[Music]
This is KZSU Stanford. Welcome to entitled opinions. My name is Robert Harrison.
We're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
[Music]
You're not a brother, Christopher. It's a strange notion we have in the West that of antiquity.
We're talking about antiquity. We're told that Greek antiquity begins with the Homeric epics.
The funny thing is those epics look back to an even earlier my Cinean age.
Long eclipse by the time Homer sang its glories in the 8th century BC.
The great palaces of my Cine had collapsed by 1100 BC.
Economy and overseas trade had practically ceased.
Written documents had vanished altogether. By comparison to my Cine,
the Greeks of Homer's time belonged to a dingy, poor, and primitive society.
Yet despite the utter loss of literacy, they retained a legendary memory of their distant
Greek ancestors over an abyss of 500 years of silence. Homer claimed one dialect of the Greek
language as a legacy, and through him later Greeks claimed as their common legacy,
a historical tradition to which they traced the origins of their cities,
families, gods, and heroes, conclusion beneath every antiquity lies another buried antiquity
and under that another layers upon layers of antiquities.
[Music]
The irony of the Iliad, the first book of the Western Canon, is that it tells the story of the
destruction, not the founding of a great city. Troy falls to the Ikeians,
historically speaking however, and Homer seemed to have known this, the destruction of Troy,
and the downfall of the civilization that destroyed it were more or less simultaneous events.
The Greek historian Thucydides put it mildly when he wrote, I quote, "the return of the Greeks from
Troy witnessed many changes, revolutions, and factions disrupted the cities. Indeed, when Agamemnon
returns home from the war, he is murdered by his wife and her fellow conspirators. When Odysseus
finally makes it back to Ithaca, he finds his kingdom in turmoil, not because of external invasion,
but because of domestic anarchy. It seems that while Troy was destroyed from without,
my synenean societies fell from within. Again, Homer seems to have known this, if only intuitively,
and it adds to the tragic undertones of the Iliad, which never, ever, loses sight of the
overwhelming human costs of war."
There are a lot of arbitrary lists of top 10 poets of all time or top 50 writers of all time floating
around out there. Many of them unbelievably provincial in their rankings, but I would guess
that if you could pull the writers on any of those lists, most of them would agree that Homer
comes first. Even Dante, who had never read him, believed that Homer came first, as did Virgil,
and virtually every other major poet of antiquity. In our show today, we're going to explore the
reasons for this traditional primacy of Homer. What is it that makes him the poet of all poets,
and wide-whiz epics, each in its own way, retain a degree of universality more than two and a half
millennia after they were composed or compiled? The person who joins me in the studio today is
the right person to engage on this topic. The professor Richard Martin from the Department of
Classics at Stanford, author of the Language of Heroes is one of the world's leading scholars of
Homer. He has an extensive bio, which we will be posting on our website, but let me just mention here
that Professor Martin has edited the brand new edition of Richard Latimore's Gold Standard
Translation of the Iliad, University of Chicago Press, and that he's currently working on Homer's
theological poetics, as well as the self-consciousness of the Odyssey. Richard, welcome to the
program. It's a pleasure to have you on our show. Thank you, Robert, and please to be here.
So when Dante descends into limbo, in Canto 4 of the Inferno, he meets some of the great poets of
antiquity, and foremost among them is Homer, who appears there as a single individual.
Now, when I read the Iliad or the Odyssey, I get a sense that one individual composed each of those
epics, maybe not the same individual in both cases, but to me there seems to be a poetic and narrative
unity in each epic that at least to me suggests one author. On the other hand, there are plenty
of reasons to believe that these epics were not authored by one person, so my first question to you
would be, do you believe that Homer was a single individual or maybe two individuals, one for each
epic, or were there actually any number of Homer's behind the epics? It's interesting that we immediately
get into the language of belief, do you believe? So this is a kind of catacutical question.
And of course, my answer is both. A question of us, I think, being partly trapped by our own
categories, categories which actually arose in the process of the textualization of the Iliad
and the Odyssey. So one big category that people in the West have ever since is the author.
And it's very hard for us to get around that notion of an author. How can you have a text without
an author? How can I have a text with many authors? On the other hand, there are clear signs in these
texts in the Iliad and the Odyssey that they are the product of a generation's centuries, perhaps
millennium old art form of composing. And I'm going to use the phrase that's used by some experts
in the early 20th century composition in performance. And we could talk more about how these texts
come to be. But let me put it at both ends of the spectrum. You can have heroic performers
which is to say genius figures in a traditional art form who put their mark on an entire art form.
And Homer is that. And I'm going to use the word Homer as if it's the name of one person,
but I'm also using it as the name of the entire tradition that leads up to Homer. So I know I'm
cheating. I'm having it both ways. I'm eating my cake, etc. But I think that's what makes this
whole problem distinctive. It's not quite like Milton or Joyce or even your beloved Dante.
So there is a, at least the imagination of a figure Homer, which goes back to antiquity, the Greeks
in the classical period, the fifth century BC, people like Sophocles and people like Socrates,
thought of Homer as a person. At the same time, it's unmistakable that no one person could have
devised all of the parts of the art form that he or she, Homer is mastering. And this goes for the
linguistic and the metricole and even the kind of memory of the past that's embedded in the
Iliad and the Odyssey. So the art form has been around and has been perfected by thousands of poets.
I have examples that we can get into for how you can actually have communal composition.
But that's what I'm really circling around that the Iliad and the Odyssey are the result of a
more or less communal composition under the eges, under the imaginary eges of one master figure
and we'll call them Homer. It's interesting that his name, Hormetos, means literally the one who
fits things together. Would that explain why there are different eras or historical
strata in the Homeric epics so that there seems to be at least some dim recollection of practices
that go back to the Mycenaean period that would not have been belonged to Homer's own age,
like I say 8th century BC and that the epics retain memory of not only particular sort of,
let's say war practices but even linguistically there are phrases that seem to be much more
archaic than the Greek that Homer was using. That's it precisely. It's not as if somebody in
750 BC, which to me is about the earliest possible date we could put for the Iliad and the Odyssey,
it's not as if somebody then is thinking back and reconstructing the way that a historical novelist
like Patrick O'Brien would do a particular period. It's more that the period has soaked itself
into the medium. It's like those mattresses that retain their memory. It's in the actual stuff
of the medium and the medium is this hexameter verse which requires pretty much pre-made segments
in order for singers to compose rapidly as they perform. And remember we're talking about a period
the 8th century BC when there's no widespread use of writing. So these are parts of an art form that
was passed down orally where every performer learns the art form and learns different so-called
formulae things like shining Achilles or swift footed Achilles or Odysseus of many turnings.
These are parts of the art form that help you compose rapidly. If we want to rough analogy nowadays,
if you listen to enough rap music really good rappers who can freestyle for like three hours have
their own ready-made formulae that they can kind of fit into the verse. And so you don't have to pause
like throw bare and think for exactly the right word, it's always there for you. So over generations,
the right kinds of formulae to describe say weapons or chariots or horses get created,
they fit, they work, they're economical and they get perpetuated. Which means that a poet in the
8th century BC like Homer might talk about chariots but he has no clue what you really do with the
chariot. Would Homer's contemporaries have considered the Greeks in the Homeric epics their ancestors
or would, because subsequently subsequently to Homer, the Greeks do adopt them all as their
forebears. But in Homer's say the 8th century BC, would they have understood these
warlords, the Agamemnon's and so forth to have been part of their same genealogy?
Very much so. Yes, because they come from all over and so the numbers of people that you see
listed for example in the catalog of ships in the Iliad cover the Greek world. As it was known
in the 8th century BC and therefore pretty much every local community could trace its ancestry back
to one or another figure that you hear about in the Iliad or the Odyssey. There are really
very few exceptions. Some of the far northwest Greek territories don't really have a local guy
but they get attached to somebody else. And the good, actually the big question politically is in
the 8th century BC. Is this a question of an entire city state like Athens tracing itself proudly back
to a hero? Or are they particular families who have a stake in these heroes? Is this basically
an aristocratic art form and politically are they getting something out of it? Would these claims
have been contrived on the part of these Athenian families for example? Or was there actually a
a testable genealogical link that would make the mycenaean Greeks the the actual forebears of the
classical Greeks? Well the great thing about not having writing is you don't have records
and when you don't have a library or archives you can pretty much make up within limits a convincing
genealogical line. You remember the experiments that were done I think in the 60s and 70s by Jack
Goudy who's an anthropologist working on literacy and they looked at some places in Africa
where genealogical lines had been recorded early in the 19th century and then later in the 20th
century and when they compare what the people say from century to century the
authentic historical tradition which is supposedly preserved in violet by the actual speakers in the
community turns out to have shifted because there's no control on it and so you can very easily
attach yourself as long as you get enough people to believe. So again we're back to these
interesting theological questions it's all about belief in persuasion and I don't remember which dialogue
it is in Plato it's Plato's corpus where Socrates asked someone what is your greatest pleasure and
they answer almost down to the last person that their greatest pleasure is to hear stories about
the origins and the myths and these origin stories. So whether the antiquity is contrived or whether
it's real there's there seems to have been a need to trace one's genealogies back to it you know
a long lineage and I think that in some ways our relationship to the Greek and Roman antiquities
it's part of the you know the afterlife of that same need to to go back to a distant origin and
I can imagine that it's the audience's for Homer's epics at the time would have taken a kind of
pleasure that we can barely imagine in saying this is a story of our ancestors. Yeah of course you
know most of us are not Greeks I'm not Greek it's a great tragedy in my life that I wasn't born
Greek but we still need that kind of connection and you know we have institutions that
in some way foster it like universities it's hard to recreate you know being in a small country not
even a country in a small village or city state clinging to the edge of the agean you know with all
of the Balkans behind you not really knowing where you came from but desperately needing some
kind of community because these are in the eighth century and even later basically subsistence
economies and very fragile always at war with one another even Greek against Greek they see
life in much bleaker terms and I think it is this is a shining light if you like for them
Homeric poetry and traditions that connect them to this glorious past.
So Richard whoever Homer was or in the plural or in the singular the two epics that are
associated with them are really remarkable works of art in themselves I mean they're more than
that they're they're rich archaeological records they're anthropological information and a number
of other things that one can use those epics to learn about Greek society and Greek religious
beliefs and so forth and we'll talk a little bit about that but fundamentally they are also
great poems that work as poems for a number of well attested reasons so if what do you what challenges do
face if you're teaching the ilead or the odyssey to for example undergraduate how do you make
how what do you draw attention to in order to to show exactly what makes them such great poems.
But I think you put your finger on it you have to escape the the use and abuse of Homer for
other purposes and really direct attention to the texture first of all that that these are delightful
in sound and in rhythm varying from line to line because of the nature of the hexameter line
they're not monotonous at all even for 15,689 lines I think it is in the ilead each line is
quite different from the one preceding it so what I like to do is read aloud in Greek at least say
the first ten lines of the ilead and then take people through what each word means in a kind of pigeon
translation showing how the the word order of Greek enables all kinds of different effects you don't
have to have the subject of the verb or adjectives always in the same canonical places you can
move them around and then of course I'd like to focus on how the poems themselves look at poetry
because since both epics really encapsulate the world and they put everything into their poems
poetry itself gets talked about and and discussed if not made into a theory so I think it helps to
see how the poems present poems good and what about narrative coherence do you stress that
art by narrative coherence I mean for example Homer does not tell the whole long story of the
Trojan war in fact he he just isolates a sp- just a span of days in the action it's basically
three days basically three days if you count everything it's about 40 days but of course he
focuses on really two and a half three days and you know the best metaphor for that or analogy
film because you don't have a movie that shows if it's a good movie it doesn't show 10 years of
war instead think of the guy I wanted to do my elite movie back when I was playing with the idea of
elite the movie unfortunately is dead now Akira Kurosawa yeah so the great Japanese director if you
look at the seven samurai he learned so much from American Westerns and vice versa can show you
an entire lifestyle and ideology and and culture in and afternoon on a battlefield so I think that's
part of the brilliance that even Aristotle recognized back in the fourth century BC there were
lots of other epics around and we have the titles of them and even some authors names but they
didn't survive because Aristotle said they would start at the beginning and go all the way through
and you could get eight or ten plays out of one epic of that style so called cyclic epics that
were the cycle of stories about Troy but Homer focuses basically on one event in both the
elite and the Odyssey and that event in the case of the elite is what exactly
well you would think it would be the fall of Troy and this is a great test question for students
if they claim to have read the elite nothing of what you know from popular culture about Troy
happens in the elite Achilles does not die in the elite the major hero
Achilles does not have a fatal spot in his heel that you could shoot in the elite
Troy does not fall in the elite in fact the elite concentrates on the last year of the war
and even within that not on just okay what are we going to do to take Troy now but on a particular
argument on the same side between Greeks that threatens the whole expedition which was to recover
Helen the wife of Menelaus who has either been abducted by or willingly gone with another ambiguity
Paris the Prince of Troy so it's really about a squabble on a civil war if you like on one side
which then focuses on exactly the same issue someone taking another man's woman
Achilles has been fighting we hear for ten years all up and down the coast kind of cut off the
supply lines of Troy and whenever of course a a Greek contingent goes into one of these coastal cities
they take the the women they take the the cattle they usually slaughter the men and he got a war
prize from one of these expeditions and her name is Brissais so Achilles we assume has this kind
of war bride egg a memnon has a similar war bride whose name is Chris a east Goldie literally
and the father of Chris a east Chris a who's a priest of Apollo comes to ask for his daughter back he
makes the trip to the Greek camp he begs egg a memnon who is the commander in chief of this kind
of expeditionary force to just give him back his daughter that's the opening of the entire
alien an egg a memnon makes the wrong move he says no even though all of the other Greeks were in
favor egg a memnon for whatever reason sends the priest away says I'm going to keep her I prefer her
to Clyde a mnestra and of course the audience knows what's going to happen to egg a memnon eventually
well then Apollo uh prayed to by the priest sends a plague on the camp people are dying right and left
animals are dying they don't know what to do and Achilles says let's try to figure this out did we
offend Apollo somehow and the Greeks own priest says well as matter of fact you did and it's all
like a mnons fault and he's got to give back the girl so I recommend them not comes around finally
now that his people are dying to giving back the girl but he takes Achilles war bry brissais and so
there you have in a nutshell the same problematic that started the whole war when Paris took
Helen Agamemnon has taken Achilles woman and Achilles being the expert red
erition that he is says this he says what are we fighting for here anyways it wasn't about people
taking other people's wives well what did you just do to me yeah and then it goes downhill
from there he retires from the battle he hopes that they all get killed and two they realize that
they need him he doesn't need them they need him and then his best friend patroclus gets killed by
Hector and that enrage is him and and also adds to his resolve to get back into the battle and
of course exactly and of course Achilles slays Hector and then the epic culminates in this
you know very moving sort of encounter between Hector Hector's father pryham who comes to plead with
Achilles to release the body of his son Hector so that he may be properly mourned and buried
and here's a question I'd like to ask you now about the thematics maybe more than just the narrative
arc which is the kind of primacy that this institution or religious practice of burial
plays in the ilead as well as in the odyssey and you speak about the first ten lines of the ilead
and I there are the only ones that I have with me I think here at underhand and if I can read them
and I if you have the Greek we'd love to hear the Greek actually I have the Greek in my head in your
head okay well how about you give us some Greek first and then then I'll have a problem I chose
yeah man in I hate that I'll pay lay Adele Alkeleos who lomenane hey moody Akai always I'll get a
take a hero home I'll choose the hallelujah talke kunessen oil noisy te pasi de oste de laotoboulay
exude top roto de aste tien eresanta
now I'm going to falter I'm sorry that I should have brought that to that's good enough I mean
it's good enough for our contemporary Homer we're going to actually I call you hoe for the rest
of the time no no Homer Simpson maybe well whoever but to remember 15,000 lines by memory
well again you know the art form if you're good at it enables you not to have to remember
because what you remember are formula that you can slot in yeah um and so typically I'm
remembering the formula for the second part of the line and what's dripping me up is the formula
for the first part so I remember Anaxandarone Agamemnon the leader of troops Agamemnon but I'm forgetting
what adjective goes with the kiles that will fit matrically into the line right right right
but Homer wouldn't have Homer or his his kin would not have that problem so in uh in English
sing goddess the anger of pelleus's son Achilles and its devastation which puts pains thousand
fold upon the achaeans hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls of heroes
but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting of dogs and all birds and I know that ancient
commentators declared of these opening verses that they uh I'm that they devise a tragic prologue
for Homer's tragedies and I think one of the tragedies that are alluded to in these opening lines is
the fate of many of those combatants which was to die on the open field prey to being devoured by
birds and dogs in other words to die without burial rights and without the whatever sort of closure
burial and the weeping of the dead brought in the minds of the ancient Greeks and of course this is the
big crisis at the end after the death of hector where the whole city of Troy is in a complete chaos
and and panic and it's it's become a dysfunctional city in the absence of the body of hector
I think Achilles holds on to it for is it ten or twelve days on twelve days so when
the pryum goes there and and and we can talk about how moving is that scene in a moment but when he convinces Achilles to
restore the body given the body back then the body of hector goes back to Troy and now all of a sudden everything is completely
organized everything is rich there's a strict protocol and in a certain sense this is an ironic happy ending
at least in so far as hector does get a burial whereas so many of the other
warriors on the battlefield will be deprived of this and there was in the minds of the Greeks it seems to me
from
what happens when Odysseus meets some of the unburied dead in book eleven of the Odyssey that there was hardly
a worse fate imaginable to the Greeks and to to not have this kind of burial exactly and
it is interesting as you say that it's a happy ending in a very weird way so the poem begins
with on buried corpses and ends with a burial and it begins with a child not returned to its father and it ends with a child returned to its father so there's closure in in two ways and this notion of burial is so wrapped up with human feeling which is further institutionalized in
religious ideas I won't say doctoring because Greek religion didn't have dogmas or any of the things that we associate with monotheism but the the ruling idea is that if you don't have the body somehow the spirit is
wandering and it's an idea you find in many cultures of course but in Greek it would mean that the the spirit doesn't go into its right place in the underworld something sort of
out of wack. And it might be an angry spirit. And it might actually be an angry ghost. And
there are plenty of great ghost stories about people mistreated who come back and get you.
The notion that you're going to be ripped apart and eaten by anything, but especially
dogs and birds or by fish at sea is the most horrifying thing that they seem to have. It's
one of the things that makes the Odyssey much more threatening for them than perhaps
for us because we think, well, people lost at sea. Gee, you know, maybe drowning is not
a bad way to go after all. But for them, there's nobody. And there's so conscious of this
that the Greeks begin the tradition of, well, it's a Greek word, the Seno Taf, which
means literally the empty tomb. So you set up a grave even if you don't have the bodies.
It's like you're trying to grab at the smallest possible palpable memory. Again, if you
think of institutions like the city state, they too depend on getting a body at the center.
We know that in the case of many city states at the center of the marketplace was a
hero tomb. And come to think of it, the whole notion of hero, which is, after all, a Greek
word, hatos. It's right there in the beginning of the elite, a hato-ome. The hero is in Greek
religious terms, technically a dead ancestor. And so heroes cannot be heroes unless they
die. Now, from the standpoint of the poems themselves internally, these are live warriors
very much alive. But from the standpoint of Greek religious sentiment and practices, heroes
like Odysseus, like Achilles, like Agamemnon, were people whose graves you could visit,
the way you would in Western medieval saints cult.
And there are vestiges of that, even in our own nation, when, for example, when Lincoln
was assassinated and that beautiful poem that Whitman wrote on the--
When Lilac's last in the New York, exactly. And this is about the procession of the body
all around the various cities. And it's almost as if the corpse of the slain president
served to re-found the unity of the nation in the wake of a civil war that had fractured
it and that the burial and proper mourning of it. When JFK died, it was another moment
of--it had this archaic power of bringing the nation together. And then 9/11, there
were ways in which the dead and even the mortal remains still serve this crucial sort of
psychic function so that those were deprived of a body don't know how to work out there.
Right. And I think as you say, it's also the kind of communal sharing of the body. What
we all get to see--I'm thinking Robert Kennedy in 1968--where the train takes him all along
the east coast and there are crowds at every railroad stop. There's something about the communal
participation in getting close to the body. That is, I think, very Greek. And I'm reminded
that Bobby Kennedy himself, especially after the death of Jack, was completely immersed
in reading Escolus. And if you ever visited Bobby Kennedy's grave in Arlington, I don't
know who we've been there. I have it. There is a verse from Escolus about pain gripping
slowly and knowledge coming with suffering. So, you know, in terms of Greeks in the 8th century,
it's very interesting and we're still trying to figure it out that this is the century
when other panhellenic institutions apparently get started. The Olympic Games supposedly
were instituted in 776 or the early 8th century, an institution to which all Greeks are welcome.
The colonization where Greek culture spreads, you know, too salt-edily, to Sicily, to the
Black Sea even, begins in the 8th century. So, it's been suggested that the Homeric poems
themselves are a kind of communal possession that for the first time essentially says,
"Look, we're all in this together. We all share the grief over dead heroes like Achilles."
And you know, Achilles, not to get too etymological here, but Achilles name means grief
for the people. So, he encapsulates the notion of something that you mourn over.
Well, there's two things that come to my mind with this motif. One is the burial of
the spectropolis, who is the dear friend of Achilles. And that's a very long description, and it seems
to have very archaic practices associated with it. There are a number of sheep and cattle and dogs
are slain, and there's all this blood that's flowing there to the corpse. There's even 12
a lot of the pros and pros that are being used to it. And it seems that there, even though
Homer presumably no longer believed in the literal subsistence of the person in the corpse,
it seems to recall ancient superstitions about the need of the dead for servants and for blood
and sustenance. So therefore, the proper burial of Patrochilles gives us,
narratively speaking, makes it so much more evident why it's so important for Troy to get Hector's
body back, so that he can have the same honors and allow them to reorganize themselves.
And it's another thing Richard just wrapped this up, is what happens to his father before he gets
about body back. It's very much like what happens to Odysseus' father who thinks his son might be dead.
He's there, he's in a kind of catatonic state, and he's putting dung all over his head and leaves,
and as if he has this compulsion to bury something, but in the absence of the body he's self-reflexive.
And layerties back in Ithaca is also sleeping in a pile of leaves and dirt. It's almost like he
must have buried himself because he cannot bury his son properly. So it's very powerful stuff.
Yeah, just to imagine that, and even Achilles imagines how his father will react when he knows
that Achilles is not coming home. And Achilles himself knows that like clockwork, once Patrochilles
is dead Hector is going to die, and at once Hector is dead he's the next, he Achilles. So Achilles
he's for Caesar's own death, and that makes it all the more powerful. We never see Achilles burial.
We only hear about that from the Odyssey which kind of finishes off the Ithaca in some ways.
So this is the question that intrigues me a great deal, which is Achilles is the
Speaker of the People, or he's the one, he understands in a certain theoretical level the
futility of war as in his first speech there, you know, the Agamem, what are we doing here? He
and he manages to feel enough sympathy for Priam that he'll give back the body. So he
he becomes not just a great hero, but he comes a great human being someone wrote somewhere that
and at the same time he will choose his early death for the sake of the glory. And therefore,
on the one hand in trauma you have a depiction of war as the most horrific of horrors imaginable
for the people who are engaged in it. And yet at the same time it seems like well it's the only
consolation we have for this miserable human existence is the kind of immortal fame and glory
that we can have through making a name for ourselves through war that makes Achilles someone like
Achilles opt for it regardless of the fact that he that he knows that there's an underlying
tragic futility about it all. I think that's exactly right that the Greeks know just how bleak
everything is. There's no consolation after death. You go to this dank place under the earth. There's
no even illusion fields. That seems to be a somewhat later invention. So all you've got is what people
remember about you and how you're going to get into their memory. Not by being even a good performer
of poetry, although Homer certainly succeeded, but by doing some tremendous deed and it doesn't
even have to be a morally good deed. This is the other thing about heroes that tends to disturb the
modern sensibility. Achilles himself is a killer in many ways. He goes, "Braserk."
Yeah, it's a mass murder. Right, right. Odysseus, you know, who in some ways might look like a
friendlier guy is the person who comes home and kills 108 unarmed suitors of his wife.
And that's a real problem that the Odyssey tries to skirt in various ways, but he, as Mike Nagler at
Berkeley has written, this is really the first scene justifying domestic violence in Western literature.
Yeah, no, Odysseus can be put on trial and found guilty. I think very with the right kind of
prosecutor because he leaves Ithaca with the flower of the Ithaca youth and he comes back
absolutely empty handed alone, having everyone that he took away dead. Right. And then he proceeds to
kill off, you know, the rest of the Ithaca elite. And you say, "Well, is this the paradigm of a great
leader or is this the paradigm of the absolute failed leader whose self interest has taken priority
over his responsibility?" It is definitely someone who's bad side you don't want to get on. And
notice that he has a story about how all of those crew members died, a story that is pretty much
unverifiable even within the terms of the of the poem itself. How much of that really happened? We
also know he's a great liar. He lies five different times at length in the second part of the poem.
But the other interesting thing and I wanted to bring the elite in again for a second is
both the elite and the Odyssey and with the gods having to intervene. So Achilles doesn't
own his own say, "Well, you know, I really should give back the body." He's more or less told to do that
by Zeus and the other gods and his mother Thetus communicates the command to him and then he gives
in. Odysseus would have with his father and son slaughtered everybody else on the island except
Athena comes down and Zeus hurls a thunderbolt and they put an end to the vendetta. So in one way
the poems know that you can't have continual bloodshed but then the only solution is for the gods to step in.
And the gods control so much in both of those epics so that I'm always struck by the difference
between the Homeric War scenes and medieval chivalric stories of war. In the middle ages it was
actually the prowess and virtue of the of the combatant that wins out over an inferior opponent.
In Homer it's not how good a warrior is this, which god is on your side or it's fate, it's not
Verte bravura or what you would call some kind. So everything seems undist or arbitrarily
mediated through the will of the gods. Well, I think there's also a rhetorical spin to this too
because sometimes if sometimes there's fate right and sometimes there's fate in scarequotes when a
character says oh it was faded for me not to hit so and so. Well that's just an easy way to get
out of it but you write that the the gods and fate and sometimes fate controls the gods are up there
as yet another layer of motivation and causation which I don't think you have in other traditions
to that extent maybe in biblical tradition. Of course the complication of having a polytheistic
system is that one god might want one thing for his or her son or daughter another god will
want something else and so even Zeus has to witness his own son Sarpidin being killed on the field
at Troy in book 16 and he says for a minute will I save him I think I'll save him and his wife
Heeras says okay go ahead and save him but the rest of us are going to be angry and so as a political
decision to keep peace on Olympus Zeus says okay I'll let him die.
You have when you speak about the language of Heeros what do you mean by that term?
Well it's really a remarkable thing that Iliad and Odyssey both have so much time devoted
to speech and if you've ever seen one of the other performed it's very easy to turn them into stage
plays you have a kind of narrative voiceover and then the characters can just talk and this is the
most immediate way of characterizing. I set out a long time ago to try to figure out whether
there were stylistic differences in the presentation of characters and I got into a lot of
somatic studies also I was interested as I still am in mythology and this very interesting word
mute thaw which gives us the word mith. When you look at it in Homer it basically means a big
speech and authoritative utterance as opposed to the word epos which gives us epic but seems to
just mean expression. So if you study all of these what you can find is that the speakers are very
carefully arranged for different skill sets especially in the Iliad so that Achilles is the best speaker
and also the best more than Odysseus. More than Odysseus. Odysseus has different skills. He can
pretend for instance to be dumb and this is what said in book three one of the Trojans recalls
oh yeah Odysseus came to Troy once and he was you know moving kind of keeping his head down and
not talking so much and you know you look like a stupid person but then he opened his mouth and the
words came thick and fast like snowflakes so he's a different skill set there it's a whole
typology of all of the rhetorical strategies and modes that one could come up with.
So Achilles is not just this brute barbaric he you know henchman he is the most articulate of the
Greeks and he actually has a power of resonation that's very impressive. He is and you wonder you know
to what extent these go together is this why he is so remarkable we're told that he was instructed
always to be a door of deeds and a speaker of words so these are kind of the two halves of the
Homeric education but most people are one of the other in these poems he's the one who can really do
them both. Is he a hero you like? That's a good question I can't really say that I warm up to Achilles
I admire him for his skills I'm afraid of him for other reasons I'd like Odysseus more but on the
other hand I'd like the Iliad more than the Odyssey. I have a hard time warming up to Achilles
I have to say in fact every time I revisit you know the the Iliad I always wish I always hoping that
the Trojans will win the war rather than the Greeks or of course I'm not going to happen but
I guess the figure of Hector I find more sympathetic somehow or less mercyless or but the Hector
was really you know into some minds he's the hero of the whole poem. He's his family man he's the one
you see with his child on the wall of Troy with his wife and andra maki and the boy Astianax
you see him trying to deal with his brother this kind of
wasting Paris you know he's the one you can sympathize with and then he's the victim of this
murder machine ultimately Achilles so I think he does have much more of our sympathy yeah and when
we deal with Odysseus in the Odyssey I also wanted to ask you what you mean by self-consciousness
in the Odyssey but Odysseus is someone family man to a certain extent I mean without bringing
a suspicion to bear on why he spends all those years. He's got lots of families actually as it turns
out in mythology we've got several families which you don't really hear about in the Odyssey
yeah the poem itself is self-conscious in as much as it's about poetry to a large extent so you see
performances of poems you also get a performance by Odysseus remember that you know all of the stuff
we associate with the Odyssey the Cyclops and the Lotus Eaters are parts of a story told by Odysseus
so there's a poet within the poem and other people in the poem say oh man he tells stories just like a
great poet he's also a liar but we know from other sources that the muses themselves took pride in
being able to lie when they wanted to apart from that what I am intrigued still by in the
Odyssey is why it starts not with Odysseus but with his son Telemachus and so for the first four
books you don't see Odysseus you only hear about him and your vision of Odysseus is focalized
and focused through his son who has never met him because Odysseus went to the war
shortly after Telemachus was born and there's a story about that too how he wouldn't actually
have gone to the war except for Telemachus because at first when they came to recruit him
he pretended to be crazy and then in order to test him one of the recruiting agents put
young baby Telemachus in front of the plow that Odysseus was using in pretending to plow in a
particularly crazy way he was plowing with one ox and one donkey so they put the baby in front of
the plow and then Odysseus stopped because he wasn't that crazy he wasn't going to run over the kid
so in a weird way it's only because of Telemachus that Odysseus goes to Troy in the first place
the self-consciousness I think enters into the fact that Telemachus himself is not a hero
except for participating in the mass slaughter at the end of the poem that has rather initiated
Telemachus is not going to go anywhere he there's no more Troy there is no opportunity and so
I think that this is an indication that the poetic tradition is very much aware that
it itself is changing perhaps dying out maybe experiencing a new technology maybe poets are beginning to
realize that there's this new thing writing that is going to change their lives forever but it's framed
in this kind of elegia kue that the the next generation is looking back even within the poem
to the heroic generation of the fathers and it's really one of the only stories
in the western canon love stories that has to do between a man and a wife almost all's love stories the
great love stories in the in the Christian era seem to be doomed adulterous or the kind of
passionate love that that has a fundamental impossibility about it and if it doesn't end in
in the kind of tragic deaths of the lovers and that it doesn't gratify the odyssey on the other
hand is one of them that there's something there about the domestic that domesticity as a kind of
endpoint of a quest right that seems very there seems to be a wisdom there after all the
search for glory through battle and destruction and devastation exactly and you know it questions
the elia in that way because the elia says you need the claus or the fame fame through poetry
that comes from being in Achilles and the odyssey in effect says well not really because
Odysseus is going to get fame for being a survivor he endured and then he goes back to this domestic
situation and it's totally convincing that this is the real desire that powers all of us to kind of get
back home when you first see Odysseus he's thinking about not his wife but just the fire that is on
his heart and seeing the smoke coming out of his chimney and that that kind of says at all that
feel that you get when you smell you know the fireplace of your house and of course it's metonymic
for penelope and lier days and telemicus and the whole family and the whole kingship but it comes down
to just being at your heart the interesting thing is that the odyssey as you know never says
Odysseus loves penelope your penelope loves Odysseus and yet we're completely convinced of that
relationship um he says to the young now sick at one point when he meets this princess on one of his
many islands you know there's nothing like having like my didn't is between man and woman i hope
you have that when you grow up and you get married and that's about the closest you get to Odysseus
admitting how he feels for penelope but he proves it and let's not forget that he passes up an offer
of immortality and basically living in the elisian fields with a shining goddess at that name
calypso right that's that that's the immortality could have had but he chooses the the mortality
of going home being Odysseus dying and yet chillingly we're still reading about him so he did
have it both ways well Richard we uh i'm gonna coming to come to the end of our show but i'm going to give
you a choice between two exit songs one about Helen of Troy and one about this young maiden that
you just mentioned now seeka um Odysseus uh it's always so you have actual songs about now
sick uh yeah there's there's one on now seeka one on Helen of Troy so i'm gonna go for now
sick you're gonna go for now sick okay good so i want to remind our listeners we've been
speaking with professor Richard Martin from the department of classics here at Stanford about the
Homeric epics for entitled opinions i'm Robert Harrison if you wanted to listen to any of our past
140 or so shows just log on to our website on entitled opinions and uh you can also get us through
the iTunes podcast that we put up there every week and we'll look forward to having you join
us next week thanks again Richard for coming on thank you we'll leave you with this song by glass
wave on now seeka
I'm a wold should be your friend/ dear in the heat.
You're dead, dear.
Finally the ocean gave me love.
What it should never take away.
I'm a wold.
You were just like a gun.
You stepped out from a cloud.
But by the house they knew said,
And the weather she hoped would be.
Couldn't we possibly reach others?
Isn't there a sunwher to deliver soon?
Why did you have to be for another?
Why can't I come with you as a lover?
I'm a wold.
I want you to show me.
I watch where your footsteps have been.
Should I trust the gods of destiny?
May I think I'll serve to the sea?
Couldn't we possibly reach others?
Isn't there a sunwher to deliver soon?
Why did you have to be for another?
Why can't I come with you as a lover?
I'm a wold.