This Chapter is concerned with deixis in Homer and Hesiod. In particular, I will study the deictic demonstrative οὗτος, whose use, I attempt to show, can tell us something about the way in which an audience experiences Homer’s heroic and Hesiod’s theogonic narrative as a distant reality, a reality that is nevertheless shared by poet and audience as an immediate presence in the context of performance.

Languages may or may not provide separate deictic elements for these two jobs. Homeric Greek does, in the anaphoric pronoun ὁ as against the deictic pronoun οὗτος. Such a situation is not only a grammatical expression of discours and histoire, of near and far in narrative; it also provides narrators with a means to use the deictic markers of the near, when they wish to pretend that the remote reality of their story is actually present in the performance, before the listeners’ eyes. This possibility, an important grammatical aspect of what ancient literary criticism called Homeric “vividness” (enargeia), is the main focus of this chapter.

Today’s conception of oral poetry in performance differs increasingly from that of Parry. We tend to emphasize communication rather than composition, and we conceive of the epic performance as the enactment, between a performer and his audience in their here and now, of a heroic past that is distant, yet alive, and accessible through the recognized medium of the poetic tradition. In this conception, the performer’s interaction with the audience in his evocation of the past is no less important than his mastery of a formulaic, metrical idiom. It is, I believe, a major task in Homer studies today to recover, if possible, some of that interaction.

The retention of old forms, be it for their metrical utility or simply for their oldness, may have side effects that bear on the semantic depth of the Homeric Kunstsprache. When what has become obsolete in the ordinary language is retained, and continues to be used alongside the newer form, the result may be a semantic choice, and hence a richness, that is unavailable in the ordinary language. The case of ὁ and οὗτος, and the grammar of narrative deixis in Homer and Hesiod, is an example of this phenomenon.

The pronoun ὁ continues to be used in classical Greek, but its anaphoric demonstrative force is weakened to that of the definite article (by a development not unlike that of Latin ille into French le); only in some fixed combinations (ὁ μέν, ὁ δέ) does the erstwhile demonstrative retain its original force. Its anaphoric functions have been mainly taken over by οὗτος, for example:

Priam has Agamemnon in mind, and he refers to him with the pronoun ὅδε: the object of pointing cannot yet be assumed to be a perception shared between him and Helen, and has to be presented as deixis from the point of view of the speaker himself. Helen answers Priam’s question with οὗτος, thereby indicating that she knows at whom Priam is pointing:

Unlike the Homeric narrator, Helen is dealing with a reality that is not produced by her own discourse; it exists before her, not in her speech but preceding it. With οὗτος she is actually pointing at the object of her reference, in the direct sense of “deixis.” Moreover, this pointing serves a distinct social function: Helen’s answer acknowledges Priam’s earlier perception. Helen’s and Priam’s joint seeing is in fact the very point of the use of οὗτος. We may say, then, that οὗτος is not only deictic, but also “dialogic.” The value of οὗτος as deictic of the second person is clearly brought out by the following example:

Thus far the difference between ὁ and οὗτος has been linked to the distinction between narrative and speech. But in the end this distinction is in and of itself not the final criterion. Before I discuss the use of οὗτος in narrative, I shall present some examples of ὁ in speech. In the following passage, for example, the two pronouns occur side by side in one context:

This is Agamemnon addressing Teucer; with οὕτως he refers to Teucer’s actual shooting, which is taking place right before his eyes. The reference to Teucer’s old father Telamon, on the other hand, is done with τὸν, not τοῦτον: the old man is not present; he cannot be pointed at and has to be established in Agamemnon’s speech, so as to be an antecedent for subsequent anaphoric reference. We observe, then, that the pronoun of anaphoric reference is not at all barred from the discourse of characters; it can, in fact, be quite effective in what they want to say. Consider, for example, how Agamemnon refuses to give back Chryseis to her father:

The choice of demonstrative, anaphoric τὴν instead of deictic ταύτην, signals that as far as Agamemnon is concerned Chryseis is not a reality shared between himself and her father. She is not present, not allowed to come out of the discourse that contains her reference, not allowed to become on object of pointing. Equally instructive is the way in which Eumaios the swineherd speaks about his absent master: after establishing him in the discourse with κεῖνος, the pronoun for remote deixis (xiv 70, 90), he refers to him with ὁ, the pronoun of anaphoric reference (xiv 133–137).

The closing formula has to be taken in close connection with the famous invocation of the Muses at the very beginning of the Catalogue, one of the rare moments at which the narrator speaks directly of himself and his public in terms of “me” and “us”:

The next example, too, is concerned with the poet’s human limitations. At the onset of the Battle of the Ships, he is faced with the arduous task of putting the chaotic complexity of the Trojan War into words. This is how he expresses his mortal vision:

The passage just discussed is a good point at which to turn briefly to Hesiod. We saw that the Homeric narrator is aware of his mortal shortcomings when confronted with the formidable task of recreating the past, and this human condition with its cognitive limitations calls for the aid of the Muses. The persona of Hesiod, on the other hand, appears to be much more confident. He can take the Muses’ assistance for granted, since he has been personally initiated. His discourse, in fact, is much more personal than Homer’s. The passage in which he tells of his poetic vocation contains the most explicit self-presentation of any narrator in all of Greek literature:

Hesiod strikingly refers to himself with ὅδε (τόνδε με) which, as we saw, is the pronoun of proximal, speaker-oriented deixis: the pronoun here designates the speaker himself as he is physically present before his audience. Hesiod goes on to say that the Muses ordered him to sing of the race of the immortal gods, thus implying their continued presence in the performance of the poet’s song.

It appears, then, that οὗτος is used when attention is drawn to the poet’s own speaking in the present. This would seem to apply to the next example as well, with which we return to Homer. Οὗτος is used here to characterize the words of the misguided Trojan warrior Asios:

These words refer to a preposterous speech in which Asios has blamed Zeus (calling him a liar, φιλοψευδὴς) for not allowing the Trojans to eliminate Polypoites and Leonteus, who successfully resisted the Trojan onrush. We have already been explicitly told that Asios is doomed:

Asios’s words are referred to with ταῦτα, yet closed in the usual Homeric way with ὣς ἔφατ᾿, “so he spoke.” This is different from the examples from the Odyssey to which we now turn. In Book Eight, the three performances of Demodokos at the banquet in honor of Odysseus are all closed in the following way:

Such a total coincidence, I suggest, is exactly what ταῦτα effects. But then Demodokos’s performances are far from being ordinary speeches; in fact, they are not direct discourse at all. They may seem to end as speeches, but they do not begin in this way. Demodokos’s songs are explicitly introduced as well-known, recognizable songs. The first is called “the οἴμη (‘lay’) whose “fame” (κλέος), was reaching up to heaven, the quarrel of Odysseus and Peleus’ son Achilles” (viii 74–75); the second simply “on the love of Ares and Aphrodite of the gold wreath” (viii 267); and the third one, in Odysseus’s words, “the ἵππου κόσμον (‘construction of the horse’),” followed by a brief description in which Odysseus’s own role is emphasized (viii 492–495).

This means that Demodokos’s songs start, quite uncharacteristically for Homer—but see the next example—as indirect speech (ὡς ‘how’, viii 76, 268, 500). Immediately after, however, the indirect speech construction verges into a discourse mode that seems at first sight to be direct speech, with Demodokos as speaker. Yet on closer inspection, it appears that we have here in fact a curious blend of Demodokos, the poet of the past, and Homer, the poet of the present. The voice of Demodokos is allowed to intrude into the discourse of the present. The song of the blind mythical bard, performed on the rarest of occasions, with an eyewitness in the audience whose scrutiny it withstood, is in fact appropriated by the Odyssey of the present; it becomes the Odyssey. Its reality is now nothing less than the reality of the Homeric performance itself. The immediate deixis of ταῦτα, then, bridges the gap with the past; far from merely repeating the earlier speech, it pulls that speech into the present, while at the same time characterizing the song of the present as just as good as the song of the past.

The remaining examples of οὗτος in Homeric narrative take us from represented speech to represented thought. In what ways does Homeric poetry represent the thoughts of its heroes or gods? The best-known strategy is the hero addressing his own thumos: the hero’s thoughts are performed on the Homeric stage, and there is no formal difference from overt speech presented to another person, for example:

Just as in the case of direct speech, the anaphoric adverbial demonstrative ὥς is used, marking the speech as a performance pointing to the past.

The narrator closes his rendering of Odysseus’s thoughts with a simple report on the outcome: “he considered A and B, and he decided B.” Again, the anaphoric ὥς is used. Notice, however, that ταῦτ᾿ ἄρα οἱ φρονέοντι would have been metrically possible, a phrase that actually occurs elsewhere (see the next example). In choosing the anaphoric adverbial demonstrative ὥς instead of the deictic accusative ταῦτα, the narrator contents himself with repeating the thought process as such, without allowing it to break through the narrative framework to become part of the immediate reality of the performance.

Consider now the second possibility. The character’s thought processes may also be interrupted by the sudden appearance of a god who determines his line of action. When this happens, the indirectly reported thought is referred to with the pronoun of dialogic deixis: ὥς recedes in favor of ταῦτα. Consider for example:

Let us first observe that Apollo’s true identity is a matter between the narrator and his audience: Hektor himself is not aware of it. Second, Hektor’s deliberation has potential consequences that transcend the framework of the narrative: had the second alternative, retreating to the city walls, prevailed in his mind, there would have been no encounter with Patroklos, and the course of events would have been very different from the received story. Apollo’s intrusion is thus crucial for the action of the Iliad. The deictic pronoun ταῦτ᾿(α) objectifies Hektor’s thought, and sets it up for the confrontation with Apollo, who as an external agent decides the outcome. The following example, from the Quarrel of Achilles and Agamemnon, is similar:

One of the instances of this formula (X 507) involves a divine epiphany, but the other cases are different. They do not involve a divine intervention that is responsible for the action of the poem, nor is the thought presented as indirect speech. All but one of the instances of this formula follow thought presented as direct speech, a hero addressing his own thumós, in the line we have already seen:

With this formulaic connection, οὗτος is a truly Homeric element. More important than formulas and their relative age, however, is the function of the demonstrative as part of the Homeric grammar of deixis, serving a fundamental goal of the epic tradition and its performers: the vivid representation of a heroic past that is alive thanks to the power of words that can reveal its presence.