Chapter One
HOMER I: POETRY AND SPEECH
MOSTLY, we read the Homeric epics; despite the existence of modern recordings, few of us listen to them. In the last seventy years, scholars have devoted a great deal of time to studying the poems as oral compositions, butâas the term suggestsâhave very largely concentrated their investigations on the techniques by which poems of such metrical complexity and length could be composed and adjusted to the occasions of performance. Not much attention has been paid to the listeners, and what demands were imposed on them by the need to understand the recitations, what capacities they had to employ if they were in any way to appreciate the enormous depth of artistic skill that we readers identify in Homer.
Yet two great advances made about seventy years ago much improved our understanding of what the characteristics of oral poetry meant to the listener, as well as to the singer. Only quite recently, however, has this become clear. The two scholars responsible for the older discoveries, Hermann FrĂ€nkel and Milman Parry, though unaware of each otherâs work, shared a common and largely original insight: that Homerâs verse should be analyzed into larger units than dactyls and spondees, and his sentences should be analyzed into larger units than words. And now, within the last fifteen or twenty years, there have been two other advances, in the field of linguistics, that have provided a much better theoretical understanding than we had before of why this is the case. They have revealed that the now-well-known compositional techniques of the oral poet not only provide the resources for the singer to present a song adapted to the occasion of performance: they are also developed so that the song will be as accessible as possible to the listening audience.
In what follows I first quickly explain the âlarger unitsâ upon which Hermann FrĂ€nkel in 1926 and Milman Parry in 1928 focused attention. Then I describe the two more recent and less-well-known theories I mentioned. Finally, I demonstrate the advantages of emphasizing this kind of approach to Homer by commenting in detail on one passage from the Iliadânot a well-known speech or a highly wrought emotional scene, but one of the descriptions of Achillesâ battles soon after his return to the fighting. Battle scenes are sometimes neglected, because there are so many of them, and because their brutality may discourage and perhaps disgust the modern reader; but just as Homer lavishes all his poetic powers on the speeches of his hero Achilles, so, if one pays proper attention, his account of Achillesâ battles, too, brings before our eyes the superb skills of this greatest of poets.
THE OLDER DISCOVERIES: FRĂNKEL AND PARRY
In 1926 Hermann FrÀnkel published a monumental article in a German periodical1 demonstrating that the Homeric hexameter should be viewed not simply as a succession of six metrical feet, heavy and light syllables arranged as dactyls (
DUM DE DE) or spondees (
DUM DUM), but as a series of four (or occasionally just three) word groups whose syllables certainly add up to a hexameter, but which should be regarded as entities separated by word-end and often by a pause in sense.
2 This means a typical hexameter might be
DUM DE DE DUM (word break)
DE DE DUM DE (word break)
DE DUM DE DE (word break)
DUM DE DE DUM DUM (verse-end)âor (with some dactyls replaced by spondees)
(
Iliad 1.2). The four units in this example include interior word breaks as well, but the sense pauses (often the punctuation points) would fall
between the units, not
within them. Occasionally a verse occurs that illustrates this by presenting strong and obvious breaks between each of the units, as in
(
Iliad 1.158:
3 âBut youâyou shameless thingâwe followed you, to do you a favorâ). It is highly significant that all the units are of different metrical shapesâa vital matter for avoiding monotonyâand, of course, further variety is added both because the units in other verses will be different in shape from those given in the example, and because each group of two light syllables may be replaced by a single heavy one.
Here is a further illustration, from a couplet that will concern us again later. In the second book of the Iliad, after Agamemnon finishes addressing the assembly, the Greek troops move off and fix themselves a meal, which as always includes a sacrifice. Then come the lines (Iliad 2.402â403):
The orthodox prose translation is, âBut Agamemnon, king of men, slew a fat bull of five years to the son of Cronos, supreme in might.â4 If we follow the examples FrĂ€nkel gives (1968b: 112â113), we would divide the lines into word groups like this:
Most of the breaks are obvious, and they divide the sentence into separate sense-units. In the first half of the first verse, however, there is a problemâshould the break fall before or after
âand in such cases it is best not to force the issue but (as Kirk pointed out, 1985: 19) to take the half-verse as a virtually continuous whole. We might note (though this is surely acci-dental) that the two verses are similar in rhythm, each composed of the different metrical units
DUM DE DE DUM DE DE DUM DE DE DUM DUM DUM (or
DE DUM DE DE DUM)
DE DE DUM DE. In the past I have tried to give nonclassicists an idea of the effect of Homeric verse, when looked at in this way, by quoting Longfellowâs âHiawatha.â5 If one runs two âHiawathaâ verses t...