The Poetics of Consent
Collective Decision Making and the Iliad
Publication Year: 2013
Published by: Johns Hopkins University Press
Acknowledgments
This book has been years in the making, and I have benefited from the advice, support, and friendship of many people along the way— too many, in fact, to list them all here. Some of my debts, however, are too great to go unmentioned. ...
Introduction. From Politics to Poetics
At the conclusion of the chariot race described in the Iliad’s twenty-third “book”— to use the misleading but conventional modern term for what ancient scholars more accurately called rhapsōidiai, “rhapsodies” or “songs”— a question arises. An unforeseen and unaccountable mishap has caused the best team to come in last; how then should the prizes be awarded? ...
Part I: Frameworks and Paradigms
Chapter 1. The Grammar of Reception
This book is fundamentally a study of the Iliad’s vision of community. Since this vision is constructed and communicated in language, it is also, in the first instance, a study of the words and formulas employed in the Iliad to describe the essential activities of communal life, that is, the activities by which a community constitutes itself as such. ...
Chapter 2. Consensus and Kosmos: Speech and the Social World in an Indo- European Perspective
So far I have focused my discussion of the key verb epaineîn strictly on the patterns of usage attested by the system of Homeric diction and formulaics. This is an essential first step made necessary by the constraints of formulaic phraseology, which, by virtue of an ecology that assigns to each expression a more or less discrete niche in the overall system, ...
Chapter 3. Achilles and the Crisis of the Exception
The Iliad begins with a question. After invoking the Muse and stating the overarching themes of Achilles’ wrath (mēnis) and his strife (eris) with Agamemnon, the narrator begins to zero in on a starting point for the narrative by asking, “which of the gods set them on to contend in eris?” (Il. 1.8). The answer— Apollo— leads the narrator to work backward in time ...
Chapter 4. Social Order and Poetic Order: Agamemnon, Thersites, and the Cata logue of Ships
For Joseph Russo, the basic aesthetic impulse of Homeric poetry, from the microlevel of the verse’s metrical structure to the macrolevel of the story of the Trojan War, is to reimpose order and regularity after temporarily permitting free play to disorder and abnormality.1 As a paradigmatic example of this pattern, Russo offers Book 2 of the Iliad, ...
Part II: The Iliad’s Political Communities
Chapter 5. In Search of Epainos: Collective Decision Making among the Achaeans
In the previous chapter, Book 2 emerged as a paradigmatic instance of the Iliad's overarching drive to move from the free play of eccentricity to the reassertion of the normative. The key to this movement is the epainos achieved by Odysseus’ speech to the assembled troops, the exemplary value of which is underscored by the fact that this is the first instance of epainos in the poem. ...
Chapter 6. A Consensus of Fools: The Trojans’ Exceptional Epainos
At the close of the Iliad's third day of battle, the Trojans hastily convene a battlefield assembly. Achilles has just appeared at the Achaean fortifications, scattering the Trojan charge with a powerful war-cry and thereby creating an opportunity for the rescue of Patroklos’ corpse. The Trojans gather to discuss whether they should camp on the battlefield ...
Chapter 7. The View from Olympus: Divine Politics and Metapoetics
The practice of politics is not a solely human activity in the Iliad. The gods, too, are subject to the political imperatives of collective decision making. No less than their human protégés, they must make accommodations and negotiate conflicting preferences in pursuit of a common basis for group action. ...
Part III: Resolutions
Chapter 8. The Return to Normalcy and the Iliad’s “Boundless People”
In elucidating the crisis that sets the Iliad in motion, I identified several interlocking norms whose violation or suspension defines a state of exception that is more or less coterminous with the Iliad’s plot. The most important of these is the norm of collective decision making through epainos, but implicated in this are several others, ...
Chapter 9. The Politics of Reception: Collective Response and Iliadic Audiences within and beyond the Text
Previous chapters have advanced the claim that the Iliad's depictions of collective decision making point, implicitly but unmistakably, beyond the poem to its real-world audiences. In the transference of epainos from the Achaeans to the Trojans, in the metapoetic character of the debates on Olympus, and especially in the image of the “boundless people” ...
Afterword. Epainos and the Odyssey
George Bolling stipulated that “a Homeric grammar should be written in three parts: a description of the Iliad, a description of the Odyssey, a comparison of these descriptions.”1 This principle certainly holds true for what I have called the “grammar of reception,” with respect to which we find significant differences between the two Homeric poems. ...
E-ISBN-13: 9781421408279
E-ISBN-10: 1421408279
Print-ISBN-13: 9781421408262
Print-ISBN-10: 1421408260
Page Count: 336
Publication Year: 2013
OCLC Number: 824353596
MUSE Marc Record: Download for The Poetics of Consent
