Ahuvia Kahane

Written voices, spoken signs : tradition, performance, and the epic text

* Introduction Eghert Bakker and Ahuvia Kahane * Storytelling in the Future: Truth, Time, and Tense in Homeric Epic Egbert Bakker * Writing the Emperors Clothes On: Literacy and the Production of Facts Franz H. Bauml * Traditional Signs and Homeric Art John Miles Foley * The Inland Ship: Problems in the Performance and Reception of Homeric Epic Andrew Ford * Hexameter Progression and the Homeric Heros Solitary State Ahuvia Kahane * Similes and Performance Richard P. Martin * Ellipsis in Homer Gregory Nagy * Types of Orality in Text Wuif Oesterreicher * The Medial Approach: A Paradigm Shift in the Philologies? Ursula Schaefer * Notes * Bibliography * Contributors * Index

Antiquity and the ruin: introduction

The question of ‘antiquity and the ruin’ poses a difficult, but interesting challenge, since the ruin inherently resists many otherwise useful temporal, disciplinary and other boundaries: it is an object that belongs as much in the present as it does in the past, it is a material object that is not what it is (or what it was), which cannot be used for its own purpose, and which is meaningless without its missing parts qua missing parts (we will comment further on these points below). Practically, one can, to be sure, focus the discussion on classical antiquity. Most of the contributions to this collection do indeed explore aspects of the idea of ruins in the Greco-Roman world. The problem is that to have stopped there – the essays in this volume do not – would have meant describing only a part of the essential object in question. By placing firm boundaries on the ruin in antiquity we risk defining it precisely, but too narrowly for the good of the topic itself, creating a well rounded but misleading ‘whole’ by cutting off essential loose ends. Such wholeness goes against the nature of the ruin, in antiquity, and throughout history. The challenge for this volume, then, was how not to cut off those ends: how, in other words, to discuss the question of ‘antiquity and the ruin’, placing large, sprawling themes squarely in the foreground yet within the confines of a single volume. To meet this challenge, we invited scholars of varying persuasions and interests to contribute essays on the imagination of ruins in Rome (Edwards), on literary fragments (an important form of verbal ruins, discussed by duBois and Pucci), on the aesthetics of the ruin in antiquity (Porter and Alston, each adopting a different perspective), on the dual qualities of ruins in antiquity and beyond (in contributions by Settis, Schnapp, and, setting a wider context, by Vallat), on some receptions of ancient ruins in modernity (Hall and Wittenburg), on the ethical relation of the ruin to the past in modernity (Zill) and finally, on the ‘modernity’ of ancient ruins (Kahane). The result is not a handbook of the ruin in antiquity, not a ‘companion’, not, to be sure, an exhaustive survey, but a composite set of images that trace the wider arcs of our topic. In the latter half of this introduction we provide brief descriptions of the individual essays, but before doing so, it may be useful to comment on some of the general issues at hand.

The Complexity of Epic Diction

This article offers a revised interpretation of the relationship between form and meaning in Greek epic hexameter diction, binding our understanding of traditional language and idiolects as well as patterns and their exception within a single, systematic approach. The article draws on methodological (and underlying philosophical) principles embedded in contemporary cognitive functional linguistics, usage-based grammar, and the study of language as a complex adaptive system (which emerges from the study of complexity in the sciences). Fundamental to work within these fields in recent decades is the rejection of paradigmatic linguistic approaches (such as traditional Greek and Latin grammar, Saussure and his emphasis on langue , Chomskyan transformations) and the polarities of form and content paradigmatic analysis often assumes. Usage-based linguistics place emphasis on signification and symbolic functions, communicative exchange, and contingent historical evolutionary processes as the primary realities of language and language formation. Grammar is regarded, not as an underlying universal structure, but as an epiphenomenal linguistic symptom. The study of complexity in linguistics expands such perspectives to provide a deep, scientific argument that binds rule-based usage and unpredictable exceptions and anomalies within a single, integrated system. Key elements of these perspectives can be extrapolated already from Milman Parry’s early observations on analogy—even as the full implications of these observations could not have been understood within the historical framework of Parry’s methodology. Various examples from the Iliad and the Odyssey , especially the usage of the formula ton d’ apameibomenos , illustrates the argument for the complexity of epic diction.

Image, word and the antiquity of ruins

This paper considers the ruin as a special genre of representation involving special objects. The paper examines the temporality of the ruin, the mediality of the ruin – especially the relation between image and word – and the historical positioning of the idea of the ruin in relation to antiquity and the modern era. The author analyzes aspects of the basic visual and phenomenological “grammar” of the ruin and comments on some of the implications for our understanding of the representation of history and historical change. The ruins “deep sense of voicefullness” (as Ruskin calls it) is conveyed precisely through the silence of the material remains (and hence also their quality as images). The ruin, the paper argues, is as much an ancient idea as it is a product of modernity, but it allows us, paradoxically, both to understand times other than our own and to maintain historical difference and to keep a distance from the past.