In the second part of his on-going series on the uses of myth throughout history, By Jovian Alexander Woodward takes us back to where it all began…
Hello, I’m Woody – welcome back to my mini-series on some of the great re-uses of myth throughout the ages. This is the blog for a theatre company so the first bit was on ancient theatre to whet your appetite. That done, we’re now going back in time and dealing with the rest of the series chronologically. I will, alas, not have enough space to mention everything. I’m aiming to include the important points to pique your interest and to give you a base understanding. You can then do your own reading and we can have an engaging chat in the pub.
Having roped you into the series I’m now going to talk about Homer: that’s the Iliad (the story of Achilles’ anger in the ninth year of the Trojan War) and the Odyssey (the hero Odysseus and the ten years it took him to get home from the Trojan War). We’re starting here because (to a Classicist, at least) if a theory doesn’t have a parallel with Homer it’s probably not literature. We’re also discussing Homer because it is where Western literature started.
I say “literature” because that’s that the word that gets used – but it’s wrong. It’s wrong firstly because I re-watched The History Boys earlier in the week and Hector’s views on the term are still in my head (gods rest your soul, Richard Griffiths). It’s also wrong because it’s too monolithic a term for Homer. In their conception at least, these poems (and the related but unfortunately lost poems of the Epic and Theban Cycles) were far more fluid than literature. Indeed, Homerists tell me that they weren’t even written down for a century or two after their composition. “Composition”, that’s the point. These poems were orally composed, improvised by very skilled bard-type people on the spot. There is evidence of the nature of their composition in the texts themselves.
The Iliad has a fair number of fight scenes. It is a strange fact in said scenes that whichever warrior throws his spear first loses. This has to be a literary affectation because if it were true of actual fighting of the time no one would ever do it. The poet follows this pattern so he doesn’t have to think about it too much and can concentrate on other things. Similarly in the Odyssey Telemachus and Odysseus both turn up at the courts of foreign kings at points in the first half-dozen or so books of the poem. Here, too, there’s a pattern. There’s a formula to the greetings, where the visitor is sat, then there’s the pouring of the wine, the cutting of the meat, and the gift-giving when they leave. These episodes are included because xenia (“guest-friendship”) was an important indicator in the Heroic Age of whether someone was civilised or not. These actions have to be mentioned, but the reason they’re mentioned in the same way each time has as much to do with having a formula to aid composition as it does with the niceties of mythic palace life.
Repetition can be taken even further. In the Iliad there is a speech on how unpleasant war is that appears word for word twice in the poem several books apart. The first occurrence is in a conversation between two Greek soldiers and the second time it is in a conversation between a Trojan and his wife. These differing contexts give the speech a different spin each time, of course, but that doesn’t change the fact that when the poet wanted to have his characters discourse on this subject he used the exact same phrasing. The same technique of using the exact same wording is also used in the device known as the Homeric epithet. This is the habit of using a formulaic phrase as description for character or place. So, to quote E.V. Rieu’s excellent translations, we have Zeus as “King of gods and men”, Athena as “Goddess of the flashing eyes”, and (relatively) famously whenever there’s a new day in the Odyssey the phrase is “Dawn appeared fresh and rosy-fingered”. Certain characters have several epithets so there’s always one available to fit the metre of where it’s needed in the line.
The best modern analogy I have for this sort of composition is the world of rap. In freestyle an artist will be practised enough that they will have (in addition to fantastic on the spot creativity) a bank of phrases that fit the beat and rhyme together which can be conjured from thin air as and when they are needed. Certain topics will come up more often so there are more phrases to do with those topics. I use the comparison advisedly, having recently listened to a talk by Professor Ahuvia Kahane, Head of Classics at Royal Holloway, on certain similarities between Homeric Epic and rap culture. It was excellent and ended with him rapping the first forty lines of the Iliad to the beat of a track by the artist Nas. Not strictly relevant but interesting enough merit a mention when Homer comes up.
I have been driving home the point that these poems were orally improvised and not painstakingly created on paper. This is important because these poems (and the two similar, though sadly lost, collections of poems known as the Epic Cycle and the Theban Cycle) were retellings of familiar, existing stories already known to their audience. The texts that have survived down to us are the last flowerings of a tradition that started off as oral history as much as anything else. This is why the Catalogue of Ships is there in Book II of the Iliad. These poems are retellings and polished versions of stories that were already old. The poets could retell them because they belonged to everybody. They kept on belonging to everybody as well, which is why the tragedians could make use of them as source material. For example, the Oresteia and Hecuba have their roots in poems from the Epic Cycle, while Antigone and Oedipus the King come from the Theban Cycle. Good stories deserve retelling but sometimes need to be presented anew for more recent generations – so perhaps you can see why this blog post is now suddenly very relevant to a theatre company dedicated to just such a practice? It’s almost like I planned it that way. Funny that.
One hopes you’re well,
ADWoodward
