By utilizing a comparative approach, David Larsen highlights both the differences between early Islam’s and Homeric poetry’s incorporation of mantic speech—a demonstration to any Homerist that the hexameter epic’s relationship to prophecy is not a cultural inevitability—and the constitutive repurposing of the speech of the seer to the words of the Prophet. Curtis Dozier and Charles Stocking present a different side of the understanding and adaptation of traditional styles of speech in the formula. Both argue that even if we cannot attribute an intellectual understanding of the workings of oral-formulaic theory either to the Roman poet Virgil or to the character Achilles, each shows a practical mastery of the formula not only within the context in which they need it, but for deeper poetic and narrative needs as well. Dan Sofaer and I organize our essays around the repurposing of objects, birds and wine respectively, within culture, and how their reuses and transformations within texts act as tokens of traditions. Many more such correspondences can be drawn across these essays; now, however, it will be worthwhile to run through each of them in turn.

The first three essays examine the opposition and conjunction of prophetic and poetic speech in the performance of authority. David Larsen’s “Signs, Omens, and Semiological Regimes in Early Islamic Texts” examines the Qurʾān’s preemption of the pre-Islamic oracular tradition—a confrontation that is as formative for early Islam, Larsen argues, as its encounter with Judaism and Christianity. Making a comparison with the emblematic use of oracular vocabulary within Homer, he notes that while both the Qurʾān and Homeric poetry use divinatory language to stage interpretation by their audience, that appropriation within the Qurʾān discredits and is hostile to divination. The interrelation of performance and tradition is constituted through the historical, generative struggle within the appropriation of the semiological concepts and poetics of sajʿ, the performative medium of the kāhin or pre-Islamic soothsayer. Within the Qurʾān, the soothsayer’s omen is sublated by Prophetic demonstration of evidence of the power of God. Thus, without access to correct belief through the medium of the Prophet, interpretation of the signs is bound to fail: divination has gone from a method for interpreting signs to fully being contained by them. The one type of divination not rejected by Islam, a sign of confirmation (faʾl) roughly analogous to the Homeric phēmē, is the exception that proves the rule, as it lends itself to the semiological hegemony of the Prophet, available without interpretive mediation and controlled at the level of language by Prophetic fiat. In an appendix, Larsen illustrates the shifting polarities of traditional Arabian oracular signage with two translated entries from the Lisān al-ʿarab of Ibn Manẓūr (d. 711/1311 CE).

Jack Mitchell provides a complementary analysis of the intersection of prophetic and performative authority in “Theoclymenus and the Poetics of Disbelief: Prophecy and Its Audience in the Odyssey.” Mitchell’s goal is to understand the portrayal of the seer Theoclymenus, a seemingly minor figure who nevertheless has a prodigiously long narrative introduction, the longest of any figure in Homer. The three prophecies of Theoclymenus provoke different reactions from Telemachus, Penelope, and the suitors, depending on the degree to which the magical power of formal language manipulates the understanding of audiences through their receptivity to the truths of the narrative. Theoclymenus as a hexameter performer of events in the present has strong commonalities with the epic reimagining of its performance through the aoidos, and at one significant point he reveals that a narrative description has provided a focalized sign seen only by him, a “perspective zeugma” that provides the basis of his prophecy to the suitors. Theoclymenus colludes with the narrator to perform the story for his own interest, as a well- and ill-treated guest.

Dan Sofaer looks at the significance of Aristophanes’ bird-chorus in musical performance in “The Places of Song in Aristophanes’ Birds.” Observing that birds in Greek poetic traditions are the quintessential intermediaries, whether on the metaphorical level of poetic performance or the metonymic level of carriers of the gods’ will through signs of mantic significance, yet are not authorities in themselves, Sofaer reads the lyric passages of Birds as performances of comedy under scrutiny. The birds’ transformation to active agents correspondingly transforms comedy’s relation to other traditions of song. He argues that there is something fundamentally novel in the birds’ creating a community through song, from the first lyric in which a performing group is forged from a disparate set of voices and styles. They go on to lay claim to a sacred, musical authority from Phrynichus, and reject epinician and dithyramb in the intruder scenes because they are too dependent on the institutions of the human city. The birds, together with their city, thus construct a music divorced from civic or divine dependency, a music connected explicitly with the Muses, a music, Sofaer suggests, that may have implicitly provided the model for the “birdcage of the Muses,” the Library of Alexandria.

Both Thomas Walsh’s “Some Refractions of Homeric Anger in Athenian Drama” and Charles Stocking’s “Language about Achilles: Linguistic Frame Theory and the Formula in Homeric Poetics” address the construction of cultural memory by building on Walsh’s earlier work on the ideology of Homeric anger (Walsh 2002). Walsh looks at the uses of κότος as a term for anger in Aeschylus and argues that the term is central for his portrayal of conflict and emotion, and even more thematically significant in his tragedies than in Homeric epic. For Aeschylus, kotos retains its Homeric cultural framework, yet is “refracted” through contemporary public politics to provide an ethical center for archaic values that would otherwise fade. It acts out two interrelated problems: a political one of allegiances and acts of violence that persist even beyond death and a poetic one of the continuity of cultural memory. Walsh notes that, ironically, for all the rhetoric of permanence around archaic kotos, it is marginalized and virtually ignored in later Athenian drama. This word not only shows its potential for structuring the institutions of society but also reveals the ultimately fictive nature of such institutions.

Stocking takes the insights of Walsh’s work and of frame theory semantics to argue that the narrative associations of the anger term χόλος imply a potential script, or a socially stabilized series of events bound to speech-act(s). He applies his model to a speech by Achilles to his Myrmidons in Iliad XVI, and argues that it depicts a practical understanding of the semantics of formulaic language. Achilles projects an imagined, distributed complaint against him through an act of poetic mimesis framing a series of formulaic speech-events that use the conventional language of Homeric poetry. Yet when we look to the context of that imagined complaint, we see Achilles not only creating grammatical and metrical structures not represented elsewhere in the corpus, but also framing the language about his anger with the same formal structures the poet(s) use for his exceptionalism. Stocking illustrates how an exceptional character such as Achilles can be represented as reacting to and recreating generic structures even from within Homeric poetry.

Concluding the volume, Rodney Merrill presents a translation of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo. Beyond the thematic resonances of this hymn, Merrill’s use of English hexameter and consistent English-language rendering of Homeric formulae provides the closest possible experience in English to the actual audition of Homeric poetry in Greek. And, in a real sense, Merrill provides an artistic analogue to the scholarly project of the essays here, that of making the often subtle and complex effects of Greek verse perceptible to contemporary readers.

I would like to extend my thanks to Gregory Nagy for setting us on this journey and for his help throughout this project; to Curtis Dozier and Wilson Shearin for their input at various stages of the editing process; to Olga Levaniouk, Jill Curry Robbins, and Leonard Muellner at the Center for Hellenic Studies for their invaluable assistance and patient guidance; and to Mary Bellino for her superb, vigilant copyediting.

“And about some other song I will be thinking …”