The Language of Achilles and Other Papers

348 Pages·1989·4.266 MB·

by  Adam M. Parry

THE LANGUAGE OF ACHILLES
AND OTHER PAPERS
The late Adam Parry
The Language of
Achilles
AND OTHER PAPERS
ADAM M. PARRY
CLARENDON PRESS · OXFORD
1989
Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford ox2 6DP
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Parry, Adam
The language of Achilles and other papers
1. Classical literatures, --Critical studies
I. Title
880.09
ISBN 0--19-814892-5
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Parry, Adam.
[ Essays. Selections J
The languaie of Achilles and other· papers/ Adam M. Parry.
Includes index.
1. Classical philology. I. Title.
PA27.P257 1989 880'.9' 001 -dc19 88-36833
ISBN 0--19-814892-5
Set by Latimer Trend & Company Limited, Plymouth
Printed and bound in
Great Britain by Biddies Ltd,
Guildford and King's Lynn
Foreword
PROFESSORE RIC HAVELOCK, who was best qualified to do it,
wrote an excellent obituary notice of Adam Milman Parry
(1928-71) and his wife Anne Reinberg Amory Parry (Yale
Classical Studies 24 (1975, pp. ix-xv); but I cannot help
prefacing what I say about Adam's work with a few personal
reminiscences. His character somehow invites the less formal
American rather th:;_i.nth e severer English mode of treatment.
Adam Parry was not only a scholar of rare gifts, but one of
the most delightful and accomplished human beings I have
known. Handsome, elegant, and witty, he had a most unusual
charm, by no means diminished by a streak of bohemian
wildness. He once told me that the only three things he could
have been were a classical scholar, a lawyer, and a beach
comber: he had a mixture of the qualities needed for all three
professions. Soon after my first arrival in New Haven as
Visiting Professor in 1964, I was invited to dinner by Adam, of
whom I had heard much from Maurice Bowra, and his first
wife Barbara. By way of preparation for campus life an
experienced friend had lent me Alison Lurie's first novel, Love
and Friendship, which I had much enjoyed. I asked the Parrys if
they too had read it, and learned that they had. Then I asked if
it were not perhaps a roman a clef,a nd Adam gravely told me
that he thought it was. Had I known the Parrys a very little
longer, I would have realized that they had been the model for
a couple in the book: these people's children managed to burn
down a college house, and when their parents were given
another, they burned down that one also; this episode, I was
told, was founded upon fact.
Life with Adam was full of excitement. Not long after that,
I was driving with him in his car, and Adam cut in in front of
':another driver in proper Massachusetts fashion. A moment
afterwards the car was stopped by a traffic light, and the other
driver jumped out of his car and advanced towards us. He was
a roughneck wearing a check shirt and a baseball cap, and
carried a pistol, which he pointed at Adam. Just then the light
Foreword
VI
changed, and Adam coolly drove off; luckily the man was too
surprised to fire.
Adam took a strong left-wing line in politics, thus display
ing a kind of aristocratic rebellion against the section of
American society which had fewest intellectual interests. One
good result of this was that during the rebellious sixties, when
Adam was chairman of the Yale classics department, the
students found that they had no one to rebel against.
Anne Parry as a young girl had been with her parents high
up in the Andes, where her father was building a railway, and
rations were dropped daily from the air. Wandering down the
line of huts, the young Anne saw what use each woman made
of the identical rations served to all; in consequence, she
became a superb cook. As a hostess, she was a perfectionist,
sometimes spending two ·days in preparing for a dinner-party.
Guests at these parties, some of whom had come up from New
York, were carefully selected; if one of them turned out n-ot to
be an entertaining talker, she would make up for this by being
a beautiful young woman. The conversation was exceedingly
amusing; with such a host and hostess, people tended to be at
their best.
In the back of one's mind there was always a faint flavour of
danger when Adam was about; he had a fatal penchant for
taking risks. In the spring of 1971 Eric and.Christine Havelock
gave a splendid luncheon-party at their house in rural Connec
ticut, more or less equidistant between Poughkeepsie and New
Haven; Adam and Anne were there, and were in their best
form. Afterwards we all filed out to watch them ride away on
one of Adam's motorcycles; as they vanished, we were all
silent, and looked round at one another in anxiety. That
summer they were both killed in a motorcycle accident near
Colmar.
Adam used to say that if his famous father had lived he
himself would never have become a classical scholar. Being the
son of the most distinguished American Hellenist of his time
was not an unmixed blessing, particularly since Adam came to
be discontented not with his father's work but with the way in
which other scholars had arrested his investigation at the point
it had reached at the time of his sudden death and with their use
Foreword
Vll
of his legend to enforce the stultifying dogma. With great
courage and intelligence, he succeeded in placing his father's
achievement in its right perspective; and during his short life
assured himself of an honoured place in the history of Ameri
can and indeed of international scholarship.
The article 'Landscape in Greek Poetry' (No. 2) already
shows Parry writing in a relaxed and elegant manner and using
his familiarity with several languages and literatures, as well as
with the better sort of modern literary criticism, to throw light
upon his subject. He argues that in early Greek poetry
'landscape, as a distinct element, plays no part', descriptions of
nature being used 'sparingly and briefly, as a direct metaphor
for things human'. Then, taking a hint from the unusually
wide significance given to the term pastoral by Sir William
Empson, he puts forward the view that Greek pastoral 'pres
ents an idyllic nature in which the poet can move by proxy,
and in which he is content'. Thinking of the Phaedrus, most
effectively quoted at the beginning of his article, he suggests
that pastoral in this sense originates with Plato.
Adam Parry's thesis 'Logos and Ergon in Thucydides' won
him the degree of D.Phil at Harvard in 1957. He intended tc
expand it into a major study called The Mind of Thucydides, and
so it remained unpublished till ten years after his death. In the
thesis a succinct study of the logos/ergon antithesis from the
beginning of Greek literature down to the fourth century leads
up to an account of the way Thucydides makes use of it. The
popular distinction between these notions, as Parry calls it, is
simple, and rejects logos in favour of an ergon which is assumed
to be easily knowable; the literary distinction, however,
'presents logos and ergon as analytically disjunct, but of equal or
near-equal importance', and further suggests that 'ergon is
unknowable except through logos'. This leads up to an account
of the complicated way in which Thucydides uses the anti
thesis, showing how a statesman like Themistocles or Pericles
tries to make his logoi express and conduce to erga and how a
historian like Thucydides in a different way sets out to do the
same. Then Parry goes on to examine the antithesis as it
appears in the first two books of the History, rounding off his
work with a brief summary of the part it plays in the
Foreword
Vlll
remainder of the work. A voiding the naivete of critics who
have supposed that Thucydides thought that his book would
enable readers to predict the future, he remarks that Thucy
dides believed that it would be of some assistance in showing in
a general way how things tend to happen. Pericles, he thinks,
praises the Athenians for having, more than any other com
munity, made their erga correspond with their logoi. The close
relationship between Thucydides' antithetical style, making
full use of abstract nouns used to characterize concrete events,
and his tragic view of history was further developed in a later
essay on 'Thucydides' Use of Abstract Language' (No. 11). In a
posthumously published article on 'Thucydides' Historical
Perspective' (No. 17), Parry powerfully brings out the appar
ently paradoxical notion that though Pericles' policy finally led
to disaster the Athenians, in the view of Thucydides, had been
right to follow it. Following in the tracks of F. M. Cornford' s
Thucydides Mythistoricus, Parry argued that the History of
Thucydides is essentially a tragic history. It was not necessarily
influenced by tragedy, as Cornford had supposed; it was
enough that Thucydides was always conscious of Homer as a
predecessor. In another Thucydidean article (No. 13), Parry
refuted the contention of Sir Denys Page that the description
of the Plague in Book Two is written in the technical language
of the doctors. In Thucydides' tragic view ~f events, according
to Parry, the Plague has the dramatic function of following the
idealism of the Funeral Speech by an unforeseeable disaster that
no intelligence could have predicted or controlled.
In his article 'Thucydides as "History" and as "Literature"'
(History and Theory 22 (1983), 6of. = The Greeks and Their
Legacy (1988), 6of.), Sir Kenneth Dover writes about the new
kind of study of Thucydides, no longer focused upon the
problem of when each part of the History was written, which
has become fashionable in recent years. Dover does not
mention Parry, but since the earliest of the works cited as
exemplifying this approach appeared only as late as 1966, Parry
may be regarded as a pioneer, and his failure to complete the
major work which he had planned as a grievous loss to
scholarship.
But the most important work left by Parry is his contribu
tion to Homeric study. The early article on 'The Language of
Foreword
IX
Achilles' (No. 1) shows him already troubled by the problem
of how, if it was true that the Homeric poems came into being
without the aid of writing as a result of improvisation facil
itated by the existence of numerous standard formulas and
orally preserved, they could contain great poetry. If there were
certain things which the inherited vocabulary of oral poets did
not allow them to say, how could poets whose area of
operation was thus restricted produce poetry of high quality?
Taking the truth of the accepted orthodoxy for granted, Parry
was obliged to conclude that Achilles in his reply to the
embassy in Book Nine 'has no language in which to express his
disillusionment': but as M. D. Reeve (CQ, NS 23 (1973), 193f.)
later pointed out, Achilles does express his disillusionment.
Long before. Reeve's article appeared, Parry had seen that the
article could have reached a very different conclusion, if its
acceptance of the then current dogmas about oral poetry had
been abandoned. But Parry's article is, as Reeve said, one of the
more important contributions to Homeric studies in the last
fifty years, for it raised the question which was bound even
tually to lead to the reconsideration of the current theories
about oral poetry and the formula.
Parry's literary skill and fine appreciation of Homer are also
displayed in his castigation of two bad translations (No. 4) and
of one good but not wholly satisfying version (No. 7); it was
obvious enough that Robert Graves' Homer was not worthy
of him, but at that time it was highly desirable that someone
should point out that the undeservedly popular translation of
E. V. Rieu rested on Rieu's discovery that Homer was really
Trollope.
Three years later Parry again touched on Homeric problems
in his article 'Have We Homer's Iliad?' (No. 10). Guided by the
fine feeling for poetry, a quality not shared by all modern
Homeric scholars, which helped him to perceive the essential
unity of the poems and the close relation between their parts,
Parry wrote, speaking of his father, that 'it is up to us not to
stop where he stopped'. His father's work, he says, was at first
designed to describe the tradition of Greek heroic song: 'he is
not to be blamed', he adds, 'for not having stressed, or only in
rare moments, the distinctiveness of Homer'. The danger of
confusing Homer with another kind of poet, a poet with a
Foreword
X
style not depending, as Homer's does, upon an oral tradition,
should not lead us to confuse Homer with the tradition which
he followed. Parry argues that 'the Ionian singer of 725 BC,
trained in the use of a formulary technique far more subtle and
elaborate than any other we know, would, ifhe had learned to
manipulate the magical a~µ,aTa which had come to him from
the Phoenicians, not be inclined to change his thoughts of
modes of expression at all'; and he recognizes that modern
research into oral poetry in no way rules out 'the notion
explored by Lesky, Whitman, Wade--Gery, and Bowra, that
Homer himself knew the art of writing'.
This conclusion is argued for in detail in Adam Parry' s
splendid introduction to his father's collected papers (No. 15),
which appeared during the year of his death. Starting with an
admirable sketch of the history of the Homeric Question,
Parry goes on to describe his father's work and its effects,
taking advantage of Sterling Dow's discovery in the library at
Berkeley of the thesis with which Milman Parry obtained the
degree of MA before he went to France. After surveying the
influence of his father's work up to the time of writing, Adam
Parry remarks that to the lover of literature 'the whole
argument may well appear so narrowly technical as to miss
somehow the fundamental issue, which is the poetry of
Homer, and how Parry's work, and that of his successors, will
affect our reading of it'. Next he sets out to answer this
question. Milman Parry, he says, 'unlike many, if not most, of
his followers, possessed an acute sensitivity to the poetry of
Homer': but he was too much concerned with the tradition to
pay special attention to the individual poet, so that his fol
lowers 'have often cheerfully adopted his limitations along
with his constructive arguments', with the result that intelli
gent appreciation of the poems has been inhibited.
The arguments of the introduction were strengthened by
the posthumously published article 'Language and Character
ization in Homer' (No. 18), in which Parry shows how
mistaken it is to think that certain Homeric phrases, metrically
convenient and often recurring as they are, carry no meaning,
and goes on to demonstrate Homer's power of character
ization, mainly through a perceptive study of the portrayal of
Menelaus.