Foreword Gregory Nagy {ix} The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the “Iliad,” by Richard P. Martin, inaugurates the “Myth and Poetics” series. My goal, as series editor, is to encourage work that will help integrate literary criticism with the approaches of cultural anthropology and that will pay special attention to problems concerning the nexus of ritual and myth. For such an undertaking, we… Read more
Preface [In this on-line version, the page-numbers of the printed version are indicated within braces (“{” and “}”). For example, “{69|70}” indicates where p. 69 of the printed version ends and p. 70 begins. These indications will be useful to readers who need to look up references made elsewhere to the printed version of this book.] To hear the voice which tells the Iliad—that was my… Read more
Chapter 1. Performance, Speech-Act, and Utterance {1} Does it really matter whether or not Homer’s Iliad is a piece of oral poetry? In the final analysis, no. Even if the 15,693 hexameters printed in T. W. Allen’s Oxford Classical Text happen to represent the exact transcription of an actual performance by one “singer of tales” from the eighth century B.C., we still do not have an oral… Read more
Chapter 2. Heroic Genres of Speaking {43} The notion of “genre” has been described as “the most powerful explanatory tool available to the literary critic.” [1] It has usually been discussed within the confines of literary criticism. With the growth of Modernism and, concurrently, the recognition of non-Western literary traditions, critical assumptions about idealized genres of any sort have had to change. Read more
Chapter 3. Heroes as Performers {89} “A work about death often modulates readily, if eerily, into a work about literature. For death inhabits texts.” [1] In the terms of the Iliad, death generates texts; it is the boundary that one tries to surmount by action in this world. A reputation enshrined in poetry, “unwithering fame” (9.413), is the goal for every hero;… Read more
Chapter 4. The Language of Achilles: Language, Formula, and Style {146} Every hero is a performer. That is the essence of the dictum Peleus entrusts to Phoinix, who in turn reminds Achilles to be a speaker of words and a doer of deeds. [1] Between the two concepts no distinction is drawn. Both are performances. The poetry anticipates Austin and Searle in… Read more
Chatper 5. The Expansion Aesthetic {206} The changes made in formulaic patterns by the addition of words, or by melding with other patterns, can be seen at a number of points in Achilles’ longest speech. I shall concentrate on a few groups of lines that offer the best examples of the technique. Then, the expansions can be related to the rhetoric of the speech as a whole… Read more
The Poet as Hero: A Conclusion {231} Contact and distance. In these terms, I have approached Homer’s Iliad, in an attempt to overcome the long years in which the poem has been a text, to regain some sense of the poem as performance. I have claimed that the poet had a word for “performance” in the sense of authoritative self-presentation to an audience. I used this word—… Read more
Bibliography Abrahams, R. 1970. Deep Down in the Jungle, Rev. ed. Chicago: Aldine. ———. 1976. “The Complex Relations of Simple Forms.” In Ben-Amos 1976, pp. 193–214 ———. 1983. The Man-of-Words in the West Indies: Performance and the Emergence of Creole Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press ———. 1985. Review of Jeff Opland, Xhosa Oral Poetry. Poetics Today 6, 553–58. Adkins, A. 1960. “‘Honour’… Read more
Conclusion {263|264} After defining the essential semantic features of the participants in choral performances by women, an examination of their morphology clarified the relations that unite the members of this type of lyric group. The hierarchical relations uniting each of the chorus-members to the choregos (male or female) is doubled in the ties of equality that link these same chorus-members. These relationships were realized in the activity… Read more
