Homer's Divine Audience: The Iliad's Reception on Mount Olympus

233 Pages·2019·1.795 MB·English

by  Tobias Myers

Title Pages
Homer's Divine Audience: The Iliad's Reception
on Mount Olympus
Tobias Myers
Print publication date: 2019
Print ISBN-13: 9780198842354
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2019
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198842354.001.0001
Title Pages
Tobias Myers
(p.i) Homer’s Divine Audience (p.ii)
(p.iii) Homer’s Divine Audience
(p.iv) Copyright Page
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Title Pages
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© Tobias Myers 2019
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First Edition published in 2019
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Page 2 of 2
Dedication
Homer's Divine Audience: The Iliad's Reception
on Mount Olympus
Tobias Myers
Print publication date: 2019
Print ISBN-13: 9780198842354
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2019
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198842354.001.0001
(p.v) Dedication
Tobias Myers
for Nina (p.vi)
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Acknowledgements
Homer's Divine Audience: The Iliad's Reception
on Mount Olympus
Tobias Myers
Print publication date: 2019
Print ISBN-13: 9780198842354
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2019
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198842354.001.0001
(p.vii) Acknowledgements
Tobias Myers
It is a task both pleasurable and daunting to recall the process by which this
book came into being, and the many people who contributed to its making. I can
still recall the desk where I was sitting, by the window of a 9th-floor apartment
on 110th Street in Manhattan, when I first felt the Iliad’s gods begin to work on
my perceptions in the way that this book argues they may. My 2011 Columbia
University doctoral dissertation was a first attempt to explore the relationship
between Homer’s audience and his gods. Subsequent revisions, deletions, and
expansions have resulted in a book that retains relatively little of the
dissertation’s content, but still reflects the formative ideas and critiques of those
who lent their assistance during my time as a graduate student, as well as those
who provided support and suggestions over several further stages of
development, during my time as a lecturer at Columbia and an assistant
professor at Connecticut College.
The faculty and graduate students at Columbia during my time there contributed
to a wonderfully conducive environment for research on Homer. Elizabeth Irwin
gave generously of her time throughout my dissertation work and beyond. Her
brilliant criticism, support, and enthusiasm over a period of many years were
invaluable. Katharina Volk not only improved my work with her comments, and
suggested the book’s eventual title, but also provided a necessary, steadying
perspective at a moment of crisis when I took the prior existence of an article
focusing on ‘my’ passages as evidence that I had arrived too late, and might as
well give up on the spot. Deborah Steiner, my dissertation adviser, introduced
me to the bewitching world of Homeric poetics, and improved my work
immeasurably through rounds of exacting readings and extensive comments.
Also, my sincere thanks to Jenny Strauss Clay, Helene Foley, Joseph Howley,
David Ratzan, Suzanne Saïd, Elizabeth Scharffenberger, Laura Slatkin, and
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Acknowledgements
Nancy Worman for their engagement with my work at this time. Special
additional thanks are owed to Jenny Clay for sharing her then unpublished book
Homer’s Trojan Theater with me at a crucial moment in my dissertation’s
development, for giving (p.viii) me needed confidence by taking my comments
on it seriously, and for her support.
Writing a book while teaching at a small liberal arts college presents its own
challenges and rewards. Absent the chance meetings with fellow Hellenists on
street-corners and in stairwells, or the fierce discussions in lounges after invited
talks, and without the push to publish as primary justification for one’s stipend
or salary, one feels all the more keenly the value of support and interest from
friends outside one’s speciality. I wish to thank friends with whom I discussed
the ideas in this book; I think especially of Joshua Babcock, Michael Caramanis,
Michael Fish, John Murray, Desiree Sykes, and Andrew Waight. I also wish to
thank the many people at Connecticut College who gave friendship and
professional advice, especially Ginny Anderson, Simon Feldman, Afshan Jafar,
Eileen Kane, Steve Luber, Ross Morin, and Caroleen Sayej. A pre-tenure
sabbatical leave granted by Connecticut College in the fall of 2016, and support
from the Judith Opatrny fund, provided time for research. The book’s final
revisions were completed with the generous support of Sofia Koutsiana and
Jackson Kellogg, who gave me the use of their Athens apartment as a daytime
writer’s retreat in the winter of 2017–18.
Several classicists offered encouragement, comments, and advice, mostly from
afar, whose importance to me would be hard to overstate. Eleanor Dickey gave
the right advice at a crucial moment in the quest to get this book published. I
thank Helen Lovatt for her encouragement, for sharing her then unpublished
book The Epic Gaze, and for her many insightful comments. I am also very
grateful to Hayden Pelliccia for his kindness, for the example of his scholarship,
and for his deep engagement with my own work by correspondence. Special
thanks are owed to Sarah Nooter for her unflagging support and brilliant
comments on draft chapters, typically offered within a space of days or hours, at
many times over the course of this project’s development. And I thank James
Uden warmly for conversations which always left me with a profound sense of
the fun, value, and limitless possibilities of scholarship, for his good company
throughout many days writing in an Athens library, and most of all for his
generosity in reading the entire penultimate draft of my manuscript in just over
six days. His comments proved crucial to the final stage of revision.
Valuable feedback on parts of this book was offered by audiences for talks, or
conference participants, at Columbia University, the (p.ix) Open University,
Cornell University, the University of California at Davis, The George Washington
University, Boston College, Connecticut College, and Amherst College.
Alexander Loney in particular went the extra mile as a respondent for a paper
that would eventually become this book’s Chapter 1. Sincere thanks are owed to
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Acknowledgements
the readers for Oxford University Press—it is sobering to think what this book
would lack, without the benefit of revisions in response to their comments. I also
wish to thank the editorial and production teams at Oxford University Press,
especially Charlotte Loveridge for her guidance and care with the review
process in the final months. Responsibility for any faults that remain in the book
belongs to moira, myself, and atē—though not necessarily in that order.
I thank my parents for always encouraging honest exploration, and my siblings
Emma, Paul, Peter, and Tamsin, who are each my hero in their own ways. I am
very grateful to my children, Nora and Natalia, for their admirable patience
while I worked on this project over what has been, after all, their entire lives to
date—and for their interesting suggestions and demands about the content of
my next book. Most of all, I thank my wife, Nina Papathanasopoulou, for her
support, energy, and the countless hours she devoted to revising my work and
finding the patterns I could not yet see, sometimes reading new drafts on a daily
basis. She also carried our lives at times when I was lost in research, and kept
the greater joys of life from ever slipping out of view. I dedicate this book to her,
with love and wonder. (p.x)
Page 3 of 3
List of Figures
Homer's Divine Audience: The Iliad's Reception
on Mount Olympus
Tobias Myers
Print publication date: 2019
Print ISBN-13: 9780198842354
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2019
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198842354.001.0001
(p.xiii) List of Figures
Tobias Myers
0.1. Sixth-century Attic black-figure amphora depicting Heracles
wrestling a lion. Attributed to the Painter of Berlin or the Painter of
Tarquinia. The Art Institute of Chicago; Katherine K. Adler Memorial
Fund, 1978.114. 15
Photo: The Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, NY.
1.1. Sixth-century Attic black-figure amphora depicting two female
figures, hands upraised, who flank two duelling warriors on whom they
also gaze. Attributed to the Medea Group, c. 520 BCE. Side B, The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Purchase, Christos G. Bastis Gift,
1961, 61.11.16.
www.metmuseum.org. 52
(p.xiv)
Page 1 of 1
Zeus, the Poet, and Vision
Homer's Divine Audience: The Iliad's Reception
on Mount Olympus
Tobias Myers
Print publication date: 2019
Print ISBN-13: 9780198842354
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2019
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198842354.001.0001
Zeus, the Poet, and Vision
Tobias Myers
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198842354.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords
Chapter 1 argues that the Iliad’s proem anticipates certain key elements of the
battlefield spectacle to come: its central action (warfare and the desecration of
corpses), and its staging and direction (with Zeus and the poet as joint
orchestrators of the battlefield conflict). While the agency of Zeus and that of
the poet are highlighted in various ways throughout the text, they overlap
specifically in respect to their control of the warfare. Such moments of overlap
heighten excitement during performance, as the ‘now’ of performance and the
‘now’ of mythic Troy become momentarily indistinguishable. The chapter
concludes by bringing the lessons of its close readings together, to motivate and
describe a new approach to the metapoetics of the Iliad’s gods, in place of the
prevalent tendency to describe Zeus and the gods as drivers of ‘plot’. Instead,
the chapter suggests, divine control should be seen as the flip side of divine
viewing, and Zeus recognized as a figure who controls the course of the battle
(not the whole plot). One should ask not just how Zeus’ role and the poet’s
relate, but also what difference it makes for the Iliad as a performance event.
Where textual cues are sufficient, certain scenes of divine viewing can be
usefully read as a mise en abyme of the spectacle experience offered by the poet
to his listeners.
Keywords:   plot, proem, nucleus, enargeia, staging, direction, Zeus, poet, metaperformative
A god can do it. But tell me, how
might a man follow through the narrow lyre?
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Zeus, the Poet, and Vision
Rainer Marie Rilke1
It is right for me to sing to you as to a god.
Phemius2
The gods’ role as spectators does not become prominent until passages in Book
4 and later. Yet the spectacular quality of those passages depends in no small
part on their power to harvest the fruit of ideas introduced much earlier: in
particular, the idea that the poem’s essential action is playing out not as a result
of happenstance, but as the product of intentional orchestration. Starting with
its opening lines, the poem introduces and develops this idea primarily through
the presentation of two figures: the poet himself, and Zeus.
μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος
οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί᾽ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε᾽ ἔθηκε,
πολλὰς δ᾽ ἰϕθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν
ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν
οἰωνοῖσί τε δαῖτα, Διὸς δ᾽ ἐτελείετο βουλή,
ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε
Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς.
τίς τ᾽ ἄρ σϕωε θεῶν ἔριδι ξυνέηκε μάχεσθαι;
Λητοῦς καὶ Διὸς υἱός…
– 1.1–9
(p.28) Sing, goddess, the wrath of the son of Peleus, Achilles –
the destructive/accursed [wrath], which set countless sufferings on
the Achaeans,
and hurled forth to Hades many noble souls
of heroes – and them it was making into prey for dogs,
and a banquet for birds, and Dios boulē [‘a/the plan/will of Zeus’]
was coming to fulfilment –
yes, from when first they stood apart, in strife,
the son of Atreus, lord of men, and bright/godlike Achilles.
Which of the gods, then, brought them in strife to vie?
The son of Leto and Zeus…
By directing the Muse to sing (ἄειδε 1.1), specifying the subject matter (μῆνιν…
Ἀχιλῆος 1.1), and selecting a starting point for the narrative (ἐξ οὗ δὴ…and τίς
τ᾽ ἄρ σϕωε…1.6–9), the poet introduces himself as a figure of agency. That is, he
not only makes these decisions, but enacts the decision-making in propria
persona. During these initial moments, the Iliad’s dramatic ‘stage’ is not the
plain of Troy, but the setting of the poem’s performance. The dramatic action is
the performer’s assumption of the role of aoidos (‘singer’), in view of and for the
benefit of his audience, and his presentation of an initial vision of the Iliad:
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Zeus, the Poet, and Vision
Achaean suffering, heroes dying, the exposure of corpses, and Zeus’ role in
bringing all of this about (1.2–5).
With the sudden statement in line 5 that Zeus’ boulē was being accomplished,
the poet invites listeners to conceive of the elements he has just highlighted—
violent death, the exposure of corpses—as being not only central to his song, but
also crucial, perhaps culminating features of Zeus’ designs. One effect of this
move is to set the poet’s vision of the Iliad in a tragic light: the song’s focus, we
are told, will be dying and defilement as the realization of an ineluctable divine
plan. Another effect is to suggest a parallel between Zeus and the poet. After all,
hearing these lines in their dramatic context—the invocation of the Muse—we
are also being told that the song’s focus will be dying and defilement as the
realization of the poet’s request. The roles of the poet and Zeus are thus
suggestively connected, through the results that their activities jointly produce—
the epic drama that the audience is about to experience.
The invocation presents a conundrum. As many scholars have noted, bodies are
never actually consumed by dogs and birds in the Iliad. Yet the poet presents
this situation, which is never to be narrated at all, as though it is foremost in his
mind as the poem begins. Zeus, for (p.29) his part, will memorably work to
ensure the preservation and proper burial of bodies—not their consumption by
birds and dogs.3 I will return to this apparent problem later, to offer a new
solution, which emerges in the course of pursuing the chapter’s main objectives.
This chapter explores the programmatic significance of the poem’s early focus
on the agency of both Zeus and the poet. It argues that the proem looks ahead to
an epic which puts mortality on display—a promise fulfilled at climactic
moments in which the audience is led to perceive violent action as the object not
only of viewing, but also of deliberate staging and direction. I use ‘staging’ as a
shorthand for these interrelated ideas: the act of arranging for an event or set of
events to occur (for instance, the day’s battle); the act of arranging for them to
occur before the eyes of a viewership; and finally the act of making these staging
operations evident to that viewership—that is, the creation of what might be
called a staged quality.
‘Direction’ I use to refer to ongoing direct control of a spectacle that has been
staged, and is in progress. The word is intended to capture loosely the following
set of ideas: Zeus sometimes directs as a general directs—commanding Iris and
Apollo, for instance, to deliver his orders to others. He also affects the direction
in which the battle turns, toward the Trojans or the Achaeans, as they push back
and forth. Like battles, a story may take a particular ‘direction’ (a metaphor
particularly apt for story-tellers working in an oral tradition who visualize their
story as linear sequence4), and when it comes to the progress of the spectacle at
Troy, Zeus, like the poet, sometimes organizes what he sees into narrative form.
Finally, we may think of the director of a play—anachronistic as the analogy may
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