Chapter 1. The First Song of Demodokos

1§1. Homeric Epos has the power not only to define the hero but to articulate this very power. In my search for evidence in support of such a claim—and this search will extend throughout my presentation—I will of course have to struggle with the overwhelming dimensions of the Iliad and the Odyssey. It is especially difficult to find an appropriate place to begin. How to approach two such monumental compositions, representing as they do the culmination of perhaps over a thousand years of performer-audience interaction? Already at this point, I stress these important factors of performer and audience, in light of the discoveries made by Milman Parry and Albert Lord about the traditional nature of Homeric composition. [1] We see at work here an inherited medium where the composition can be simultaneous with performance—or at least, where composition becomes a reality only in performance. [2] In fact, I find this factor of performance an ultimately suitable point of departure. We are about to examine Odyssey viii 72–82, the description of a poet's performance as actually narrated by Homeric Epos. In this description we may discover a vantage point from which we are allowed an instant glimpse into the artistic unity of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined.

1§2. Unlike Indic epic, where narrative is enclosed within the overall framework of dialogue or dialogue-within-dialogue, oftentimes in accretions of seemingly never-ending inner circles, [3] Greek epic de-{15|16} livers the narrative directly in the persona of the poet. The invoking of the Muses at the start of a Greek epic is the tag of the poet's own performance. The immediacy of performance, however, is counterbalanced by an attitude of remoteness from composition. The performer feels himself distant enough to intimate that the message of his composition comes not from him but from tradition. As the poet tells the Muses before he launches into the Catalogue of Ships: Accordingly, the poet invokes the Muses to tell him how it all happened (Iliad II 484). He behaves as an instrument, as it were, in the hands of the Muse, whose message is equated with that of creative tradition. He passes on the kléos, let us call it the 'glory', of heroes. And yet, the word kléos itself betrays the pride of the Hellenic poet through the ages. Etymologically, kléos should have meant simply 'that which is heard' (from klúō 'hear'), and indeed the poet hears kléos recited to him by the Muses (again, Iliad II 486). But then it is actually he who recites it to his audience. Here the artist's inherited message about himself is implicit but unmistakable. In a word, the Hellenic poet is the master of kléos. 'That which is heard', kléos, comes to mean 'glory' because it is the poet himself who uses the word to designate what he hears from the Muses and what he tells the audience. Poetry confers glory. [5] The conceit of Homeric poetry is {16|17} that even a Trojan warrior will fight and die in pursuit of κλέος … Ἀχαιῶν, ‘the kléos of the Achaeans’ (Iliad XI 227). [6] If you perform heroic deeds, you have a chance of getting into Achaean epic. The Achaean singer of tales is in control of the glory that may be yours.

1§3. As Marcel Detienne has shown in detail, [7] the verb mi-mnḗ-skō, designating the function of the Muses at Iliad II 492 (μνησαίατ᾽) and elsewhere, means not so much that the Muses “remind” the poet of what to tell but, rather, that they have the power to put his mind or consciousness in touch with places and times other than his own in order to witness the deeds of heroes (and the doings of gods). [8] He is independent of seeing the here and now; he need only hear the kléos. For him, a thing like blindness cannot help but serve as a proof, a veritable emblem, of his artistic independence.

1§4. Enter Demodokos, the blind poet of the Phaeacians in Odyssey viii. This figure Dēmódokos 'received by the dêmos' [9] is an appropriate idealization of an artist by the art form of epic. Through the persona of Demodokos, the epic of the Odyssey can express many {17|18} things about itself as a composition—far beyond what the medium of performance could let the poet say in his own persona when he invoked his own Muse. As Samuel Bassett has remarked in another connection, “Homer has carefully groomed the Phaeacian bard for his part.” [10] After the Phaeacians have had their fill of food and drink, the time for an evening's entertainment is at hand. The Muse, or perhaps we should say “a Muse,” impels the poet Demodokos to sing the ‘kléos [plural] of men’ (κλέα ἀνδρῶν: Odyssey viii 72–73), from a story that had a kléos of great impact “at that time”:

1§5. I have not yet reached the point where I can examine what Demodokos then sang. Suffice it now to observe that he performs not just one but three separate compositions in Odyssey viii, all of them pertinent to the themes of the overall Odyssey. What is more important for now, the performances of the idealized poet seem to be themselves idealized within the narrative. Outside the narrative, on the other hand, the composition of the Odyssey itself is idealized in such a way that it has become unperformable. Not only for the Odyssey but for the Iliad as well, an important aspect of idealization is amplitude and comprehensiveness. In size and in arrangement, they are truly monumental structures. Between the two of them, the Iliad and the Odyssey manage to incorporate and orchestrate something of practically everything that was once thought worth preserving from the Heroic Age. Their monumental scale, however, has far outgrown the earlier and ideal context of performance, namely, an evening's dinner-hour entertainment as described by Odysseus himself before he begins his own narration: The dinner-hour performer described here is none other than Demodokos himself. By contrast, the Odyssey acknowledges its own monumental scale with the narrative that Odysseus is about to perform, starting at Book ix. As the inner narrative of his own adventures by Odysseus begins to exceed—by way of its actual length—the span of an evening's entertainment, the outer narrative has Alkinoos urge the inner narrator to continue with the following words: What goes for the adventures of Odysseus in the inner narrative goes also for the entire composition: the Odyssey itself is here in effect jus-{19|20} tifying the evolution of its own dimensions. The idealized performances of Demodokos, on the other hand, have retained and thus in a sense compensated for this element of dinner-hour entertainment that had been lost in the idealized compositions of the Odyssey and the Iliad. Of course, it cannot be emphasized enough that both the Iliad and the Odyssey must have evolved within the medium of composition during performance, performance during composition. The paradox is that the compositions were developed to the point where they came to defy the traditional format of their performance. [16]

1§6. Earlier, I had referred to the “artistic unity of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined.” The wording was meant to convey what I consider the ultimate token of self-reflexiveness in Homeric poetry. The Odyssey, in the words of David Monro, “never repeats or refers to any incident related in the Iliad.” [17] Denys Page amplifies: [18] Page argues that the Iliad and the Odyssey are thus unconnected. And yet, it is precisely the size of the Iliad and the Odyssey that forces me to believe the opposite. [19] Both the Iliad and the Odyssey are so ambitiously comprehensive that their sheer size would make it seem inevitable for them to overlap in their treatment of at least {20|21} some events related to Troy—unless there was a deliberate avoidance of such overlapping. If the avoidance was indeed deliberate, it would mean that the Odyssey displays an awareness of the Iliad by steering clear of it. Or rather, it may be a matter of evolution. Perhaps it was part of the Odyssean tradition to veer away from the Iliadic. Be that as it may, the traditions of the Iliad and the Odyssey constitute a totality with the complementary distribution of their narratives and, to me, there seems to be something traditionally self-conscious about all this. It is as if there were a traditional suppression of anything overtly Iliadic in the Odyssey.

1§7. What I have offered so far, of course, is just an intuition. Perhaps I can be more convincing if I find positive rather than negative evidence. What I need is a specific instance where the Odyssey unmistakably alludes to an Iliadic scene without duplicating it. Monro's Law would be violated only by duplication, not by allusion. For example, the passing reference in Odyssey xxiv 77 to mixing the ashes of Achilles and Patroklos is not a duplication of two other references to the same mixing in Iliad XXIII 91–92 and 243–244. Even if we were to accept the argument that Patroklos had been perhaps an exclusively Iliadic figure, [20] the parallelism of references fails to overturn Monro's Law. Inside our Iliad, the references to the mixing of ashes are themselves allusions to future events that are projected as occurring outside the Iliad. One of the artistic triumphs of our Iliad, as Cedric Whitman has shown, is that it makes the painful death of Achilles ever present by allusion inside the Iliad, even though the actual death scene lies in the future, outside the Iliad. [21] The future for the Iliad is a suitable past for the Odyssey.

1§8. There is, however, someone who could bridge the gap between past and future. The poet has such powers, granted by the Muses. The poet of the Theogony, for example, says that they breathed into him a wondrous voice: It is at this point that I am at last ready to consider the first performance of Demodokos, poet of the Phaeacians. He is singing the κλέα ἀνδρῶν 'kléos [plural] of men' (Odyssey viii 73), and the kléos of {21|22} his song reached all the way up to the heavens (Odyssey viii 74). Perhaps this kléos also bridges the gap between Iliad and Odyssey:

1§9. These verses have been a puzzle for ancient as well as modern exegetes. The passage was already a landmark of literary controversy, a zḗtēma, at the time of Aristarchus. [22] Nowhere else in attested Greek epic do we find a tradition reporting an overt neîkos 'quarrel' between Odysseus and Achilles, which is described here in words appropriate to the baneful neîkos between Agamemnon and Achilles in Iliad I. The only direct trace of any altercation between Odysseus and Achilles appears in surviving fragments of the Syndeipnoi ‘Banqueters’ by Sophocles (fr. 562–571 Pearson). [23] The playwright, in the opinion of such analysts as Peter Von der Mühll and Wolfgang Kullmann, must have derived the theme of the altercation from a {22|23} scene in the epic Cycle, somewhere in the middle of the Cypria. [24] The theory goes further; the neîkos in Odyssey viii is supposed to have been based on the same purported scene in the Cypria. In the middle of the Proclus summary of the Cypria (104.23–24 Allen), however, we find only that Achilles had a quarrel with Agamemnon over not being invited to a feast of the Achaeans at Tenedos. Accordingly, Von der Mühll and Kullmann adjust their theory; Odysseus must have been featured in the Cypria as taking the side of Agamemnon and goading a recalcitrant Achilles to rejoin the Achaean expedition (cf. Sophocles fr. 566).

1§10. It would require separate argumentation to refute the notion that our Odyssey postdated the Cypria and even derived material from it. [25] What is more important for now, the theory that the neîkos ‘quarrel’ scene of Odyssey viii was modeled on a neîkos scene in the Cypria fails to account for the precise manner in which the theme is treated by Demodokos. The form and content of Odyssey viii 75–81 are noticeably tailored to suit the beginning of an epic poem. [26] The unitarians Walter Marg and Klaus Rüter go even further, in pointing out that these verses in Odyssey viii are eerily reminiscent of the way in which the Iliad itself begins. [27] There too we find a programmatic correlation of the following themes: Achilles, son of Peleus (Iliad I 1 ~ Odyssey viii 75); Agamemnon, king of men (Iliad I 7 ~ Odyssey viii 77); the beginning of grief for Trojans and Achaeans alike (Iliad I 2–5 ~ Odyssey viii 81–82); the involvement of Apollo (Iliad I 8–9 ~ Odyssey viii 79–82); the Will of Zeus (Iliad I 5 ~ Odyssey viii 82). If indeed verses 75–82 of Odyssey viii are based on a scene in another epic, then an incident which is supposed to occur in the middle of the Cypria does not seem a likely traditional model. At best, we can rescue the relevance of the Cypria here by imagining some lost epic tradition that began with a dispute between Achilles and Odysseus and to which both Cypria and Odyssey had alluded.

1§11. Marg and Rüter would argue that the neîkos ‘quarrel’ between Achilles and Odysseus in Odyssey viii is a pastiche actually based on the opening of our Iliad, where Achilles and Agamemnon {23|24} have their unforgettable neîkos. [28] To support this interpretation, they adopt George M. Calhoun's theory of the misunderstood oracle. Agamemnon was happy, the reasoning goes, because Apollo had told him that Troy would be taken only after the “best of the Achaeans” had a quarrel; at the time, he supposedly did not realize that the oracle had meant Achilles and himself, rather than Achilles and Odysseus. [29] I agree that Agamemnon must have misunderstood Apollo's oracle, but I disagree with Calhoun's theory about the actual misunderstanding. I find this theory hard to reconcile with Rüter's own reconstruction of the traditional cause for such a quarrel. As Rüter argues, [30] the thematic conventions of Epos pitted the aristeíā ‘prestige’ [31] of Achilles against that of Odysseus in the form of a quarrel over whether Troy would be captured by might or artifice respectively. The scholia to Odyssey viii 75 and 77 suggest an epic tradition that has Achilles advocating might and Odysseus, artifice as the means that will prove successful in capturing Troy. [32] We can also infer from the scholia (A) to Iliad IX 347 that Aristarchus apparently considered this Iliadic verse to be an allusion to just such a tradition. The context of Iliad IX 347 is this: Achilles is rejecting the pleas of Odysseus that he rescue the hard-pressed Achaeans; Odysseus and the other Achaean leaders, Achilles tells him, should devise a way to keep the enemy's fire from reaching the Achaean ships. Achilles seems to be saying: “you come to me now that you need my might; well, just leave me alone and go see how far your artifice will get you!” [33] If might is more important than artifice, then Achilles is more important than Odysseus. The quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles would have centered on who is the “best of the Achaeans,” just like the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles. [34]

1§12. The disadvantages to Calhoun's theory of the misunderstood oracle become more apparent: (1) Agamemnon would be ignoring his {24|25} own heroic worth if he understood Odysseus and Achilles to be the “best of the Achaeans,” and (2) such a misunderstanding would result in slighting the heroic worth of Odysseus within the Odyssey itself. [35] It would then be an absurdity for Odysseus to praise the compositions of Demodokos, as he does at Odyssey viii 487–488 and 496–498.

1§13. My suspicion is that the oracle was not misunderstood in its prophecy of a quarrel between Achilles and Odysseus specifically. The reference to Achilles and Odysseus as the “best of the Achaeans” at Odyssey viii 78 may have served to reveal that the poetic repertory of Demodokos is in control of two distinct themes that permeate the Iliad and the Odyssey—themes that define the central hero of each epic.{25|}