Sons of the Gods, Children of Earth

Ideology and Literary Form in Ancient Greece

Peter W. Rose

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501742583
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In this ambitious and venturesome book, Peter W. Rose applies the insights of Marxist theory to a number of central Greek literary and philosophical texts. He explores major points in the trajectory from Homer to Plato where the ideology of inherited excellence—beliefs about descent from gods or heroes—is elaborated and challenged. Rose offers subtle and penetrating new readings of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Pindar's Tenth Pythian Ode, Aeschylus's Oresteia, Sophokles' Philoktetes, and Plato's Republic.

Rose rejects the view of art as a mere reflection of social and political reality—a view that is characteristic not only of most Marxist but of most historically oriented treatments of classical literature. He applies instead a Marxian hermeneutic derived from the work of the Frankfurt School and Fredric Jameson. His readings focus on illuminating a politics of form within the text, while responding to historically specific social, political, and economic realities. Each work, he asserts, both reflects contemporary conflicts over wealth, power, and gender roles and constitutes an attempt to transcend the status quo by projecting an ideal community. Following Marx, Rose maintains that critical engagement with the limitations of the utopian dreams of the past is the only means to the realization of freedom in the present.

Classicists and their students, literary theorists, philosophers, comparatists, and Marxist critics will find Sons of the Gods, Children of Earth challenging reading.

1

How Conservative Is the Iliad?

A major work will either establish the genre or abolish it; and the perfect work will do both.

—Walter Benjamin

The Origin of German Tragic Drama

In approaching a text as vast and complex as the Iliad, we cannot hope to deal with all the potentially relevant dimensions. Even in attempting to keep a relatively narrow focus on the theme of inherited excellence and the politics of artistic form, we find that an extraordinary range of issues are relevant. Of the two major conflicts in the narrative—one between Achilles and Agamemnon, another between the Greeks and the Trojans—the first is centrally imbued with the ideological ramifications of inherited excellence and the second, which entails the broader issues of the role of the gods and the status of women, is significantly if indirectly linked with it. The form of the Iliad in turn raises in a particularly striking way the general issues of determination and historical reflectionism with which we are concerned centrally in the preceding chapter. Finally, any assessment of the relation between the ideology of the poem and its form raises the issue of its utopian dimension.

The Form: Determinism by Rhythm, by Mode of Composition, by Genre

To speak of the form of the Iliad is to pose immediately the question, at what level or levels does one conceive of the form of a text? An excellent case, for example, has recently been made for viewing all early hexameter poetry as essentially of the same form (Thalmann 1984: xi–xiv). This approach appears to take the rhythmic structure—or lack thereof—as the decisive criterion. But this particular rhythm in the specific historic and cultural context of Archaic Greece (800–480 B.C.) implies more decisively the public character of the poetry, its oral reception by some sort of assembled community in a limited if not completely recoverable set of circumstances (Thalmann 1984: xiv). Research during the past sixty years has also established that this particular form of poetry is orally composed or based on a specifically oral mode of composition.1 The essential building blocks of this mode are the repeated phrase (formula), the repeated scene or motif (type-scene or theme), and the repeated story pattern.2

Although these three components will constitute the decisive point of departure of my exploration of inherited excellence in the Iliad, they do not exhaust the question of the criteria by which we might specify the form of the Iliad. Since we have argued that form most profoundly mediates any relation between those ideas and any recoverable reality giving rise to those ideas, the issue must be explored somewhat further.

The broad category of rhythmic arrangement entails a whole chain of constraints and conditions of possibility for communication: the possibility or impossibility of word shapes to fit in that tight pattern, the resulting pressure to preserve the widest variety of dialect variants and historically anachronistic forms, the consequent panhellenism and emotionally evocative archaism of the diction, the patterns of word order and emphasis conducive to this meter, the mode of discourse and organizational syntactic structures conducive to oral composition and oral reception (M. Edwards 1987: 42–60; Thalmann 1984: 4–32). All these elements and others radically condition the message of the resulting text. Indeed, there is a distinct sense of inevitability in those scholars who trace this series of determinisms from a fixed metrical pattern through formulaic language, recurrent patterns of narrative and of discourse to a fixed mode of thought and to a fundamentally homogeneous, static conception of the world. Here is just one example:

My interest, then, is in the more overt kinds of conventions—that is, in the characteristics, ideas, attitudes, and concerns that all the poems share. What seems to be most important about this poetry is that it was a means of coming to know and explaining the world and man’s place in it: the history and arrangement of the physical world; the course of divine and human history; the conditions that govern men’s relations with the gods and with each other; and the significance and value of human civilization and social institutions. Poetic conventions, as vehicles of meaning, furthered this aim in crucial ways and thus enabled the poetry to present a coherent worldview. (Thalmann 1984: xiv)3

Before considering the assumptions of this eminently plausible strategic series of moves, we need to consider the relation of these dimensions of the text of the Iliad to more familiar categories of literary history associated with the notion of genre as a designation of form. Here, in addition to conventions of rhythm, conditions of performance and reception, mode of composition, and characteristic patterns of organization, affect, and thought, one must consider issues of length and subject matter. If the phrases “epic” or “heroic” poetry have any use today, the most concise definitions focus on a distinctive scope and a clearly delineated subject matter. Thus we not only break apart the broad category of early Greek hexameter poetry but must also recognize that the form of the Iliad owes much of its range and richness to its incorporation of a vast array of other forms or genres that demonstrably or presumably had an independent existence in the Archaic period—prayers, hymns, short narratives about the gods, and brief, paradigmatic accounts of “the glorious deeds of heroes” (klea andrōn), military exhortations (parainesis, M. Edwards 1987: 3), boast-and-insult contests (Martin 1989: 47), love poems, catalogues, genealogies, work songs, and laments for the dead (Bowra 1961: 4–6). Bakhtin contrasts the “closed and deaf monoglossia” of epic with the “polyglossia” of the novel—an openness to the clash and dialogue of a wide range of different languages from different social strata, different territories, and different literary genres (1981: 12). Yet, if the epic language appears to us to have completely integrated and homogenized these constituent voices, we must nonetheless recall that the sweep and comprehensiveness of the anomalously long Iliad and Odyssey owe much to this incorporation of all the voices of so many preexisting smaller genres.4

If for later generations only these two poems are the Greek representatives of the epic genres, their sharply differentiated subject matters, taken most broadly as war and homecoming, respectively, have operated as grounds for two separate subgenres, only rarely, as in the Aeneid, consciously combined. Thus it is worth emphasizing that the form of the Iliad, if we consider all elements apart from its subject matter, is paralleled only in the Odyssey; but if we consider as well its subject matter, it is unique, sui generis. Its store of specifically martial type-scenes and formulas, painstakingly analyzed by Fenik (1968), imply a long and subtle development of a tradition of specifically battle-oriented narratives.

The Traditional Poem and a Traditional Worldview?

In view of the enormous interest generated in all aspects of the Homeric poems, what is really extraordinary is the extent of the consensus among those working primarily at the formal level and those who have focused on questions of belief systems, social function, and more traditional thematic criticism. There is widespread agreement in emphasizing the fundamentally conservative character of the poems, “conservative” in virtually every sense of the term. In the case of Homer, formal analysis has appeared to give an almost self-evident validity to pronouncements about the political and social character of the poems.

Milman Parry’s ground-breaking initial study was significantly entitled “The Traditional Epithet in Homer” (1971 [1928]: 1–190). Parry begins that work with a quote from Renan urging the necessity of entering “into the personal and moral life of the people” who have made “primitive literature.” Parry declares that this concept is “the central idea of [his] study” (2). Thus, at the very outset, his vision is fixed on a fundamental integration of the style of Homeric poetry with its vision of the world. At the same time, in words that echo the assumptions of those German historians so taken to task by Marx and Engels in the German Ideology, Parry declares, “The literature of every country and of every time is understood as it ought to be only by the author and his contem poraries” (1971: 2).

It is important to appreciate the radical integrity with which Parry attempted to adhere to that principle and at the same time to recognize its essential inadequacy. No student of Homer has surpassed him in the rigor with which he sought to grasp the world of the poems with as few preconceptions as possible, to think himself into both the minutiae of the process of composition and the vision of reality he conceived of as an inevitable consequence of that process.5 Yet the assumption of the perfect integration of mode of expression with mode of perception is itself ideological and was most radically challenged by Parry’s son, Adam Parry (1956). In a tantalizingly brief article, Adam Parry raised the possibility that Achilles’ great refusal speech in Bk. 9 might best be understood as an effort to confront the inadequacy of the traditional language to express a radical perception of fundamental contradictions within the values expressed in the “normal,” less self-reflexive use of that traditional language . We consider later the issue of the validity of Adam Parry’s analysis; but for all the praise lavished on the son’s insight, the father’s perspective—backed as it is by such a wealth of argument—has remained overwhelmingly dominant.

Challenges to M. Parry, recently dubbed reactionary criticism (Martin 1989: 2; so too Lynn-George 1982), have characteristically taken the form of fundamentally aesthetic defenses of the great poet’s originality and creativity (e.g., N. Austin 1975; Griffin 1980; Mueller 1984). In my view, at least, these challenges have not in any way supplanted M. Parry’s analysis of the mode of composition.6

Proceeding from the widespread recognition that the epithets were traditional, that is, that the vast majority of them are unlikely to be the invention of a single creative poet, Milman Parry carried Homeric studies into a detailed demonstration of their systematicity, their essential functional role in building dactylic hexameter lines (1971: esp. 270–79). The next step was “to show that the Iliad and Odyssey are composed [not only] in a traditional style [but also] are composed orally, then to see just how such poetry differs from our own in style and form” (269). One crucial aspect in which Parry argued that oral/traditional poetry differs from literate poetry is in the traditional poet’s relative lack of freedom to express either a traditional idea in an untraditional form or an untraditional idea in any form. In Parry’s work itself and in that of his followers, one feature after another has been demonstrated to be traditional and, so the assumption goes, therefore determined by the rules of oral composition. It is no accident that Albert Lord (1965: 280), Parry’s co-worker and disciple, is probably the first English-speaking classicist to cite Lévi-Strauss—no accident that recent work on both the smaller and larger components of Homeric poetry have made dramatic use of the structuralist linguistic analogy and techniques of narrative analysis. Both stress the automatic character of language rules and thought processes independent of individual consciousness and with little or no focus on historically generated social conflict.

At the level of the individual phrase—whether one looks to the “hard” Parryists gathering statistics of exact repetitions or to those in quest of structural formulas, modifications of formulas, or the flexibility of formulas, or even those who, applying a Chomskian linguistic analogy, would abandon formulas in favor of mental templates, families, or sphota—there is basic agreement that the language of Homer is deeply traditional.7 M. Parry himself demonstrated the traditional character of Homeric metaphor (365–75), and subsequent work on the similes, whose language has been demonstrated to be generally very late (Shipp 1972), stresses that the vast majority of similes follow predictable, traditionally fixed patterns of association (W. C. Scott 1974)·

At the level of motifs, themes, and so-called type-scenes—arrival, sacrifice, eating, journeys, arming, dueling, dressing, decision making—the emphasis may have moved away from the notion of mechanical repetitions toward the elucidation of fixed assumptions shared by poet and audience about a fixed number of meaningful activities carried on in a fixed way. Variations and omissions do not reveal “Homer against his tradition” (Russo 1968, modified 1976) so much as Homer exercising the peculiar spontaneity made possible only within those fixities (Nagler 1974: chap. 3). Thus scholars treating these motifs tend, pretty consistently, to perceive an implied conservative moral in the rare departures from the typical. Patroklos, in assuming the armor of Achille...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Introduction: Marxism and the Classics
• 1. How Conservative Is the Iliad?
• 2. Ambivalence and Identity in the Odyssey
• 3. Historicizing Pindar: Pythian 10
• 4. Aeschylus’ Oresteia: Dialectical Inheritance
• 5. Sophokles’ Philoktetes and the Teachings of the Sophists: A Counteroffensive
• 6. Plato’s Solution to the Ideological Crisis of the Greek Aristocracy
• Afterword
• References
• Index