Appendix A. Rhapsodes in Vase Painting; Rhapsōidia Vase painting provides evidence for the nature of Homeric performance, though not as much as might be thought, and not in as much abundance as for other musical contests held at the Panathenaia. [1] The earliest depictions of performance on vases of Panathenaic shape pre-date Plato’s Ion by a century and a half, however, and… Read more
Conclusion Epic is not simply a stripped-down version of tragedy, some sort of primitive ancestor. Instead, the “half-acting” of epic creates an atopia—a placelessness, an uncanniness—in which the absent and the past take over the present, along multiple paths. The performance dynamic creates separate realms of action—present, past, divine, human, living, dead—on occasion layering these on top of one another. These boundaries, once in place, can be… Read more
4. The Living Instrument: Odyssey 13–15 in Performance The actor … must make his own inner being ‘an instrument capable of playing any tune,’ as it is often put. Francis Fergusson, The Idea of a Theater, pp. 252–253 Turning our focus from the Iliad to the Odyssey, it seems plausible that the distinct virtue of the Odyssey in performance… Read more
Interlude 2. A Source for the Iliad’s Structure Now that we have drawn out the performative virtues of the Iliad’s use of the Protesilaos story, let us pivot around and look again at the question of sources and intertextuality. What are we to make of the genealogical connections among the female figures in the background: Marpessa, her daughter Kleopatra, and her granddaughter Polydora? As Pausanias [… Read more
3. Half-Burnt: The Wife of Protesilaos In and Out of the Iliad The most passionate advocacies for the art of poetry in sophisticated late periods, such as the period of Horace, turn upon the function of poetry as keeping alive, across the abysses of death and of the difference between persons, the human image. … Now I think you make a generational error … by… Read more
Interlude 1. Ring Thinking: Phoenix in Iliad 23 A full account of the theatricality or performability of Phoenix’s speech involves features such as structure, image, and mythological background. This Interlude shows how these features carry forward from Book 9 to reappear in the narrative of Phoenix’s other major appearance in the poem, in the Funeral Games of Book 23. Somewhat as the second panel of his speech,… Read more
2. Marpessa, Kleopatra, and Phoenix Perhaps it means that at the point where we are we have lost all touch with the true theater, since we confine it to the domain of what daily thought can reach, the familiar or unfamiliar domain of consciousness;—and if we address ourselves to the unconscious, it is merely to take from it what it has been able to collect… Read more
1. The Elements of Poetics and Presence The specific virtue of solo Homeric performance has come into view: namely, the performer’s position between representation and action. The bard drifts within the space of half-acting; he does not merely alternate smoothly between narrating and enacting. Epic performance brings characters and objects into presence but also induces uncertainty as to the “whereabouts” of the performer, the characters, and the… Read more
Introduction “Isn’t everything that is said by the storytellers and the poets a narrative of what has happened or what is or what is to come?” “What else?” he said. Plato Republic 392d This book plumbs the virtues of the Homeric poems as scripts for solo performance. Despite the focus on orality for the last several decades, and… Read more
Acknowledgements This book has its origins in my University of Chicago dissertation. I treasure my conversations with my advisors: first, the late David Grene, who demanded that every act of translation be a performance, and then James Redfield, Laura Slatkin and the late Paul Friedrich. Each of these brilliant scholars opened to me doors of reading and thinking and encouraged me to strike out on the path… Read more
