Third, the audience for poets is not mired in tradition; they openly seek innovation and variation, which is to say that they listen self-consciously to the narrative being sung. The narrator returns to the matter of narration when Odysseus is being given shelter and hospitality at the court of the Phaiacians book 8.
First, he is described in the banquet hall listening with the others to the singing of Demodokos who is telling tales of events during the Trojan War. The narrator is describing in Odysseus a man who has critical faculties and aesthetic judgments. This, while interesting, does not seem unique. These two no doubt can also pass judgment on the skills of the professional singers in the army camp. Very talented amateurs, we might call them. More interesting is the way in which Odysseus responds when he is finally called upon to identify himself.
Rules of hospitality at the time allowed a stranger to protect his anonymity until he had been given food and lodging, and Odysseus has been withholding his name despite the obvious curiosity of his royal hosts.
Finally, when King Alcinous sees his guest crying at the events Demodokos is describing in his song, he cannot contain himself. What follows is an extraordinary tour de force in which Odysseus stands where Demodokos had stood, creates an introduction to himself as elaborate as any song that could be sung, then launches into an account of his travels after leaving Troy that occupy the next two thousand lines of hexametric verse in a poem that is only some 12, lines long—in short, about one-sixth of the narrative.
Two observations must be made at this point. The ongoing decipherment of cuneiform tablets is constantly telling us more about this third-to-second-millennium narrative which originated in the area of present day Iraq. The story of Gilgamesh is now thought to have been in circulation, passed about by singers, somehow made available far west of present-day Iraq, to Mycenaean and Dark Age centers of culture where it might have been the kind of novelty item a singer could incorporate into his traditional materials.
Whatever is the case, the great reply that Odysseus makes to King Alcinous must have struck the listener as highly artificial, both because of its peculiar content and for its great length. In the course of his delivery, Odysseus falls silent—no doubt exhausted, poor guy—and Queen Arete bursts out But we should all give him a present.
You have a shapeliness to your words, a good brain in you, and you tell your story out with expertise, like a singer. Like the professional singer, Odysseus cares about what he is singing, the shape of his story.
Like the professional, when he is told not to stop by his presumptive patron, he can continue on; he has endless endurance. His audience recognize the quality of his delivery, can compare him against professionals they have known, recognize how superior he is to the fakes, the obvious amateurs who stop at their doorstep.
The story is strange; the delivery dazzles the audience. It is another reminder that storytelling is in some ways the subject of this poem. At this point, I would like to suggest something for which there is no authority whatsoever in the text, but is the kind of thing a reader can imagine while an auditor of oral poetry cannot.
My inspiration for doing this is the contemporary tendency among Homerists to posit all sorts of hidden meanings in the text, the attitudes of the ever-silent Penelope, for instance, or the implied relationship between the Iliad and the Odyssey, for another. What I should like to propose is that Odysseus, as the narrator tells, has just spent seven years with Calypso, having passed time in her company filling out those long boring evenings after dinner telling her stories of the Trojan War and the days before that in Ithaca.
Repeated performances over time perfected his hexameters, so that when he gets to Scheria he is, as one senses by the elaborate manner of his revealing his identity, both proud of his talent and ready to pull off two thousand lines. If Odysseus is audacious in telling this extraordinary story to the court at Scheria, so is the narrator for having constructed so ingenious a narrative.
The Iliad moves forward on the psychological roller of emotions. Agamemnon gets angry being thwarted; Achilles responds in anger, departs in petulance; and so it goes, until, when Achilles will not come back to the fight, his tent-mate, concerned over the Achaian losses, borrows his armor and is killed, which produces enough anger and desolation in Achilles to send him back into the battle, to the killing of Hektor and his own certain death implied in the future, beyond the limits of this narrative.
That is how a writer would pitch this story at a conference in Hollywood. These several scenarios force his audience to care about Odysseus, and urge on the successful completion of his story, just the way the crowd in a sports arena roots for the team.
The Odyssey story can be schematized as three separate stories: Telemachus in search of his father, Odysseus trapped on the islands of Ogygia and Scheria, and Odysseus regaining his throne which includes his son and wife. To overcome the inherent incoherence of this material, the narrator uses Athena as a kind of chapter heading or storyboard, artificial, and with no great motivation. Nothing could be more unlike the Iliad.
Odysseus reestablishing himself on Ithaca is the foundation of the entire poem. Athena, the Fairy Godmother, appears to Odysseus as he wakes up on the beach, where she proceeds to outline for him what trials lie before him until he achieves his longed-for goal.
Disguised as a beggar, he is like Cinderella or any other societal outcast and failure whose almost miraculous success is the very stuff of the fairy tale mentality. Indeed, Odysseus has already been depicted sitting in the ashes of the fireplace when he takes the mendicant posture at the court of King Alcinous.
Here in Ithaca, the journey from the beach to the palace is fraught with humiliations inflicted upon him by the haughty suitors or their hangers-on, which is an analogue to the snickering and taunting that Cinderella must endure from her contemptuous stepsisters. Likewise, our hero, after hearing the jeers from the assembled throng, strings the bow which the suitors cannot, and shoots them dead.
Pyrrhus answered,. Tell him what a failure I've become, and how degenerate I am, his little Pyrrhus. Don't forget. Now, die. He grabbed his hair with his left hand, and with his right pulled out his shining sword, and entombed it in his side.
That was all that Priam lived to see, his fate, his lot, his luck to watch his city burnt, its topless towers overturned, a land of victories long ago where foreigners brought tribute. Now there lies a bloated body on the shore, a head ripped from its shoulders, and a corpse without a name. A ghastly moment, and even more so for those who know what was happening in the Rome of Vergil's day. The foundation of Augustus' newly formed government rested on a century of civil war. Just the generation before, Julius Caesar had made Rome his own by winning over important legions whom he convinced to fight against their own state.
In the end, Caesar met Rome on the field of battle and won. The result was the extermination of the Roman Republic, and an autocrat installed in power. The turning point of those wars and the most crushing defeat the Roman Senate suffered came when Pompey , Caesar's most formidable rival, lost the Battle of Pharsalus in 48 BCE, the Senate's last real hope of defending their independence.
Pompey was forced to flee to Egypt, where he was greeted by people he took to be allies. He was instead ruthlessly butchered, his beheaded corpse left floating in an Egyptian tidal pool—"a head ripped from its shoulders, and a corpse without a name" is a fitting description—and it was at this crux in history that many Romans looking back called the time of death for their Republic, and the conception of Augustus' Empire.
In casting Priam's death as a clear recollection of Pompey's, it seems obvious Vergil is commenting in some way on current events. In that respect at least, The Aeneid cannot be seen as invented history, pure or simple.
In Book 3, Aeneas continues his narrative, relating to Dido where his wanderings after the fall of Troy have taken him. Although having sailed for many years around the shores of the eastern Mediterranean Sea, he has yet to find the land called Italy promised to him by the gods.
His and his men's spirits are at an all-time low and they despair of ever again having a place they can call home. In Book 4, Dido seeks to comfort the charming stranger—and marvelous story-teller!
Ultimately, however, the gods summon Aeneas away to serve his destiny and found the state of Rome. Told he has no choice in this regard, the hero goes to Dido and tries to explain why he has to leave. She, blinded by love, denounces and curses him, and after he leaves, stabs herself with his sword out of grief.
Her body is cremated on a funeral pyre and, as he's sailing away, Aeneas looks back at Carthage and sees smoke in the distance but doesn't realize it's all that's left of his beloved, benighted Dido. Carthage is now just another city he's fled in smoke and ash and the death of a woman he loved. Ruin, it seems, is the reward for being pius. In Book 5 Aeneas' father Anchises dies, and in Book 6 the hero enters the Underworld at the gods' bidding to receive from his father's ghost a vision of the future.
Pius Aeneas does his duty as always and, because the gods insist, confronts the horrors of Hell. The worst Hades has to offer him, however, is not the battalion of infernal monsters that live and lurk down there—not that there aren't plenty of those! But most horrific of all the terrors the hero encounters in the Underworld is the soul of Dido. Unaware as yet that she had died until he sees her ghost, he surmises correctly that his departure was the cause of her demise and begs her to forgive him.
In one of the great silences of all literature, she just stares at him and says nothing. Toward the end of her life, she had tried to convince him not to leave her but he did, and he deserves not one word more.
And in one of the great poetic similes of all time, Vergil says she passes away from him "like the moon behind a cloud. Finally, shaken to the core as any man would be who's lived through both literal and personal hells, Aeneas at last meets the spirit of his father Anchises who comforts him—or tries to—by showing him why he must endure. He takes his son to see a pageant of the future, a parade celebrating all that Rome will be and do one day. In a sort of triumphal procession of Romans-yet-to-come, the great generals and statesmen of Vergil's past, which is of course Aeneas' future, form a procession lining up in chronological order to meet their coming destinies, a seemingly endless tableau of patriots who kill their rebellious kin, fathers who execute their own sons in the name of Rome, and it culminates with a shadowy figure, who Anchises explains is Marcellus, Augustus' nephew, a young man who had died in 23 BCE while Vergil was writing The Aeneid.
This final figure in Aeneas' far distant future and Rome's most recent past is the very picture of unfulfilled promise, the perfection of imperfection, as yet again Vergil's times intrude upon the mythological epic. Like Aeneas' account of the fall of Troy and Priam's gruesome slaughter on the altar, this passage, too, ends on a discordant chord with odd echoes of Vergil's times. After he's finished watching the triumph of Rome-yet-to-be and finally departs the Underworld for the upper airs, Aeneas leaves, according to Vergil, through a gate with a curious significance.
These are the last words of Book 6 of The Aeneid , the exact midpoint of the twelve-book epic:. Sleep has two gates it can go through, so they say. An easy one, made of horn, shadows that don't lie use this one.
The other gleams. It's made of polished ivory, and spirits of the dead send false dreams to heaven. Anchises goes all the way there with his son Aeneas carves a path back to his ships and meets his friends, then follows the coastline to Cajeta's port.
The anchor is thrown from the prow, the ships stand on the beach. Aeneas exits the Underworld by passing through the ivory gate, the road which false dreams take! What is Vergil saying here? Was the "Triumph of Rome" which Aeneas just witnessed a false dream which he's now carrying up to the world above, a dazzling lie of some sort meant to deceive the Romans with the hope of glory into wreaking centuries of war and carnage by which to fill up Hell?
To die and recycle your soul, that's the purpose of Rome? With no further explanation, Vergil returns to the story. In the second half of The Aeneid Books , Aeneas and his bedraggled followers at last settle in Italy, much to the displeasure of a local people called the Rutulians. Led by Turnus , they force Aeneas and his men into open warfare, principally over which of the two of them—Aeneas or Turnus—has the right to marry Lavinia, a native Italian princess whose hand in marriage brings with it her father's kingdom.
The war at first goes in Turnus' favor when he scores a victory by killing one of Aeneas' dearest friends, a young man named Pallas. To salt the wound, Turnus strips Pallas' body of its armor and proudly wears it as a badge of victory. The Aeneid ends with a final showdown between Aeneas and Turnus, who fight one on one. Enraged over Pallas' death and the dishonor of his memory, Aeneas advances on Turnus with bloodthirsty fury.
Dazed and overwhelmed by his foe's uncontrolled savagery, Turnus turns and runs, but eventually Aeneas pierces his leg with a mighty spear throw, pinning him down helpless on the ground. The Aeneid ends with Aeneas standing over the fallen Rutulian who begs for his life:. He lay flat on his back. His eyes beseeching mercy, hand in the air. He said:.
Enjoy this. Return me to my kind, or if you prefer, my body stolen from the light. You win. They see me, all of these Rutulians, a man defeated, holding out his hands. Lavinia is yours, your bride.
Yet take this hate no further. He stood there, Aeneas, clenching his fist, his eyes aflame, and slowly lowered his sword. His shoulders began to relax as the words turned in his heart. Then he saw it, that unhappy beacon riding on his shoulder, the buckler. He recognized it instantly, its shining metal studs.
He was wearing that unlucky belt the day he died. The memories of unholy grief, these ashes stole his sight. His anger burned, a terrifying wrath:. Pallas does this, slaughters you! The great man's limbs grew slack and cold, and with a groan his bitter life ran off into the darkness. And that's it. That's the end of The Aeneid. As far as we know, these are, in fact, the last words ever spoken by the greatest writer in Western Civilization, except perhaps "Would someone please burn what I just wrote?
The link between the myth of Aeneas and the political realities of Vergil's day seems all too readily apparent here. What exactly Vergil is trying to say through The Aeneid may not be clear, but that he has a message of some sort is. To have a person of his intelligence and status in the Roman world commenting on the events of his time is something historians can't afford to dismiss lightly, which is why they have to know how to read literature, not just recite dates and accounts and laws.
The simple truth is that fact can be—and often is—encoded in fiction. How do we decide what Vergil really meant? Our only recourse is to examine the text of The Aeneid carefully and try to sift the author's message from the tale he's telling by looking at the big picture: how the characters evolve, what happens to them, what choices they make.
The Aeneid begins with a man who's seriously—one could argue, clinically—depressed, a hero who's witnessed the deaths of many he cherished and wishes openly he were among his deceased friends. That Aeneas looks back at the past in grief and weeps. The epic ends with an angry, murderous avenger who presses death down upon a suppliant kneeling before him.
This Aeneas looks back at the past in rage and kills. From wounded thinker to butchering Fury, Aeneas has somehow turned into the likeness of Pyrrhus, the brutal teenager who so roundly disgusted him—and any compassionate reader! But what does all this mean for Rome, for history? Why does Vergil leave us with a portrait of his hero as both executioner and founder, builder and killer?
Was that how he interpreted Rome's progress, an evolution from some pitiful, downtrodden band of refugees into a murderous army serving cynical gods who care only for some plan they've conceived to breed more ruthless, vengeful, pius adherents? Was that what Vergil saw when he looked back over Roman history and reviewed the major events of his day, particularly the century-long civil war which left the collective democracy of Rome floating as dead and headless as Pompey in some distant land, while the purported liberator—the master really!
And what of the Gate of Ivory? Does that make The Aeneid Vergil's way of asking his contemporaries, "Can a people, who commit genocide on not just the rest of the world but themselves as well, be trusted by heaven to hold up the torch to tomorrow? That is, after all, what my patron Augustus would have all you Romans believe. No one can answer these riddles, because The Aeneid is a work of fiction, a mask the perfectionist poet wore to protect his artistic autonomy and the freedom to speak his mind, to the extent any work of literature can relate what its author believes.
But w hen openness and honesty are muted, writers must veil their message in invented history and trust the public to decode it. Lies, in this arena, are solemn agents of the truth and an all-important key in understanding what-really-happened in the past.
In using the verb in the first person here in book IX, Odysseus calls attention to the fact that he is, in a sense, singing a kleos which normally would be recited about him in the third person. The Homeric hero is generally unreticent about his own achieve- ments His kleos, however, the fame which is "heard" among men cf. This kleos is for others to sing, for "strangers to carry around the wide world", as Penelope says Od.
A hero may talk of "winning kleos for myself, as Hector does when he boasts of his martial prowess II. Even here kleos is something to be won and is closely associated with the father as well as the individual hero. Parallels to Odysseus' phrasing occur at two moments of special heroic intensity in the Iliad. Quite the contrary, it seems remote and beyond his direct control.
Hector's challenge to the Greek army in Iliad VII offers a closer parallel : his opponent will die, Hector boasts, "but my kleos will not. Here, too, as in Iliad, VI, above, the hero is in the process of creating that kleos. Similarly, Achilles in Iliad, IX, stands at a moment of crucial decision which will determine whether or not that kleos will exist in the future.
The situation of Odysseus at Od. He is not involved in action or decision. He is, in fact, far from the heroic world, safe among the soft, luxury-loving Phaeacians. Both hero and bard, he is in the unique position of being the singer of his own kleos.
His kleos, in other words, gains both a subjective and an objective aspect. The interlude in book XI makes this double function explicit.
The anomalous position of Odysseus as the reciter of his own kleos, in other words, brings together two aspects of kleos which are usually kept separate. First, as Nagy has recently suggested, kleos is "the formal word which the Singer himself aoidos used to designate the songs which he sang in praise of gods and men, or, by extension, the songs which people learned to sing from him" Second, kleos is also the objectification of the hero's personal survival in epic song, the "imperishable fame" which lives among men and keeps alive the hero's name.
Thus, as Nagy points out, the usual translation of kleos as "fame" is inadequate, for "fame" indicates only "the consequences rather than the full semantic range", whereas in fact the relation between the actual "fame" of the hero and the medium which that "fame" is more complex : "The actions of gods and heroes gain fame through the medium of the Singer, and the Singer calls his medium kleos" By removing Odysseus far from the locus of his great heroic achievements at Troy and even from the adventures of the more recent past, the poet views kleos retrospectively.
It is already fixed as part of an heroic tradition. That tradition can itself be held up for reflection, examination, criticism. Odysseus' encounters with the Cyclops and. The great deeds of the past, in other words, are now especially designated as a part of heroic song qua song.
The magic of the singer is necessary to call these deeds into being and give them their life. The "message" appears, for a moment, as the creation of its "medium". Hesiod, looking at the epic tradition from a certain distance, can even go so far as to suggest that the poet's Muses can speak falsehood that resembles "truth" Theogony, 27 f. The Iliad offers a few brief glimpses of kleos self-consciously denoted as a creation of bardic tradition.
On the other hand a later poet like Ibycus is quite overt about the distinction and the interdependence between the objective kleos of heroes which the poet transmits and the. Odysseus' formulation of his kleos in IX, has yet another anomaly. Odysseus' kleos can be a universal fame "all men" , or a fame won for the thoroughness of his trickery, the totality of his immersion in unheroic guile "all ruses". Odysseus' very name, as Dimock, Austin, and others have pointed out, so deliberately concealed or revealed, associates him with the ambiguous practices of trickery and his descent from the trickster Autolycus.
Odysseus' representation of himself as an ambiguous hero of dolos is all the more striking in the light of Penelope's very different view of him and his kleos at the end of book 4. She fears the loss of her noble and courageous husband whom she describes as. Viewing Odysseus nostalgically from the needy perspective of Ithaca, Penelope endows him with the traditional heroic aretai and the traditional wide-spreading kleos.
Odysseus himself, fighting his way out of the strange fairyland world of his sea travels, sojourning among the unwarlike Phaeacians, has come to experience and value a very different aspect of himself.
Encounters with monsters like Polyphemus, soon to be described, have taught him the futility of the Danaan aretai that Penelope praises and the emptiness of the kleos that spreads far and wide over Hellas and the midst of Argos. Here he needs a larger, more universal, more convertible form of kleos. He must also exercise skills which have an ambiguous value among the warriors at Troy.
Fame being as central as it is to both epics, one would expect this formula to be of frequent occurrence It is striking that neither of the other two instances describes the martial glory of a traditional epic hero.
Odyssey, VIII, 73 f. The other occurrence is more striking still. It describes Penelope whom Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, addresses for the first time in the darkened halls of his palace XIX, :. One of several "reverse similes" applied to Penelope 23, this one too places heroic kleos in a new and unfamiliar light. A noble queen keeping her fidelity to her absent lord in the palace has kleos as well as a warrior facing his enemies on the open field of battle.
Though nothing overt is said, a situation is created in which each recognizes and begins to revivify the obscured kleos of the other. Here the threatened queen, beset by dangers, approaching desperation, lacking a firm protector in her house, receives this formula of heroic honor from the king in the guise of a starving, homeless beggar. Not only is he without kleos at this point, but he is even without name. He explicitly asks Penelope not to inquire about his lineage or his homeland, for that would fill him with grief and painful memory Od.
The situation utterly reverses heroic practice. The traditional warrior who guards his kleos as his most precious possession proudly boasts his name, his race, his origins, and his native land, as for instance Glaukos does in his encounter with Diomedes in Iliad, VI, ff.
Penelope makes the appropriate reply ; here, for the only time in the poem besides IX, 19 f. In the speech in. I and complained of the suitors' behavior, but here she tells the story of. Her tale reveals that her kleos, like Odysseus1 in.
This combination of dolos and the highest heroic kleos again points up the paradoxes and contradictions in Odysseus' "heroism". A woman can be expected to use doloi for her kleos, but a hero should win his kleos in fair fight on the battlefield. Both Penelope and Odysseus tread a fine line where dolos leads to "glory", not "shame".
In this respect, as in so many others, Odysseus and Penelope complement and parallel one another. This complementation of dolos and kleos for them both is especially clear in the second Nekyia. Odysseus, on the other hand, master of disguise and trickery, nevertheless fights an heroic battle of sorts.
This last scene contrasts with the heroic exertion of Odysseus' son at the crucial moment of battle :. XI, f. Agamemnon's heroism cannot cope with a woman's doloi ; Odysseus, meeting Penelope on her own ground, can enlist their separate doloi jointly in the reestablishment, rather than the destruction, of their house and their kleos. That remote prayer for Nausicaa and her prospective husband now becomes relevant for Penelope and himself, fulfilled in the reaffirmed kleos of his Ithacan wife The poem defines heroism through a series of symmetries and inversions : Odyssean doloi contrast with Agamemnon's kleos, the success of the one with the failure of the other.
The house-destroying dolos of Clytaemnestra also contrasts with the house-preserving dolos of Penelope, as aischos contrasts with kleos. Now, thanks to Georg Danek of the University of Vienna and Stefan Hagel of the Austrian Academy of Sciences , we have some idea of what those songs may have sounded like. At their site , the two scholars present an abstract of their Homeric singing theory, with musicological and linguistic evidence for the recreation.
Their technical criteria will confuse the non-specialist, and none but ancient Greek speakers will understand the recording above. Would you like to support the mission of Open Culture?
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To donate, click here. We thank you! I read that book many years ago and goes into depth with oral transmission of oral poetry. What a treat, especially the bit where Hephaestus catches the illicit couple in the act!
Or you can hire me to come tell you the story live. Details and podcast links: jeffwrightstoryteller. Really now? At least use a Greek who can pronounce the letters correctly!! I am Greek and we Greek can read Homer from the prototype from the ancient text.
We know that some letters have some difference in pronunciation from all these centuries passed but i cant understand a single word that guy is saying! I agree with you. It sounds no more than recited, without the energy and dynamics that such as Homer himself, and perhaps Thespis would have brought to it.
It may well have been done with too much reverence for the material, and not enough of a sense of the sheer energy of the ancient Greek people. You really think ancient Greeks spoke like that and still created one of the most influential civilisations,to modern society,of all time.?
Yes, it was pronounced differently, no matter what your crackpot theory says. Nice to hear this, and I do appreciate the work that must have gone into it.
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