Homeric Responses

Chapter 3: Irreversible Mistakes and Homeric Clairvoyance

Chapter 3 Irreversible Mistakes and Homeric Clairvoyance 49 The original version of this chapter is Nagy 1999b. 1. The central works, again, are [M.] Parry MHV and Lord 1960, 1991, 1995. 2. Lord 1960:28. 3. Janko 1998b:7. In “oral poetry,” mistakes can and do happen in the process of compositionin -performance. Such mistakes, including major mistakes in narration, are documented in the fieldwork of Milman Parry and Albert Lord on South Slavic oral poetic traditions.1 For a striking example, we may turn to Lord’s account, in The Singer of Tales, of a singer who made the same mistake in plot construction when he sang the “same” song in a performance recorded seventeen years after an earlier recording.2 In an article entitled “The Homeric Poems as Oral Dictated Texts,” Richard Janko claims to have found such mistakes in the Iliad and the Odyssey, summing up his views this way: “Poets composing orally cannot go back and alter what they have composed.”3 With due allowance for differences in contexts, he compares the words of Horace Ars Poetica 390: nescit vox missa reverti. I find it noteworthy that Janko speaks of poets who cannot “alter what they have composed,” not of poets who cannot “alter what they have performed.” His idea, then, is that Homeric composition is irreversible and that therefore any mistakes in Homeric composition are likewise irreversible. In what follows, I take issue with such an idea. I propose to reconsider the two central Homeric examples chosen by Janko, and I suggest alternative ways of interpreting what he thinks are irreversible mistakes. The two examples of Homeric “mistakes” are (1) references to the weather in Odyssey 20.103–106 and 113–114, and (2) the use of duals instead of plurals in the “Embassy Scene” of Iliad 9, about which we are told: “But Homer 50 Homeric Responses 4. Ibid.: 8. 5. Again, Lord 1953, later reprinted in Lord 1991:3–48, with an addendum. 6. As Casey Dué pointed out to me, Lord in the 1991 addendum (pp. 47–48; repeated for emphasis at pp. 11–12) raises important questions centering on the idea that composition-in-dictation may be different artistically—or even cognitively—from oral composition-in-performance without dictation. 7. The most informative and insightful summary of the ongoing debate, I find, is Wilson 2002:71–108. 8. See Broggiato 1998. never went back to erase the tell-tale duals.”4 Janko’s interpretation of such “mistakes” depends on his “dictation theory.” I disagree with this theory. On the other hand, for reasons I have already explained, I have no reason to disagree with the “dictation theory” of Albert Lord.5 Moreover, I should stress that Lord’s general idea of Homeric oral composition-in-performance, which is foundational for my argument, is not at all dependent on his “dictation theory.”6 This chapter is divided into two parts. In the first, I argue generally, in purely poetic terms, that the two Homeric examples chosen by Janko involve not “mistakes” but just the opposite, feats of artistic virtuosity. In the second part, I go on to argue more specifically that such virtuosity can be appreciated in oral poetic terms. Let us begin with the extended passage known as the “Embassy Scene” in Iliad 9, featuring dual forms where we may have expected the plural. In Homeric scholarship during the last half century or so, the ongoing debate centers on this question about the embassy sent to Achilles and comprised of Phoenix, Ajax, Odysseus, and the two heralds Odios and Eurybates: Do the dual forms in this passage refer to Ajax and Odysseus, excluding Phoenix, or can they refer to Phoenix and Ajax, potentially excluding Odysseus?7 Already in the Hellenistic era, scholars who produced editions and commentaries of Homer disagreed about these tell-tale duals, and their disagreements reflect the inherent problems as they persist to this day. According to Aristarchus (middle of the second century b.c.e.), the usage of dual forms to express plural meanings was ungrammatical for Homer; according to Zenodotus (early third century) and Crates (middle of the second century and earlier ), such a usage was grammatical.8 For Aristarchus, the duals in the Embassy Scene had to be explained as referring only to two persons rather than three, and his solution was to argue Irreversible Mistakes and Homeric Clairvoyance 51 9...