Part II. Chapter 4. Genre and Generation in the Odyssey

In recent years, much brilliant and invaluable work elucidating Greek myths has been done by Jean-Pierre Vernant and Marcel Detienne, [1] who have looked across texts and across historical periods in order to discern and retrieve a given myth’s dispersed but essential components, which, seen in their relation to each other, yield meaning in every feature and become comprehensible as a totality. Having acknowledged with admiration the fruitfulness of looking for this material across the boundaries of literary types, we might ask, from the standpoint of anthropology, “Can we learn anything from where those boundaries are, in fact, established? Can the boundaries themselves tell us anything? Do they form part of the regulation of an economy of myth that they can help to identify?”

We may take as a starting point a statement by Louis Gernet: “What is of particular interest in an anthropological study is the question about the barrier between human and divine reality: what separates the human from the divine and, conversely, what brings them together?” [2] I would like to suggest that this barrier is reflected in different types of poetry, or more precisely that the separation between types of poetry exists to express aspects of that fundamental separation of which Gernet speaks. It may be appropriate for classicists to follow suggestions implicit in the work of an ethnographer like Pierre Smith in “Des genres et des hommes” [3] on the one hand, and a literary theorist like Tzvetan Todorov in Les genres du discours on the other [4] —that is, to treat genre itself as an institution, an aspect of society, and the distinct relations among genres and sub-genres as charged with ideological content, wherein the way that they are demarcated makes it possible to read the clas- {157|158} sification of cultural phenomena, to see represented ways of organizing the world through distinct spheres of concern and distinct realms of reality. In this way literary studies and anthropological—especially structuralist-symbolic—studies can be mutually illuminating if we look at the meaning of genre distinctions or genre boundaries, when we recognize that genres can be viewed, like other cultural institutions, as existing in a relationship of interdependence, in which they have complementary functions in conveying different aspects of a coherent ideology or system of beliefs about the world. The crucial point about these distinctions or differentiations is their complementarity: they exist within, and serve to complete, a conception about the way the world is ordered.

Given the difficulties of applying anthropological methods of inquiry to mythology as rendered in ancient works of art, and of drawing anthropologically valid conclusions without fieldwork, [5] it may be useful to move back a step to see what we can learn from genre as a socially determined structure underlying a given work. To decode this properly would be a large project, but this paper will make a few suggestions of how such an effort might be relevant to seeing Homeric and Hesiodic poetry not just as “different except in the ways that they are similar (or vice versa),” but as fundamentally complementary institutions comprising a coherent world-picture.

Herodotus, at 2.53, speaks of Homer and Hesiod as being jointly responsible for having systematized the gods for the Greeks: he ascribes to them the authority for producing theogonies, naming the gods, identifying their attributes and functions, in sum for having explained in a certain sense how and why to worship the gods. What we know of Greek religious history and practice, of course, tells us that Homer and Hesiod are very far from constituting religious instruction in terms of practice. They do explain relations between men and gods, but from our modern critical standpoint it is curious that Herodotus should conjoin them as he does, in that the two traditions appear to do it in such different ways. What I would like to consider briefly is how we can see those differences as significant and also locate the differences themselves as part of a coherent cultural strategy within a larger integral system of viewing the social and cosmic order.

In order to bring this question into focus, we might consider one divergent feature that needs to be reconciled with Herodotus’ statement, namely that the Iliad and the Odyssey do not present theogonic or cosmogonic material, except by way of allusion. It is clear that the Iliad and Odyssey, when they {158|159} speak of Zeus, son of Kronos, assume and refer to the same basis of cosmic order that is spelled out in Hesiod; that is, they presuppose material that is elaborated in Hesiodic poetry, but do not themselves make that material overt. For example, in the Iliad we find allusions to divine struggles on Olympus that, as Mabel Lang has shown, are linked together to form a kind of narrative beneath the surface level of the poem. [6] These would not be comprehensible without an understanding of the theogonic scheme as we are presented with it in Hesiod. Moreover, the Iliad takes as its central hero the son of Thetis, who, we know from any survey of her mythology, is a vehicle for divine succession. As is told elsewhere, [7] when Zeus was courting Thetis, intending to marry her, Themis, the guardian of order, intervened to prohibit the union because Thetis was destined to bear a son greater than his father. Themis urged the gods, therefore, to marry Thetis to a mortal, and to let her see her son die in battle. Hence Thetis’ marriage to Peleus, and Achilles as the issue of an arrangement whereby he has to die, but Olympian stability is maintained. By looking at the diction and motifs associated with Thetis in the Iliad [8] —her connection with a divine conflict on Olympus in which Zeus is victorious and binds the losers; [9] her association there with Briareos the hundred-handed, to whom Hesiod assigns a prominent role in the Titanomachy; [10] the reference in Iliad I to ὁ γὰρ αὖτε βίῃ οὗ πατρὸς ἄμεινον; [11] her complaints about being forced to marry a mortal, and her lament about seeing her son die and being unable to help him [12] —from a constellation of allusions of this kind, we are able to perceive an underlying dimension to the Iliadic situation that, again, only makes sense in the light of the Hesiodic schema. From Hesiod we gain knowledge about divine intergenerational conflict and its massive consequences and implications; we learn what successive violent usurpation of the divine regime entails. Only through an account like that given by Hesiodic poetry are we enabled to understand that the Iliad is offering an explanation for human mortality in the paradigm of Achilles: in order to prevent perpetual violent overthrow, endless disorder, and for the sake of preserving Zeus’ hegemony and cosmic stability, which as the Theogony shows us has been achieved—human beings must not {159|160} threaten to be stronger than their divine parents; that is, human beings must die. Embedded in the Homeric poems is the presumption of an evolved set of cosmic relations dependent on the myth of divine succession; yet if we look for such explicit material in the Iliad and Odyssey, we find that it is excluded, adverted to only in allusions. The question then becomes whether variant treatments of a given myth are developed in order to suit different genres, or whether, in the first place, alternative genres develop with exclusive parameters in order to suit the content of the myths?

We can examine another instance of differentiation and complementarity by looking at a problem in the Odyssey. It announces its subject as ἄνδρα with the first word, but defers the naming of its hero until line 21—an absence, a hiatus, that corresponds to the narrative strategy by which it does not introduce us to the missing hero until the fifth book. The epic thus invites its audience to ask the question, “who is this poem about?” and the response is twofold. The poem is about ἄνδρα, it is about a man and it is about man, or perhaps more pointedly, it is about a man who has “seen the cities of men and known their minds.” The poem identifies its subject, then, in precise terms: man is both the viewer and the viewed; he is what he has seen. The poem proceeds to define its subject and object, man, along two axes: the vertical—who is man on the spectrum between gods at one end and beasts at the other? [13] —and the horizontal—who is a given man among men, how is he human among all the possible ways of living as a human being, as his place on the vertical axis has established the meaning of human?

Themes associated with the horizontal axis, framing the vertical, are presented in the opening and closing books of the poem, with Telemachus on Ithaca, at Pylos, in Sparta, and again on Ithaca. How does one society compare to another? Pylos, Sparta, and Ithaca are all alternative human communities juxtaposed for the sake of comparison. But the question of societal norms is put into a wider context by the central books of the Odyssey, V-XII, where the vertical range and man’s place within it—that is, the terms for what is human—are established: the extremes being on the one hand the divine immortality offered by, and embodied in, Kalypso, and on the other hand, the pigs in the pen of Circe. [14] In between the extremes exists a range of alternatives, beings who are all in some ways recognizably human and in some {160|161} ways monstrous. The fullest account is of the Cyclops, who is the most challenging to Odysseus of all the beings he encounters, and the most profoundly dismaying because he is “so human”; yet he lives without social organization, without laws, and most unspeakable, he is capable of practicing cannibalism without thinking that there is anything wrong with it.

This recalls a problem that the Odyssey has long presented for Homerists. They have puzzled over the fact that the Odyssey makes distinctions between right and wrong that the Iliad does not make, or as some scholars have put it, that the Odyssey is concerned with δίκη, in a way that the Iliad does not apparently help us to make sense of. [15] In the past this has been advanced as evidence against unity of authorship. Unlike the Iliad, in which Greeks and Trojans are not compared in terms of guilt and innocence—even Paris has his merits—in the Odyssey there are good and bad characters. There are the suitors, who are manifestly villains and whose behavior against the innocents in Ithaca amounts to criminality and clearly offends against everyone’s sense of justice, except their own. From our standpoint it is useful to ask the question, where does that sense of justice, affronted by the suitors in the Odyssey, come from? Are there proto-legal notions to be uncovered here? How are we to understand what δίκη is, what norms of behavior it requires? Much as the idea of succession linked with cosmic order is not spelled out in the Iliad but fundamentally underlies it, similarly, I suggest, the answer to the question of Odyssean δίκη is to be found in reading the Odyssey in the light of the concept of δίκη as presented in the Works and Days.

Pierre Vidal-Naquet has pointed out that the places Odysseus visits in the course of his travels are distinguished by the absence of agriculture (and by the absence of sacrifice to the gods). [16] It is emphasized in Book IX that the Cyclops has nothing to do with agriculture: it is said that the Cyclopes “neither plow with their hands nor plant anything, / but all grows for them without seed planting, without cultivation, / wheat and barley and also the grapevines, which yield for them / wine of strength, and it is Zeus’ rain that waters it for them.” [17] Now, this description has special meaning when we consider that it is remarkably reminiscent of Hesiod’s description of life in the Golden Age, under Kronos, before the separation of men and gods, [18] because men and gods (as Martin West puts it in his Commentary [19] ) began {161|162} on the same terms. For those in the Golden Age, under Kronos, “all good things were theirs; ungrudgingly, the fertile land gave up her fruits unasked (αὐτομάτη).” [20] But as we know from Hesiod, the age of Kronos was the age of cannibalism as well, as Vidal-Naquet has pointed out [21] —after all, Kronos is the god who ate his own children! But thanks to the succession struggle by which Kronos was overthrown, Zeus is established in power on Olympus. Now gods and men are radically remote from each other; men have to labor and till the fields. But the Works and Days tells us that “Zeus the son of Kronos established this law for men, that it is for fishes and wild beasts and winged birds to eat each other, since δίκη is not in them; but to men he gave δίκη, which is much the best.” [22] So we are again given a picture of an evolved set of relations between men and gods—costly for men, but beneficial as well. Man is no longer on a par with the gods, but neither is he to be identified with the beasts, and what determines this is δίκη.

So insofar as the Odyssey is concerned with exploring the nature of being human—its potentialities, limitations, and rough edges—it is concerned with δίκη as distinctive to that condition. It is on this basis, therefore, that the poem indicts the suitors, who, over and over again, are said to be eating up the substance of another man: [23] it is not so much that they are bad people as that, being without δίκη, they are, so to speak, not people at all—and from the travel books V-XII, we are prepared to appreciate what that means, as we remember the Cyclopes or the Laestrygones. It is striking, then, and worth noting, that the passage in the Works and Days about δίκη precluding ἀλληλοφαγία occurs specifically in the context of an exhortation to Perses to restrain his voracity in claiming someone else’s patrimony.

Hesiod opposes δίκη and ὕβρις in the Works and Days so as to show, as J.-P. Vernant has pointed out, that they are in a perpetual deadlock over pride of place among men. [24] We may remember that three times in the course of his travels, upon arriving in unknown territory, Odysseus asks himself whether he has landed among men who are ὑβρισταί or δίκαιοι. Significantly these occur when he arrives on Scheria, that most humanly refined place where the inhabitants are ἀγχίθεοι; on the island of the Cyclops, that extreme of bestiality; and finally, when he reaches Ithaca, and does not know where he is. [25] It {162|163} is the ambiguity of the status of δίκη on Ithaca that is to be underscored here, in its Hesiodic sense.

If the suitors, like Polyphemos, behave as the absence of δίκη implies, they threaten to invert all the procedures by which men recognize each other as beings of the same species, and treat each other with respect as men. This means that on Ithaca no identity is secure. In shorthand, it means that Telemachus does not know who he is; so that when Athena says, “You certainly look like Odysseus! Are you his son?” he replies, “I don’t know; no one ever knows his own father.” [26] As for Laertes, he is less like a valued elder of the family than a superannuated retainer or discarded beast of burden. In Book II, the first assembly since Odysseus’ departure is called. Mentor regrets the current state of affairs, which, he says, has come about because no one remembers the just king—the σκηπτοῦχος βασιλεύς—who was like a father. [27] When the disguised Odysseus later compares Penelope to a king who rules with δίκη, [28] the passage is, as Gregory Nagy has pointed out, particularly close in diction and purport to the Hesiodic description in the Works and Days of orderly right relations in the community where δίκη is upheld. [29] But at Odysseus’ praise evoking such a community Penelope demurs—rightly, because in a Hesiodic sense δίκη cannot be said to exist on Ithaca. As Penelope replies, only Odysseus can make this happen, because only his return will restore δίκη; only his return will put all the pieces in place and restore the categories that δίκη exists to govern. In the Works and Days, Hesiod says that under δίκη women bear children who resemble their fathers, [30] so that it is the return of Odysseus that will allow Telemachus to know what he looks like, and will allow Laertes to be a father again—a father who recognizes his son.

Here I want to emphasize the importance of understanding recognition on Ithaca as a function of δίκη, which, as Hesiod shows us, allows us to identify members of our own species in general, and to know how we are related to them in particular—and to treat them appropriately. “It is for fishes and wild beasts and winged birds to eat each other, since δίκη is not in them; but to men [Zeus] gave δίκη, which is much the best.” [31] If δίκη enables human beings to observe the distinction between their kind and other kinds, it makes those fundamental defining features explicit in the first place through {163|164} the family. This is the entity that allows you to identify others as members of your own species, because in order to do that you must first know what you look like yourself. (We remember here that Penelope rejects the beggar Odysseus’ characterization of her as a king upholding δίκη in telling terms: she responds by saying that in the present conditions on Ithaca she no longer looks the way she used to—she has become unrecognizable—but that were Odysseus to return, she would look like herself again.) Thus δίκη allows human beings, by recognizing species and family, to determine a distinction—with which the Odyssey is concerned throughout—between licit and illicit appetites, both for what one consumes and for sexual relations. Fishes, wild beasts, and birds do not make those distinctions, either within species or within family; they avoid neither ἀλληλοφαγία nor incest.

Given conditions on Ithaca, in the absence of Hesiodic δίκη resemblance between the generations of a family may indeed cease to be reliable, as in the case of the faithful Dolios and his treacherous offspring Melanthios and Melantho—so that we see a son who partakes of the wrong food (with the suitors), and a daughter who sleeps in the wrong bed (also with the suitors). To put it another way, in such conditions, how to avoid the threat realized in the Telegony, where Telegonos, Odysseus’ son by Circe, kills his father without knowing who he is, and then proceeds to marry Penelope?

In this sense, the extended meeting scene between Odysseus and Laertes in Book XXIV is anything but gratuitous, despite objections to it by a number of scholars, famously, for example, Denys Page. For this scene asserts the coherence and continuity of generations guaranteed by and reinforcing δίκη; the token of their relationship, the orchard of Odysseus and Laertes, bears fruit unfailingly, as in the Hesiodic community where δίκη prevails, and women bear children who look like their fathers.

These illustrations of some ways in which Homeric and Hesiodic poetry exhibit a complementary distribution of subject matter within a relationship of interdependence could of course be reciprocally matched by illustrations from Hesiod vis-à-vis Homer: the Hesiodic poems assume heroic events and situations—at Troy and at Thebes—but do not elaborate or recreate them. The level at which we need to see Homeric and Hesiodic poetry as participating jointly in the systematization of the gods for the Greeks, as Herodotus claims, must precisely identify the differentiation between the two traditions—their very distinctions—as a crucial part of the system. The separation between them reinforces and institutionalizes the proposition inherent in the mythological totality: namely that the order of things is organized, based on a prior evolution, according to a separation between human and divine, a breach that {164|165} is complete, and must continually be recapitulated, as with the institution of sacrifice. But if we can see both a symbolic and an effective function for genre boundaries in this way, we can understand as well why Homeric poetry and Hesiodic poetry occasionally, if only tangentially, extend into each other’s territories: to incorporate another genre, as the Odyssey has been shown to do with “instruction poetry,” [32] is not just to be more sophisticated as poetry, but to be more encompassing as a representation of social and cosmic order; in this sense Homeric epic seeks to preempt other genres, to be the “genre of genres.” But this must be done with great tact and subtlety: otherwise, as with the strategy of the succession myth, the attempt to devour the alternatives may be indigestible and self-defeating, not only for the poem but for the audience. The anthropologist Mary Douglas in her essay on “Deciphering a Meal” quotes Allan Tate saying, “Formal versification is the primary structure of poetic order, the assurance to the reader and to the poet himself that the poet is in control of the disorder both outside him and within his own mind.” [33] Perhaps the same can be said of the function of genre, if for poet we substitute society. [34] {165|}