Reading · Alexander Reynolds's Substack

To reiterate Chapman’s little couplet

Beta the dream and synod cites

And catalogues the naval knights

I dealt with the dream in the last talk. In this talk I want to make a few brief remarks about the “synod” – the great meeting of the army called by Agamemnon – and then another few brief remarks about the “catalogue”.

The short last part of this catalogue, however – its much more puzzling and schematic part dealing with the Trojans and their allies – necessarily raises questions regarding the nature of the Trojan War in general.

And this will give me a chance to segue into some questions relating very closely to the present day

and also to introduce a second series of talks I want to run concurrently with this dealing with a somewhat later treatment of the Troy legend-cycle.

84-86

First a general remark about Homer’s style and the way in which it formed the style of later literature.

Lines 84 – 86 are also interesting in that they describe two actions, with a striking disproportion between the sizes of the descriptions and the sizes of the actions described.

οἳ δ’ ἐπανέστησαν πείθοντό τε ποιμένι λαῶν

σκηπτοῦχοι βασιλῆες ἐπεσσεύοντο δὲ λαοί

Nine words

οἳ δ’ ἐπανέστησαν πείθοντό τε ποιμένι λαῶν

σκηπτοῦχοι βασιλῆες

are used here to describe a relatively limited movement

He spake, and led the way forth from the council, and the other sceptered kings rose up thereat and obeyed the shepherd of the host

and a remarkably compressed three words

ἐπεσσεύοντο δὲ λαοί

are used to express a vast one

And the people were hastening on.

(episeuo is a vague general verb expressing rapid motion).

Now this can be read in a political sense, as the poet’s reflecting the extreme discrimination between social classes that was present already in Greek perception during the Greek Heroic Age.

The action of the λαοί deserves little attention, that of the kings much.

And indeed we see this attitude come to even clearer expression a few lines further on when, after the assembly has broken up, Odysseus goes along the ships rallying the Greeks and adopts radically different forms of address when dealing with “excellent” and with “common men”.

I think, though, that this construction of an asymmetric dyad, regardless of the social status of its components, has something characteristically Homeric about it – and, like much that is characteristically Homeric, founds a large and mighty tradition in Western poetry.

(Of course, we might also speculate about whether apparently “pure aesthetic form” here is not indeed somehow born out of social and political reality)

There goes to support this latter reading the fact that the extended simile which immediately follows the pithy three-word

ἐπεσσεύοντο δὲ λαοί

is also closed off, after four lines (91-94) by a similarly pithy three-word formulation

οἳ δ’ ἀγέροντο

“and they were gathered”.

Here, no class division or discrimination is evident. It is a purely poetic operation.

Now, as I say, this framing of more extended, almost rhapsodic passages with propositions of extreme semantic sobriety and minimality is, it seems to me, a poetic practice that “holds the place of the Greeks” throughout millennia of later Western literature right down into modernity.

It tends, in fact, to be overlooked in modern renderings of Homer.

A T Murray’s rendering, for example, which is the one used in the extant Harvard Loeb bi-lingual edition, makes this asymmetrically dyadic structure invisible by blending the closing

οἳ δ’ ἀγέροντο

which is discrete and distinct in Homer, into the flow of a longer construction

even so from the ships and huts before the low sea-beach marched forth in companies their many tribes to the place of gathering.

Here, the very pithy “and they were gathered” vanishes altogether, as such. The action performed by the Greeks becomes a mere adjectival qualification of the place at which it occurs.

I speak, perhaps, only for myself when I say that it is a translatorial error to suppress this characteristically Homeric “asymmetric dyad”

I think this trait of Homer’s style is preserved in the most truly “Greek” of modern, even of modernist, literature.

I hear it, for example, in the pithy six final words of the seventh verse of Hoelderlin’s Der Frieden:

Wer hub es an? wer brachte den Fluch? von heut
Ists nicht und nicht von gestern, und die zuerst
Das Maß verloren, unsre Väter
Wußten es nicht, und es trieb ihr Geist sie.

Hoelderlin, of course, was one of the greatest of all carriers-over of Greek linguistic forms into modern European language.

But quite definitely, the more important legacy of the Greeks to literary posterity is the “extended simile” itself that these pithy formulations act as opening and closing “bookends” for.

The very compressed

ἐπεσσεύοντο δὲ λαοί

is in fact a “taking in of breath” before what all the commentators note to be the first extended simile in the poem.

It begins – typically for such similes – with the word ἠύ̈τε

ἠύ̈τε ἔθνεα εἶσι μελισσάων ἁδινάων

πέτρης ἐκ γλαφυρῆς αἰεὶ νέον ἐρχομενάων,

βοτρυδὸν δὲ πέτονται ἐπ’ ἄνθεσιν εἰαρινοῖσιν:

αἳ μέν τ’ ἔνθα ἅλις πεποτήαται, αἳ δέ τε ἔνθα:

ὣς τῶν ἔθνεα πολλὰ νεῶν ἄπο καὶ κλισιάων

ἠϊόνος προπάροιθε βαθείης ἐστιχόωντο

ἰλαδὸν εἰς ἀγορήν

This stylistic construction that begins with Homer – a discrete and protracted passage of simile beginning with a “like unto…” or some such phrase – is passed down, like the “asymmetric dyad” structure I pointed to above, through thousands of years of Western literature.

The last major work, perhaps, in which it is present in a form that unmistakably recalls Homer is Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Hundreds of examples could be given here – but we might cite one from the end of Book One of Milton’s epic poem, which describes the assembly of the demons under Satan to debate on whether to mount another assault on Heaven, not least because the simile used here is also that of bees and is most likely directly inspired by the Homer passage we are looking at.

Just as Homer uses, to join the two lengthy “wings” of the simile, the two short correspondent terms

ἠύ̈τε and ὣς

Milton uses the two short correspondent terms as and so.

As bees in spring time, when the Sun with Taurus rides,

Pour forth their populous youth about the Hive

In clusters; they among fresh dews and flowers

Fly to and fro, or on the smoothed Plank,

The suburb of their Straw-built Citadel,

New rubb’d with balm, expatiate and confer

Their State affairs. So thick the aery crowd

Swarm’d and were straitn’d, till the Signal given.

Once Homer begins with the “extended simile”, he really throws himself into it.

It is a device used again and again throughout the whole description of the “synod” – although it goes into “recession” during the long sequence when the Greeks actually comply with Agamemnon’s deceitful urging and disassemble, flooding down to the ships.

In this long sequence between disassembly and reassembly – when Odysseus persuades them all to come back, and confronts Thersites when they are reassembled (lines 160-360) – the action becomes more concrete and focused, with no use for metaphor or simile.

But aside from this long interval, the description of the Greeks’ movements en masse – their response to the call to assemble, their rush away from the assembly ground, their rush back to it, and finally their charge into battle – consists almost all of elaborate and extended similes using ἠύ̈τε and ὣς.^[1]

From line 144 on a second extended simile, or rather two extended similes back to back, extending to line 149 describe the Greeks’ rush to the ships.

And between 455 and 485, in order to describe the Greeks’ renewed onslaught on the city, we have no less than four extended similes, each five to ten verses in length, describing both the mass of the troops and their leaders.

Given the political orientations of my likely audience, it would seem desirable, even imperative, to say something about the methods Odysseus uses to re-marshal the Greeks in 188-198 and to put down the final stirring of sedition at 230-270.

Odysseus’s very different tone and behaviour with “the men of note” and with “the men of the people”, culminating in his beating of Thersites a few lines later, is clearly a point at which it emerges especially clearly that the Greeks did not share our modern conception of a single humankind.^[2]

We find an especially stark statement of the Nietzschean anti-egalitarianism of the Greeks at line 201, which describes Odysseus’s manner of exhorting the “common men” to return to the assembly

δαιμόνι’ ἀτρέμας ἧσο καὶ ἄλλων μῦθον ἄκουε

οἳ σέο φέρτεροί εἰσι, σὺ δ’ ἀπτόλεμος καὶ ἄναλκις

οὔτέ ποτ’ ἐν πολέμῳ ἐναρίθμιος οὔτ’ ἐνὶ βουλῇ

Fellow, sit thou still, and hearken to the words of others that are better men than thou

whereas thou art unwarlike and a weakling,

neither to be counted in war nor in counsel.

Not what a man does but what he is is the final deciding factor.

ἐναρίθμιος here might be argued to lie in the ascendancy of a phrase often used at least in the culture wars of the German-speaking world in the past hundred years or so:

In Betracht kommen.

There is, of course, much more to be said here but I want to get on to

The Catalogue of Ships

Woven into the catalogue are several great themes and stories in their own right:

For example, that of Philoctetes, whose strange story makes up the matter of whole tragedies centuries later.

Notable also is Odysseus’s twelve ships – barely a tenth of Agamemnon’s hundred and ranking very low among the kings.

This is another expression of Odysseus’s immaterial rather than material power and force – a feature strongly developed in modernity.

We also meet, in the disproportionately shorter “Trojan” part of the Catalogue, Aeneas, Greek myth’s bridge to the mythology of Rome.

In fact, the part of the Catalogue that most interests me here is that part of it that lists the peoples defending Troy as its allies

(Note that Agamemnon has already stated that it is the presence of these allies that has caused him to fail, for nine years, to take the city).

Lines 810-877 are an excellent primer in the geography and ethnology of Asia Minor: that region of the world which was already at this time colonized in part – above all in the coastal regions – by the proto-Europe that was Greece but which was in other of its many parts Europe’s obscure antipodes.

Scholarly controversy has raged for centuries regarding how much Homer actually knew about the eastern, inland regions of Asia Minor.

That he had a far less detailed knowledge of this region than he did of the region that now forms Greece is indicated clearly enough by the great disparity in size between the Greek and the Trojan “Catalogue”.

Also, an air of exoticism and mystery is imparted to the Trojan allies and their home regions by the fact that they are nearly all qualified by such epithets as “far” and “distant”.

lines 848-9

αὐτὰρ Πυραίχμης ἄγε Παίονας ἀγκυλοτόξους

τηλόθεν ἐξ Ἀμυδῶνος ἀπ’ Ἀξιοῦ εὐρὺ ῥέοντος

lines 856-7

αὐτὰρ Ἁλιζώνων Ὀδίος καὶ Ἐπίστροφος ἦρχον

τηλόθεν ἐξ Ἀλύβης, ὅθεν ἀργύρου ἐστὶ γενέθλη.

Thomas William Allen, a great Homer scholar from around the turn of the 19^th to the 20^th centuries, published a book in 1921 specifically on Homer’s Catalogue of Ships where, referring to an Anatolian ally of Troy mentioned at line 858,

Μυσῶν δὲ Χρόμις ἦρχε καὶ Ἔννομος οἰωνιστής

he writes “the Musoi might be in the moon”.

To get some idea of the “far side of the moon” quality that the people they were facing in battle presented to Greeks of the Trojan War period I would recommend watching Pasolini’s Medea.

Pasolini here uses, to represent Colchis, the Anatolian destination of Jason and the Argonauts, still-surviving “cave cities” of Asian Turkey (Cappadocia) that have an arresting Unheimlichkeit for the European viewer.

(Pasolini correlatively gives a hyper-Heimlichkeit to the scenes in Corinth, by filming them not in Greece but in the Campo Santo in Pisa, thus fusing the whole of “the West” – Hellenism, Christianity, the revival of antiquity under Christian auspices – into a single heimlich entity).

The peculiarities of the disproportionately smaller Trojan part of the “Catalogue of Ships”, then, reminds us that the Trojan War was the first iteration of a seemingly perennial war between Europe and an “Asia” represented specifically by its Europeanmost edge.

i.e the “Eurasia” represented by Eastern Turkey and Western Persia.

The current Iran War is in many ways a refighting of this ancient conflict.

The account of European/Asian relations that Herodotus offers in the first book of his Histories makes this especially clear.

Herodotus situates the Trojan War at the end of a long chain of Asian incursions into Europe and European incursions into Asia going back to the legend of Io’s abduction.

Herodotus ascribes this not to Zeus but to the Phoenicians, one of the great seafaring powers of the Bronze Age.

Those of the Persians who have knowledge of history declare that the Phoenicians first began the quarrel. These, they say, came from that which is called the Erythraian Sea to this of ours; and having settled in the land where they continue even now to dwell, set themselves forthwith to make long voyages by sea. And conveying merchandise of Egypt and of Assyria they arrived at other places and also at Argos; now Argos was at that time in all points the first of the States within that land which is now called Hellas;—the Phoenicians arrived then at this land of Argos, and began to dispose of their ship’s cargo: and on the fifth or sixth day after they had arrived, when their goods had been almost all sold, there came down to the sea a great company of women, and among them the daughter of the king; and her name, as the Hellenes also agree, was Io the daughter of Inachos. These standing near to the stern of the ship were buying of the wares such as pleased them most, when of a sudden the Phoenicians, passing the word from one to another, made a rush upon them; and the greater part of the women escaped by flight, but Io and certain others were carried off. So they put them on board their ship, and forthwith departed, sailing away to Egypt.

The Phoenicians take Io of the Argives, Jason Media of Colchis etc, all this preparing Paris’s mind for what he thought would be an abduction of Helen from Mycenae with impunity.^[3]

But the directly politically relevant point is made in the continuation of the passage, where Herodotus explains that the massive military (over-)reaction to the final tit for tat abduction by the Hellenes was perceived as an insult and an injury by the Persians of the day, since their rulers saw the Greeks’ expedition against Troy as an expedition against Persia, since the Persians saw all of Asia Minor as standing under their protectorate

σφέας μὲν δὴ τοὺς ἐκ τῆς Ἀσίης λέγουσι Πέρσαι ἁρπαζομενέων τῶν γυναικῶν λόγον οὐδένα ποιήσασθαι, Ἕλληνας δὲ Λακεδαιμονίης εἵνεκεν γυναικὸς στόλον μέγαν συναγεῖραι καὶ ἔπειτα ἐλθόντας ἐς τὴν Ἀσίην τὴν Πριάμου δύναμιν κατελεῖν. ἀπὸ τούτου αἰεὶ ἡγήσασθαι τὸ Ἑλληνικὸν σφίσι εἶναι πολέμιον. τὴν γὰρ Ἀσίην καὶ τὰ ἐνοικέοντα ἔθνεα βάρβαρα οἰκηιεῦνται οἱ Πέρσαι, τὴν δὲ Εὐρώπην καὶ τὸ Ἑλληνικόν ἥγηνται κεχωρίσθαι.

And the Persians say that they, namely the people of Asia, when their women were carried away by force, had made it a matter of no account, but the Hellenes on account of a woman of Lacedemon gathered together a great armament, and then came to Asia and destroyed the dominion of Priam; and that from this time forward they had always considered the Hellenic race to be their enemy: for Asia and the Barbarian races which dwell there the Persians claim as belonging to them; but Europe and the Hellenic race they consider to be parted off from them.

^[1] In fact, whereas we saw in the first example the terms ἠύ̈τε and ὣς being used to construct the simile, later in this long series of extended similes in Book Two different methods are used. The second extended simile, starting at line 144, uses ὣς twice, for both terms of the simile. The next uses a single term to create the simile: φὴ It corresponds to the English use of “say” to create hypotheticals. It sounds, indeed, like an inappropriately informal usage – and in fact the rigorous Aristarchus has dismissed it as an interpolation, claiming that Homer would not have sunk to such a “low” construction.

^[2] Our understanding of the moral dynamics of this situation is interestingly complicated, however, by the fact of Odysseus’s using the same form of address - δαιμόνι’ – to both “men of the people” and “men of note”. A huge amount of scholarly work has in fact been done on this single address form, which occurs thirteen times in the Iliad and nine in the Odyssey. Most of my listeners will be aware of the very complex history and developing semantics of this word in Greek culture. To address someone with it would appear to imply some association on their part with “the divine” but the nature of the association appears to have been hugely labile, depending on the circumstances. Scholars have developed immensely complex accounts of it which see its meaning as constantly situationally altering due to differences not just in status of speaker and addressee but also emotional/dispositional factors. Liddell and Scott have an especially comprehensive, and thereby confusing, entry on it:

voc. mostly in the way of reproach, thou luckless wight! thou wretch! sirrah! madam! Il II: more rarely by way of admiration, noble sir! excellent man! id=Il., Hes.; also by way of pity, poor wretch! also in an iron. sense, my good fellow! good sir!

Chapman, for example, is here once again extremely free in his rendering. He translates δαιμόνι’ at 190 as “good sir” and at 200 as “wretch”.

^[3] Also of great contemporary relevance is the cynical/misogynistic Persian “take” on all this that Herodotus recounts

τὸ μέν νυν ἁρπάζειν γυναῖκας ἀνδρῶν ἀδίκων νομίζειν ἔργον εἶναι, τὸ δὲ ἁρπασθεισέων σπουδήν ποιήσασθαι τιμωρέειν ἀνοήτων, τὸ δὲ μηδεμίαν ὤρην ἔχειν ἁρπασθεισέων σωφρόνων· δῆλα γὰρ δὴ ὅτι, εἰ μὴ αὐταὶ ἐβούλοντο, οὐκ ἂν ἡρπάζοντο. σφέας μὲν δὴ τοὺς ἐκ τῆς Ἀσίης λέγουσι Πέρσαι ἁρπαζομενέων τῶν γυναικῶν λόγον οὐδένα ποιήσασθαι.

Now they say that in their judgment, though it is an act of wrong to carry away women by force, it is a folly to set one’s heart on taking vengeance for their rape, and the wise course is to pay no regard when they have been carried away; for it is evident that they would never be carried away if they were not themselves willing to go.

This Persian wisdom could certainly be well applied to the present “migrant rape” hysteria.

GUIDANCE NOTES FOR AUDIO RECORDING OF 22/08/26 ON THE SECOND RHAPSODY OF HOMER’S ILIAD (AND ALSO FOR UPCOMING RECORDINGS ON THE ILIAD AND AESCHYLUS’S ORESTEIA)

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