Allusion, Authority, and Truth: Critical Perspectives on Greek Poetic and Rhetorical Praxis

469 Pages·2010·4.73 MB·English

by  Christos Tsagalis

Allusion,Authority,and Truth
Trends in Classics –
Supplementary Volumes
Edited by
Franco Montanari and Antonios Rengakos
Scientific Committee
Alberto Bernabé · Margarethe Billerbeck · Claude Calame
Philip R.Hardie · Stephen J.Harrison · Stephen Hinds
Richard Hunter · Christina Kraus · Giuseppe Mastromarco
Gregory Nagy · Theodore D.Papanghelis · Giusto Picone
Kurt Raaflaub · Bernhard Zimmermann
Volume 7
De Gruyter
Allusion, Authority, and Truth
Critical Perspectives on Greek Poetic
and Rhetorical Praxis
Edited by
Phillip Mitsis
Christos Tsagalis
De Gruyter
ISBN 978-3-11-024539-4
e-ISBN 978-3-11-024540-0
ISSN 1868-4785
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Allusion,authority,and truth :critical perspectives on Greek poetic and rhetorical praxis
/ edited by Phillip Mitsis,Christos Tsagalis.
p.cm.-- (Trends in classics.Supplementary volumes ;v.7)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-3-11-024539-4 (hardcover :alk.paper) -- ISBN 978-3-11-024540-0 (ebk.)
1.Greek poetry--History and criticism.2. Allusions in literature.3. Rhetoric,
Ancient. I.Mitsis,Phillip II.Tsagalis,Christos.
PA3095.A55 2010
881'.0109--dc22
2010034958
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet
at http://dnb.d-nb.de.
© 2010 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/New York
Typesetting: Michael Peschke, Berlin
Printing: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen
∞Printed on acid-free paper
Printed in Germany
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Preface
This volume of papers by fellow scholars and students of Pietro Pucci is
a collective act of admiration, friendship, and gratitude. It represents, of
course, only a small fraction of the many scholars worldwide who have
been touched by the force of his scholarship and the generosity of his
intellect and person, and as such, it can only pretend to address a few of
the many critical questions that Pucci has been instrumental in raising in
his remarkable career.
As is well known, Pietro Pucci has been among the handful of key
figures who have transformed the study of archaic and classical Greek
texts over the past several decades from what was a dominant philologi-
cal approach, and if there is no longer any common consensus about
how we are to approach the powerful riddles that these works confront
us with, it is in large part because of the scholars who along with Pucci
have been exploring the possibilities and limits of these conflicting criti-
cal discourses. Traveling between Ithaca, Paris, and Rome, Pucci has
been at the center of an international conversation that has been open-
ing new critical perspectives from which to view the cultural contexts,
the ethical and religious aspirations, and the nature of the oral and writ-
ten representations formulated by the Greeks as they attempted to
fathom their own difficult social and individual protocols. By invoking
notions of allusion, authority, and truth in our title, we have hoped to
signal the centrality in this international conversation of Pucci’s charac-
teristically brilliant and innovative explorations into key aspects of the
divine voice created by the human poets to give expression to the deep-
est conundrums of life and death. Of course, this captures only a fraction
of the significant and powerful insights that Pucci has made in a body of
scholarship that itself has explored many forms, including translation,
commentaries, critical studies, and works for a wider public. As well as
taking on many guises, Pucci’s work appears in a variety of languages
and that has allowed him not only to speak to, but also to unite and en-
ergize a broad international community of scholars.
The fact that the language of this volume is only English perhaps
fails to capture the particular nuances and richness of those individual
conversations, but we would be remiss if we did not thank Jeannine
Routier-Pucci and her gifted translation team of Loredana Comparone,
Elizabeth Rawlings, Susan Tarrow, and Aaron Tate for their devotion
and care in helping to make possible what is perhaps an artificial, but we
Preface vi
hope, stimulating conversation among Pucci’s French, Italian, British,
Greek, and American interlocutors. By the same token, we could hardly
fail to mention that other gifted team, of course, Pietro and Jeannine.
Those who have had the good fortune to spend time with them either
as students, friends, or colleagues know how difficult it would be to
imagine finding any better company in which to partake of the life of
the mind, bask in marvelous and seemingly unending hospitality, and
marvel at the possibilities of mutual wit, good cheer, and love.
Table of Contents
Preface ........................................................................................... v
Introduction ................................................................................... 1
EPIC AND LYRIC
1. The Authority of Orpheus, Poet and Bard:
Between Tradition and Written Practice (C. Calame) ............. 13
2. Remembering the Gastēr (E. Bakker) ...................................... 37
3. Achilles Polytropos and Odysseus as Suitor:
Iliad 9.307-429 (P. Mitsis) ....................................................... 51
4. Hector’s Inaction (Iliad 5.471-492) (Ph. Rousseau) ................. 77
5. Epic Space Revisited: Narrative and Intertext
in the Episode between Diomedes and Glaucus
(Il. 6.119-236) (C. Tsagalis) .................................................... 87
6. Idealism in the Odyssey and the Meaning of mounos in
Odyssey 16 (S. Goldhill) ......................................................... 115
7. Reading the Epic Past: The Iliad on Heroic Epic
(D. Turkeltaub) ..................................................................... 129
8. The Meaning of homoios (ὁμοῖος) in Theogony 27
and Elsewhere (G. Nagy) ....................................................... 153
9. Hesiod, Th. 117 and 128: Formula and the Text’s
Temporality (P. Judet de La Combe) ..................................... 169
10. Pylades and Orestes in Pindar’s Eleventh Pythian:
The Uses of Friendship (T. Hubbard) .................................... 187
DRAMA
1. Aeschylus, Suppliants 112-150 (V. Citti) ................................. 203
2. Sons of the Shield: Paternal Arms in Epic and Tragedy
(B. Goff) ................................................................................ 219
3. Echoes from Mount Cithaeron (O. Taplin) ............................ 235
viii Table of Content
4. Notes on Tragic Rhetoric in Euripides’ Hecuba
(J. Bollack) ............................................................................ 249
5. The Lady Vanishes: Helen and Her Phantom in
Euripidean Drama (F. Zeitlin) ................................................ 263
6. “A Song to Match my Song”:
Lyric Doubling in Euripides’ Helen (A.L. Ford) ...................... 283
7. Tyrants and Flatterers:
Kolakeia in Aristophanes’ Knights and Wasps
(A.T. Edwards) ...................................................................... 303
8. Do Not Sit near Socrates (Aristophanes’ Frogs, 1482-1499)
(St. Jedrkiewicz) .................................................................... 339
9. Veiled Venom: Comedy, Censorship and Figuration
(G. Dobrov) .......................................................................... 359
PROSE
1. Shifting Paradigms: Mimēsis in Isocrates
(L. Collins Edwards) .............................................................. 377
2. Polybius and Daniel: Two Universal Histories, or What
Does It Mean To Be Contemporary? (F. Hartog) .................. 401
Bibliography ................................................................................ 413
List of Contributors ..................................................................... 445
Publications by Pietro Pucci ........................................................ 451
General Index .............................................................................. 457
Introduction
All the contributors have taken as their point of departure critical issues
that have been at the center of Pietro Pucci’s scholarly interests and
writings, especially how conceptions of allusion, authority, and truth
helped to shape the poetical and rhetorical practices of our ancient
Greek texts. The volume begins with Claude Calame’s far-ranging study
of that preeminent singer of the Greek tradition, Orpheus. Beginning
with the question of how the songs of poets gain their authority and are
able to project their truths, Calame proceeds to examine a wide array of
textual and iconographic evidence surrounding the practices of ancient
Orphism. He deftly shows the multiform ways and contrivances by
which the “incantorial authority” of Orpheus’ singing voice is projected
to orphic initiates and how it is able to be transferred to orphic written
texts whose authority is, in turn, further supported by a practice of writ-
ten commentaries. Calame’s arguments about the nature of Orphic song
and its relation to writing raise a fascinating set of critical questions that
also confront scholars of ancient epic. At the same time, however, these
questions of poetic authority become further complicated in the context
of the intertextual, ideological, and metapoetical rivalries staged in the
Iliad, Odyssey, and Hesiod. What Hubbard in his paper describes as the
“semionarrative” of the archaic poets is weaved from a complex associa-
tion of heroes, cults, places, political centers, and rival poetic voices,
each with their own ethical, religious, and generational aspirations. The
authors of the next set of papers on Homer, Hesiod, and Pindar have all
taken on some of the most difficult problems or texts in the archaic cor-
pus. While not always agreeing either in their methodologies or in their
results, they nonetheless have created an interesting commonality by
keeping in mind, if not always following, many of Pucci’s own theoreti-
cal gestures and questions about the nature of ancient poetic praxis.
The first two of these papers take as their starting point questions
about the uses of allusion in epic texts. Egbert Bakker begins with an
intriguing discussion of the intertextual and metapoetic aspects of Odys-
seus’ return and slaughter of the suitors. Focusing on the metapoetic
signification of Odysseus’ gastēr, another theme that has become closely
identified with Pucci’s reading of the Odyssey, he argues that there are
Iliadic cross-references that distinctively mark the Odyssey’s representa-
tion of the slaughter of the suitors. In a way that recalls Achilles’ own
murderous anger, Odysseus’ gastēr is the principle driving him on in this