A. Homer's Pretensions

Our concern here will be to examine one among several traditions of the interpretation of Homer in antiquity: that characterized by the claims that Homer was a divine sage with revealed knowledge of the fate of souls and of the structure of reality, and that the Iliad and Odyssey are mystical allegories yielding information of this sort if properly read. It will be necessary to omit from discussion the larger part of the history of the interpretation of Homer in antiquity^[1] in order to look specifically at the tradition closing that history and looking forward to the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Nevertheless it seems appropriate to begin by examining the earliest testimonia (including the Homeric texts themselves) providing insight into the prehistory and early history of the conception of Homer as a sage.

It has been customary among recent students of Homer to minimize the importance of the prophetic element in Homeric diction and, on the

[1] This vast field was approached as a whole by Félix Buffière in Les Mythes d'Homère et la pensée grecque . His work, though anticipated to some extent by iconographical studies such as those of Franz Cumont, broke new ground and has remained the definitive treatment. Buffière's vast scholarship permitted him to sketch out a comprehensive history of the interaction between Homer and Greek philosophy. The debts of all subsequent work in this field to his study are very great. Of comparable importance, but more general in scope, is Jean Pépin's Mythe et Allégorie: Les Origines grecques et les contestations judéo-chrétiennes .

― 2 ―

contrary, to emphasize the absence of any pretense to supernatural insight in the narrative voice. J. Tate sums up the negative evidence:

Homer . . . does not claim to be "controlled" by a spirit not his own, or to utter oracles containing a manifold significance. . . . Nor does he claim the standing of a priest. . . . The Homeric claim to inspiration does not imply profound wisdom or even veracity.^[2]

Tate's point is that the "divine" Homer of Plato, whom the Neopythagoreans and Neoplatonists systematically expanded (in isolation from the ironies and contradictions of the relevant passages of Plato) into a seer and sage, has no Homeric roots whatsoever. Tate does not place great weight on his own argumentum ex silentio , but at the same time he takes it for granted that any reasonable reader will agree with him. The Homeric narrative voice, though, is notoriously opaque with regard to its own identity and function, and Tate's argument does have decided weaknesses. For the sake of a full appreciation of the qualities of the poems, this commonly held view deserves to be examined and questioned.

No one will deny that direct access to information about a mode of existence beyond the human, about the fate of souls after death, and about events on the human plane but hidden from everyday perception is a possibility in the imaginative world of Homer. Revelation is the stock-in-trade of Homeric seers from Calchas to Theoclymenus and Tiresias, and direct, accurate perception of divine reality is commonly extended to the heroes themselves.^[3] The contrast between human ignorance and divine omniscience is repeatedly drawn,^[4] and the epiphanies that provide breakthroughs from perception on the human level to perception on the divine are among the most dramatic moments of the poems.

There is ample basis, then, on which to claim that the epics contain a complex model of perception in which the world of experience of ordinary mortals is seen as severely limited. The perceptions of the heroes remain similarly limited except for occasional moments of insight. Those of the seers differ from those of the other heroes only in degree: for

[2] J. Tate, "On the History of Allegorism," p. 13.

[3] The instances are so numerous and conspicuous as scarcely to require enumeration. In the Odyssey , Odysseus is repeatedly given privileged information by Athena. In the Iliad , her striking apparitions to Achilles at 1.294-222 and to Diomedes at 5.123-33 and 799-845, along with that of Apollo to Achilles at 22.7-20, all involve the imparting of privileged information, available only through the superhuman perceptions of a divinity.

[4] E.g., in the line that opens Achilles' response to Thetis's questions at Il . 1.365.

― 3 ―

them, epiphanies are the rule rather than the exception. The gods, whose experience otherwise in many respects resembles human experience, are omniscient, and though this principle is commonly incompatible with the demands of the narrative,^[5] it is nevertheless repeatedly expressed and seems an integral part of Homeric theology.^[6]

Where are we to place the bards in this hierarchy? It has been a commonplace of Homer criticism since antiquity that there is an element of self-portraiture in the bards of the Odyssey .^[7] This principle extends to the Iliad as well, and the portrait of Achilles as amateur bard singing the

by his tent (Il . 9.189) is surely included to increase the prestige of the Homeric bard and the tradition of Homeric song. Without insisting, with Proclus, on the symbolic values of the portraits of the individual bards and their relationship to the various levels of poetry in the Homeric corpus, we may reasonably assume that we have, at least in Phemius and Demodocus, figures whom the Homeric tradition created in order to glorify its own self-acclaimed roots in the Heroic Age and to provide us, if not with a self-portrait, then at least with an ancestor-portrait of the founders of the Homeric line. The epithet "divine" applied to bards in the Odyssey^[8] doubtless in part explains the application of the same epithet

to Homer by Plato, and the bardic performances depicted provide opportunities for numerous compliments that reflect upon the whole tradition of heroic song,^[9] though focusing, it is true, rather on the capacity of the bards to delight the senses and the imagination than upon other "divine" qualities.

The characteristics of the Odyssey bards are not explicitly claimed by the Homeric narrative voice for itself, but the implication is very strong that the listener is expected to make the connection and to associate with the bard whose voice he is hearing the qualities of the bards whom that

[5] E.g., the scene between Zeus and Hera at Il . 1.536-94, which is unthinkable if they are both truly omniscient. Pushing the concept to its logical conclusion, all dialogue between omniscient gods would be impossible or simply superfluous.

^[6]

[7] E.g., Proclus In Rep . 1.193. See ch. 5D below.

^[8]

[9] E.g. Od . 8.44-45 and 478-81.

― 4 ―

voice describes and impersonates. At one point, moreover, the narrative voice groans under the difficulty of the task and reminds us that superhuman demands are being made upon it:

It is a hard thing for me to tell all this like a god.

(Il . 12.176)

A more complex, though largely tacit, claim to superhuman powers and knowledge can be found in the narrative voice's claims regarding its own performance. The salient characteristic of privileged knowledge in the context of Homeric psychology is the ability of the mind to move freely in time and space. The gods' knowledge is infinite because it extends into the past and into the future and is not limited to a single location or perspective. Normal human knowledge, however, extends only to that portion of the past the individual has experienced or been told about, and to that portion of the present currently within the grasp of the senses. Calchas the seer, however, is characterized as one

Who knew those things that were, those that were to be and those that had been before,

(Il . 1.70)

and this is clearly the core of his claim to competence as a seer. The narrative voice, it is true, never makes explicit claims to share in this sort of privileged knowledge. It does, however, frequently request supernatural aid in order to comprehend or transmit the relevant information, and the invocation immediately preceding the catalogue of ships makes explicit the function of Homer's Muses:

Tell me now, Muses of Olympus—
for you are goddesses, here beside me, and know everything,
while we hear only reports and know nothing—
who were the leaders and chiefs of the Greeks?
For I could not remember them all and name them,
not if I had ten tongues in ten mouths,
an invincible voice and a heart of bronze,
unless the Olympian Muses, daughters of
aegis-bearing Zeus, remind me who came to Ilium.

― 5 ―

(Il . 2.484-92)

Homer's humility, then, extends only to his own unaided voice. When aided by the Muses he can perform tasks of memory and song that go far beyond normal human limitations. Specifically, in this instance, he claims the ability to include within the scope of his song a vast and complex body of information about the past.^[10]

Here, the invocation constitutes an inflated introduction to a set piece of exceptional complexity and the intention of the narrative voice seems to be to bring the magnificence of its own upcoming performance to the attention of the audience. In other instances, however, the narrative voice gratuitously destroys the dramatic coherence of a scene in order to impress us with its own broader perspective on the matters at hand, its ability to contemplate past and future, whereas the actors in the drama it relates cannot see beyond their immediate surroundings.

Thus, when Helen looks down on the Greek troops in the episode of the "View from the Wall," she mentions finally that she does not see her brothers Castor and Polydeuces, and conjectures that they may be absent because they are ashamed on her account. The narrative voice, however, closing the episode, observes:

Thus she spoke, but the fertile earth already held them fast,
back in Lacedaemonia, in their own land

(Il . 3.243-44)

The moment for the interruption is carefully chosen. We have been exposed for the last 180 lines to a complex dramatic situation the focus of which is discovery. One limited perception is played off against another: Priam's (rather unaccountable) ignorance, Helen's relatively great knowledge of the Greeks, and Antenor's limited, but complementary, knowl-

^[10]

― 6 ―

edge. The drama has been a drama of revelation in which we have been intensely conscious of the horizons of experience of each individual. This is the moment at which the narrative voice reveals something of the scope of its own knowledge, and the effect is one of a rapid alteration of perspective, analogous, perhaps, to a retreating zoom shot in the narrative vocabulary of cinema: we pass from an intense and claustrophobic dramatic situation, viewed from within, to a distant, ironic vantage point, which is that of the poet himself.

The particular instance we have examined relates to the past, and it is certainly true that the primary focus of the Homeric narrative voice's claims to privileged wisdom is retrospective. Homer is equally capable, however, of making such leaps to reveal some fact about the future, as when Patroclus has just requested of Achilles that he be allowed to lead the Myrmidons into battle and the narrative voice interjects, before Achilles can answer:

So the fool pleaded—he was asking
for his own foul death and doom.

(Il . 16.46-47)

The effect is to emphasize the vast gap between the knowledge of past, present, and future available to the narrator and the limited knowledge of the actors in the drama. This gap generates the tragic irony characteristic of the narrative technique of the Iliad .^[11] It necessarily involves the raising of the narrator to a level of perception for which the most obvious analogy is that of the gods. Thus the narrative voice does in some sense assimilate "divine" wisdom and adopt a privilege that implies such wisdom.

In the context of the implicit claims made by the Homeric narrative voice for its own powers and for the wisdom it taps, the descriptions of the Odyssey bards take on a new seriousness. Demodocus, in particular, the blind protégé of the Muse, is seen to enjoy that protection as more

[11] There are numerous examples beyond those given here. The most frequent pattern is an interjection at the moment of an oath or prayer, in which the narrative voice indicates that what is prayed for or sworn will not be fulfilled. Cf. Il . 2.36 and 3.302. The narrative voice of the Odyssey seems far less concerned with this dramatic contrast, and in general the effect sought in the Iliad , with its cultivation of the brutal contrast between ignorance and knowledge, seems rooted in the far more bitter ironies of the military epic.

― 7 ―

than an empty convention.^[12] What appears to be simply insistence on the vastness of his repertory—

for the god made him able to
delight, however his heart might impel him to sing.

(Od . 8.44-45)

—has overtones of an extraordinary power of the mind to move in space and time, along with the implication that Demodocus is "divine," not only in his power to delight, but also in his ability to exercise that power in casting his mind over a vast range of poetic material.^[13] The only singers who make such claims explicitly in the poems are the Sirens:

For we know all that the Trojans and Greeks
suffered in Troy by the will of the gods.
We know all that happens on the rich earth.

(Od . 12.189-91)

The coincidence is far from gratuitous, and the Sirens resemble the Odyssey bards in other ways as well: they "bewitch" (

, Od . 12.44) as Phemius's songs are called "bewitchings" (

, Od . 1.337). Thus they share both of the supernatural qualities attributed to the bards: the power of the mind to violate the normal limitations of space and time and the power to entrance their audience. The Sirens' claim to exceptional wisdom corresponds closely to the implicit claim of the Iliad poet, aided by his Muse, to universal knowledge of the Troy tale. By the time of Hadrian, the identification of Homer with his own Sirens must have been a commonplace, for in the Certamen (38) an oracle calls Homer himself an "ambrosial Siren"

. The evolution of Homer's Sirens—with the help of the quite different Sirens who generate the music of the celestial hemispheres in the myth of Er in

[12] Cf. Od . 8.44-45, 61-63, 489-91.

^[13]

― 8 ―

Plato's Republic —into symbols of the divine order in the universe^[14] is an important part of the evolution of the claims for Homeric wisdom from esthetic convention to cultural and philosophical mythmaking.

This, then, is the range of Homeric singers to whom we can turn for self-portraits of the creator of the Iliad and Odyssey . But there is one other Homeric teller of tales whom a part of the later tradition was able to identify with Homer: Tiresias. Though there is no surviving evidence of the assimilation of Homer to Tiresias in antiquity, the engraving that appears on the title page of Chapman's Odyssey is unlikely to represent an invention of the early seventeenth century. This plate (see frontispiece) has often been reprinted,^[15] but its contents and importance do not seem to have been examined, though Allardyce Nicoll describes it briefly and notes that a figure of Homer stands in the center.^[16] There is little doubt that the figure is, in fact, Homer. The head, with blind eyes turned to heaven, illustrates a tradition, at least as old as Proclus,^[17] that made of the myth of Homer's blindness a metaphor for transcendent vision. It is virtually the same head that appears on the title page of Chapman's Iliad and is there explicitly labeled "Homer."^[18] The Homer of the Odyssey title page is, however, someone else as well. He is surrounded on all sides by ghosts, whose outlines are dotted. His is fully drawn, and the epithet over his head, solus sapit hic homo , along with that of the ghosts, reliqui vero umbrae moventur , clearly constitutes a paraphrase of Circe's description of Tiresias:

Even in death, Persephone granted to him alone the use of his
wisdom, but the others are shadows that flit around.

(Od . 10.494-95)

In the foreground sit Athena and Odysseus, the latter looking up a t Homer/Tiresias in response to the goddess, who is pointing upward.

The profile of Dante from Raphael's Parnassus is certainly the inspiration for the most clearly defined of the ghosts contemplating Homer, and the scene as a whole includes elements both of the Odyssey and of the

[14] See Pierre Boyancé, "Les Muses et l'harmonie des spheres."

[15] E.g., as frontispiece to George deF. Lord, Homeric Renaissance , and to the second volume of the Bollingen edition of Chapman's Homer , edited by Allardyce Nicoll (see "Works Cited: Ancient Authors").

[16] Chapman's Homer , ed. Nicoll, vol. 2, p. xii.

[17] Proclus In Rep . 1.193-94.

[18] See Chapman's Homer , ed. Nicoll, vol. 1, frontispiece.

― 9 ―

Divine Comedy .^[19] Raphael's fresco is the principal source both of composition and of detail, but the scene has been moved from Parnassus back to the underworld. The ghosts swarming around Homer/Tiresias and crowned with laurel must surely be equated with the crowd of poets of the fourth canto of the Inferno , rather than those of the fresco. Homer is presented in the form of Tiresias as a seer and the founder of the poetic tradition. Though the literary conceit of visiting Homer in Hades is at least as old as Plato,^[20] the vision of him surrounded by the other poets, all of whom look up to him as their leader, is Dantesque—or, rather, Dante and Raphael are the proximal sources that have most influenced the artist of the title page. The concept of Homer as the focus of a literary court in the other world has been traced to the Pythagoreans,^[21] and Lucian was able to parody it in the second century, leaving little doubt that such a figure was taken seriously a millennium before Dante.^[22] The notion of the assimilation of this vision of Homer to his own creation Tiresias, the one ghost able to provide true information about past, present, and future, may likewise have had a long history antedating Chapman. The iconography of the title-page clearly belongs to the Renaissance, and the baroque style of the engraving, with its aggressive and exaggerated classicism, is a reminder of its distance from classical antiquity—yet, as the examples above have shown, the possibility of a Homeric self-portrait in the form of a seer rather than a bard is not out of the question.

This survey of the claims, implicit and explicit, of the Homeric narrative voice to privileged knowledge has provided us with a range of possibilities and the rudiments of a historical outline. The widespread myth of Homer's blindness is probably an indication that, even before the classical period, the description of the blind bard Demodocus was read as a Homeric self-portrait. The bard of the Hymn to Apollo who describes himself as a blind man (Hymn 3. 172) provides attractive support for this interpretation. By Proclus's time, the perception of the Odyssey

[19] The Raphael drawing of Dante juxtaposed with a Homer of the Hellenistic "blind" type (actually drawn from the recently discovered Laocoön group), reproduced as frontispiece to Hugo Rahner, Griechische Mythen in christlicher Deutung , and on the jacket of this volume, is a study for the great Vatican fresco of Parnassus.

[20] Plato Ap . 41a.

[21] "L'immortalité, conçue comme une récompense de la science, devait nécessairement crier un paradis d'intellectuels." Franz Cumont, Recherches sur le symbolisme funéraire des Romains , p. 315

[22] Luc. Ver. hist . 2.14-16.

― 10 ―

bards as Homeric self-portraits had become an apparent commonplace of interpretation. With Proclus, and perhaps earlier, those multiple portraits became metaphors for multiple levels of meaning in the poems. In the form in which it reaches us,^[23] the assimilation of Homer's voice to that of the Sirens may be no more than a lovely, but fanciful, Hellenistic conceit, but it implies a history of interpretation that had already identified Homer's voice with the limitless knowledge of his Muses, and had seen the connection between that composite figure and the Sirens. Finally, the assimilation of Homer to Tiresias, though we glimpse it only in the context of the declining northern European Renaissance, casts some light on a lost portion of the history of the interpretation of the Iliad and Odyssey that had made of their poet a prophetic figure only dimly foreshadowed in the ancient critical tradition before the Neoplatonists.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 742