“coming from the mountain a great eagle with crooked beak broke their necks and killed them all.”
Thus in four passages the descent of Odysseus on the suitors has been foreboded or foreseen in strikes made by birds of prey. In three cases the attacking birds are eagles; once it is a hawk. The appearance of the motif twice in Book XVII and once again in Book XIX harks back to its introduction in Book II. It also anticipates the climax of the fight in Odysseus’ hall in Book XXII. At that point Athena unfurls her stormcloud, the aegis, overhead, and the surviving suitors break and run like cattle stung by gadflies. Now (302) comes the simile:
“But the pursuers, like αγυπιο with hooked talons and crooked beak issuing from the mountains to dive on flights of birds, etc.” We had expected eagles, αετο, or hawks, κρκοι but the word is αγυπιο, and I am distressed to say that the usual translation of that is “vultures.” Liddell & Scott give “vulture” for αγυπιóς. But let us consider the case patiently. We have not met the word before in The Odyssey. Liddell & Scott and the Homeric lexicographer, Autenrieth, cite three occurrences in The Iliad. In Book VII, 59, when Athena and Apollo are represented as taking their seats on the oak of Zeus as Hektor challenges the Akhaians,
“They perched like birds, like αγυπιο.” In Book XVII, 460, Automedon making chariot forays among the Trojans is likened to an αγυπιóς among geese. Most interesting of all is the case in Book XVI, 428, when Patroklos and Sarpedon clash in battle—for here the first line of the simile is the very same line that we find repeated in The Odyssey:
“like αγυπιο with hooked talons and crooked beak/on a high rock, crying loud, they fought.”
Now, it seems to me that on the Homeric evidence there is something wrong with translating this word as “vulture.” A vulture as we understand the term is a carrion bird rather than a hunting bird, and in every context of both Iliad and Odyssey where a vulture in our sense is clearly indicated Homer uses the word γψ. In no instance, as we have seen, is αγυπιóς used of a carrion bird; on the contrary, in two cases, one in The Iliad and one our climactic simile in The Odyssey, it is used of a hunting bird, and in one of the two remaining cases it supplies a simile for two gods at rest on a bough. If Homer had meant γψ he could have used γψ, a handy word and one he used often enough elsewhere. But he used another word, and used it because he unquestionably meant another thing. He meant a bird like a hawk or an eagle, a killer, a threat to geese, a hunter of small birds in general. He did not mean the stinking buzzard that feeds on corpses left by others.
In the first edition of my Odyssey I translated αγυπιο in Book XXII as “eagles” to go with the eagle passages that lead up to it. I went too far. If the poet had wished to say “eagles” he could have used the word for eagles, αετο. Instead, he lifted a line from The Iliad, as he often did, presumably because it would suit his purpose here. How, then, should αγυπιο be rendered? Well, I see that John Moore, in his recent excellent version of Sophocles’ Ajax, (The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. Lattimore & Grene, Chicago), encountering this problem in line 169,
translates
But fear of the huge falcon, etc.
possibly in view of considerations like those I have been expounding. In revising I have followed his example. I hope Homer would be better pleased. No doubt the four attackers in Book XXII are more justly likened to falcons than to eagles if, as I suspect, falcons more often hunt in company; the wild eagle, unless paired by Zeus, I imagine hunts alone.
SOME GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS
I
An artist in narrative as we know it will have been interested in his art through reading, and he will expect to be read. It is difficult for us to realize what it means that the man who made The Odyssey may never have read anything at all. Five or six centuries before his time, in the heroic age of his poem, there had been a Greek syllabary at Mykênai and elsewhere, apparently used mainly for keeping accounts and lists. A memory of this may have survived in a line of The Iliad, but the syllabary itself had long gone out of use, and the world of Homer was illiterate. During the eighth century B.C. the people of the Greek mainland and islands imported a Semitic alphabet and began using it, at least for brief inscriptions. If Homer lived to see this, he probably thought of it as a new magic or amusement, almost certainly not as the medium of his work. We can surmise that we owe our text of Iliad and Odyssey not to Homer but to the importunity of some technician who “took them down,” as nowadays a man would do with a tape recorder. Even in the unlikely event that Homer himself wrote out versions of one or both poems, the fact would remain that he and his audience were not readers but auditors of stories in verse.
Dozens of these stories had been told, or sung, among Aegean people for generations before Homer, forming a tradition possibly as old as English literature is now. We may imagine small communities of a feudal sort whose gentry found in the recitation or performance of these tales all history, all theatre, and all that we think of as literary entertainment. The performers were no doubt sometimes amateurs, but more often as time went on they were professionals who spent a lifetime in a hard craft. Our poet came late and had had supremely gifted predecessors. He inherited a traditional art comparable in range and refinement to the art of the musical virtuoso in our day, but more creative and fluid, for in some degree it remained an art of improvisation.
Thirty years ago my teacher and friend Milman Parry showed how many Homeric lines were constructed out of metrical formulas, out of a vocabulary of metrical parts that with slight modification or none would serve in the context of various actions or descriptions. This vocabulary of phrases was like an Erector or Meccano set for making verse as you went along. Parry and Albert Lord, who has continued his work, studied the similar technique of oral epic still practised in our day in Jugoslavia. Professor Lord’s important book, The Singer of Tales (Harvard, 1960), is an account of their researches and conclusions, and it is indicated reading for anyone who wants to understand the kind of art that Homer practised. We appear to know more about this art than Plato did. It is a technique rather simply described: many formulas ready in the memory give the storyteller or singer a means of developing action and dialogue as the spirit moves him, with formulaic lines or passages to buoy him up when invention fails. A stringed instrument is indispensable. Meter is indispensable. What Lord calls the “phonological context,” the alliterative and voweling pattern, to a certain extent determines invention.
I cannot refer to these studies without making one or two reservations. Parry thought Homer’s vocabulary of formulas almost wholly traditional and conventional, but I could never see why originality in detail should be denied a poet to whom it was impossible to deny originality in the large—in conception and organization. I should suppose, too, that although his medium was suited to improvisation, it was no less suited to composition and rehearsal beforehand—an aspect of the matter rather slighted in Parry and Lord. Finally, while statements of the theory sometimes give us to understand that formulaic structure was all-pervasive in both Iliad and Odyssey, I have yet to see this proved. My own reading of both poems has left me with the impression that while there are many recurrences and reshapings, there are also many passages without echo or precedent—as we might infer from the fact that many Homeric words occur once and once only.
Our understanding of the Homeric poems, however, has been permanently altered and improved by Parry’s work and Lord’s, and the famous Homeric Question, the question of single or multiple authorship of Iliad and Odyssey, will never be the same again. There is little doubt now that from the singers before him Homer had learned not only a rich metrical language but a large repertory of themes. Old themes, like that of the return of heroes, he handled again with joyous elaboration and cunning. It is likely that his compositions, from the nature of the case, varied from one performance to another. No doubt a tale might be told either briefly and broadly or at length and with subtlety, depending on audience
and occasion. There was no canonical version.
As Professor Lord puts it: “The theme is in reality protean; in the singer’s mind it has many shapes, all the forms in which he has ever sung it, although his latest rendering of it will naturally be freshest in his mind … And the shapes that it has taken in the past have been suitable for the song of the moment. In a traditional poem, therefore, there is a pull in two directions: one is toward the song being sung and the other is toward the previous use of the same theme. The result is that characteristic of oral poetry which literary scholars have found hardest to understand and accept, namely, an occasional inconsistency, the famous nod of a Homer.”
Our versions of Iliad and Odyssey must have originated in those versions that at the moment of dictation or recording the performer, whether Homer or a follower of Homer, happened to sing. He may have been more inspired on other occasions, but it is fair to assume that when it came to recording he did his best, and did well. Perhaps on this occasion he chose to record the “long songs” and to restore, so to speak, many cuts often made in performance. Neither poem as we have it could have been recorded at one sitting, and it is possible that long intervals elapsed between the recording of one part and that of another. Given the conditions, and given what Professor Lord calls the protean nature of the themes, we can no longer take inconsistencies in the poems as proof of multiple authorship.
Artist and writer know that any work, ancient or modern, even any masterwork, could easily have been very different from what it is. If you are curious about these matters, you can often see, in drafts and sketches, part at least of the sheaf or spectrum of possible forms of which the “final” version of a story or poem or picture represents a selection—not necessarily or invariably the best—or simply a terminus at which effort stopped. An element of the composite remains in all but the most perfect composition. Of this general truth the Homeric poems are special instances. It is not difficult to see in each poem traces of other stories, or of other versions in which the same stories were handled differently. For more than a century Homeric criticism devoted itself to spotting logical and linguistic discrepancies, discovering one or the other poem to be a “wretched patchwork,” in the words of one eminent scholar. While I was engaged on this translation, Professor Denys Page’s Bryn Mawr lectures, published as The Homeric Odyssey (Oxford, 1955), argued, or reargued, the case against “unity” with asperity and flourish. But many of his points were debater’s points, and I doubt that Page realized all the implications of Parry’s work or Lord’s.
To sum up, The Odyssey could well have been composed by one singer, working with themes he had heard from others, in a medium developed by others; if single in one sense, the authorship was certainly multiple in another. There is no way of proving it single in any sense. An admirer, a son, an apprentice, a collaborator, may have contributed passages or sections—a final section perhaps, as many critics have thought—to the “long song” as we have it. But the contrary is also possible. The truth, I think, is that we are too remote in time and language to decide. These, roughly, are the considerations that ought to be present to our minds when we think of Homer. But it is not necessary to put the name in quotation marks.
II
A living voice in firelight or in the open air, a living presence bringing into life his great company of imagined persons, a master performer at his ease, touching the strings, disposing of many voices, many tones and tempos, tragedy, comedy, and glory, holding his auditors in the palm of his hand: was Homer all of this? We can only suppose that he was. If what we imagine is true, Homer must himself have been his poems, in a physical sense unequalled in the case of any poet since. Imagine Henry IV and The Tempest composed not for production by a company of actors but as solo performances by Shakespeare himself. Or imagine it in the case of either, not both. The notion is still astonishing, and it is difficult to believe it.
I learn from W. S. Merwin, in the introduction to his translations of Spanish Ballads (Anchor, 1961), that the wandering juglares of medieval Spain, who sang and recited the epic cantares, “might be accompanied in their performance by mimes, known as remendadores, and cazarros—a name which included clowns and most varieties of stunt man.” Well, stunt men, or tumblers, are mentioned as performing along with a poet or singer at Menelaos’ court in Book IV of The Odyssey. But no mimes assist any οδς in the Homeric poems. This of itself would not prove that Homer did his own impersonations. The οδς as Homer presented him was a figure of the heroic age, four or five centuries before his time. But so far as I know there is no evidence whatever that Homer himself, or the ’αοδο in his immediate tradition, or their successors, the rhapsodes, were accompanied by mimes or actors.
We have no perfect word for οδς, for the kind of artist Homer was. “Bard” was fairly exact but has become a joke. “Skald” takes us too far into druidical regions. “Minstrel” is better but still too slight, too trammeled with doublet and hose, and faintly raffish after Gilbert & Sullivan. The Italian compound word cantastorie is at least neutral and is a definition of sorts. Lord did well to adopt the English equivalent, “singer of tales.” But I am not satisfied. The term does not do justice to the creative and inventive power of the οδς. It does not suggest his mimetic art. And there is a difficulty about “singer” as a term for the poet and performer of these things.
That the telling of a story, and the incidental acting of roles, should be called “singing”—this will strike us at first as affected or strange. We may indeed think of opera, disciplined and expressive opera like the Orfeo of Gluck, true lyric theatre as the Italians call it; but the orchestra and the stage, the whole convention, are alien to Homer. Perhaps it is enough to recall certain fine acting voices. As a child I sat aloft in the second balcony of an old theatre in Illinois while a traveling company played Sancho Panza, and I remember the beautiful voice of the late Otis Skinner rising effortless, malleable and pure, or falling to a crystalline whisper, far off there below, in unhurried declamation, while the whole theatre sat spellbound by that human instrument alone. There is no doubt that the master οδς had a gift like that, a trained voice of great expressive and melodic range.
By all accounts, too, the Homeric performer used a second instrument and depended on it: the κθαρις, an affair of a few gut strings with some kind of resonator, possibly a tortoise shell, like the later lyre. It would be anachronistic to think of it as a guitar or lute, so I call it a “gittern harp” and sometimes refer to the performer as a harper. Homer describes him more than once as plucking or strumming an overture to a given tale or song, and he must have used the instrument not only for accompaniment but for pitch, and to fill pauses while he took thought for the next turn. No doubt the instrument marked rhythm, too.
We need not delude ourselves as to how far these generalities really take us. How in particular the voice, the metered verse, and the stringed instrument were related in these performances, and in the recital of poetry throughout antiquity, I do not well understand, and I do not think anyone does perfectly. In our own tradition the “music of verse” is one thing and “music” proper is another. A song is a song, not necessarily a poem. The Peaceful Western Wind and Mistress Mine indeed happen to be both, and I have heard Christopher Casson lean to a small Irish harp and sing Oft in the Stilly Night so attentively that it seemed twice the poem I had known before. But this is exceptional. Who would set to music the great lyrics of Yeats? Who could improve on Lear by scoring it? Here all is in the shape and movement of metered language. But we find the verse of Homer—and this is my point—as beautiful in itself as the verse of Yeats or Shakespeare. What we call a “musical arrangement” would disperse or confuse the effect of it. We can be sure, I think, that harp or κθαρις played a very subdued part, however essential, in the original Homeric performance.
III
One of our first discoveries in reading Homer will be that he was a poet in our sense of the word, a man gifted at making verse. All
the learning that we may later assemble, all we can know or guess of the artist as an improviser and entertainer, even our fugitive sense of him as the demiurge of a world transfigured, all this cannot supersede—indeed it is founded on—our pleasure in him line by line, the way we hear or read him. I will never forget how unexpectedly moved I was years ago when for the first time I heard Telémakhos in Book I speak of his father as
The Odyssey: The Fitzgerald Translation Page 52