Looking up, I said to myself, in effect, “Why, this really is poetry!” and I meant poetry as good as “Call for the robin redbreast and the wren.” Many times afterward, in reading or translating Homer, I have again paused over a line or a pair of lines in recognition and homage.
Parry thought this incomparable medium, the formulaic hexameter, had been shaped through centuries of trial and error, a testing and refining process conducted on many occasions before generations of auditors, so that in the end only the fittest language survived and the virtuoso had at his command the best words in the best order for anything he cared to relate or invent. I used at first to feel that the recurrent epithets and formula lines were a mere convention and a bore. In time I realized that they were musical phrases, brief incantations, of which the miserable renderings gave little or no idea. These formulas entered the repertory not only because they were useful but because they were memorable, I mean because nobody who had once heard them could easily forget them; and that is true to this day.
It is possible that by Homer’s time even he could not have said precisely what the two epithets in this line meant—and there are a number of others of which the same is true—but the line had been kept for its fragrance, a fragrance of Dawn, inimitable and unsurpassable, no more boring in its recurrence than Dawn itself. Because there are hundreds of lines like this and more hundreds of half lines and phrases, the very medium of Homer is pervaded by lyric quality. The simplest phrases have it. Hear Hektor saying (Iliad VI, 264), “Don’t offer me any sweet wine, dear Mother:”
How could you render that? Consider the voweling, and consider how the first epithet, after the ghost of a pause, hovers between “wine” and “mother.” There is, besides, a peculiar cleanliness and lightness of movement, as often in Homer, and there is something else that I call the cut or sculpture of words. It is easiest to be aware of this in the last two feet of certain hexameters: νστον ταρων and νδον ντων. These are rounded shapes.
I am not being what Professor Irving Babbitt used to call “fanciful.” If you will make the effort to imagine this Greek as still virgin of any visual signs at all, associated with no letters, no Greek characters, no script, no print—as purely and simply expressive sound, you will be able to perceive it in the air, its true medium, and to hear how it shapes and tempers the air by virtue of stops and tones. I will quote two more lines, one for consonants, and one for vowels. The first is Aphrodite saying in Iliad V, 359,
in which we hear the light tongue of the goddess of love herself in three coquettish particles, τε … τε … τε … My second example is the first line sung by those temptresses of the sea, known to Homer as Seirenes, and it is a typical triumph of formulary art since it is a modified version of a line that occurs in The Iliad in quite a different context, and in the mouth of quite a different personage. Here it is, XII, 184:
There is a rhythm of anapests, and intricate rhyming: Δε and σε on the beat, λ on the offbeat and κ on the beat, αν’ and α on the beat, ν on the beat and ν on the offbeat, and γ’ turned round widdershins on µγα: this is a conjuring kind of echolalia. But more: the crooning vowels are for low seductive voices, rising in mid-line with αν’ and then rising and opening with a savage shout in ’Aχαν at the end.
You might call this sort of thing “phonetic wit”—though it may have come to the artist without calculation. Along with it, in Homer, there is a lot of verbal wit enjoyed for its own sake and also syntactical wit, a quality of style that Chapman and Pope could appreciate. Chiastic order is a favorite form, and The Iliad especially teems with it. Book IV, 125:
I could go on indefinitely, but I should cut this short and say that we are not meant very often to stop and consider so curiously. The narrative pace does not encourage it. You can be a connoisseur of the single line if you like, but this is only the beginning of appreciation. Homer is lyric but rarely indulges the lyric, he keeps his surface alive but keeps it moving; the line is only the medium, as I began by calling it, and as such it is subordinate to practically everything else. It is subordinate in the first place to the passage, to the effect created by the placement of lines in succession. Continuous prose cannot achieve the switches and surprises that you get by playing on a regular meter, a measured base. Of these effects Homer, formulas and all, was a master. We have often heard how the movement of the hexameter line itself could be varied by pauses, lightened by dactyls, retarded by spondees; but we have heard less of what could happen in the movement from line to line and in the course of action or speeches. A change of pace, a change of mood, an ironic aside, a quick look into the past or into the distance—we find all these between one line and the next.
Homer’s humor, too, in The Iliad rather grim or slapstick, in The Odyssey more subtly comic, often dawns on us at the unexpected swerve of a new line. In Iliad VIII there is a crash of lightning against the Akhaians and the best charioteers give way. Idómeneus retreats, Agamemnon retreats, big Aias and little Aias retreat, but Nestor? Nestor alone stood fast, we hear, and just as we begin to admire the veteran the next line says (81),
“Not that he wanted to in the least, but one of his horses was disabled.” In Odyssey IV, after Helen’s story of how virtuously she kept Odysseus’ secret when she had recognized him spying in Troy, Meneláos cannot refrain from a pointed story to keep the record straight. There is a march of hexameters extolling Odysseus’ courage when he and the Akhaian captains were waiting in the wooden horse to bring death upon the Trojans. Then abruptly, in 274, λθες πετα σ κεσε. The words make a trochee and two amphibrachs: “Who should come by there but you then”—and he goes on to tell of the peril she put them all in by mimicking the voices of their wives. You can see this trick of the sudden change of movement and tone played by Eurymakhos in Odyssey I, 405, when after several lines of hearty assurance to Telémakhos he looks at him harder, λλ’ θλω σε, φρστε,περ ρσθα and the sneer becomes, yes, audible.
Another thing, more highly dramatic, is of course the calculated and gradated heightening of tone or energy throughout a longer passage. For a crescendo of passion, I suppose Akhilleus’ great tirade in Iliad IX, 307 sqq., cannot be matched, but Odysseus, among his other gifts of gab, has a way of beginning mild and ending deadly. In XVIII there are two examples, a relatively brief one in his reply to Iros, 15 sqq., and a longer one to Eurymakhos, 366 sqq.
Now all these that I have mentioned are tiny applications of a principle everywhere at work over the expanse of both poems. Narrative art lives as a river lives, first by grace of tributaries—in Homer by the continual refreshment of invention and unlooked-for turns—and second by the direction of flow. If in the line and passage the poems are interesting, as they are, heaven knows they are even more interesting, in the ways they take as their currents widen. Not that Homer is free of longueurs: Phoinix’ tale of Meleagros in Iliad IX strikes me as windy, and in the slow movement of The Odyssey at least one of the digressions and retards—the pedigree of Theoklýmenos—was too much even for this virtuoso to bring off. He nods, and we nod with him. But almost always the attention of the audience is courted and held. The earliest critics noticed how Homer varied his effects: for an offhand example, Telémakhos arrives off Pylos by sea at dawn, arrives at Sparta by land at nightfall. The battle scenes in The Iliad are sometimes thought monotonous; in fact they are prodigiously inventive and differ one from another not only in general shape but in detail: time after time, it is true, a man falls and his armor clangs upon him, but either he or the man next to him has just been killed in an entirely new way. The formulas give the narrative musical consistency; the innovations keep it alive. The more it is the same, the more it changes. In the very use of the formulas themselves, remarkable effects are got by slight additions or modifications. Penelope’s visits to the banquet hall in The Odyssey are formulary: she appears with her maids, she draws her veil down and across her face, she speaks, she retires, weeps, and goes to sleep. The firs
t time (I, 365) after she is gone the suitors make a din, they all swear they will have her; the second time (XVI, 413) she appears and retires as before but there is no din, no swearing; the third time (XVIII, 212) there is no din, but on her appearance (not on her withdrawal) a new line is added to the formula, telling us that the suitors’ knees were weakened with lust for her; then comes the swearing line from Book I. Someone has called this trick of style “incremental repetition.” It can be, as it is in this case, very powerful.
IV
A probable rate of Homeric performance was about five hundred lines an hour. So far as I know, nobody has gone very far with deductions from this fact. The first four books of The Odyssey are obviously a narrative and dramatic unit, so are the next four, and so are the next four. These are three successive waves of action, and each runs to about two thousand lines or about four hours of performance. There is no reason for not regarding this as the duration of a formal recital. If we look again at the second half of the poem we will see that these twelve Books, too, fall into three divisions of about the same length. XIII through XVI, XVII through XX, and XXI through XXIV. These six divisions could well be considered the true Books of The Odyssey, within which the traditional Books are like chapters or cantos. Please understand that I have no positive authority for this suggestion; it merely accords with units of probable performance and with the organization of the poem. I would not discard the traditional twenty-four sections, τασθαλσιν made by Alexandrians who were perhaps following a still earlier tradition.
My six divisions, at any rate, will help us to see the entire poem in outline. In the first performance (I through IV) the last is of course foreshadowed if not determined, Olympian decisions are taken, we are introduced on the scene to the situation that is to be remedied, the conflict to be decided, and we are prepared to meet the famous man who has it all to cope with. In the second (V—VIII) we find him in a distant setting and see him in action, facing other situations, other challenges, making his way back toward the big one that awaits him. In the third (IX—XII) he himself takes over the narration and interests us directly in his past adventures, as though he were now the poet before us. In the fourth or “slow movement” as I call it (XIII—XVI) we see him at last near to his home and battleground, gathering information, testing a likely helper, and reunited with his son. In the fifth (XVII—XX) he enters the scene itself, comes to grips with his situation, suffers it, and sizes up the persons involved in it at close hand. In the sixth (XXI—XXIV) he fights and wins, remedies and recomposes everything.
That is an outline in the most general terms. If I tried to follow and comment on the narrative in detail I would never finish. But there are a few matters … . One is this: the universe of The Odyssey is subject to moral law, and in the first few lines briefly, or amply in the first few hundred, we are informed of this law, of how it may be violated, and how badly, sooner or later, the offenders come off. The poet was not Plato, Augustine, or Immanuel Kant, and we need not bother to pick flaws in his thinking. He tells us that Odysseus’ crew perished for their τασθαλσιν and then Zeus remarks that Aigisthos in particular and mortals in general have aggravated their lot by the same misdemeanor. What is this misdemeanor? Presumption, impious and reckless: a folly of greed. It is more than taking what belongs to a vague “someone else”—for you are permitted some raids and wars of conquest; it is claiming and taking more than your share in your own commonwealth, without a decent respect for the views of heaven or the opinions of mankind. Wife-stealing and murder, usurpation and insolence: these are the crimes against private and public order that the Olympians meditate as the poem opens. Specific objects of meditation are two Akhaian kingdoms left masterless by the war. Mykenai succumbed, now Ithaka is threatened. The two casts of characters are paralleled, as they will be often again, openly or by implication, throughout the poem: Aigisthos and the suitors, Klytaimnéstra and Penelope, Agamémnon and Odysseus, Orestes and Telémakhos. The present action will stand out more sharply by contrast with the dark action in Mykênai years before.
A very learned and close student of literature, Erich Auer-bach, was led by the argument he was making at the time to assert that “the Homeric style knows only a foreground, only a uniformly illuminated, uniformly objective present.” It would be better to remove the word “only” and to add that the Homeric style knows a constant background of retrospect and allusion to the past. It is so in The Iliad, and more so in The Odyssey. In fact, that past of which the events of The Iliad form a part stands everywhere behind the events of The Odyssey, the perspective in which The Odyssey takes place.
The relationship between the two poems is fascinating. Clearly, both are drawn from the same great fund of stories about the heroes of the expedition against Troy, both are composed in the same formulary tradition, and The Odyssey was second in order of composition. Besides a great many lines of The Iliad adapted or even playfully parodied in The Odyssey, there is one curious bit of evidence that I do not remember seeing noticed. The audience of The Iliad had to be kept straight at every point as to which of the two armies was being referred to, hence a great number of formula lines ending with the Greek for “Akhaians,” a short syllable and two longs in any of the plural cases. These line endings were so convenient metrically that they were kept throughout The Odyssey, even in contexts where they were no longer functional, where it was unnecessary to distinguish Akhaians from anyone else. But no single incident or event of The Iliad is so much as referred to in The Odyssey, and this is so striking (there are also a few odd differences of vocabulary) that it has been possible to argue that the composer of The Odyssey did not even know The Iliad. We will be sensible to conclude that he not only knew but leaned on it familiarly; that he, like Odysseus, did not hold with twice-told tales; and that he wanted to complete and complement The Iliad by working into his background events that took place after the funeral of Hektor, the close of that poem.
Of these events, the fate of Agamémnon, as I have said, is from first to last the pattern of tragedy against which The Odyssey is played to a happy ending. In the successive appearances of the Mykênai theme, something is added each time—here is incremental repetition for you—until the climax in Book XI when Agamemnon himself tells his story. There is also a coda, in Book XXIV. But of course Mykêenai is only a part of the background richly given in the first four Books and kept in view later, a background not only of depth in time but of the wide world beyond Ithaka. To make clearer the disorder of that realm there is first the order of Nestor’s kingdom, where sacrifice and prayer are duly offered before meat (the suitors in Books I and II neither sacrifice nor pray) and then the splendor of Meneláos’ court. In the discourse of the two great gentlemen there are echoes of battles long ago, and there are also images of other seas and lands far to the east and south. Most important of all, from one Book to another in the “Te-lemakheia” the figure of the absent Odysseus grows more vivid in what is said about him. We are being prepared for an entrance. We are even prepared thematically, in Meneláos’ story of seafaring, of detention on an island, of the nymph Eidothea and the Ancient of the Sea, for the adventures of Odysseus.
V
The Odyssey is about a man who cared for his wife and wanted to rejoin her. In the resonance of this affection, and by way of setting it off, the poem touches on a vast diversity of relationships between men and women: love maternal and filial, love connubial and adulterous, seduction and concubinage, infatuation superhuman and human, chance encounters lyric and prosaic. There are many women, young and old, enchantresses and queens and serving maids. In the “society,” as we say, of The Odyssey, women can be very distinguished: Athena is powerful in the highest circles, Arete holds equal power with her husband in Phaiákia, Helen has been reestablished in the power of her beauty, which if I am not mistaken she makes Telemakhos feel. The honor roll of lovely dead ladies in Book XI is fully appropriate to this poem. Three of the principal adventures of Odysseus are with
exquisite young women of great charm and spirit, and during each of these episodes the audience must wonder how he can possibly move on. He wants to regain his home and kingdom, it is true. But besides that, as Kalypso inquires, what is it about Penelope that draws him homeward? Her distinction is often mentioned, but do we ever see it overwhelmingly demonstrated?
I believe we do, or should. The demonstration, however, is dramatic and has been missed by many people, though not by all, through a failure to grasp the nature of The Odyssey as performance. Let me again insist upon it. More than half of this poem is dialogue. We know that in the first centuries after the Homeric poems were written down, they were presented as performances by rhapsodes who had them by heart, and we know from the Ion of Plato that such performances could be histrionic, highly and effectively so. There must have existed among these professionals a tradition of interpretation, nuance, gesture, and “business” in general that may easily have descended from the οιδο the inventors, from Homer himself. Into later and literary ages none of this survived. The French Homerist Victor Bérard noticed years ago that our text of The Odyssey often resembles an acting script. But no stage directions are included, and if we ask how to play any particular scene we find that there has been no Harley Granville-Barker of Homeric studies.
Well, let us at our leisure look into one situation and one big scene that will answer Kalypso’s question.
The purpose of Odysseus, determining the action of the poem, is to get home and to prevail there. Once he lands on Ithaka his problem is a tactical one: how, with his son and two fieldhands, to take on more than one hundred able-bodied young men and kill them all. By the end of Book XVI he has thought his problem through to a certain point: Telémakhos is to precede him to the manor, he is able to follow as a beggar, and at a signal from him the young man is to remove all shields, helmets, and throwing spears from those racks in the banquet hall where, as we remember, they were located in Book I. To be exact, not all are to be removed; a few are to be put aside for use against the suitors. My first observation is that this is as far as Odysseus ever goes, by himself, in planning the final combat. He goes no farther in the course of Book XVII and Book XVIII, and as if to fix this in our minds the poet at the beginning of Book XIX has him repeat his previous instructions about removing the arms; in fact he and Telémakhos do the job together. (This repetition used to be thought an interpolation; the arms, at any rate, are removed.)
The Odyssey: The Fitzgerald Translation Page 53