Homer: Odyssey Books VI-VIII

374 Pages·2003·7.251 MB·English

by  A. F. Garvie

CAMBRIDGE GREEK AND LATIN CLASSICS

GENERAL ΕΒΙΤΟᾺΒ
E. J. Kenney
Emeritus Kennedy Professor of Latin, University of Cambridge
AND
P. E. EASTERLING
Regius Professor of Greek, University of Cambridge
HOMER
O IYSS oY

BOOKS VI-VIII
EDITED BY
A. F. GARVIE
Reader in Classics, University of Glasgow
SM CAMBRIDGE
ἘΠῚ UNIVERSITY PRESS
CAMBRIDGE UNTVERSITY PRESS
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© Cambridge University Press 1994
This publication is in copyright. Subject to slatytory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 1994
Reprinted 1999, 2000, 2003
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
ISBN-13 978-0-521-32929-3 hardback
ISBN-10 0-521-32929-9 hardback
ISBN-13 978-0-521-33840-0 paperback
ISBN-10 0-521-33840-9 paperback
Transferred to digital printing 2006
CONTENTS

Preface page vii
Introduction 1
1 Homer 1
2 The Phaeacian books 18
3 Metre 41
4 The text 34
OMHPOY OAYZZEIAZ Z 39
OMHPOY OAYZZEIAZ H 50
OMHPOY OAYZZEIAZ © 62
Commentary 81
Bibliography 351
Indexes 357
1 English 357
2 Greek 366
PREFACE

Like generations of students I was introduced to Homer at school
through reading Odyssey 6 and 7 in the 1915 edition of G. M. Edwards,
and the experience has left me with a particular affection for those
books. It is, however, odd that so far as I know there has been until
now no separate edition of books 6-8, although they provide a self-
contained unity, covering, as they do, most of the events of Odysseus’
stay among the Phaeacians, and establishing the setting for the narra-
tive of his adventures in books 9-13. Odysseus’ encounter with Nausi-
caa will always be for many readers one of the highlights of the poem,
but of equal interest is the whole account of Phaeacian society and of
Odysseus’ reception by its royal family, while in book 8 the three songs
of Demodocus provide valuable insight into Homer’s attitude to his
own art.
This edition may be seen as complementary to R. B. Rutherford’s
edition of books 19 and 20 in the same series. In both the emphasis is
on the Odyssey as a work of literature, on Homer’s narrative techniques
and poetic artistry. Analytical criticism is mentioned from time to time
in the Commentary, but, while it is often useful in drawing attention
to problems, for the most part it seems to me to be unrewarding in the
answers that it attempts to provide. I take it for granted that Homer
was trained in all the techniques of traditional oral poetry, as ex-
pounded by Milman Parry and his followers, and the Commentary
provides much evidence for formulaic composition and the use of typi-
cal themes. But I also believe that a single poet used those techniques,
often in a subtle way, to create a poem with a coherent unity, that,
when he composed books 6—8, he remembered, and expected his audi-
ence to remember, what preceded, and had already planned the way
in which the poem was to develop. The Commentary therefore refers
quite often to such devices as echo, preparation, and foreshadowing.
For the most part it seems to me that problems of structure and compo-
sition are best explained, not in terms of interpolation or dislocation or
a multiplicity of authors, nor even of the combination by an improvis-
ing oral poet of disparate traditional themes, but in terms of one poet’s
conscious purpose. The first section of the Introduction deals with such
matters as they concern the Odyssey in general, while the second section
vii
viii PREFACE
discusses the Phaeacian books and their contribution to the poem.
There are brief sections on the metre and on the text of the poem,
but there is no attempt at providing a comprehensive account of
Homeric grammar. I hope that sufficient help is given with this in the
Commentary.
My debts to previous editors of Homer will be obvious, particularly
to Stanford, and to Hainsworth in vol. 1 of the three-volume Oxford
Commentary on the whole poem (first published in Italian). I make no
claim to have read all of the vast recent secondary literature, but the
Bibliography lists those works which I have found most useful. My
thanks are due to many people, to my family, especially David for help
with word-processing and Margaret for assistance with proof-reading;
to friends and colleagues at Glasgow and in other universities with
whom I have discussed many Homeric problems; to Professor E. J.
Kenney, who, as one of the General Editors of the series, read part of
the typescript and all of the proofs; to Professor Pat Easterling, the
other General Editor, and Professor Malcolm Willcock, who read the
whole of my manuscript, and who gave me invaluable help in pointing
out errors, and in cutting the book down to a manageable size by
removing superfluities and repetitions, and by suggesting ways in which
the same point could often be made more clearly and concisely. Most
of their suggestions I have been happy to adopt. Finally I express my
gratitude to all the staff of Cambridge University Press.
A.F.G.
INTRODUCTION

|. HOMER
There is a reasonable consensus that the Odyssey was composed some-
what later than the /Zliad, by an Ionian poet, at about the end of the
eighth century Bc, or early in the seventh. Of the various places which
in antiquity claimed to be the home of Homer, Smyrna and Chios are
as likely as any,! the latter being supported by the existence there in
the post-Homeric period of the Homeridae, the guild of reciters who
claimed descent from, or a special relationship with, Homer himself.
The poems were composed some five hundred years after the Late
Bronze Age period of the Trojan War and its aftermath, in which their
stories are set. What may seem even more surprising is that these, our
earliest works of European literature, display a poetic artistry, a highly
sophisticated gift for story-telling, and an ability to shape a narrative
over a very long poem, that have scarcely, if ever, been equalled
since. The Greeks of the classical period regarded them as the supreme
achievements of their literature, and many later readers have been
happy to concur with that judgement. However, although for us they
represent the beginnings of European literature, it is certain that be-
hind the Zliad and Odyssey lies a long tradition of oral epic poetry,
developed over the Dark Age, and, as some would argue,? perhaps
going back to the Mycenaean period itself.
Whether or not the Jliad and Odyssey are the work of the same poet
remains difficult to determine. Already in the Alexandrian period the
Separatists, Xeno and Hellanicus, assigned them to different poets.
There can be little doubt that they both belong to the same poetic
1 See Kirk, Songs 47-51, 271-4, 282-7, Iliad vol. 1 1-4; Lesky 690-3;
Heubeck 213-28.
2 E.g. M. P. Nilsson, The Mycenaean origin of Greek mythology (California
1932); Page, Homeric Odyssey 145, History and the Homeric Iliad (Berkeley and Los
Angeles 1959) 218-22; J. Chadwick, in Kirk, Language 120; Lesky 694, 703.
Kirk, Songs 105-25 (also Homer and the oral tradition 19-39), reckons with the
possibility that for two or three generations the tradition may have been in
prose, but see also Iliad vol. 1 15, 11 33; contra U. Hölscher, Gnomon 39 (1967)
435-6.
2 INTRODUCTION
tradition, and many ofthe formulae (for which see pp. 4-5) are common
to both poems. But there are also differences in the use of formulae
and in vocabulary, and in the structural principles that they display.?
There are differences also in their spirit. In particular, the Odyssey
seems to be more moral than the Jliad, with the gods taking a greater
interest in the punishment of human wickedness. And, whereas in the
liad the gods intervene constantly in human affairs, and are much
given to quarrelling among themselves, in the Odyssey such interven-
tions are more limited, and there is general harmony on Olympus (for
the relationship between Athena and Poseidon see 6.325-7n.).* To
some extent these and other differences might be explicable in terms of
the different subject-matter of the two poems, The Jiiad is based largely
on heroic saga, while the Odyssey depends also on folk-tale and on
sailors’ stories. The former presents a society at war, the latter for the
most part one at peace. As early as ps.-Longinus (9.13) it was sug-
gested that the poems may have been composed at different periods of
H.'s life, the Odyssey being the work of his old age.’ However, the
prevailing view among modern scholars is that the differences are too
great to be satisfactorily explained in such ways. It is curious that the
Odyssey, although it often refers to events of the Trojan War, never does
so to any event which the /liad itself describes.® Page concluded that
the poet of the Odyssey did not even know the Iliad, and that the two
3 See Page 148-57, more cautiously Hölscher, Untersuchungen 37-50; Kirk,
Songs 292-9; Strasser 63-4, 67-9; Rutherford 3-7. Against Page see Webster
275-83. Sacks 105-51 and 186-8 argues that the epithet φαίδιμος and the
expression ἀγλαὰ δῶρα (see 7.132n.), though common to both poems, are used
in radically different contexts. Parry (190), stressing the similarity between the
diction of the two poems, remarks that ‘we must be careful not to see in this any
proofo wfhat is usually meant by the unity of the Homeric poems. All we know
is that the author or authors of these two poems faithfully maintain the tradi-
tion of bardic diction.’
* See Kirk, Songs 290-2; Lesky 728-9, 819-20; Eisenberger 333; Hölscher,
Epos 21-2.
* For a modern statement of this view see G. Steiner in Steiner—Fagles,
Homer: a collection of critical essays (Englewood Cliffs 1962) 11-14; also Janko 14,
who remarks that the linguistic gap between Iliad and Odyssey is smaller than
that between Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days, and who surmises that
H.'s ‘diction evolved with his years’.
* This fact was first clearly pointed out by D. B. Monro, Homer's Odyssey τὶ
325; see also Page 158-9.
1. HOMER 3
poems belong to entirely isolated branches of the epic tradition. He has
found few followers. It is much more likely that the poet of the Odyssey
deliberately avoided any reference to the other poem.? Some have
thought that it was the production of the ‘monumental’ /liad that
inspired him to emulate that poem by composing his own Odyssey on a
similar scale, with Odysseus as a new kind of hero to rival, and perhaps
to surpass, the Achilles of the earlier poem.’ Those who accept two
poets for the two poems have always tended to think of H. as the
composer of the /liad, with the Odyssey the work of an anonymous
poet.? But there is in principle no reason why we should not attribute
the Odyssey to H., with the poet of the Jliad anonymous. In any case it
is pedantic to avoid the name ‘Homer’ altogether, and to insist on
using ‘the poet’ throughout. In this book, therefore, ‘H.’ is used for
convenience to describe the composer or composers of both poems.
That a single poet, whether or not we call him Homer, is to be
credited with the achievement of the Odyssey (or Iliad) has not always
been believed. The poem contains a number of discrepancies and in-
consistencies in its narrative, and it was a cardinal principle of analyti-
cal criticism that such inconsistencies could be explained only as the
work of different poets.!° Analysts accounted for the genesis of our
Odyssey in terms of earlier and later versions, each successive poet con-
sciously correcting and adding to the work of his predecessors, and
with the various versions finally combined in its present form by a
more or less incompetent redactor, or Bearbeiter. Book 8 has suffered
particularly from such theories (see pp. 27-8). Analytical criticism was
much exercised also by the repeated passages and lines, which are
7 So Kirk, Songs 299-300; Heubeck 96. Eustathius in his προοίμιον remarks
that the Odyssey in a way completes the Iliad: ἃ γὰρ ὁ ποιητὴς ἐκεῖ ἐνέλιπεν,
ἐνταῦθα προσανεπλήρωσε (the death of Achilles, the Wooden Horse, etc.).
8. See for example Ritter 247-54; Thornton 8-10; Eisenberger 333-4; Clay
96-112, 241-6; A. T. Edwards; Hölscher, Epos 307-9; Goldhill, Poet's voice
95-108; M. Fantuzzi, Q.U.C.C. 35 (1990) 103-19. For Pucci 18 ‘the two texts
probably evolved simultaneously, each aware of the other, before being fixed in
the monumental compositions we now have’; also Nagy 20-1.
* See Lesky 692; Kirk, Homer and the oral tradition 201.
10 Such scholars include Kirchhoff, Wilamowitz, Bethe, Schwartz, Focke,
and, more recently, von der Mühll, Schadewaldt (for the Odyssey), Merkelbach,
and van Thiel. Heubeck 8-15, 87-98 gives a useful summary of analytical
scholarship.
x INTRODUCTION
characteristic of oral poetry, and had revearse to wholeszle delegor of
wharorreganted 1 la aT ots
It s chanas to che American scholar Mi'man Parr. apd "Ws ἴον
owers, that we new have a much better understandirg of what is
meant by traditional ora! poetry. Parry published bis Fre nesuis iy
1928, and then proceeded τὸ record and study in Yugos'avia what
was at that time a sull living tradition cf oral peetry among ierate
Serbo-Croatian singers. He showed that cral poetry is periormet in
front of an illiterate audience bv an equals δ τόταῖς poet who. be
maintained, improvises his poem as it progresses.’ He remembers. no’
the fixed text of his song, but a vast stock οὔ stories and themes, and of
formulaic phrases which enadie him τὸ express these theres within the
compass of the metrical line «see p33. Oral epie song ‘cons’ sist the

building of metrical lines and half tines by means of formulas and
formulaic expressions and of the building of songs bv the use ot therres’
(Lord, Singer 4°. The choice of formula is determined by the space
available within the line, and. if it is a noun-epithet formula, by the
grammatical case of the noun. In 1928 ‚13: for his 1exo definition see
p 272° Parry defined a formula as ‘an expression regwar.v used. under
the same metrical conditions, to express an essential idea’. Vers rarels
do we find more than one wav of expressing the same idea under the
same metrical conditions. This Parry called the principle of economy.
In this kind of peetry. according to Parry, there is no seeking alter
criginality of expression. Whenever possible the peet uses the former lae
which ke has inherited far. his trad.sop
Such formulae can be seen most clearly nthe noun-epither nhrases,
which are perhaps the first to strike the modern reader, but are bv n>
means confined to them.!? For every recurring idea or activity apprs-
priate formulae exist. Whole lines regularly express commn ideas. Sc,
when H. wishes to describe the appearance of dawn, he can instant’,
*t For the techniques cf eral poetry see. apart from Parry, Lord Siege, ard
in Componicn 179-214 Kirk, Songs 55-101, For Parry's debt te his predevessors
stt Voom Povey ce MP Parry κι ke Laker ng.
= [. A. Nevopeuios, Hesperta 29 uO 1%. estimates that ας οὐ 27.853 ἔπος
of the Mad and Odyssey 9,253 are repeated or contain repeated phrases. Page,
Aistory ar? the Homeric [ad Berkeley and Los Angeles rgso° 223, that thers are
abcut 25,000 repeated phrases. See also Kirk, Srrger 80, 83.