Preface for the Online Edition The printed edition of Poetry as Performance, originally published in 1996 by Cambridge University Press, is now in 2009 published online here by the Center for Hellenic Studies, with the permission of the Press. The original page-numbers are indicated within braces (for example, “{1|2}” indicates the break between pages 1 and 2). And I add here to the Preface of 1996… Read more
Introduction: A Brief Survey of Concepts and Aims The two central concepts of this book can be summed up in the words performance and composition, which are to be taken as two different aspects of one process in oral poetics. The emphasis here is on performance, as the title of the book indicates. The basic work on the interaction of performance and composition continues to be… Read more
Chapter 1 The Homeric Nightingale and the Poetics of Variation in the Art of a Troubadour. {|7} Let us begin with a passage from epic, where the epic is representing lyric, not epic. Specifically the lyric form is a song of lament. Penelope is at the moment comparing herself to a nightingale, the typical songbird of lament in ancient Greek traditions, who in a previous life… Read more
Chapter 2 Mimesis, Models of Singers, and the Meaning of a Homeric Epithet Let us continue where we left off, with the song of the nightingale. In the previous chapter, we noted that the idea of variation is implicit in the epithet poludeukḗs describing the voice (phōnḗ) of the songbird in Odyssey xix (521), but the task remains to formulate the precise meaning of this epithet,… Read more
Chapter 3 Mimesis of Homer and Beyond The variant epithet of the Homeric nightingale’s voice in Odyssey xix (521), poludeukḗs ‘patterning in many different ways’, applies to Homer himself and—just as important—to those who perform Homer. In making this claim, I am arguing that Homer’s nightingale is in effect a model for Homer—and even for performers who model their identities on Homer—in her capacity to… Read more
Chapter 4 Mimesis in Lyric: Sappho’s Aphrodite and the Changing Woman of the Apache We turn to a striking example of the equation between a ritual “this” and a mythical “that,” as postulated in Aristotle’s formulation of mimesis. This example of dramatic re-enactment, taken from a culture that is definitely unrelated to the Greek, is explicitly a case of initiation—a concept that we have seen… Read more
Chapter 5 Multiform Epic and Aristarchus’ Quest for the Real Homer. {|107} Multiformity, as conveyed by poludeukḗs ‘patterning in many different ways’, the variant epithet describing the sound of the nightingale in Odyssey xix (521), is a key concept in understanding poetry as performance in ancient Greece. This has been the general argument so far, which will now be applied specifically, in the second part of… Read more
Chapter 6 Homer as Script The Athenian Koine or “Vulgate” version of Homer, even if it were to have no claim to be the original Homer any more than the text established by Aristarchus, represents a crucial era in the history of Homeric performance traditions. This is the next argument to be made, added as a qualification to my earlier argument that we cannot simplistically… Read more
Chapter 7 Homer as “Scripture” Let us turn to the last of the five periods in the history of Homeric transmission, as formulated at the beginning of the fifth chapter. For the later Alexandrian scholars starting with Aristarchus, whom I put into period 5 of Homeric transmission, that is, into the most “rigid” period, the script or scripts stemming from the Athenian State tradition became… Read more
Chapter 8 Epilogue: Dead Poets and Recomposed Performers There is a late twelfth-century lai by Marie de France, entitled Laüstic, about a nightingale that was killed by a jealous knight who had been told by his wife, when asked why she would leave the bed so often at night and stand by the window, that ‘there is no joy in all the world like hearing… Read more
