Conclusion: Endgame

One of the issues shadowing this book throughout—and one with which we have sparred constantly—is the how; that is, how the complex associations between poems of different traditions (and within the same tradition) originated; how the Iliad and Odyssey came to be the only heroic epic poems left standing; and how, in turn, the Theban epics were lost to time. This question is all the more pressing, when so many resonant cases of engagement may be identified between the poems that we have—the Iliad and the Odyssey—and the stories, motifs, and structures we believe were in those that we have lost.

In the last chapter we suggested that Homer’s use of Thebes and, ultimately, the city’s suppression, were in all likelihood connected to the Panhellenic horizons of the Homeric poems, oriented towards an ever-expanding world of external struggles and adventures, where the communities on the margins of the Greek world held all the faster to those foundational narratives that most efficiently (or authoritatively, or provocatively, or...) told of heroes fighting in war or struggling to return home. [2] To highlight the efficacy of this storytelling is also to acknowledge that the narrative dynamics of the Homeric poems actively repurpose and reshape other traditions’ story patterns, themes, and elements. Seen in this light, a Theban focus on internal strife in a story like the Seven Against Thebes comes across as somehow less able to respond or speak to a world of expanding horizons; at the same time such a story is already covered by the Iliad’s treatment of strife between of Achilles and Agamemnon.

We close by offering a viewpoint through an alternative Theban lens, which we believe best helps us to rethink the continually renewed “afterlives” of the Iliad and Odyssey and their epic rivals. Our interest lies not so much in the intrinsic value of this alternative account as in how it potentially sheds light on the processes of change undergone and endured by Homer’s poems.

In the Introduction we used the image of the rhizome, popularized by Deleuze and Guattari, to think about the process behind the emergence of the Greek epic oral tradition. In A Thousand Plateaus, they reject the familiar idea of the knowledge tree, in which origins may be traced back to a single point and influence is conceived of as hierarchical and uni-directional, in favour or the rhizome—an understanding of cultural objects as multiple, heterogeneous and diffuse. For us, this image best captures the oral tradition, whose beginnings are not singular or discrete, and whose individual components (poems) are a product of endless struggles over and links between shared storyworlds, narrative patterns, themes and language. We believe that this metaphor has been helpful for better understanding the process of cultural and poetic development that helped to produce our epics, and then for using that understanding to provide a reading of those epics. But this metaphor does not adequately account for why (or how) the Homeric epics outgrew their rivals to choke out all other life. [3]

To address this specific question, the metaphor of the tree may still hold a value for thinking about Homer’s poems. [4] In the Iliad, trees are often used in a metaphorical sense by the poet to denote the death of a warrior, an association underlined by Glaukos, who uses the image of trees shedding their leaves to describe the passage and passing of generations of man. [5] The emphasis in the Odyssey lies, in contrast, on trees that are still standing and their use as material for human goods of survival and identity. Trees indicate Odysseus’ location and represent his progress towards home, describing in turn the topography of Kalypso’s island (1.51), where he is to be found languishing at the beginning of the epic, and the view he spies when finally landing back on Ithaca, whose trees he initially fails to recognize (13.196). [6] When Odysseus first makes the steps necessary to embark upon his nostos—understood as both the passage home and the narrative told about it [7] —he must cut down the trees on Ogygia and carve out his own vessel (5.228–262). His skill in fashioning his means of return from wood is also highlighted in the gloom of Cyclops’ cave, where he makes the stake from an olive tree with which he and his men will blind the monster and enable their great escape (9.375–388). In Book 23, the bed that was a tree is both a token of Odysseus’ skill—he crafted his marriage bed from an olive tree—and a symbol (σῆμα, 23.202) of the rootedness of his relationship with his wife; indeed, Penelope’s trick to reveal her husband’s identity is the claim to have moved their bed, which in fact has remained throughout everything “in place” (or “in the ground”: ἔμπεδον, 23.203). [8] The pattern culminates in the reunion of father and son in their walk through their family’s orchard, where Laertes “reads the sure-grounded symbols Odysseus had pointed out ” (σήματ᾽ ἀναγνόντος τά οἱ ἔμπεδα πέφραδ᾽, 24.346) to prove who he is. [9]

How to read these sure signs shared between father and son is a challenge of semantics and semiotics. To gain his father’s recogition, Odysseus immediately shows his scar. We have already witnessed the sigificance of this sign for indicating Odysseus’ heroic credentials, when. accidentally exposed by his nurse, it threatens to expose the beggar as the returning hero. What worked before (inadvertently) seems insufficient now, as Odysseus quickly changes tack and instead provides details of the trees in the orchard that his father has been tending (ἕκαστα…ἕκαστα… ἕκαστος, 24.337, 339, 343). In the cataloguing of each species, it is difficult to see the wood for the trees. What is clear is that this secondary supplementary sign plots out Laertes’ inheritance for his son. [10] John Henderson draws attention to the specialized vocabulary of διατρύγιος (‘bearing grapes in succession’ 24.342), a hapax which appears to signify “expertise in tending the vintage through to its ultimate garnering” (1997: 105); and to the game of number crunching the orchard; and indeed to the act of naming (ὠνόμασας…ὀνόμηνας, 339, 341) the trees, which in itself needs to be glossed (as in to “name the species”: 1997:108n78). Alex Purves (2010:228) retraces these steps as Odysseus “taking an imaginary walk through the orchard in his mind just as [Elizabeth] Minchin has suggested that Homer takes a cognitive walk through the Peloponnese in order to recount the Catalogue of Ships (2001: 84–7).” In this recounting of the catalogue, the trees were “‘planted’ in Odysseus’ mind when he was just a boy before the frame of the Iliad had begun,” which in turn suggests that the Odyssey’s catalogue of trees is somehow some kind of response to the Iliad’s great Catalogue of Ships, by which means Homeric epic encapsulates the launch of the Achaean expedition against Troy. Trees are also present in (and responsible for) that launch, in the form of the ships—trees that have been felled—that carry the soon-to-be-felled Achaean heroes to Troy. [11]

Whether or not Laertes’ list of trees bookends the world of Homeric epic by bringing to mind the Iliad’s Catalogue of Ships, the orchard evocatively resounds within an epic cosmos, where trees are suggestive of the stories that are or could be told. [12] In announcing his intention to test his father, Odysseus hands over his “warlike arms” (ἀρήϊα τεύχε᾽, 24.219) to his slaves, as if Laertes’ farmstead represented a “temporary retreat and seclusion from epic struggle” (Henderson 1997:99). The toil showcased here is Laertes’ (epic) work on the land (ἐπεὶ μάλα πόλλ᾽ ἐμόγησεν, [13] 24.207)—Odysseus finds his father “digging about a plant” (λιστρεύοντα [14] φυτόν, 24.227)—and the care (κομιδή, [15] 24.245) he has shown his orchard. Not only does this picture suggest an adjournment to the “anti-heroic margins” (Henderson 1997:112) of the poem; it resonates with the everyday humdrum world of Hesiod’s Works and Days, towards which the narrative arc of the Odyssey has been building. The vines “named-and-promised by Laertes are dwelt on…in lyrical rapture on the promise of a seasonal abundance” (Henderson 1997:104, our italics), with “the seasons [ὧραι] of Zeus’ sky weighing them down to the ground from on high” (24.344, our italics), as if the hard labor countenanced in Hesiod’s Works and Days finds its instantiation and ultimate reward in the gods’ favor here in Laertes’ “Works and Seasons.” When, therefore, hostilities are renewed (which only ever remains an indefinitely deferred promise at the end of the Iliad [16] ), the scene is all the more shocking after this walk through the orchard, as if Hesiod’s discontentment with his brother had transmogrified into full-blown civil strife, or additionally the ever-present threat of a Theban tale interrupts the bucolic setting. No wonder it takes renewed plotting by Zeus and Athena to (literally) put an end to the conflict and bring this poem to a shuddering halt.

These closing metapoetic ruminations are rooted in the poem’s beginning, where Odysseus fashions a sailing craft to (re)start his journey home (nostos) and, thus, begin (again) his narrative (nostos). In the previous chapter we explored the metapoetic associations in Teiresias’ prophecy, where, following Alex Purves, we suggested that the prophetic announcement of (yet) more wanderings for Odysseus (until his oar is confused with a farming tool), points to a world beyond heroic epic, to the agricultural poetics of Hesiod’s Works and Days. [17] Here, as the Odyssey itself runs to a close, the oar is returned to the soil in the form of the trees of Laertes’ orchard. [18] Laertes himself is silent on his careful tending. Instead, it is what these trees mean to the on-looking Odysseus that is articulated.

In this way, the trees may stand metonymically for epic poems, but not in the way that the arboreal metaphor is usually imagined. Instead, these trees/poems represent the combined product of nature and nurture which have been shaped by the judgment (aesthetic and political) of countless constant gardeners. To point to one instance in this process and claim any one to be the most formative for the creation of these specific trees is to underplay the contribution of others and to overlook and appeal to and significance for generations of people who experience them right now, each time.

The challenge of the way we invite people to think about Homer is part of the point. As readers and thinkers we are attracted to and distracted by the object we can see so powerfully that it is hard for us to think about what had to be before what is there developed. In this way, the Iliad and the Odyssey are but two outcroppings—or trees—tended and grown in an unknown number of wild groves and family orchards. The work we have done in this book, we believe, functions in part both to trace the impression of what might have been on the poems we have and to help us think and talk about them better. It seems only fitting, therefore, that before we close this book, to speculate on what might have happened following the epics’ textualization.

One suggestion that we pursued throughout this book and that was explored most fully in our last chapter is that individual manipulations of mythical traditions preserved in historical records are likely to have played a role in the privileging of one tradition over another. As such, the process of (pan)Hellenization—to be conceived not as a direct and teleological flow but rather as a chaotic series of negotiations in multiple directions—clearly exercised an influence on the formation of the epics that we now possess and on the traditions which we believe they appropriated. [19]

During the period of the development and institutionalization of epic poetry, different cities laid competing claims to the burial sites of heroes, including those of Theban myth. One material consequence of this inter-civic rivalry was the urgent pursuit to acquire the remains of heroes, which in turn became increasingly important for helping to establish or promote a city’s political identity. In a similar way to the role that holy relics played in the formation and consolidation of the Catholic faith in communities throughout medieval Christendom, bones represented tangible connections with the larger-than-life figures from the age of heroes. At the same time, the cults that grew up around these remains provide further evidence of the use of genealogies to define and redefine identities in relation to one another. [20]

Within such a context of a maturing institutional framework and claims on dominion, Herodotus provides an account of Spartan hegemony in the Peloponnese. Critical to this tale of growing Spartan power is a venture to find and bring back the bones of Orestes [21] —an importance signaled by consultation of the Delphic oracle, a special-forces mission, and careful decoding of the oracular text (Herodotus I 67–68). [22] Orestes was important, in the words of Gina Salapata, because he “was a favorite hero of all Peloponnesians and had achieved what Sparta aspired to: the hegemony of the whole Peloponnese under legitimate claim” (2014:37). For Salapata, the Spartans embraced both Dorian and Achaean origins to affiliate with both Homeric and Heraclid identities (2014:35; cf. Herodotus V 72).

Evidence from other sources reveals a similar tale of body snatching elsewhere across the Greek world, in order to justify territorial claims and/or hegemony over other groups. Not surprisingly, the Spartans’ most serious rivals during this period of consolidation and retrenchment, the Athenians, seem to have been most active in this regard—a point that befits both their acquisitive character (as commented on by Thucydides) and their appropriation of the Homeric poems within the institution of the Great Panatheneia. According to Pausanias, the Athenians claimed the tombs of several heroes and may have made unsuccessful attempts to acquire the bones of Aiakos. More certain are the records of the Athenians “recovering” the bones of Theseus from Skyros in the fifth century BCE, immediately after the Persian invasion. [23] Thus, just as recovering the bones of Orestes allowed the Spartans to appeal to a more indigenous royalty as they asserted themselves throughout the Peloponnese, so the Athenians used the bones of Theseus to justify their emerging hegemonic position at the head a renewed Ionian naval alliance with the islands of the Aegean . Equally, such claims could play a role in internal politics: for Cimon, recovering the bones of Theseus was a political coup for the family of Miltiades and helped bolster the standing of their faction in the city. [24]

Among these many tales of claim and counterclaim on the body of heroes, there is one that directly informs and impinges on our investigation into the ongoing struggle between Troy and Thebes. This is the strange tale recorded in the scholia to Lykophron which implies that competition between Troy and Thebes may have persisted outside the Homeric poems for some time: This evidence is interesting, for it not only represents a literal Theban appropriation of a Homeric hero, as the bones of Hektor are dug up and reburied in Thebes; it also relies on a detailed understanding of the Iliad in which Boiotian Thebes is conspicuous by its absence—and all the more so when, as we saw in the previous chapter, the Catalogue of Ships circles around Thebes but studiously avoids naming the city. The familiar trope of an oracular proclamation as a response to some crisis also invites the reader to ponder the cause and effect: here, the implication seems to be that the Greeks are suffering from famine because of their assault on Troy, as if it hadn’t enjoyed the full support of the gods after all. Again such an explanation both corrects the Iliad (where Zeus oversees the fall of Troy) and draws on it for its legitimacy (where Apollo, indeed, favors the Trojans and is represented largely acting against the Achaeans). Using the Iliad against itself, then, this account finds in favor of Thebes, the one (mainland) Greek city not to have joined in the (now) discredited expedition against Troy.

The tradition of the transfer of Hektor’s bones reappears in other sources. The historian Aristodemos of Thebes, whose work only survives in fragments, is recorded in a scholion to the Iliad providing an account largely similar to the one just cited. On this occasion, however, the (unspecified) crisis is restricted to the Thebans alone, whose oracular injunction to move the bones to “a place in their land” suggests an (overdue) anxiety to be involved in the Trojan War. [26] Pausanias too identifies a grave of Hektor near Thebes, along with the oracle that had supported it. Significantly, he combines the tale of Hektor’s bones with the tale of Oedipus (IX 18.5): There is some debate about whether or not there was an actual cult practice centered around Hektor’s bones in Thebes and, if there was, when it actually began. [27] For our purposes what it represents is a continuation of some of the same real-world struggles and tensions that helped to shape the Homeric poems. However secure (or not) these texts are as witnesses to an ancient tradition, they reflects an ongoing understanding of the absence of Thebes in the Trojan War narrative, a reflection of the importance of Thebes right up to and beyond the composition and institutionalization of the Homeric poems, and, despite the city’s absence in the extant heroic epic corpus, an indelible connection between the two chief cities of ancient Greek myth.

In Homeric epic, the destruction of Troy is built upon the destruction of Thebes, both by coming after it and by subordinating the role of that other city in its own narrative. In these later accounts of Hektor’s bones, we see the future of the Greek world being determined by the continued rivalry between the two cities, based now on the possession of the material remains of the past. In this putative victory of the “real-world” Thebes over the imagined Troy, we find a metaphor for our relationship with the past and a demonstration of the results of Homer’s competitive practice. The Iliad may end with the interment of Hektor, but later traditions would not let these bones lie in peace. In Aristodemos’ fragment, the Trojan War narrative is reified as a material object that can relieve the suffering of the physical inheritors of the world of Thebes. While this could be viewed as a victory of the power of the story of Troy over the Theban tale (since the former functions as a magic talisman in the very homeland of the latter), Pausanias offers a somewhat different take. Here, the tales of Hektor and Oedipus are materialized and collocated together, two sets of relics of a past with various shades of relevance. The relics are metonyms for their narrative traditions, nestled together in a way similar to the collocation of Thebes and Troy in Hesiod’s myth of the ages in the Works and Days. From our distant perspective, the continued cultural relevance of Theban myth seems less powerful, thanks largely to the long history of the reception of Homer’s poems.

Even in the way we read these objects and their relationships to the narratives that might have been, we too are engaging in a weighing of their meaning that has no universal measure. They shift depending upon our knowledge of the traditions for which they are metonyms and, by being placed alongside each other in our vision of Homer’s Thebes, create other levels of meaning anew. This dynamic process wherein meaning shifts from viewer to viewer recalls the emphasis that we have previously placed on traditional referentiality as an interpretive approach that facilitates multiple axes of time, authority, and audience engagement. While this book has certainly been about the use of Theban myths in the Homeric epics, its subtext—how to “read” Homer and situate that meaning in larger hermeneutic traditions—has been our endgame all along.

To address such a weighty task has meant approaching the topic obliquely rather than head on, precisely because of the absence of evidence and the gravity exerted on the missing bodies of Theban myth by the overwhelming presence of Homer’s two poems, at once both so paradigmatic of the genre of heroic epic and so exceptional within it. In this sideways wander through Homeric epic, we have moved back and forth through different themes to force ourselves to think in terms of the subjects presented by the poems as both content and form.

The first chapter considered the question of how Homer’s epics orient themselves toward the past, specifically in the creation of a Theban past that (re)defined that city’s epic scope and relevance. This chapter’s emphasis on the Iliad’s creation of a Thebes it needs for its own themes fluidly transitions to questions of what different heroic traditions mean and how their identities, affinities, and affiliations are negotiated, not with reference to another city or place, but almost exclusively with reference to the story being told. In these terms, the Iliad’s Herakles is recognizably Theban primarily to deny him a Panhellenic currency that the Iliad claims for itself (Chapter 2). Such a process of selection and suppression is evident too from Odysseus’ mercurial use of other narrative traditions in his epic, as he bends and remakes them for his own ends (Chapter 3).

If these first three chapters focused on Theban heroes and the themes of politics, time, and form, one critical element of epic poetry more generally—strife—has helped us think about Homeric composition and structure on a bigger canvas. Chapters 4 and 5 explored how the emergence and containment of strife is a signal topic of Greek epic poetry; in our final chapter, we observed its importance in the very process of Panhellenization and the formation of cultural continuities. This contemplation of strife has suggested that such continuities almost always must contain within themselves discontinuities and elisions that make their existence possible. The story of how the Iliad and Odyssey came to be will also always be a type of cenotaph, a eulogy or a lament for the stories that came to be, those that were lost, and for all the stories that never were fully realized.

In our reading of the epics and our attempt to approach the problematic hermeneutics of Homer askance, we have been engaging in a different type of domesticated strife, of the kind that Timon the Philiasian calls “The paper-pushers behind their palisade waging endless contest / in the bird-cage of the Muses” (βιβλιακοὶ χαρακῖται ἀπείριτα δηριόωντες Μουσέων ἐν ταλάρῳ, fr. 60W = Athenaeus Deipnosophistae I 22). As collaborators, we have constantly challenged each other to consider new angles and to force ourselves to consider and reconsider what kind of stories Homer’s epic presents. Just as Odysseus tries to articulate what he had learned from his father in their walk through the orchards, so we too retrace the steps of our predecessors, recounting how these powerful poems, whose fruits we continually enjoy, have been lovingly tended and passed down to us. And, every so often, a trace of some other presence in the shadows or soil detains us.