Introduction “Isn’t everything that is said by the storytellers and the poets a narrative of what has happened or what is or what is to come?” “What else?” he said. Plato Republic 392d This book plumbs the virtues of the Homeric poems as scripts for solo performance. Despite the focus on orality for the last several decades, and… Read more
1. The Elements of Poetics and Presence The specific virtue of solo Homeric performance has come into view: namely, the performer’s position between representation and action. The bard drifts within the space of half-acting; he does not merely alternate smoothly between narrating and enacting. Epic performance brings characters and objects into presence but also induces uncertainty as to the “whereabouts” of the performer, the characters, and the… Read more
2. Marpessa, Kleopatra, and Phoenix Perhaps it means that at the point where we are we have lost all touch with the true theater, since we confine it to the domain of what daily thought can reach, the familiar or unfamiliar domain of consciousness;—and if we address ourselves to the unconscious, it is merely to take from it what it has been able to collect… Read more
Interlude 1. Ring Thinking: Phoenix in Iliad 23 A full account of the theatricality or performability of Phoenix’s speech involves features such as structure, image, and mythological background. This Interlude shows how these features carry forward from Book 9 to reappear in the narrative of Phoenix’s other major appearance in the poem, in the Funeral Games of Book 23. Somewhat as the second panel of his speech,… Read more
3. Half-Burnt: The Wife of Protesilaos In and Out of the Iliad The most passionate advocacies for the art of poetry in sophisticated late periods, such as the period of Horace, turn upon the function of poetry as keeping alive, across the abysses of death and of the difference between persons, the human image. … Now I think you make a generational error … by… Read more
Interlude 2. A Source for the Iliad’s Structure Now that we have drawn out the performative virtues of the Iliad’s use of the Protesilaos story, let us pivot around and look again at the question of sources and intertextuality. What are we to make of the genealogical connections among the female figures in the background: Marpessa, her daughter Kleopatra, and her granddaughter Polydora? As Pausanias [… Read more
Acknowledgements The ideas in this book were first launched in a waterlogged basement in Queens, New York City, in the spring of 2007, although our partnership had first emerged in the similarly watery surrounds of the Venice International University Seminar on Literature and Culture in the Ancient Mediterranean (2003–2004). There we enjoyed the rare resources of both time and money to hear lectures by and receive advice from Alessandro Barchiesi,… Read more
Note on Text and Translations Passages from the Homeric poems are quoted from T.W. Allen’s editio maior of the Iliad (1931) and P. Von der Mühll’s Teubner Odyssey (1962) respectively. Those from Hesiod are from M. L. West’s Theogony (1966), F. Solmsen’s Works and Days (1970), and R. Merkelbach’s and M. L. West’s Fragmenta Hesiodea (1967). Quotations from the Theban fragments come from the editions of M. Davies (1988) and… Read more
Introduction. Why Thebes? You tell the events of Thebes,he tells of the Phrygians’ battle-shouts;but I tell of my conquests.No horse has destroyed me,nor foot soldier, nor ships,but another new armystrikes me from its eyes. Anacreontea, fr. 26 [1] When we first started working on this book, just over a decade… Read more
1. Troy, The Next Generation: Politics [1] Homer’s engagement with Thebes comes to the fore as the two opposing forces prepare to do battle for the first time in the Iliad on the plain in front of Troy’s citadel. Agamemnon’s review of his troops (Iliad 4.223–421) continues both the examination of his leadership and the introduction to some of the main Achaean figures. While some… Read more
