Part III. Epic Competition in Performance: Homer and Rhapsodes amant alterna Camenae Muses love singing by turns Vergil, Eclogue 3.59 16. The Amoebaean Muses In recent Homeric scholarship it has become something of a commonplace to reconstruct speech genres and discourse strategies within the Iliad and Odyssey. [1] Yet there is still disagreement… Read more
17. From Written to Oral Milman Parry and his students have shown in detail how poet-singers compose while they perform, and perform while they compose epic poetry. However, we have yet to apply the valuable insights gained from their research to later stages of a poetic tradition, particularly after the poetic “texts” are written down, while live performances of these “texts” continue. The time has now come… Read more
18. Modes of Innovation The evidence for rhapsodic performance as we have it suggests that there were at least three basic types of improvisational activity in which rhapsodes engaged. The first involves the “stitching” or “weaving” of song, the second involves the insertion of newly composed “Homeric” verses into a preexisting text, and the third involves capping with hexameter verses. We are often at pains to determine… Read more
19. The Panathenaia and Beyond The most prominent rhapsodic competition that we know about took place at the Panathenaia in Athens. In this competition rhapsodes performed by exchange and by cue in a manner that seems to reflect, albeit indirectly, what we observed in the Certamen. I will only discuss here the two most important testimonia for what J. A. Davison once called the “Panathenaic Rule.”… Read more
Acknowledgments My warmest thanks go to Gregory Nagy, Casey Dué, Alexander Hollmann, Ryan Hackney, Ivy Livingston, and the entire CHS publication team. To Stephe … Read more
Introduction As Herodotus explores how much and in which ways human societies are mutually different, he takes for granted the generally recognized subdivision of the world into Greeks and barbarians. [1] But this common-view discourse provides only a partial framework of explanation for the text of the Histories. [2] The language of the Greek-barbarian antithesis stands in… Read more
1. Greek Speakers Greeks and Pelasgians In his narrative of Miltiades’ conquest of Lemnos (6.137–140), Herodotus begins by reporting how at that time Pelasgians were occupying the island. In the heroic age these Pelasgians used to live in Attica but the Athenians expelled them, “either justly or unjustly,” depending on the source one believes. According to Hecataeus, the Athenians had allowed the Pelasgians to inhabit an… Read more
2. The Ethnographer and Foreign Languages Another histōr: Psammetichus and the origin of language One passage in the Histories appears to raise the anthropological problem of the beginning of human speech and therefore, potentially, of the origin of language differentiation. But it does so in an indirect way, through the eyes of the Egyptian king Psammetichus who is, moreover, interested in a different problem. Psammetichus “wants… Read more
3. Herodotos hermēneus Metalinguistic glosses Herodotus himself assumes the role of interpreter when he translates a foreign word into Greek or provides a native term. Aside from Psammetichus’ discovery that bekós is Phrygian for bread (2.2), all switches of the linguistic code in the Histories occur in metanarrative. [1] In about twenty cases the narrator deliberately introduces a common noun denoting some… Read more
4. The Meaning of Language Difference On misunderstanding language difference In relation to the standards against which he measures himself, the histōr of the Histories possesses a multi-lingual competence that contrasts with the sense of strangeness most Greek-speakers experience when confronted with any barbarian speech. In his narrative of the common origins of the oracles of Zeus-Ammon in Libya and of Zeus at Dodona, [… Read more
