The best of the Achaeans: concepts of the hero in Archaic Greek poetry

483 Pages·1998·4.66 MB·English

by  Gregory Nagy

The Best of the Achaeans
Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek
Poetry
Revised Edition
Gregory Nagy
Copyright © 1980, 1997 The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved. First edition 1979. Revised edition 1999. This document may be used, with this
notice included, for noncommercial purposes within a subscribed institution. No copies of this work may be distributed electronically outside of the subscribed
institution, in whole or in part, without written permission from the JHU Press.
The Best of the Achaeans
Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry
a machine readable edition
Gregory Nagy
Table of Contents

Foreword The 1999 second edition
Introduction A Word on Assumptions, Methods, Results
Part I. Demodokos, Odyssey, Iliad
1. The First Song of Demodokos
2. The Best of the Achaeans
3. A Conflict between Odysseus and Achilles in the Iliad
4. The Death of Achilles and a Festival at Delphi

Part II. Hero of Epic, Hero of Cult
5. The Name of Achilles
6. Lamentation and the Hero
7. The Death of Pyrrhos
8. The Death of Hektor
9. Poetic Categories for the Hero
10. Poetic Visions of Immortality for the Hero

Part III. Praise, Blame, and the Hero
11. On Strife and the Human Condition
12. Poetry of Praise, Poetry of Blame
13. Iambos
14. Epos, the Language of Blame, and the Worst of the Achaeans
15. The Best of the Achaeans Confronts an Aeneid Tradition

Part IV. Beyond Epic
16. The Death of a Poet
17. On the Antagonism of God and Hero
18. On the Stories of a Poet's Life
19. More on Strife and the Human Condition
20. Achilles beyond the Iliad
Appendix On the Forms krataió-and Akhaió-
Copyright © 1980, 1997 The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved. This document may be
used, with this notice included, for noncommercial purposes within a subscribed institution. No copies of
this work may be distributed electronically outside of the subscribed institution, in whole or in part, without
written permission from the JHU Press.
The Best of the Achaeans
Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek
Poetry
Revised Edition
Gregory Nagy
Copyright © 1980, 1997 The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved. First edition 1979. Revised edition 1999. This document may be used, with this
notice included, for noncommercial purposes within a subscribed institution. No copies of this work may be distributed electronically outside of the subscribed
institution, in whole or in part, without written permission from the JHU Press.
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Foreword
The 1999 second edition
§1. The Best of the Achaeans is intended for both non-specialists and specialists
in Homer and in other forms of archaic Greek poetry.[1] More generally, it is for
non-Classicists as well as Classicists (that is, those who study Greek and Roman
antiquity). All quotations from the ancient texts are translated, and all cited
words are defined in context.
§2. This book is about how to read Homer--both the Iliad and the Odyssey--and
various related forms of Greek poetry in the archaic period, most notably the
Hesiodic Theogony and Works and Days and the Homeric Hymns, especially the
Apollo, the Demeter, and the Aphrodite. Other related poetic forms include the
praise poetry of Pindar and the blame poetry of Archilochus. The readings are
infused with references to non-canonical traditions as well, especially women's
laments and the earliest attested versions of Aesop's fables.
§3. The object of all the readings is to understand simultaneously the form as
well as the content of a wide variety of traditional media conveying various
basic concepts of the ancient Greek hero. The most basic of all these concepts is
a single all-pervasive historical fact of the archaic period and beyond: the cult of
heroes. Heroes were not only the subjects of narrative and dramatic media but
also the objects of worship. This book integrates heroic song, poetry, and prose
with the ancestral practices of a wide variety of hero-cults (Introduction.§16-19).
More generally, it explores the heroic tradition within the cultural context of
Panhellenism, to be defined as an early form of Hellenism that eventually
became the nucleus of Classicism (Introduction.§13-15).
§4. The Best of the Achaeans was completed in 1978 and first published in 1979.
Now, twenty years later, I have a chance to revisit. The present foreword
highlights the specifics of what has changed and what remains stable.
§5. I start with the main points of consistency. This 1998 edition is
"archaeological," adding to the general argumentation only the essentials for
supplementing what I knew twenty years ago. I have preserved the original text
and page-numbering of the 1979 edition for the introduction and for all the
chapters as well as the appendix. The Bibliography has been updated with
additions. Here too, however, I have maintained an "archaeological" stance,
concentrating on research that directly follows up on the arguments made in the
1979 edition. The addenda in the text proper of this second edition, which are
mostly cross-references to new points raised in this Foreword or to new entries
in the Bibliography, have been inserted at the ends of the 1979 footnotes. The
corrigenda in the text proper of this second edition, mostly minor, have been
entered without further comment.
§6. There is not much in the book, I find, that needs to be corrected for factual
mistakes, and there is practically nothing in the contents that I would wish to
retract. There are, however, things that needed to be restated, and this Foreword
addresses that need. [1] There is also a great deal that could be added. Much of
that has been done in a 1990 book providing additional context, Pindar's Homer.
[2] The argumentation has been developed further in two 1996 books, Homeric
Questions and Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond. [3]
§7. Homeric and Hesiodic poetry are the focus of chapters 1-10 and 20. That set
of chapters can be read independently of the rest, yielding a more compressed
book of 240 pages. For those who wish to concentrate on Homer alone, the book
can be compressed further: chapters 1-8 and 20 are likewise self-contained--a
total of 180 pages. I worry that some readers of the first edition may have
stopped at chapters 8 or 9 and never made their way to chapter 20, where I offer
retrospectives and overviews essential to my argumentation about Homer. My
hope, in any case, is that the reader will take on the whole book, which addresses
a variety of topics that are essential for understanding archaic Greek poetry.[1]
§8. For my reading of Homer and other forms of archaic Greek poetry, I rely on
the traditional methodology of Classicists, combined with other empirical
methods drawn from research in anthropology, linguistics, and oral poetics. This
combination of approaches occasionally makes my specific readings different, in
varying degrees, from those of my immediate predecessors. Such differences
help explain some problems of reception, especially in the earlier years that
followed initial publication. Over the last two decades, however, the
argumentation of Best of the Achaeans has held up. Citations of the book in
ongoing research reflect its expanding influence,[1] and much of what seemed
controversial then is no longer so now.[2]
§9. Debate persists, however, on various levels. Some of it goes back to negative
reactions at the time of initial publication. The sheer animosity of a few of the
criticisms directed at my work surprised me at first. After all, I consistently
avoid personal polemics in Best of the Achaeans. Why, I asked myself, has this
book made some critics so angry? One answer, shaped by years of retrospection,
is that it all comes down to assumptions that I challenge in the book. As I look
back at the subtitle of my introduction, "assumptions, methods, results," I now
see in this wording a clue to a source of provocation.
§10. The methods of Best of the Achaeans not only achieve new results: they
also call into question various assumptions essential to the Homeric
interpretations of various critics. Ironically, much of the initial criticism leveled
against the book was based on the same assumptions that my methods and
results have challenged. There is a further irony: a few continue to assert these
assumptions as if they were facts. Another reaction is to say, in effect, that no
one has made such arguments before, and what right does anyone have to make
them now? I resist using up this space with a bibliography of such polemics,
since I hope to keep this second edition free, like the first one, of the ephemeral.
[1] Rather, I concentrate on the actual assumptions that caused the problem in
the first place. These assumptions have taken on many forms, but they all come
down to a simple enough notion: that oral poetry is lacking in cohesion and
artistry. Therefore, the thinking goes, Homeric poetry must be explained in terms
that transcend oral poetry.
§11. Here I revisit the basic questions, starting with the basic fact that drives
these questions: a major challenge to our reading of archaic Greek poetry,
especially Homer, is its heritage as oral poetry. Oral traditions, including oral
poetry, depend on performance. In oral poetry, unlike written poetry,
performance is a necessity, not an option. Moreover, the ongoing empirical study
of a wide variety of living oral traditions makes it clear that any given
performance becomes an occasion for some degree of recomposition-in-
performance (the actual degrees of recomposition will of course vary in different
contexts or phases).[1] How, then, do we read something that was meant to be
performed, not read from a book? How do we read something that is subject to
change in each performance? These are the questions that I seek to answer in
Best of the Achaeans, focusing on two key Homeric passages as my starting
point: the first song of Demodokos in Odyssey viii and the "embassy scene" in
Iliad IX.
§12. Mention of the word "passages" raises an even more basic question,
stemming from an obvious fact: Homeric poetry survives because it was written
down. The question, then, is as obvious as the fact: how did archaic Greek
poetry, especially Homer, get written down in the first place? As of now, no
direct answer is available. Nor is there any consensus about why or how or even
when Homeric poetry was written down. One thing and one thing only, it seems
to me, is certain: no one has ever been able to prove that the technology of
writing had been necessary for either the composition or the performance of
Homeric poetry.[1]
§13. So much for the negative side. On the positive, I argue that Homeric poetry
(by which I mean the Iliad and Odyssey combined) is a system, and that this
system can be explained consistently in terms of oral poetics. The application of
linguistics is vital for the argument.[1] The Homeric textual tradition is the
primary evidence for this system, but it cannot be equated with the system itself.
[2] My linguistic approach to the poetic and textual traditions of Homer extends
to the other forms of archaic Greek poetry as well. Here is how James Redfield
describes my methodology:

His concern is not with particular works per se but with the underlying
system of meanings common to the epic tradition and inherited by Greek
poets down to Pindar. This is a system, not as geometry is a system, but as a
culture is a system; there is a high degree of redundancy, of alternative
ways of expressing the same or similar ideas, of making similar
distinctions. Terms are not connected by relations of identity but of
analogy; themes are displayed through their variations. [3]
§14. My reading of Homer, especially of the passages in Odyssey viii and Iliad
IX, has occasionally been disputed on the grounds that it gives the impression of
literary rather than oral poetics. Such an impression, however, stems from
unjustified negative assumptions about oral poetics. There is no evidence for
assuming that oral poetry is by nature unsystematic. The results of my readings,
which add up to show that Homeric poetry is indeed a system, cannot be used as
ammunition for claiming that Homer is therefore not "oral."
§15. The results of my readings show also that the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey
are complementary, and that this complementarity is itself a system in its own
right. [1] Here again, I resist the assumptions of critics who try to explain this
system in terms that transcend oral poetry. The first song of Demodokos in
Odyssey viii and the "embassy scene" of Iliad IX provide striking examples of
the system at work. Throughout Best of the Achaeans, I explain the organic
complementarity of the Iliad and the Odyssey precisely in terms of oral poetics.
[2]
§16. A central theme unites the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey: just as Achilles
emerges as the "best of the Achaeans" in the Iliad, so too Odysseus becomes
"best of the Achaeans" in the Odyssey (Ch.1§13). Moreover, the kleos or epic
glory of Achilles in the Iliad is both complemented and contested by the kleos of
Odysseus in the Odyssey (Ch.2§§10-18).[1] A key is the Odyssean theme of
nostos in the sense of 'song about a homecoming', not just 'homecoming'
(Ch.6§6n2). Ironically, as I argue, Odysseus achieves the kleos or epic glory of
the Odyssey not because he destroyed Troy (a feat heralded at the very start of
his epic) but because he achieves a nostos in both senses of the word: he comes
home and thereby becomes the premier hero of a song about homecoming
(Ch.2§11).[2]
§17. There are further related ironies. Achilles has to choose between kleos and
nostos, forfeiting nostos in order to achieve his kleos as the central hero of the
Iliad (Ch.2§11), but Odysseus must have both in order to merit his heroic status
in the Odyssey (Ch.2§§12-16). The narrative of the kleos that Odysseus earns in
the Odyssey cannot be the Iliad, which means "Troy Tale" (Ilion is the other
name for Troy). The Iliad establishes Achilles as the central hero of the story of
Troy, even though he failed to destroy the city. Because of the Iliad tradition,
"the kleos of Odysseus at Troy was preempted by the kleos of Achilles"
(Ch.2§17).[1]
§18. There is a final irony, developed in the narrative of the Odyssey (xi 489-
491): Achilles in Hades seems tempted to trade epics with Odysseus (Ch.2§11).
[1] This he will never do, of course, in his own epic. As Achilles himself
predicts in the Iliad (IX 413), the kleos of his own song will be áphthiton
'unwilting' (Ch.2§3).
§19. My arguments about the patterns of complementarity between the Iliad and
the Odyssey can be extended much further. There are also patterns of
complementarity between Homeric and Hesiodic poetry, adding up to an even
more generalized unity.[1] The compressed narrative about epic heroes in the
Hesiodic Works and Days, for instance, complements the ultimately expanded
narrative of the Homeric Iliad (Ch.9§29).[2] Herodotus, the "father of history,"
describes the unity of Homer and Hesiod in cultural terms that convey the sum
total of Greek civilization (2.53.1-3).[3] In any case, this unity can be described
as an overall cultural system, which needs to be "read" as an oral tradition
mediated by a script tradition.[4] Here we see the foundations of Panhellenism
(Introduction §§14-16). [5]
§20. Even more generally, it is possible to argue that all forms of archaic Greek
poetry complement each other. Cases in point are the relationship of epic and
praise poetry (Ch.12), of praise and blame poetry (Ch.14). The patterns of
complementarity emerge from reading the ipsissima verba, the words of the
tradition themselves. That is how Milman Parry and Albert Lord, my teacher,
have read Homer. At the very start of my book, I invoke their favorite words for
form and content, "diction" and "theme" (Introduction §1), in arguing that the
diction of archaic Greek poetry is a most accurate expression of its themes. The
Introduction goes on to describe this fundamental stance ironically as "literal
minded" (§7). The irony has been lost, I notice, on a few literal minded critics.
§21. What has given my book its staying power is that it strives to achieve a
coherent picture of a coherent system of ancient Greek poetics, to the degree that
each detail of my analysis is meant to stay true to each constituent detail of that
system. The coherence of the book results not from the sequencing of contents
page by page but from the coherence of the system that emerges cumulatively
from an overall reading.
§22. For my reading of Homer, I do not invoke theories of intertextuality.[1]
Instead, I have developed what I call an evolutionary model for the
textualization of Homer, without presupposing that the actual composition of the
"text" required the medium of writing .[2] According to this model, there were at
least five distinct consecutive periods of Homeric oral | written transmission,
"Five Ages of Homer," as it were, with each period showing progressively less
fluidity and more rigidity. [3] I argue that our Homeric text results from a
"transcript tradition" that recorded the final or near-final stages in an evolving
process of oral poetic recomposition-in-performance.[4]
§23. Here I apply a distinction made by Ferdinand de Saussure: linguistic
analysis requires both synchronic and diachronic perspectives.[1] For Saussure,
synchrony and diachrony designate respectively a current state of a language and
a phase in its evolution.[2] I draw attention to Saussure's linking of diachrony
and evolution, a link that proves to be crucial for understanding Homeric poetry
in particular and archaic Greek poetry in general. This link led to my
evolutionary model for the oral traditions that shaped Homeric poetry.
According to this model, the "making" of this poetry needs to be seen
diachronically as well as synchronically, if we follow Saussure's sense of
diachrony. My primary premise is that synchronic approaches to Homer cannot
succeed without the integration of diachronic approaches, just as diachronic
approaches cannot succeed without the integration of the synchronic. My
secondary premise is that the synchronic analysis of Homeric poetry can succeed
only when that poetry is viewed as a system rather than a text. To repeat: Irefer
to the system in question simply as "Homeric poetry."
§24. Applying these premises, I argue against the assumption that the Homeric
text of the Iliad and Odyssey, as reconstituted in various editions both ancient
and modern, can be viewed synchronically as a cross-section that represents a
single real composition or performance. In other words, the Homeric text (or
texts) is not the same thing as Homeric poetry.
§25. In this connection, we need to confront the general phenomenon of meaning
in the media of oral poetics. On the basis of my own cumulative work, I have
become convinced that meaning by way of reference in oral poetics needs to be
seen diachronically as well as synchronically: "each occurrence of a theme (on
the level of content) or of a formula (on the level of form) in a given
composition-in-performance refers not only to its immediate context but also to
all other analogous contexts remembered by the performer or by any member of
the audience."[1] The corpus of Homeric poetry cannot be reduced to the single
occasion of an utterance that is self-contained at any one time and place--or even
of a recording of such an utterance.[2] I must add that I use diachronic and
synchronic not as synonyms for historical and current respectively. Diachrony