world he depicts, which is made up of elements from different historical periods. This idea, however, was less readily accepted.

The Ancients were convinced that the Trojan War had really taken place and that Homer was describing a precise historical period. In the nineteenth century the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, who also held this view, went to look for the sites mentioned in the epic. He discovered Troy on the Hissarlik hill in Asia Minor (now Turkey) and uncovered the ruins of Mycenae. After this discovery some of the objects which Homer describes were found: Ajax’s great shield, made of seven bull skins covered with a layer of bronze (VII, 219–23), the boar’s tusk helmet that Odysseus wears in Book X (261–5) and Nestor’s cup ‘decorated with golden nails’ (XI, 633–5). Soon people were convinced that Homer’s world was that of the Mycenaean kings and palaces; but this belief faded when the Mycenaean world became better known. In 1953 Ventris and Chadwick managed to decipher the tablets that had been discovered in the palaces of Knossos in Crete, and Pylos and Mycenae in continental Greece. The language of these tablets, which were written in syllabic script, was a form of Ancient Greek (known as Linear B). Mycenaean civilisation would now give us its secrets! However, the deciphering of these documents—accounts and lists— revealed a bureaucratic administration centred on the palace which was reminiscent of the contemporary civilisations of the Near East but had little in common with the Homeric society. The ‘Mycenaean thesis’ had to be abandoned.

Should we therefore conclude that Homer portrayed the world in which he himself lived, many centuries after the Trojan War? Or is it something in between, the world of the ‘dark ages’ of the tenth and ninth centuries, as Moses Finley believes? In his landmark book³ Finley concludes that, a few anachronisms aside, the society described by Homer is coherent and thus existed. Since this society is neither Mycenaean nor that of the city-state, it must be that of the intervening period, the tenth and ninth centuries. At this time the long years of migration and expansion were over; the mixing of races and cultures was complete, ‘the catastrophe that brought down Mycenaean civilisation and made itself felt all over the eastern Mediterranean had been forgotten…the history of the Greeks as such had begun’ (Finley 1970:48).

Today, Finley’s view is questioned, since it assumes, historically speaking, a radical break between the tenth and ninth centuries on the one hand and the eighth and seventh on the other, and is based on the apparent absence of any eighth-century elements in Homer’s work. However, recent discoveries, particularly in Euboea, attest to the continuity of certain aspects of civilisation from the tenth to the eighth century. In addition, the presence of elements of eighth-century society, Finley’s famous ‘anachronisms’, has been noted in Homer’s work. For example:

• the Iliad contains a description of a battle which prefigures the hoplite tactics which were developed at the time when the epic was acquiring its defmitive form. This occurs in Book XIII, 1 130 ff. (in a group of lines repeated in Book XVI, 214 ff.): ‘an impenetrable hedge of spears and sloping shields, buckler to buckler, helmet to helmet, man to man.’
• The chariots which clog the battles of the Iliad must have belonged to a distant tradition whose significance was lost to Homer, since, with one exception (IV, 297 ff.), they no longer engage in combat, being used only to carry the heroes to the place where they are to fight. This they then do on foot. Such a procedure is more readily understandable in the light of the practices of the eighth century, when combatants would travel on horseback to fight on foot.

Both more ancient and more recent forms of war thus coexist in the epic. In the same way the Homeric poems put institutions belonging to different periods side by side. In matters of dowry, inheritance or funerary rites, they portray different practices arising in different societies. It can only be concluded that Homer’s is an artificial, composite world in which the most ancient elements coexist with more modern ones. It is a poetic world; it does not give a historically accurate reflection of a society.

This world, so hard to place in time, is not always easily located in space either. Strabo, the late first-century BC historian and geographer, took great pains to show that Homer was a geographer. Following him, many scholars have sought to locate the places described by Homer. Victor Bérard⁴ triedto retrace Odysseus’ journeys across the Mediterranean and the places where he landed: he identified the island of the lotus-eaters as Djerba, while Stromboli was the island of Aeolus; Circe’s cave was to be found in southern Italy, the oracle of the dead near lake Arvernus and so on. Certainly, as J.de Romilly notes, Visiting the places where Odysseus landed sets one dreaming and gives the Odyssey —as archaeology does the Iliad—a heightened presence. Yet the Odyssey is no more faithful to geography than the Iliad is to history; here too, the poet’s imagination was set free by the long work of transmission and adaptation.⁵

So let us end our search for Homer the historian or geographer and turn instead to his poetry.

The Iliad

The Iliad describes Achilles’ anger and its disastrous consequences.

Book I provides a prologue, describing Achilles’ quarrel with Agamemnon. Humiliated by the King of kings, who deprives him of his prize, Briseis the hero retreats to his tent. Zeus promises to make up for the affront he has suffered by arranging the defeat of the Achaeans. Books II to VII describe the first day of fighting (Book II gives a catalogue of the Achaean and Trojan forces and the first set battle between the Greeks and Trojans; Book III recounts the single combat of Paris and Menelaus; Books IV to VII describe a series of battles and duels; during the night the armies retrieve their dead and the Achaeans build a wall around their ships). The second day of fighting (Book VIII) is devoted to the Trojans’ victory. Hector, who is Zeus’ favourite, sets up his bivouac in front of the Greek ships. Books IX and X provide an interlude: the Greeks take advantage of the night to send an ambassador to Achilles (Book IX) and reconnoitre the Trojan camp (Book X). The third day of fighting begins with Book XI. Despite the exploits of the Achaean leaders (Books XII to XIV), the Greek side is routed; the Trojans penetrate the Achaean camp and threaten to burn the ships (Book XV). Patroclus is horrified by the Achaean losses and puts on Achilles’ armour in order to drive back the Trojans (Book XVI), but is killed by Hector (Book XVII). When Achilles hears of his friend’s death he decides to avenge him, vowing to kill Hector even if, as Thetis has predicted, his own death follows that of the Trojan hero. Hephaestus makes new arms for Achilles (Book XVIII). The fourth day of fighting opens with Book XIX, which tells of the reconciliation of Agamemnon and Achilles. Achilles drives the Trojans back to the river (Book XX), then into their city (Book XXI). He kills Hector (Book XXII), but the presages of his own death multiply in these four books. Book XXIII describes Patroclus’ funeral and Book XXIV, which ends the poem, replaces the climate of violence which has reigned hitherto with one of pity and compassion: Achilles renounces anger and agrees to return his son Hector’s body to Pri...