Homer’s Thebes: Epic Rivalries and the Appropriation of Mythical Pasts

Citation: Barker, Elton T. E., and Joel P. Christensen. 2019. Homer's Thebes: Epic Rivalries and the Appropriation of Mythical Pasts. Hellenic Studies Series 84. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_BarkerE_ChristensenJ.Homers_Thebes.2019.

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 army
strikes me from its eyes.

Anacreontea, fr. 26 [1]

When we first started working on this book, just over a decade ago, very little had been written on the topic of Theban epic and even less on Theban myth in Homer. Since then, however, in addition to our articles of 2008, 2011 and 2014, there has been a spate of publications on non-Homeric archaic Greek hexameter epic, encompassing both the other Trojan War poems (the so-called “epic cycle”: West 2013; Fantuzzi and Tsagalis 2014; Davies 2016; cf. Burgess 2001) and the poems related to Thebes and Theban myth (Davies 2014; cf. Tsagalis 2008). As part of this burgeoning interest in Homer’s epic rivals, the mythical archaeology of Thebes has come under particular scrutiny (e.g. Berman 2013; 2015), as well as the use of Theban myth in Homer (e.g. Tsagalis 2014), which is the central concern of this book. Given this proliferating bibliography, it is fair to ask: why Thebes, why now?

The city of Thebes has always been of interest to scholars working within mythographical and literary traditions, precisely because its presence looms large in our corpus of extant textual and especially non-textual sources. Looming even larger is the absence of a monumental epic to encapsulate its story in the manner that the Iliad and Odyssey do for the Troy story. [2] Myths set in Thebes or involving Theban characters occupy a significant portion of the surviving plays of Athenian tragedy (as well as testimonies of lost plays), and feature prominently in epinician and lyric poetry from the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. Yet none of the epics that purportedly detailed the strange origins under Cadmus, the labors of the Theban Herakles, and the two wars for the city walls have survived (save for a few unclear fragments). While the loss of Thebes’ rich epic heritage may be put down to historical accident, given the city’s importance in myth and history, the impact that these epics might have had continues to attract scholarly attention.

Some of this attention may be due to the absence itself—we love mysteries, and it is tempting to reframe the fragments that we do have in order to tell the stories that we want to hear about Thebes. In itself, however, this is insufficient to account for the refocusing of a critical lens onto the Theban epic over the past decade. In part, the renewed interest in Thebes relates to a trend in recent scholarship to reconsider fragmentary works more generally, especially with a view to paying due attention to their contextualization in, and reframing by, later sources. More importantly, however, the study of epic fragments has been revolutionized by oral theory. All examples of Greek hexameter epic poetry, whether the ”complete” poems of Homer or Hesiod, or fragmentary remains from alternative traditions (such as those related to Thebes), as well as other performance-based poetry, like lyric or elegy, are now subject to analysis in terms of their shared language and motifs.

Before setting out this methodological approach in more detail below, we first want to consider Thebes’ epic credentials. The clearest evidence for thinking about Thebes in epic terms comes from a passage of the Works and Days where Hesiod pairs Thebes with Troy (156–165):

Αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ καὶ τοῦτο γένος κατὰ γαῖα κάλυψεν,
αὖτις ἔτ’ ἄλλο τέταρτον ἐπὶ χθονὶ πουλυβοτείρῃ
Ζεὺς Κρονίδης ποίησε, δικαιότερον καὶ ἄρειον,
ἀνδρῶν ἡρώων θεῖον γένος, οἳ καλέονται
ἡμίθεοι, προτέρη γενεὴ κατ’ ἀπείρονα γαῖαν.
καὶ τοὺς μὲν πόλεμός τε κακὸς καὶ φύλοπις αἰνὴ
τοὺς μὲν ὑφ’ ἑπταπύλῳ Θήβῃ, Καδμηίδι γαίῃ,
ὤλεσε μαρναμένους μήλων ἕνεκ’Οἰδιπόδαο,
τοὺς δὲ καὶ ἐν νήεσσιν ὑπὲρ μέγα λαῖτμα θαλάσσης
ἐς Τροίην ἀγαγὼν ῾Ελένης ἕνεκ’ ἠυκόμοιο.

But when also this race he had hidden beneath the earth,
again still another, the fourth on the fruitful earth
Zeus the son of Cronos made, more just and brave,
a divine race of hero-men, who are called
semi-divine, the race prior to ours, throughout the boundless earth.
Evil war and dread battle destroyed them,
some at seven-gated Thebes in the land of Cadmus,
when they fought for the flocks of Oedipus,
others when it had led them in their ships over the great deep sea
to Troy for lovely-haired Helen.

This passage has long been recognized as disrupting Hesiod’s depiction of a cosmic fall from grace, which charts a serial decline from a golden age society of easy living and righteous behavior to the present day world of his audience, an “iron age” characterized by hard graft and corruption. Prior to his description of that world, Hesiod inserts “a divine race of hero-men, who are called semi-divine” (ἀνδρῶν ἡρώων θεῖον γένος, οἳ καλέονται / ἡμίθεοι). Here, Thebes and Troy are paired as a way of denoting this heroic age, as the sites where major conflicts took place. These conflicts, while bearing witness to the characteristic feature of this age—men who were “more just and brave”—also have the instrumental effect of wiping out the race of heroes, which leaves the world populated by mere mortal men. This grim existence of having to scrape out a living is the scenario envisaged and explored in the Works and Days. Hesiod’s poem, then, provides a cosmological frame for thinking about the “generation of hero men” and their relation to the world of the present, where there are no more heroes anymore.

At the same time this passage suggests a metapoetic reflection on, and rivalry with, heroic epic as a genre. One of the few remaining fragments from the so-called heroic epic poem the Cypria, apparently from its proem, sets out how Zeus planned to rid the world of heroes through conflict at Troy, in order to relieve Earth of her burden of men (fr. 1.4: κουφίσαι ἀνθρώπων παμβώτορα σύνθετο γαῖαν). While the Iliad’s proem is conspicuously less explicit, there are hints of such a narrative in the reference to Zeus’ plan, the focus on conflict (between Achilles and Agamemnon), and the description of the myriad souls of heroes being sent to Hades (Iliad 1.1–9)—heroes here being almost a generic marker for this kind of epic (ἡρώων, 4). [3] Later on, at more or less the midpoint of the poem, Homer pans back from the fighting to situate his narrative of the fall of Troy in the context of the disappearance of this heroic world, using the striking description of “semi-divine” (ἡμίθεοι). We say “striking” because the only other occurrence of ἡμίθεοι in the whole of the hexameter epic corpus is in our passage from Hesiod, where it serves to delineate further the generation of heroes. This “divine race of hero men” (ἀνδρῶν ἡρώων θεῖον γένος) turns out to be only semi-divine (ἡμίθεοι); that is to say, crucially, these heroes are mortal. [4] This is the point of the passage in Hesiod, which, as we have seen, describes their annihilation at Thebes and Troy; it is also the force of the passage in the Iliad, where Homer describes the action of his epic from the perspective of a much later age when the heroes of Troy are dead and buried. Along with the evidence from the fragment of the Cypria, the impression is that heroic epic, as a genre, not only celebrated the great deeds of men but also dramatized the destruction of the race of heroes, as if part of some broader evolutionary narrative.

What that broader evolutionary system might look like has been articulated by Barbara Graziosi and Johannes Haubold who have shown how Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey fit into a putative cosmic history mapped out by four extant hexameter epic poems. This history begins with Hesiod’s Theogony, which describes the origins of the cosmos itself (including the birth of the gods) and explains how Zeus came to rule supreme (and will rule forever); it culminates in the Works and Days, which provides an epic view of ordinary life in its divine framing of the human business of working hard and pursuing justice. [5] In between these two poles are the Homeric poems. The Iliad covers the story of the end of the “race of heroes.” What is important here is that the Iliad is not only set in the now bygone heroic era; to a certain extent it also accounts for its destruction. Through its protagonist Achilles, the Iliad charts a movement from a world full of gods to a world of men. The poem’s first movement is dominated by “godlike Achilles,” especially his interaction with a number of divine figures. In Achilles’ final appearance, it is his status as “the son of Peleus” to which Priam appeals and by which he contemplates their common mortality; the gods are conspicuously absent (since even the boundary-crossing Hermes recuses himself from the scene); the poem itself ends with the burial of this other, very mortal hero, Hektor. Along the way, we see Achilles slaughter countless numbers of Trojans, who (we are led to be believe for the first time in the war) have only been enticed out of their walls by his initial absence and a mistaken belief that Zeus now favored them. By the poem’s end, then, the fate not only of Troy but also of the heroes who fought there is sealed. That is not to say that some heroes do not make it home: the Odyssey picks up the tales of those who did. But, as this poem shows, they have to undergo a kind of transformation to make it home. The Odyssey begins this process with its very first word—this poem will be about the man (ἄνδρα, 1.1) Odysseus. It continues with a pared-back divine apparatus that casts into relief human agency and responsibility. In turn, its investigation of what constitutes appropriate behavior for mortals is picked up by the intense interrogation of justice in Hesiod’s Works and Days. [6]

Whether poems about Thebes similarly situated their narratives within such a cosmological framework is impossible to say in the light of the fragmentary remains, but this question and the related issue about the degree of their Panhellenic appeal is a concern to this book for a very good reason. Hesiod’s passage clearly pairs Thebes and Troy in the destruction of the race of heroes. The pairing is not limited to the idea of these two cities as the sites of total war, where the heroes perished. Given what we have just said about the Iliad’s depiction of the Trojan War and the Odyssey’s post-war vision, to pair the two cities is also suggestive of comparable narrative traditions, as if we should expect heroic epics about Thebes (which we don’t have) as well as those about Troy (which we do). From a Hesiodic perspective, then, the wars and traditions about Troy and Thebes are notionally equivalent, in that they both serve to relate the extinction of this former race of heroes. It is also true that the two cities share a certain cognitive distance. In Hesiod they already exist on the margins of time, as if belonging to the (already) doomed race of heroes. In later performance contexts, too, Troy and Thebes enjoy a degree of separation from their audiences: where Troy is the city that is forever doomed to fall, Thebes is the city that is forever under siege. [7] Thus, although only fragments of a Theban tradition remain, in contrast to the tradition of the Troy story represented for us by the Iliad and Odyssey, [8] these fragments tend to be grouped together to form functionally equivalent epics. The resulting poems—namely the Oedipodea, Thebais, Epigonoi, and Alcmeonis—are reconstructed from later representations (especially tragedy), references in works of historiography, comments of the scholastic tradition, and the story patterns of Homer’s epics. [9]

One pressing issue for us has been how to negotiate such a notional equivalence of these two cities, when it is only Homer’s poems about the war at Troy and the return home that have survived. If Hesiod’s invocation of the cities of Thebes and Troy were the only pairing of these two cities, it might be possible to understand it as merely a broad reference to a heroic mythical past. But the cities—and their attendant motifs—are compared and contrasted throughout early Greek poetry. Pindar, for example, pairs the marriages of Cadmus-Harmonia and Peleus-Thetis (Pythian 3.86–105) as golden-age unions that precipitate the wars of heroic extinction around Thebes and Troy. Anacreon, too, (fr. 26 cited above) contrasts the affairs at Thebes (τὰ Θήβης) and the wars in Phrygia (Φρυγῶν ἀυτάς) with his own non-martial poetry (ἐμάς). In Attic tragedy, Thebes is established as the “other” city always under siege, a counterpoint to Troy, the city always sacked. At the same time, however, it may well be mistaken to consider Hesiod’s association of Thebes and Troy, at any rate, as a pairing of equal members. As we will discuss later in the book (e.g. Chapters 4 and 5), early Greek poetry often provides lists and doublets that culminate in the most significant entry—a case of last is better. Here, Hesiod’s diction and presentation does little to betray that one city may be more important than the other apart from the sequencing that positions Helen’s Troy as coming after Oedipus’ Thebes. What is interesting, as we shall see (e.g. Chapters 2, 3 and 4), is that the temporal priority of the Theban conflict is consistently exploited by the Homeric poems to lend greater weight and significance to the events around Troy. [10] What Thebes had started—the destruction of the race of heroes—Troy finishes off. Or, to put that differently, Thebes is insufficient to do the job itself.

A brief survey of the use of the name and label “Thebes” in the Iliad serves to show the underlying importance of this city to Homer, or, perhaps better, the anxiety felt in this narrative about an epic siege of (another story of) another epic siege. It will also help to anticipate the content and form of the approach that we follow in this book (cf. Barker and Christensen 2011). When Agamemnon describes the walls of Thebes as “sacred” (ἱερὰ τείχεα Θήβης, 4.378), his words evoke descriptions elsewhere in the Iliad of other walls and other cities. The epithet “sacred” is used most often in the Iliad to denote the city of Troy itself: its use here by Agamemnon might indicate poetic tension, especially since elsewhere in extant poetry Thebes is described by this epithet. [11] Clearly, Thebes can be described, like Troy, as being a “sacred” city. Yet the one time when a Thebes is described as sacred in the Iliad, it is another city altogether. As early as book 1 Achilles declares that he has sacked Thebes—but this is neither Boiotian Thebes nor the similarly famous Egyptian Thebes, but Thebê, “the sacred city of Eetion” (Θήβην, ἱερὴν πόλιν Ἠετίωνος, Iliad 1.366). The immediate qualification suggests Homer’s care in defining this city for his audience. This other “Thebes” is further elaborated in book 6 when Andromache describes its sack by Achilles and the death of her father, the aforementioned Eetion (Iliad 6.414–20). Significantly, Andromache’s description of this Thebes also includes the epithet “lofty-gated” (Θήβην ὑψίπυλον), which is used otherwise only of Troy. [12] The redeployment of Thebes’ epithet as “sacred” to denote another (not) Thebes, the elevation of that other (not) Thebes to the lofty heights of Troy, and its sack (already) by the hero of this narrative, all suggest a sustained assault by the Iliad on its rival city-under-seige.

There is a further significance underlying the description of Troy and Thebes as “lofty-gated” (ὑψίπυλος) and holy (ἱερή). Both terms would seem to suggest security, either physical (as in gates that are high and difficult to breach) or conceptual (as in cities that come under the protection of the gods). Yet that is not how these terms are deployed in the Iliad. As Corinne Pache has observed, the adjective “high-gated” (ὑψίπυλος) is used in the Iliad only in the context of the sacking of a city, either in fact, as with Andromache’s Thebes (6.416), or in intention, as with Troy (the gods prevent its actual sack in this poem: 16.698 and 21.544). Furthermore, while the epithet “holy” applies to a number of cities (including Plakaian Thebes, as we have seen), the only two cities to have walls that are specifically described as “holy” are Troy and Boiotian Thebes, when Agamemnon recalls how Tydeus gathered men to attack “the sacred walls of Thebes” (ἱερὰ τείχεα Θήβης, Iliad 4.378). “The holiness of the city walls,” Pache writes, “provides no protection and is brought into play at a city’s most distressing moments.” [13] The same point emerges from the description of Thebes in the Catalogue of Ships as “the strong-founded citadel” (ἐϋκτίμενον πτολίεθρον, Iliad 2.505). This account is already curious in that it is “lower Thebes” (Ὑποθήβας) which is described—as if Thebes were the city-that-ought-not-to-be-named. This Hypothebai, which must refer to the settlement “below the city” that survived the sack of the Epigonoi, is nevertheless described as “well built.” For Geoffrey Kirk, the epithet “well-built” (ἐϋκτίμενος) “does not accord with a particularly low status for Hupothebai, but seems to be applied somewhat arbitrarily.” [14] As Pache argues, however, its application is far from arbitrary, since, “as in Andromache’s description of her own fallen city of Placaean Thebes as ‘high-gated,’ ‘well-built’ lower Thebes also calls our attention to what once was but is no longer there… The epithet ἐϋκτίμενος thus calls attention not to the present condition of Hypothebai, but to the glorious past of Thebes and the ominous fall of its supposedly impregnable walls.” [15]

Thus deeply embedded in the imagery and very language of heroic epic poetry is the memory of these two cities, Troy and Thebes. Their well-built, lofty, and holy epithets serve as reminders of their previous security and sanctity and bring their current predicament to the fore. Or, rather, in Homer they serve to commemorate Thebes’ (already complete) fall and anticipate Troy’s (endlessly deferred) sack. The picture is further complicated by the Iliad’s marginalization of Thebes through the substitution of an alternative Thebes (Plakaian) and the supplement of another (Hypothebai).

The ultimate replacement of Thebes as a city (worthy) of epic song may also be behind the Iliad’s redeployment of these epithets in the first place. Troy’s place in the tradition as “holy” is explained in its foundational story, where king Laomedon contracted Apollo and Poseidon to build the city’s defenses. [16] Thebes’ defensive constructions were arguably even more famous: its walls and seven gates function as a metonym of its fame and the stories of the wars that surrounded it. [17] As Singor 1992 has shown, the Iliad inverts the logic of the Trojan tale by depicting the Achaeans constructing a wall around their ships, with the result that it is the besieging Achaeans who become the besieged. The fact that the Achaean wall is conceived and built during the course of the narrative (indeed, in one night, it seems) is suggestive of a motif that is not germane to the war at Ilium but a conceit of the Iliad. Indeed, its presence in the Troy tradition is specifically limited to this poem: not only does Apollo breach it like a child kicking over a sandcastle; when Homer pans out to situate his poem in epic history, we are told that the wall was destroyed without trace by the pro-Achaean Poseidon in anger at the Achaeans’ lack of sacrifices (in a replay of his “original” anger at Laomedon’s foundation of Troy). [18] If we already suspect that the trope of the Achaeans under seige belongs to a Theban tradition, the fact that this hastily constructed wall is at one point specified as having “seven” gates—like the famous wall of Thebes—would seem to confirm the Iliad’s sack of Thebes and ransacking of its motifs. The Iliad’s challenge to Thebes is not so much through the wall itself as through the narrative sleight of hand, in which the fame of the Theban wall is repurposed to magnify the stakes of this version of the Trojan War, where the Achaeans’ very survival seems at stake.

It is clear from the Iliad and the Odyssey that the pairing of Thebes and Troy was not simply a feature of Hesiod’s cosmic history. Homer’s epics also appear to have intimate knowledge of events around Thebes. [19] Unlike most critics working with the references to Thebes, we are not intent on determining whether or not this knowledge comes from a lost Theban epic (or epics) or from a diffusion of Theban mythical material in multiple poetic genres and artistic forms over time. [20] Nor are we interested in relating these references to the remaining fragments of hexameter poetry from a purported Theban epic tradition for the purpose of reconstructing poems along the lines of Homer’s. Other readers have done much to shed light on the possible content and themes of such nominal epics; our stance on the remnants of Theban epic remains decidedly agnostic. Not only do we not know for certain which Theban details were available for ancient audiences of Homer, we cannot be sure that they were presented in an epic form comparable to our Iliad and Odyssey.

Our response to the question Why Thebes?, then, is to assert that the references to this city’s history in Homer’s poems can help us better understand the epics about Troy. Accordingly, the chief concern of this book will be to investigate what the use of Theban material in the Homeric epics tells us about Homeric poetics; that is, we are interested in identifying and exploring the strategies the Iliad and Odyssey employ both to develop their own themes and to distinguish themselves from rival mythological and poetic traditions. We do not deny that stories about Thebes may have explored common themes and issues shared with our epics, perhaps even in similar ways—indeed, we make a stab at identifying and discussing what some of those themes and issues might have been in Chapter 4. But our premise is that the Homeric poems selectively (re)present Theban narratives and (re)deploy Theban references in ways that amplify their own pre-eminence. In this way, our primary aim is to explore what the use of Theban myth within Homeric epic can tell us about that tradition’s view of its own mythic past—how, in other words, Homeric poetry uses other story traditions to tell its own tales. As such, this book is not truly about Theban myth; rather, it is about the strategies and aesthetics of Homeric poetry. This is Homer’s Thebes.

Still, why talk about Thebes in Homer now? After all, while new research has done much to bring to light (or, at any rate, bring together) hexameter fragments of Theban material, the references to Thebes in Homer are well recognized and have been in plain view since the fixation of the poems themselves. The answer lies in the growing maturity and progressive alignment of two strands of Homeric scholarship—the oral theory of Parry and Lord and the idea of poetic competition. Over the past decade the study of epic poetry has been revitalized by a focus on the ways in which meaning is generated in each oral performance both by drawing on a long established repertoire of phrases, scenes and stories (“traditional referentiality”) and by playing off it for particular effect (“agonistics”). Our work enters the debate by focusing on the importance of oral-traditional poetics and poetic rivalry for thinking about the use of Thebes within Homer’s poems. Indeed, we believe that an investigation of Homeric poetics, as informed by its use of other narrative traditions, can shed new light on the poetic culture that helped decisively shape the epics we have received from antiquity. By presenting a series of case studies, this book probes how much we can say about the imperfectly known contexts of Homeric performance based on the evidence internal to the poems themselves. In particular, we will be concerned to read Homer’s Theban representations vis-à-vis the often cited, but little investigated, contemporary Panhellenic developments that were taking place in the period of the Homeric poems’ likely composition.

In the rest of this introduction we set out the literary and cultural perspectives that frame our work. To begin with, we discuss the various ways in which scholars have approached reading Homeric epic in the wake of the oral-formulaic theory introduced and advanced by Milman Parry and Albert Lord. While recent studies applying the models of allusion, neoanalysis, and intertextuality have all made contributions to our understanding of Homer’s poems, we make the case that traditional referentiality and resonance can better bring to light the strategies each poem employs in dealing with Thebes. In the second part, we discuss the cultural phenomena of competition and Panhellenism that we see as most pertinent for understanding the development of Homeric poetry in its negotiation of Thebes. Such cultural features operated alongside, and shaped the conditions of, the performance of Greek epic. In particular, as we discuss throughout this book, the relationship between the poetic traditions centered around Thebes and Troy was framed and defined by agonism; in turn, the cultural forces of Panhellenism helped to sharpen poetic competition, and, as we will argue in the final chapters, were in part responsible for Troy’s ultimate eclipse of Thebes.

Methodologies

It is de rigueur to start a book on early Greek hexameter poetry with an outline of the assumptions that underpin what one means when writing “Homer.” In this section that is what we will attempt to do, although we believe that—no matter the particular theoretical position that one holds—a great deal of the work on interpreting Homer is reconcilable, as Malcolm Willcock suggested over two decades ago. [21] It has been one of our advantages as collaborators that over our years of working together we have changed our minds about the Homeric question (and rarely at the same time or in the same direction). Such a tension has forced us to keep in mind different ways of thinking about Homer—from being an individual poet working within, to being a metonym representing an authoritative retelling of, the tradition of Troy—and to conceptualize the issues at stake with greater clarity. There remain ways in which what one believes about the nature of the epics and their composition has an impact on what we (can) say about the poems and how we (can) say it. While we do not wish to get bogged down with trying to resolve irresolvable questions of authorship, this introduction needs to consider both the cultural background upon which Homer’s poems draw and the terminology that we use to explore how they function.

In our first work on this subject (Barker and Christensen 2008:2–9), we emphasized two broad trends in the study of Homer. One treats Homer as an author-genius in much the same way as one would a Herman Melville or Ezra Pound, following the ancient biographical tradition which posits “Homer” alternately as having temporal and/or cultural priority over his rivals (see on allusion and neoanalysis below). The other, which lays more emphasis on the “traditional” nature of the Homeric poems and the importance of oral poetics, presents a range of “Homers” of varying degree of fixity and textuality (see on traditional referentiality). The implied polarity is a somewhat artificial one, but the range of current interpretive responses to Homer makes it more pressing to distinguish one perspective from another.

Our first assumption when approaching the Homeric epics, following John Miles Foley and others, is that the epics are “orally-derived”—their composition betrays elements of the spoken word, such as repeated formulae, type scenes, and linear narration. [22] It is the quality and extent of this orality that is often at issue in interpretations. [23] On the one hand, the “textuality” of the epics cannot be denied: at some point the Homeric poems were recorded in writing and subsequently passed on as written texts, which is the form in which we have received them (albeit via a long and precarious tradition of physical transmission very different from our own: the manuscript codex). On the other hand, we understand these texts as having been repeated in performance long before they reached the form we have now. Such different layers of textuality—from the putative recitation of oral performance to the material reproducibility of the written word—can constitute the primary interest of academic investigations of epic. This, however, is not at all our foremost concern. Instead, we are mainly interested in what the texts we have do with the material they treat as part of the past.

In accepting the Iliad and the Odyssey as oral-derived texts, we must also face hotly debated issues around conventional versus intentional meaning as well as oral versus literary aesthetics. Throughout our work on these topics over the years we have returned to Foley’s theory of “traditional referentiality” and the idea of “resonance” as articulated by Barbara Graziosi and Johannes Haubold 2005. There are two primary reasons why we believe that these approaches are the most appropriate means for addressing the question of how the Theban references in the Homeric poems work. The first concerns the relationship between a particular instantiation of a story and its larger storytelling traditions. As we noted before, stories set around Troy and Thebes share what Jonathan Burgess has called a “mythological substructure.” [24] This means that they draw from familiar language, motifs, and themes for sometimes very different ends. The second relates, as Foley and Justin Arft have written, to the idea that individual poems emerge from larger traditions as “instances” not “artifacts” (2015). Only once they are transcribed do they become artifactual, at which point they should be treated both as oral poems and as fixed texts; that is, they present additional layers of interpretive complexity because they carry the echoic associations of multiple oral performances, while at the same time also constituting for us as readers the physical fixity of a single text. Such tensions were likely latent for the first “readers” of the poems who were also exposed to living oral traditions; as modern interpreters, we must labor intensely to develop approximate understandings of the effects of the poems’ oralities, while also remaining vigilant and attentive to the opportunities afforded by our own literacies.

This is not to say that other approaches, which treat Homer’s poems as literature—in the sense of having been composed in writing as fixed texts, and referencing other fixed texts—have little to contribute; on the contrary, what might be thought of as “conventional” literary criticism of Homer has produced some of the most enlightening and thought-provoking analyses of the poems. Nevertheless, we have found that taking the claims of oral theory seriously has forced us to confront our own assumptions when “reading” an oral poem; it has certainly helped us listen to Homer’s recasting of Thebes in new and productive ways. Before explaining in more detail what our understanding of oral theory looks like and how it might function in practice, we first give a brief overview of different literary approaches to Homer in order to identify some of the assumptions underpinning them and their influence on interpretation. [25]

Allusion

In a recent book, Bruno Currie has responded to the renewed emphasis on the orality of Homer by reasserting the importance of allusion (cf. Currie 2006), on the basis that “individual poems may be fixed enough to serve as an object of allusion.” [26] For Currie, it is possible to identify moments when one literary artifact refers directly—or alludes—to another, even within traditional art forms like oral-derived poems, “when they involve elements that appear to be typical or non-formulaic.” [27] It is not our object here to contest Currie’s analysis point by point; individually, his detailed study helpfully draws attention to some of the ways in which Homer’s poems intersect and interact with potential rivals. It is the premise itself, which refers to this engagement as allusion, that, to our minds, seems ill-founded and misleading.. For one thing, his definition of allusion relies on argumenta ex silentio—how can we know which repeated elements are not typical or non-formulaic, when so little of this kind of (hexameter heroic epic) poetry survive? For another, to think in terms of allusion is to posit not only a direct and intentional relationship between two texts, but also to establish a hierarchical relationship, with one text (the “target” for the allusion) made prior to the other (the “source” of the allusion).

This second point refers to the idea of allusion as it is often conceptualized within general literary theory, when applied to literature—works that are self-consciously written down as texts and written within a literary-based (reading) culture—outside of the Homeric poems. Here allusion tends to mean the direct and intentional quotation of or reference to a motif or even phrase from an earlier text/author by a specific author. [28] As such we find it problematic to apply allusion to Homer for at least two reasons. First, since we have no certain evidence for the content of “texts” prior to the Homeric epics, and no evidence for a cultural tradition of intentional allusion, allusion is aesthetically an anachronistic concept with which to think about oral poetry (though it can still be useful heuristically for identifying and thinking through different kinds of intertextual relations). [29] Second, the emphasis that it places on direct reference between two texts (text B is referring to text A) and intentionality (author B is deliberately referring to author A) seems particularly ill-suited to the dynamics of oral-derived poetry, no matter what one thinks about the idea of intentionality as a useful heuristic device for literary analysis more generally. What we mean is that, so far as one is able to tell from comparative analysis, oral poetry—which we can define more broadly as works that are composed in performance before an audience—places greater demands on the audience to recognize the intertextual relations and (re)construct meaning from it.

Figure 1.1 below is our attempt to provide a schematic representation of how allusion works. While undoubtedly over-simplistic, we find it helpful for drawing attention to how allusion takes insufficient account of the critical contribution of audience to meaning-making, assumes a fixed text with an intentional author for Homeric poetry, and also posits a reference to a more or less fixed prior text.

Allusion, as a manner of understanding the technique of an author and/or the cultural framework for artistic production, can play an important role in interpretation if the critic has these rather limited goals. But, by placing the emphasis on authorial intent, it ignores altogether the importance of audiences in the process of (re)constituting the text. As such it seems to us insufficient as a theoretical approach for thinking about Homer.

Neoanalysis

Allusion, insofar as it assumes a particular reference in one text to another particular text, has long been of interest to neoanalysis. [30] As Currie notes, allusion appears to be specifically focused on issues of poetics—how a specific poet does a specific thing—whereas neoanalysis writ large embraces mythological frameworks, typologies, motif transference, and issues of structure (2016:23). But the basic artistic assumptions that attend allusion are also central to neoanlysis: as a general rule, adherents of the approach have used rigorous textual criticism along with insights from oral theory to argue that other epics were known to the composer(s) of the Iliad and Odyssey and were influential in shaping their forms. [31]

Initially, then, neoanalysis may appear somewhat more promising than conventional literary approaches, since it attempts to explain the source of problematic material independently of the Homeric text and thereby provide new perspectives on the ways in which the Homeric poems are crafted. Indeed, neoanalysis has been important for challenging the assumption that grants priority to Homer, and for drawing attention to the broader background to the Homeric poems. Even so, while neoanalytical studies have identified patterns repeated in the Homeric epics and (lost) texts in ways that have improved our understanding of Homeric structure, composition and aesthetics, nevertheless, their overall aim remains the establishment of the priority of one tradition over another. [32] (See Figure 1.2, opposite, for an image of neoanayltical modelling. The broken arrow indicates an unknown relationship between the act of “transference” and audience reception.) That is to say, the relationship between these oral poems is still configured in terms of a set hierarchy (e.g. the Aithiopis as prior to the Iliad) with a direct (and intentional) one-to-one mapping between them (e.g. in its representation of the death of Hektor, the Iliad refers directly to the Aithiopis’s depiction of the death of Memnon). In addition, as Jonathan Burgess has noted, the complex system of “precise correspondences” identified by many neoanalytical arguments does not survive intact if “we drop the assumption that epic intertextuality was implemented through texts” (2009:61). [33] The level of specificity and correspondence assumed by neoanalytical studies relies on levels of fixity and repetition characteristic of literary texts and not oral traditions.

Intertextuality

Faced by the intractable problem of the so-called intentional fallacy, many literary critics have preferred a different method (and term) to mark the interplay between two texts without positing either authorial intention or a source-recipient model. Intertextuality is the theory that attempts to describe the relationship between two (or more) texts, without implying priority of one over the other or an author consciously making that connection (and asserting how it should be interpreted) themselves. Until recently, explicit articulations of intertextuality in the realm of classical studies had largely been restricted to Latin literature: it is no coincidence that the rich evidence supplied by the late Roman Republic and early Principate of a highly literate and referential literary culture should prove amenable to applications of this particular theoretical method. [34] More recently, however, “intertextuality” as a term to describe the cross-reference or even “quoting” (Tsagalis 2008:xii) between different types of hexameter epic material has gained traction. Whereas in 1987 Pietro Pucci radically (for the time) talked about the intertextuality of the Iliad and Odyssey (specifically where the Odyssey seems to be engaging self-consciously with an Iliad precedent), the method is now applied to similar references and topoi among lost traditions (like those of the epic cycle) and myth in general. [35] As Currie again notes, the evolutionary development of Homeric epic as posited by Gregory Nagy (and others), although “incompatible with unidirectional allusion, remains accommodating to a very differently conceived bidirectional intertextuality” (2016:17). [36] Such “bidirectionality” is, indeed, significant—but the oral background provides for much more than that.

It is often the case that Homerists conflate the terms allusion and intertext (as we ourselves have been guilty of in prior work), which can result in somewhat dizzying and none-too-distinct academic prose. In attempting to reconcile neoanalysis, allusion, and intertextuality, Jonathan Burgess pointedly writes: “Whereas classic neoanalysis has reserved discernment of motif transference to the scholar, it is more probable that the reflection would be recognized by a mythologically informed audience. In this case, motif transference is more than coincidental, casual, or merely vestigial. It is significant allusion, at least in the matter that oral intertextuality can be understood in the Archaic Age” (2009:71). Burgess, here, makes a salient point and, incidentally, demonstrates that Homerists will frequently refer to the same phenomena with different language. He credits the contributions of neoanalysis by shifting the responsibility for meaning making from the scholar sniffing out arcana to the ancient audience steeped in mythological narratives. Here, the “allusion” is the indication of that other tradition, the transference of motif that increases meaning.

In his work on the Trojan War in myth, Burgess has positioned Homeric epic as a particularly “self-conscious” version of “cyclic myth and cyclic epic” (2006:148–149). [37] Such self-consciousness is, as Margalit Finkelberg 1998:154–155 and Christos Tsagalis 2008:xii suggest, perhaps a unique characteristic of the Homeric epics. [38] (Given the lack of available evidence, it is impossible to say either way: but we would agree that Homeric epic does come across as particularly cannibalistic of rival traditions.) But the term intertextuality is not merely convenient for those who use it in reference to Homer: it also evokes deep metaphors of weaving as part of the creative art—present even in Homer—that imply, through the word “intertext,” a “system of interwoven fabrics whose constituent parts are interrelated.” [39]

Generally speaking, this understanding of the intertextual process applies well to the use of and interaction between broad images, motifs, and poetic structures in an oral poetic milieu. (See the representation of meaning-making in Figure 1.3 below.) Yet intertextuality remains problematic from a conceptual perspective if it relies on specific phrasing, or what a modern reader might understand as “quotation.” The programmatic statement that sets out the case against thinking in terms of intertextuality is Gregory Nagy’s assertion that “when we are dealing with the traditional poetry of the Homeric (and Hesiodic) compositions, it is not justifiable to claim that a passage in any text can refer to another passage in another text” (1979:42). [40] For Nagy, the very orality of the Homeric poems—in the sense that they are composed (and recomposed) “in performance” at each and every performance—disqualifies them from being (able to be) thought about in terms that imply discrete and definable relations between finished (and finite) products—inter-texts. In response, Burgess has attempted to reframe what he means when he applies the term “intertextuality” to a performance culture (2012:169–170), by emphasizing that “correspondence of material” (structures, motifs, even phrases) need not indicate “poem-to-poem intertextuality” (a phrase we interpret as meaning fixed-text to fixed-text); instead, in the contexts of performance before a knowledgeable audience, “early epic is potentially allusive.” Burgess concludes that a “textless intertextuality” emerges from close readings of specific phrases, reflecting “not one text influencing another, but the traditional articulation of an episode being reflected by a secondary articulation of it” (2012:181).

The approaches that we have so far outlined are underpinned by a common set of assumptions: first, that there is a relation between actual and fixed texts; and, second, that this relationship is hierarchical and mono-directional. Of these methods we are most sympathetic to applications of intertextual readings. Our primary discomfort—beyond the rather mundane one of nomenclature and the emphasis on text—is that, in the case of early Greek poetic traditions (specifically, but not limited to, hexameter epic), we must face vague and undefined inheritances that appear to have established fleeting “intertexts” over time. The plurality of intertexts and the repetition of performances add quantitative and qualitative complexity to oral-derived epic’s array of potential meaning. In addition, as we have emphasized in earlier work, models and methods that assume stability and fixity in poetic traditions are insufficient for representing the multidirectional and a-hierarchical engagements possible in living performance traditions, to which we turn now.

Oral-Poetic Frames: Traditional Referentiality

One of the advantages that literary/textualist approaches to Homer have is that they sidestep issues relating to the context of oral performance, the role of the bard in the production of poetic verse from a traditional repository of knowledge, and the competency of—or, better, the range of competencies among—the audience for interpreting and reconstructing the meaning of that composition. Yet this interpretive move merely substitutes one difficult unknown with another. There is an uncomfortable circularity in claiming that an author (or tradition) was sophisticated enough to deploy a meaningful structure, device, or allusion because we detect the use of that structure, device, or allusion in an oral-derived text.

Whether or not orally-derived epic implies or warrants a separate aesthetic interpretive framework has been a central feature of Homeric debate ever since the implications of Milman Parry and Albert Lord’s oral theory began to be worked out. [41] At first, Parry’s focus on formulaic expression and Lord’s emphasis on composition in performance challenged hard-held beliefs central to the literary criticism of the time that privileged certain ideas of intention and originality. In a way, Homerists had to contend with post-modern notions of restricted expression and audience reception without the benefit of either the philosophical concepts or technical vocabulary that would become well known a generation later. [42] With the rise in broader studies on orality alongside advances in linguistics and literary theory, we can say with some confidence that not only does oral poetry—with or without an author—offer a range of interpretive interventions similar to that of “written” poetry (indeed, the dichotomy is largely false anyway), but also that the complex overlays of meaning and interpretation available to oral-derived poems may well exceed those of single-authored literary texts. [43]

However, these acknowledgements are still not enough to correct cultural and disciplinary prejudices about what interpretation means and what its results might look like. According to Robert Lamberton (1986:21) the existence if not preeminence of nonliteral meanings of the poems was taken for granted by Homer’s earliest interpreters, showing that interpreting poetry “engaged the reader in an active role.” And yet, one of these earliest interpreters is also one of the first to privilege the author’s control over meaning over audience engagement. In his Ion, Plato (through the figure of Socrates) cross-examines a rhapsode (Ion of the dialogue’s name) about how to interpret Homer in a way that best respects the poet’s “intention” (dianoia). As Lamberton notes, Socrates’ suggestion in the Protagoras (347e)—where he expresses a desire to interrogate an author for meaning—shares a strong affinity with Enlightenment literary tastes and Hellenistic editorial principles (299–300). In many ways, Plato’s model has dominated literary approaches (especially by classicists) ever since, with the exception of more recent approaches that are informed by both post-modern literary theory and studies in orality.

As an alternative to this model of trying to recover authorial intention, we have found the orality models articulated by John Miles Foley 1988, 1991, 1999, Barbara Graziosi and Johannes Haubold 2005, and Egbert Bakker 2013, among others, to be more or less effective in both challenging our (literary-based) assumptions and offering new ways of thinking about how Homer’s poetry works. Foley describes the difference in basic cognitive framing implied by the adoption of his traditional referentiality:

The key difference lies in the nature of tradition itself: structural elements are not simply compositionally useful, nor are they doomed to a “limited” area of designation; rather they command fields of reference much larger than the single line, passage, or even text in which they occur. Traditional elements reach out of the immediate instance in which they appear to the fecund totality of the entire tradition, defined synchronically and diachronically, and they bear meanings as wide and deep as the tradition they encode…Traditional referentiality, then, entails the invoking of a context that is enormously larger and more echoic than the text or work itself, that brings the lifeblood of generations of poems and performances to the individual performance or text. [44]

Foley proposes that meaning in an oral tradition is essentially metonymic—that through synecdoche the relationship between the particular instance and traditional convention produces meaning that is “inherent.” [45] While some of the language deployed in this definition is rather too fuzzy for our liking, we endorse the emphasis placed on the audience’s role in producing meaning. According to Foley, the audience uses “extratextual” knowledge to interpret the performance of oral poetry in much the same way that many modern critics allow a literate reader to draw on prior and external knowledge in reading a text. Accordingly, Foley presents reader response approaches, or Receptionalism, as a model to be compared with his theory of traditional referentiality. [46] The perspective of receptionalism is invaluable for any genre that has its origins in performance.

In their version of this theory, Graziosi and Haubold suggestively draw on aural language, using the term “resonance” to denote the echoic reverberation that occurs when a traditional motif is deployed. If that motif reaffirms what is known (say, for example, that Troy will be sacked), it harmonizes the current poem-in-performance with the tradition, which, in turn, helps to lend it authority; if, on the other hand, the applied motif suggests an act or idea alien to or at odds with the tradition (say, for example, “swift-footed Achilles” rising to speak in the assembly), the resulting dissonance arrests the audience’s attention and alerts them to what makes this poem-in-performance different (and why they should listen to it). In this way, resonance works economically and flexibly to endow Homeric poetry with “a sense of richness and meaning.” [47]

A slightly different (again) reading of Foley’s work has led Egbert Bakker to coin the terms interformularity and intertraditionality, in a clear and deliberate fusion of the literary idea of intertextuality with Foley’s theory of traditional referentiality. [48] For Bakker, we can talk about the intertextuality of an oral poem if it “takes place within and is enabled by the formulaic system” (158). In this dynamic engagement of phrases and motifs, “The more restricted an expression, the more specific the context in which it is uttered, and the higher the point at which it can be placed on the scale” (159). Such a “scale of increasing interformularity” is useful for understanding the dynamic engagement of motifs and phrases through repetition within a given tradition. When these repetitions take place across different epic traditions, he labels them as moments of intertraditionality. By understanding “the continuum of increasing specificity” as “quintessentially cognitive” he again importantly draws attention to the dynamic between poet and audience. Recognizing (and understanding) interformularity and intertraditionality “is based on the judgment of the performer/poet and the audience as to the degree of similarity between two contexts: the more specific a formula and/or the more restricted its distribution, the greater the possible awareness of its recurrence and of its potential for signaling meaningful repetition” (159).

Taken together, these terms and concepts furnish us with a range of descriptive approaches for interpreting the Homeric poems that give due weight to both the medium (their orality) and the cultural context (their traditionality) of this kind of poetic creation. In addition to allowing us to talk about the orality of Homer in an informed and structured manner, however, two further critical trends encourage our adoption of traditional referentiality as a mode and method of analysis. First, studies in linguistics and cognitive science lend support to the notion that communication relies on shared inheritances with particular offshoots. A model that we have found useful for thinking with in this context of linguistic and cultural diffusion is the concept of the rhizome—the latest, and more nuanced, version of a linguistic tree. According to Deleuze and Guattari (1987:21), “Unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs and even nonsign states…The rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots.” As an analogical model for language and cultural diffusion, the rhizome is attractive because it focuses less on center and periphery (and thus less on hierarchy and authority), and instead values—or, better, draws attention to—connectivity and the potential for adaptation and change. In addition, since the rhizomes’ roots and connections are hidden beneath the ground, it also functions well as a metaphor for the remains of an oral tradition whose “roots” and origins are obscure and irrecoverable.

Second, the dynamic model of an audience contributing meaning to narrative is one to which critics using cognitive science in literary studies increasingly turn. [49] At its base, linguistic and cognitive studies on the operation of metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Turner 1996) have emphasized the ways in which “meaning making” takes place in a recipient’s mind, creating a bond between the story or message projected and the one received. In expanding this basic idea to the study of narrative, Mark Turner emphasizes that a parable (story) is projected upon a target, but that both sources (parable and target) reflect back on one another to create a story. What cognitive science teaches us is not only that narrative is a fundamental function of the human brain at a neurobiological level, but that it depends by and large on input from external sources (other people) as well. [50] In a literary context, too, stories may be uttered by individuals, but their meaning is forged in the minds of audiences.

Given that “oral poetry works like a language, only more so” (Foley 2002:127), it is not surprising that several studies have used cognitive science to think anew about the language of Homeric poetry and have posited that its composition-in-performance emerges from the same structures and dynamics that condition “natural language.” [51] For example, the widely observed phenomenon of repetition as a structuring element characteristic of Homeric poetry has been linked to cognitive analyses of everyday language, [52] while William Duffy and William Short (2016) have suggested that modern theories of cognitive metaphor can aid our understanding of how audiences may have conceived of epic (and their relationship to it). Other studies have more daringly examined the composition of the language itself, and, in turn, the poems. Cristobal Cánovas and Mihailo Antović have demonstrated that oral formulaic theory is functionally equivalent to usage-based cognitive grammar (2016:85) and that both descriptive categories depend on universals of human cognition. Similarly, Michael Drout has used evolutionary biology and cognitive psychology to argue that their evidence supports the development and “stability” of multiforms within oral traditions. He aptly describes our inability to “grasp multiformity” as a “cognitive weakness” (2011:448)—one that we would attest is reinforced by cultural paradigms which (over)emphasize stability, textuality, and authorship. According to Drout, by looking for similarity mental systems create a feedback loop in communities that leads to “increasing complexity as lineages ramify through cultural space and interact with each other” (2011:467). Such a feedback loop by definition includes the audience, who are perceived as working alongside performers in the creation of meaning through multiple iterations.

The epics that we possess may, in these terms, be understood as a synchronic fossilization of the diachronic process of reception and re-composition over time. [53] Absent from most text-based approaches is a recognition of the effect that this durative aspect may have had on both audiences and poems. [54] The question is: how do we deal with the (more-or-less) synchronic evidence of engagement with, “allusion” to, and “intertextuality” with, absent poems (or only partially extant and understood poetic traditions) in the diachronic plane?

We have been grappling with such shifting terms and concepts for the past decade and more. And, while we remain committed to the idea expressed by Willcock—that the approaches to Homer do have more in common with and more to teach each other than not—we have also become more alert to how drawing distinctions between methods is at times critical, not just for communicating what we think Homeric poetry is, but especially for understanding what it does. [55] Being careful to separate out approaches, moreover, helps to frame one of the questions that we think the following studies might be able to answer—namely, how and why did our Homeric epics become preeminent? [56] For reasons that should be clear, we shy away from the language of neoanalysis because it assumes traditions prior to the Iliad shaping our Iliad in a mono-directional way; we avoid allusion too, where possible, because in literary studies the term tends to convey an intentionality that is bound up with the figure of a single author and a relationship between fixed texts. In addition, while we find the application of the term intertextuality to oral-derived poetry attractive when we have specific texts that may refer to one another (such as the Iliad and Odyssey, potentially), we feel that it is insufficiently flexible—too fixed on and tied to a direct one-to-one correspondence—to be able to take into account the dynamism of poetry composed in performance.

Therefore, despite varyingly effective challenges to the language and assumptions of traditional referentiality, or “resonance,” this is the language that, along with its attendant framework, we use in this book for the following reasons. First and foremost, the ideas of traditional referentiality and resonance shift the focus of study away from the authority of the poet or the intention behind his design towards instead the interaction between audience and singer in the construction of meaning over and about a language and a tradition that they share in common. [57] Second, these approaches draw on a natural language analogy, which presupposes that motifs, structures and even particular phrases are regularly used in similar contexts over time in repeated performances. Intertexuality “works” for the Homeric epics in performance if we assume that the contents of the items being analyzed were more or less performed in the same story context and in the same way. (In this sense our approach aligns with what Jonathan Burgess has called mythological intertextuality.) Not only does resonance allow us to embrace a healthier agnosticism about what other poems might have contained; it allows us to foreground a multiplicity of performed narratives over time, any and all of which can be subject to analysis and discussion.

When dealing with the Homeric epics as “transcripts” at the end of a dynamic tradition such as we have just described, talking about resonance encourages the acknowledgement that multiple poems provided multiple points and levels of engagement for different audiences over time. It is also the argument of this book that the prolonged and repeated experience of epic poetry in communities also involves identity formation and cultural expression: oral poetry developed as part of Greek culture that was increasingly competitive and which used forms of poetry for self-definition and prestige.

Rivalry and Panhellenism

Do you say to me concerning Thebes and its seven gates
that it is the only place where mortal women give birth to gods?

Sophocles fr. 773 [58]

If traditional referentiality and resonance aid us in reading the Homeric poems by placing more emphasis on the plurality of potential responses that an audience might have, it is equally important to ponder the broader cultural framework out of which the poems emerged and in which they were shaped. Two trends in particular are instrumental for thinking about Homer’s Thebes—the culture of rivalry and the development of Panhellenism. Both trends influence the form of the Homeric epics by conditioning the ways in which they respond to their own mythical and poetic traditions and the types of stories that they tell. In addition, we believe that the dynamics of competition and the process of aiming to achieve a Panhellenic reception hold an explanatory force when it comes to trying to understand complexity of the poems that we have received. [59]

Earlier, we introduced a vegetal metaphor—the rhizome—to describe the emergence of themes, structures, and poems from larger poetic traditions. Within the larger “organism” of early Greek myth and poetry, several traditions developed that shared the same language and aesthetics—even many of the same stories and what we would call poetic devices—while being localized physically in different regions and thematically in different story traditions (often emphasizing particular genealogies). Within this larger structure, which we will discuss shortly, the story traditions vied for attention and prominence. This is not to say that the different narrative traditions were directly in competition with each other, as pointedly recreated and reimagined in the so-called “Contest” (Certamen) between Hesiod and Homer; rather that competition was embedded in the very act of oral composition, where poems were created in performance and performers needed to arrest the attention of their listeners just in order to gain a hearing. As these creations were in turn adapted and remolded to appeal to each successive audience, so each new context favored the selection of more effective or engaging story traditions over others. This process was concentrated when performance competitions became institutionalized in the later Greek world.

While such a description must remain speculative given the scarcity of evidence, Homer nods towards such performance contexts in the Odyssey. These hints occur most obviously when the Ithacan bard, Phemios, sings about the (failed) nostoi of the Achaean heroes of Troy to entertain the suitors, or when the Phaiakian bard, Demodokos, regales the disguised Odysseus with epic-like songs about Achaeans fighting among themselves, the gods at (serious) play, and the sack of Troy. But the idea of poetic performance is there too, when Odysseus himself plays the singer of tales and for three whole books holds the Phaiakians entranced with his stories about monsters (Laistrygonians, Cyclopes, Scylla and Charybdis) and the supernatural (Circe and the underworld). Odysseus, of course, is instrumentalizing epic song, in the sense that he is singing for his homecoming (partly by keeping his hosts enchanted, partly, too, by providing them with paradigms by which to judge their own behavior). But his narrative serves to highlight how familiar motifs and stories can be adapted to suit a particular context (and audience). This, as well as the intersections with other narrative traditions—voyaging into unknown magical worlds recalls the adventures of the Argonauts, the meeting with the dead Herakles’ katabasis, and so on—also reveals the strongly agonistic character of Greek poetry. [60] The internal world of the Homeric poems more generally reflects this competitive aesthetic, particularly in its questioning, and instantiation, of political behavior. [61]

The idea that the Homeric epics are closely related to each other goes back to antiquity, with Aristotle’s judgment that the two poems complement each other to communicate not just the full experience of the Trojan War story but also the broadest range of human experience in general. From the simple idea that the two poems avoid repeating or referring to events related in the other (Monro’s Law)—beginning with but going far beyond the fact that the Iliad narrates the war at Troy, while the Odyssey picks up the story of the return home—their relationship can easily be conceived of as agonistic. [62] In these terms, each poem bequeaths to its tradition not only the paradigmatic telling of the sack and return home respectively, but also different narrative styles and structures. [63] In earlier work, we have emphasized that this rivalry can also be conceived of as intergeneric, in the sense that it was likely a part of the poetic relationship between different narrative traditions, defined by performance context (e.g. sympotic vs. assembly) and poetic form (epic vs. elegy). [64] Our argument in this book draws on some of these same ideas but instead emphasize an intrageneric rivalry, using it as the framework through which to read how both the Iliad and the Odyssey use and redeploy material from the Theban tradition in the creation of their own narratives. This includes suppressing whatever themes or issues the Theban tradition had projected in favor of putting them at the service of the narrative ends of these two poems. [65] What sets this type of competition apart, we believe, is that it occurred as a process over time—at least for the duration over which both epics were being formed—and, quite likely, in multiple directions. That is to say, we see this rivalry not limited to one direction—the Odyssey responding to the Iliad, say, or the Homeric poems drawing on the Theban epics—but potentially in both directions simultaneously, as each discrete poetic production in each of its respective traditions sought to gain a foothold and an audience in a crowded marketplace of epic song. We have called this dynamic rivalry to denote this multidirectionality.

An important, and potentially decisive, step in this process is the emergence of the Homeric poems as common property for the whole Greek world—in others words, as a Panhellenic epic koine. As our work has developed, we have come to realize that the poems’ narrative strategies, particularly their (re)use of other traditions, are intimately connected to the process by which they became adopted as Panhellenic narratives writ-large. As Christos Tsagalis has written: “ ‘Homer’ then reflects the concerted effort to create a Pan-Hellenic canon of epic song. His unprecedented success is due…not to his making previous epichoric traditions vanish but to his erasing them from the surface of his narrative while ipso tempore employing them in the shaping of his epics” (2008, xiii). Since our earlier approaches only partially acknowledged the importance of Panhellenism, this book needs to address how we think it frames poetic rivalry and the conditions that helped to shape the Iliad and the Odyssey. In Chapter 6 we will consider and discuss in some detail the role that Panhellenism plays in the eventual preeminence of Homeric epic. To anticipate that argument briefly here, our view is that a Panhellenic culture increased both the opportunities for rivalry and the incentives for engaging competitively with other traditions.

It was Anthony Snodgrass in 1971 who first outlined Panhellenism in its modern form. According to Snodgrass, Panhellenism refers to a historical process that indicates a gradual expression of shared “Greekness” through the embrace of common cult sites, agonistic aristocratic games, and the Homeric poems. [66] In antiquity, the idea of Panhellenism finds articulation only in later writers, and even then often problematically. The first expression of Panhellenism arguably comes in Herodotus, when the Athenians define “Greekness” as common blood, language, religious ritual, and customs (8.144.2): but, while this speech helps to articulate the lines of a Greek coalition against the Persian invader, it is given more as a show of loyalty by the Athenians than as a clear statement of Panhellenic unity—which Herodotus’ narrative clearly demonstrates is never fully achieved. [67] Similarly, the very insistence of Isocrates on pushing the case for Panhellenic action rather betrays his lack of success in subordinating competing political motivations under the banner of a united Greek homeland. For all the flaws within these political attempts to exploit Panhellenism, modern scholars are right to identify it as an influential phenomenon implicit in the culturally shared entities identified above. [68] Constituent aspects of this Panhellenism were present at an early period in the generalization of local cult features and stories during migration and colonization (see Malkin 1998:140–145), in the development of Pan-Boiotian (see Larson 2007:8) and Pan-Ionian traditions, and in the transformation of Greek culture during the emergence of the city-state (see Nagy 1999 [1979] and 1990). Hesiod and Homer, as the foremost poets who (again according to Herodotus) “taught the Greeks their religion” (2.53.1–3), came to stand as representations of a shared Panhellenic song culture. Accordingly, part of the aesthetic of Homeric and Hesiodic poetry is the enforcement, and continual reinforcement, of a broader, more general cultural program—what Ian Rutherford has referred to as “Panhellenic Poetics” (2005:11). In the field of Homeric studies, Gregory Nagy more than anyone has explored the manifestations of a Panhellenic negotiation between local and broader traditions, and the repercussions for thinking about Homeric poetry that follow. For him, Panhellenism serves as a useful heuristic for appreciating the development of Homeric epic as Greek poetry. [69]

While there is debate about whether or not the epics reflect Panhellenism internally, [70] the various overlapping and intersecting strands of Panhellenic culture helps us to recognize that Homeric poetry partly emerges from many different local (epichoric) traditions. [71] This process of Panhellenic rivalry, moreover, was not one that occurred at single time, at a single place, or in a single direction. Instead, it is best conceived of as providing a general background for the reception of epic and a determining factor in the final forms of the Homer poems as we have them—as well as, arguably, the fragmentary form of the non-Homeric epic traditions. Fundamentally, it also helps to explain why the Homeric relationship with other poetic traditions should be geographical and political as well as poetic—a point to which we shall return in Chapter 6.

Swift-Footed Achilles, Again

To give a better idea of our methodology and to show the way in which it contrasts with but also complements the other approaches that we have outlined, we need an example of it in action. The one that we have chosen we have treated in a more limited fashion elsewhere—the case of “swift-footed Achilles” in the Iliad. [72] Achilles’ first appearance in the narrative comes at a critical moment: the people are dying because of a plague sent by Apollo; in response to this existential crisis Achilles calls an assembly. Homer subsequently introduces Achilles’ address to the assembly with the following line: “after taking his stand among them, he spoke to them, swift-footed Achilles” (τοῖσι δ’ ἀνιστάμενος μετέφη πόδας ὠκὺς Ἀ χιλλεύς, 1.58). The oddity with this description, which we have tried to bring out with our inelegant translation, is the labeling of Achilles as “swift-footed” even though he is stationary (he was only getting to his feet anyway, and even that movement has been accomplished). It is not the only time that Achilles is described as “swift-footed” in Book 1. On a further four occasions Homer uses the line to introduce Achilles speaking, first in the assembly (1.84, 148, 215), then in his report to his mother (364); on each occasion, as before, Achilles is stationary.

In fact, in his summing up of the renewed crisis in the Achaean camp, Homer elaborates on the contrast between the usual swiftness of Achilles and his current raging inaction (1.488–492):

Αὐτὰρ ὃ μήνιε νηυσὶ παρήμενος ὠκυπόροισι
διογενὴς Πηλῆος υἱὸς πόδας ὠκὺς Ἀχιλλεύς·
οὔτέ ποτ’ εἰς ἀγορὴν πωλέσκετο κυδιάνειραν
οὔτέ ποτ’ ἐς πόλεμον, ἀλλὰ φθινύθεσκε φίλον κῆρ
αὖθι μένων, ποθέεσκε δ’ ἀϋτήν τε πτόλεμόν τε.

But he raged, sitting there among the swift-wayed ships,
The divine-born son of Peleus, swift-footed Achilles.
Neither was he ever going to the assembly where men win glory,
Nor ever into war; instead he was eating up his dear heart
Waiting there, though he was full of desire for the battle-cry and war.