The Stranger's Welcome: Oral Theory and the Aesthetics of the Homeric Hospitality Scene

272 Pages·1992·3.27 MB·English

by  Steve Reece

The Stranger's Welcome
MICHIGAN MONOGRAPHS IN CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY
The Play of Fictions: Studies in Ovid's Metamorphoses Book 2
A. M. Keith
Homeric Misdirection: False Predictions in the Iliad
James V. Morrison
The 1riumviral Narratives of Appian and Cassius Dio
Alain M. Gowing
The Stranger's Welcome: Oral Theory and the Aesthetics
of the Homeric Hospitality Scene
Steve Reece
The Stranger's Welcome
Oral Theory and the Aesthetics of
the Homeric Hospitality Scene
STEVE REECE
Ann Arbor
PREss
THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
Copyright © by the University of Michigan 1993
All rights reserved
Published in the United States of America by
The University of Michigan Press
Manufactured in the United States of America
1996 1995 1994 1993 4 3 2 1
A C/P catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Reece, Steve, 1959-
The stranger's welcome : oral theory and the aesthetics of the
Homeric hospitality scene / Steve Reece.
p. cm. - (Michigan monographs in classical antiquity)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-472-10386-5 (alk. paper)
1. Homer-Criticism and interpretation. 2. Epic poetry, Greek
History and criticism. 3. Hospitality in literature. 4. Outsiders
in literature. 5. Oral-formulaic analysis. 6. Oral tradition
Greece. 7. Aesthetics, Ancient. I. Title. II. Series.
PA4037.R375 1993
883 '.0l-dc20 92-32698
CIP
Acknowledgments
The modern teacher, like the ancient Homeric bard, is, even in this highly
literate age, a receptacle and guardian of a rich oral tradition. And like
the ancient bard, the modern teacher passes this tradition on to the next
generation, and it in turn to the next. I have been particularly fortunate
in having a succession of teachers who generously and skillfully passed
this tradition on to me, and to them I dedicate this work. To Walter
Defner, Frank Austel, Ann Wigglesworth, Howard Blair, Allen Mawhin
ney, Gordon Clark, Robert Ball, Dennis Ellsworth, Robert Littman,
Alfred Burns, Paul Roth, Mortimer Chambers, lngred Rowland, Peter
Colaclides, Andrew Szegedy-Maszak, Steven Lattimore, Philip Levine,
Cynthia Shelmerdine, Oliver Taplin, David Blank, Martin West, Walter
Burkert, Sander Goldberg, Jaan Puhvel, Michael Haslam, Ann Bergren,
and Richard Janko.
I wish to acknowledge a special debt to John Lenz, Delores Lunceford,
Donald Ward, Joseph Nagy, Jaan Puhvel, Ann Bergren, John Foley,
Mark Edwards, and Richard Janko, whose careful and informed reading
of my manuscript during various stages of its evolution did much to
improve the final product.

Contents
Introduction 1
Chapter
1. The Conventions of the Homeric Hospitality Scene 5
2. Ithaca (Od. 1.103-324) 47
3. Pylos (Od. 3.4-485; 15.193-214) 59
4. Sparta (O d. 4.1-624; 15.1-184) 71
5. The Phaeacians (Od. 5.388-13.187) 101
6. Polyphemus (Od. 9.105-564) 123
7. Eumaeus the Swineherd (Od. 13.221-14.533;
15.301-494; 15.555-16.155; 16.452-17.25; 17.182-203) 145
8. Odysseus' Homecoming (Od. 17.204-23.348) 165
9. Hospitality Scenes and the Architecture of the Odyssey 189
Appendix: Schematic Synopses of Conventions
of Hospitality 207
References 233
General Index 241
Index Locorum 249

Introduction
This is a book about the rituals of hospitality (!;&via,x enia) in Homer.
But it is only secondarily so; it could just as well be about sacrifice,
assembly, arming, or any of a number of frequently recurring actions
in Homer. This book is primarily about how oral poetry works; it is an
attempt to define the aesthetics of oral poetry on its own terms.
The specific objects of analysis are the conventional elements in
Homeric hospitality scenes, on the level of the formulaic diction of which
each verse is composed, on the level of the rigidly constructed type
scenes through which frequently recurring activities are described, and
on the level of the larger and more flexible patterns in which the story
as a whole is narrated. Of course conventional elements are not a feature
of oral poetry exclusively; every art form relies to some degree on a
conventional background to inform each particular instance. But
Homeric poetry, because of the fundamentally oral nature of its com
position, performance, and transmission, is exceptionally rich in con
ventional elements: the poet relied on preformulated diction in his
composition of the very demanding dactylic hexameter verse, on con
ventional sequences of details and events in his framing of scenes, and
on inherited patterns in his building of the overall narrative structure.
Only by becoming immersed in these conventions can we as a modern
audience, oriented more toward written literature than oral performance,
approach the experience of Homer's contemporary audience and respond
intuitively to the poet's employment and transformation of these tra
ditional elements. Formulaic phrases, type-scenes, and repeated themes
and narrative patterns are much more than convenient verse-fillers,
generic descriptions, and mnemonic devices designed to assist an extem
poraneously composing oral poet. These conventional elements, inherited
from a long and rich tradition, are dynamic ingredients of oral poetry
2 I The Stranger's Welcome
that have accrued deep and significant meaning over time through their
accumulated use in various contexts, and in each particular instance,
they call these associative meanings to mind for a well-informed audience.
In a sense, then, this book is an attempt to bridge the gap, widened by
time and culture and language, between us and Homer's contemporary
audience.
Today we rarely hear Homer's poetry performed aloud. Instead, usu
ally in our solitude, we scan with our eyes a printed text that is but a
transcription of what was once a live public performance. When we read
these texts, we confront a language that is very foreign to us, with little
feeling for the nuances of the diction. Moreover, we read from eclectic
editions of the Homeric texts that cannot claim to replicate with any
verisimilitude the words of the original performances.
Our experience, then, is a very detached and artificial one. But, iron
ically, it has been not through attempts to reenact oral performances but
through tedious scholarly research of an even more artificial kind that
we have come to a greater appreciation of the oral nature of the Homeric
poems. On the level of the individual verse, we owe a great debt to
Milman Parry and his successors for their contributions to our under
standing of the nature of Homeric diction and the mechanisms of oral
verse composition. 1 On the level of the larger building blocks of Homeric
poetry-the type-scenes, the larger motifs and themes, and the narrative
patterns that arch over the epic whole, all of which are as formulaic and
typical as Homeric diction-we owe an equally great debt to the earliest
scholar of Homeric type-scenes, Walter Arend, who did much more than
plot their recurring elements on grids; he showed how these elements
were adapted by the poet to fit their particular contexts through elab
oration, curtailment, negation, and omission. 2
My debt to Parry, Arend, and their successors will be apparent in
my analysis of Homeric hospitality scenes. In particular I should mention
Albert Lord, who showed that the practice of resorting to such type
scenes, or "themes" as he called them, was not unique to Homer but
a characteristic of many unrelated traditions of oral poetry;3 Bernard
Fenik, whose two monographs on typical elements in the Iliad and the
Odyssey have become in many ways models for my work on typical
1. Parry 1971.
2. Arend 1933.
3. Lord 1960.