Robert Fowler

Herodotos and his Contemporaries

Among early Greek historians, Herodotos and Thukydides, owing to their survival, inevitably dominate our attention. But of course they were not alone. We have some substantial citations and numerous shorter fragments of many contemporaries. Difficulties of interpretation and the authority of their greatest modern interpreter, Felix Jacoby, have for many years prevented a thorough re-evaluation of early historiography and the position of Herodotos within it. The present paper is a contribution to this effort. In the first section, the list of Herodotos contemporaries is drawn up as a necessary starting-point. We shall find that Jacobys assessment of the evidence, and in particular his late date for some historians, is to be rejected, and that his conclusions about Herodotos position in the development of historiography, which still dominate the field, lack at least part of their foundation. In section II an alternative method, in the absence of certain chronology, is developed for identifying the salient characteristics of the individual historian; the method owes something to narratology. It is illustrated from the fragments of the authors listed in section I, together with those of other historians down to the beginning of the fourth century. Section III then focuses on Herodotos; it will emerge that the most distinctive thing about him is his constant talk about sources and how to assess them. Other historians (and, indeed, poets) knew that sources contradict each other, but Herodotos first realised that this situation exists as a theoretical problem requiring the development of new methods. His is a second-order, or meta-cognitive awareness. Section IV goes on to deal, as seems necessary, with Detlev Fehlings theory about Herodotos sources, since if he is right Herodotos is not really serious about them. An epilogue draws attention to a fifth-century passage in the Theognidean corpus with striking parallels to a passage in Platos Protagoras; the two together throw light on Herodotos proem, and confirm the picture drawn in this paper of his historical activity.

Mythos and Logos

While the simplistic thesis of Greek progress from mythos to logos in the form stated by Wilhelm Nestle is rightly rejected, some aspects of the emerging new consensus are open to challenge. Mythos corresponds in important ways to modern myth and Greek logos, with which it is contrasted, stands at the beginning of an unbroken tradition of Western rationalism. The semantic history of the terms is freshly analyzed, with particular attention to the contribution of pre-Socratic philosophers, Herodotos and Sophists, but looking forward also to Hellenistic and Imperial writers. The invention of mythology is dated to the middle of the fifth century, not the end. Platos complicated stand on the issue is interpreted as a reaction to Sophistic views.

The Odyssey and its explorations

Where the Iliad deals with one short phase of the Trojan War, the Odyssey tells the drawn-out story of the Achaean hero Odysseus after the sack of Troy: his enforced wanderings, his return to his homeland Ithaca, his struggle to regain his kingdom and Penelope, his queen, who has spent the best part of twenty years resisting the advances of the local princes. The Odyssey has long been regarded as a poem like, but not like, the Iliad . For Longinus, in the first century ad, the poem is an epilogue to the Trojan epic, and in support of this proposition the critic cites old Nestor’s recollections of the Trojan battlefield, as told to Odysseus son Telemachus in Book iii : There lies warlike Ajax; there lies Achilles; There lies Patroclus, peer of the gods in counsel; There lies mine own son. The Iliad celebrates a ritualised way of living and dying and, complementary to it, practises a ritualised way of describing that living and dying – which is the aesthetic rationale of its formulaic alternations and repetitions. It celebrates also a human striving for heroism and an agreed, if elusive, harmony of human striving and divine facilitation. The Odyssey is different. Though its formulaic idiom, its ritualism and its heroic ideal are similar, the Odyssean universe, by comparison, seems restless and less assured of any ultimate correspondence than concerned to achieve one. Even before the action of the poem is under way, the Odyssey foregrounds the issue of disharmony of the spheres.

Homer’s society

Introduction What sort of a world did Homer live in? What sort of a world does Homer create? If we allow that Homer in these questions stands not for the text in the form we have it but for the whole tradition that created that text, the difficulty of answering these questions becomes plain. This chapter endeavours to explain what we know about the societies in which the epic tradition was shaped, to describe the social and political arrangements implied or alluded to in the Iliad and the Odyssey , and to examine the relationship between the worlds in which Homer lived and the worlds which Homer created. Greek society in the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age The epic tradition which lies behind the Iliad and Odyssey was already flourishing in the late Bronze Age. Some of the evidence for that proposition is linguistic, some of it archaeological: words and objects (e.g. a boar’s tusk helmet, 10.261–5) appear in the poem whose presence cannot easily be explained by their survival or people remembering them into the time that the Iliad and Odyssey as we have them were put together. Any reading of the Iliad or Odyssey needs to be informed by an appreciation that the epic tradition had been formed and shaped through successive very different social arrangements and material cultures.

Similes and other likenesses

In the last thirty years a great deal of sophisticated work has been done on the notion of metaphor: linguisticians, philosophers, scientists and archaeologists, amongst others, have all joined in the debate. At the centre of the discussion has been the location of metaphor: is it a distortion of ordinary (= degree zero) language, or is it, on the contrary, at the very centre of linguistic usage? Far less attention, however, has been devoted to the closely related linguistic-rhetorical figure of the simile. In the recently published Encyclopedia of Rhetoric , for instance, the entry on simile receives 30 lines, as against 258 for metaphor. Yet there are certain forms of literature in which similes forge well ahead of metaphors as regards the insistence of their claims upon readers attention. A prime example of such a form is Homeric epic. Before approaching Homer directly, however, I want to ask a preliminary and very basic question. Is there anything to be gained, in spite of all the theoretical elaborations in recent criticism,3 by retaining an elementary, formal, linguistically based distinction between metaphor and simile, according to which a metaphor is a comparison which does not contain a word signifying ‘like’ or ‘as’, whereas a simile is a comparison which – however short or long – does contain such a term? To describe the ocean as ‘like an unfingered harp’ will be, on that formal definition, to use a simile; whereas to observe, with Stephen Spender, that ‘afternoon burns upon the wires of the sea’, will be to employ a metaphor

Formulas, metre and type-scenes

Repetition in Homer The idea that Homer was an oral poet composing in a tradition of formulaic language is one of the seminal concepts of twentieth-century scholarship. The major figure in the development of this idea was Milman Parry (1902-1935), though many other scholars have contributed to the theory. Parry built on earlier work, and it is fair to say that many elements of his theory had been stated previously; what was new was his way of combining these elements - and also the persuasiveness of his research, both in his close analysis of the texts of the Homeric poems and in his fieldwork with living South Slavic oral epic poets. The work of Parry and his followers has been supplemented by analysis of recurring type-scenes, begun by Walter Arend in 1933 and continued by many scholars since. The implications of these ideas have been felt not only in Homeric studies, and not only in classics, but in other fields as well, such as folk-lore, anthropology, medieval studies and the study of orality and literacy. Thus an account of oral-formulaic theory is essential for those interested in understanding modern Homeric scholarship, and also important for those generally interested in the development of twentieth-century thought in the humanities.

The Homeric question

How and by whom were the Iliad and Odyssey composed and preserved? Certain anticipations apart, the modern debate began in 1788 with the publication by Villoison of the scholia in the tenth-century manuscript of the Iliad , Venetus Marcianus Graecus 454. These marginal notes preserve substantial remnants of ancient scholarship on the poems, going back as far as third-century BC Alexandria and permitting inferences about the earlier state of the text. Starting from the premise that Homer lived in an illiterate age (a premise which, ironically enough, we now know to be false), and using the new evidence, F. A. Wolf in 1795 argued that the poems as we have them were put together by a compiler living long after Homer, who had been a simple singer of heroic lays. The game was then to detect by analysis of the poems which bits derived from the original Homer, and which bits from later bards or editors; of these epigoni most scholars working in the analytical tradition (Wolf himself excepted) had a low opinion. Their handiwork was betrayed by inconcinnities, inconsistencies and repetitions in the poems, allowing the scholar to determine which parts had been composed independently of each other and in what order; by these means a wonderful variety of theories emerged, dividing the poems up in different ways and placing Homer at various points in their evolution. Nowadays critics tend to explain most of these irregularities by reference to the exigencies of oral performance.

The Gods in the Homeric epics

A popular, somewhat pretentious, party game in certain circles not so long ago was to summarise a famous work of literature as briefly as possible: give the plot of Proust in one sentence, and so on. If we were thus to reduce the storylines of the Iliad and the Odyssey to the bare essentials, the Gods would not have to feature at all. Zeus’s co-operation is not necessary, given the hero’s larger-than-life status, to explain the disastrous effects of Achilles withdrawal from battle, and neither do Poseidon or the Sun need to be invoked to account for misadventures at sea and the effect of twenty years absence on a man’s home. The party game was of course intended to provoke amusement by making the summary factually accurate but also entirely incongruous with the spirit of the original. Similarly, without the Gods the epics would be quite different from the Iliad and the Odyssey that we have, and surely also from the tradition that produced the poems. The (slightly longer) summaries given by the poems themselves, after all, give divine action a certain prominence: the plan of Zeus was accomplished, he took away from them the day of their return; and the action of the Iliad begins with the question Which God caused them to quarrel? The words of the characters reflect a pervasive view that significant ideas, emotions and events are in some way caused by the intervention of a God. Insofar as some concept of cause and effect is inherent in narrative, then, the divine must make its appearance; arguably it is not until Thucydides that the idea of a sustained narrative without the divine is born.

Homer and the Romantics

Responses to Homer during the Romantic age (roughly, 1770-1830) were largely positive yet the emphases were often subtly different from those of the previous period and sometimes registered challenge or difficulty as well as easy acceptance. Many writers were prepared to acknowledge that Homer, or Homer, was endowed with a special authority which, like that of Shakespeare, gained in force from the absence of biographical detail. Homer was an originator, an original genius, the great poetic father (according, among others, to Godwin, Coleridge and Lamb). The worlds of the Iliad , the Odyssey (and, for some readers, the Hymns ) were vividly realised yet almost unimaginably different from those which had developed in Western Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Homer’s achievement was often unquestioned but it could be daunting and untouchable. This complex of reactions was given expression by Robert Southey in July 1797 when he wrote: With Homer and Milton no future, indeed no other, poems can be compared. The age of the one and the subject of the other preclude it, independant of their unequalled and perhaps unequalable merit. Phrases such as old Homer (used, for example, by Keats and Hazlitt) signalled that the Greek poet, who was still conveniently compressed into one individual by most readers, was endowed with the wisdom and insight achieved by experience: in artistic representations he is never youthful, unlike Apollo, the god with special jurisdiction over poetic affairs.

Homer and Ulysses

The authority of ‘old’ Homer: a new range of admiring responses In the opening episode of Joyce’s Ulysse s the memory of noisy horseplay between undergraduates disrupts a conversation between Stephen Dedalus and his co-tenant Buck Mulligan. The sound floats out of an open window and startles the tranquillity of an Oxford quadrangle, even as the moment of recall disrupts the narrative. Into the remembered scene a deaf gardener enters, aproned and masked with Matthew Arnold’s face. Unable to hear the shouts of the students he pushes his mower over the sombre lawn concentrating on his task intently. Before the students continue their conversation a single broken line intrudes consisting of the phrases To ourselves, new paganism and omphalos. This fragmented line, which might be said to express a parodic mantra of modernist concerns, serves to ensure that issues of identity, Hellenism and the return to the primitive remain firmly to the front of the reader’s mind even as Stephen’s attention is drawn back to the prosaic question of the behaviour of his lodger. So what are we to make of Arnold’s cameo appearance at this early stage of the novel? It is interesting that the main commentators on Joyce have nothing to say about it. But for anyone reading the text with an eye to the relationship between Homer and modernity, the evocation of one of the nineteenth century’s most illustrious interpreters of Homer cannot fail to invite speculation about this particular figuration of the relationship between an ancient Greek literary text, one of the traditional landscapes of classical learning, and the cacophony of the modern.