Homeric Questions

CHAPTER 4. Myth as Exemplum in Homer

CHAPTER 4 Myth as Exemplum in Homer There are questions about the Homeric parádeigma, which I translate for the moment by way of Latin exemplum ‘example’, following the lead of earlier inquiries.1 In an influential article on the subject of mythological exempla in Homer, Malcolm Willcock proposes that the contents of myths cited by Homeric characters, with reference to their own situations, are oftentimes a matter of ad hoc personal invention by the poet.2 In a follow-up article, arguing specific cases of ad hoc inventions of myth in the Iliad, Willcock sums up his position this way: “Homer has a genial habit of inventing mythology for the purpose of adducing it as a parallel to the situation of his story.”3 My presentation disagrees with this position and offers an alternative formulation. The key is the idea of myth as performance. I begin by recording my admiration of Willcock as a scholar and teacher, because my disagreement with his formulation is not hostile and in fact does not affect some of his basic findings. The frequency of my references to Willcock in the pages that follow reflects a recognition of the pervasive influence that his formulation of Homeric parádeigma or exemplum has achieved in classical scholarship. In this field, it could be argued, his formulation has even reached the status of a parádeigma in itself. Here I am thinking of the modern derivative paradigm—in the specific sense of Thomas Kuhn’s terminology in his inquiry into the structure of scientific revolutions.4 What I propose is not a displacement of Willcock’s paradigm but rather—to borrow 1. For example, Öhler 1929. 2. Willcock 1964. Cf. Braswell 1971. 3. Willcock 1977:43. 4. Kuhn 1970. again from Kuhn’s terminology—a “paradigm shift,” with some new additions as well as subtractions.5 A successful paradigm shift, as Kuhn observes, should make it possible to account for a wider range of phenomena or to account more precisely for some of those that are already known. Such a gain is “achieved only by discarding some previously standard beliefs or procedures and, simultaneously, by replacing those components of the previous paradigm with others.”6 It is in this spirit that I will cite, in the arguments that follow, various classicists who are recognized experts on the subject of Homeric poetry. Their names are prominent in my argumentation not for the sake of controversy but because they represent the primary authorities for the paradigms that are being challenged.7 Let us begin with the central challenge. I call into question the very idea that Homeric myth is a matter of personal invention. Such an idea, I will argue, leads to an attitude that divorces the study of Homericpoetry ,underthecontrolofclassicists,fromthestudyofmyth, as illuminated by the discipline of anthropology. The divorce is suggested in Willcock’s own conclusion: “If Homer invents so freely, it must be dangerous for us to use the Iliad as if it were a handbook of mythology.”8 Implicit in this statement is the recognition, however vaguely expressed, that the study of myth is indeed founded on some form of academic discipline. Explicit is the message that such a discipline is inappropriate to the study of Homer. A major problem lies in the instability of our own concept of myth, which leads to the destabilization of the concepts of creativity and invention in the contexts of myth. It is one thing for the ancient commentators to say that Homer created something for the moment, as for example when Aristarchus takes this stance about a story told by Thetis, retold by Achilles in Iliad 1.396–406, about a conspiracy HOMERIC QUESTIONS 114 5. Cf. especially Kuhn 1970:66. 6. Ibid. 7. In the present version, I hope that I have transcended the earlier version (N 1992b) by resorting far less often to outright polemics. 8. Willcock 1977:53. against Zeus by Hera, Poseidon, and Athena (scholia A to Iliad 1.400; cf. scholia to 1.399–406). After all, as Willcock observes, the ancient commentators “treat Homer as a creative poet.”9 But it is quite another thing for modern commentators who wish to defend the creativity of Homer to describe this story as “sheer invention.”10 For the poets of ancient Greece, as I shall argue, creativity is a matter of applying , to the present occasion...