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* Page 204 The Politics of Reception Collective Response and Iliadic Audiences within and beyond the Text * David F. Elmer 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” whose collective response to a poetic performance concludes the poem, we catch glimpses of the “fourth estate” that lies just beyond the poem’s horizon: the historical communities whose festivals provided the context for rhapsodic performances and who constituted the poem’s true stakeholders. The very possibility of tracing such gestures within the text implies “an organic link between reception and performance,” which is to say, a poetic tradition that remained sensitive, in the course of its evolution, to the process of reception, and that was accordingly able to incorporate reflections on that very process.^ ^1 But important questions remain. Is there evidence external to the poem that historical audiences recognized some semblance of their own experience in the Iliad ’s representation of political dynamics? And, more importantly, a question that is prior even to the search for such evidence: what, in general terms, was the nature of this experience, such that it could find meaningful expression in the Iliadic image of collective decision making? The concluding chapter of this study begins with an exploration of this second question, as a way of setting the stage for a broader consideration of the relationship between the Iliad and the history of its reception. Page 205 passive tradition bearers and the shaping of a panhellenic tradition It has become an established tenet of Homeric criticism that the Iliad and Odyssey are to be understood as Panhellenic in scope—that is, as appealing, notionally at least, to all Greeks, as opposed to a variety of other texts and traditions that betray a more local, or “epichoric,” orientation.^^2 The rubric of Panhellenism thus becomes a useful way of distinguishing the Homeric epics, in terms of content, form, diffusion, and institutionalization, from lyric and even other epic traditions that express a more restricted set of concerns, often because of ties to local cults.^^3 There is a tendency to speak of the Panhellenic quality of Homeric poetry as though it were something absolute, an unqualified universalism that sets the poems on the far side of an impermeable boundary. As Gregory Nagy has stressed, however, Panhellenism is not an absolute but a relative phenomenon, a tendency and an ideology rather than an uncontested reality.^^4 It is not, for example, that the Iliad is Panhellenic while the Aithiopis (one of the poems of the Epic Cycle) is not but that the Iliad is more Panhellenic, which is to say that it reflects a tradition that has developed in the direction of greater ecumenicalism rather than greater local specificity.^^5 As this formulation implies, to relativize the notion of Panhellenism is to recognize it as the product of a developmental process that privileges certain elements of a tradition over others. This is not a matter of the wholesale or instantaneous adoption of a universalizing orientation at the expense of a local one but of an evolving interaction between the two. Like the divinities of Greek cult, whose identities were implicated in a constant negotiation of tensions between local and supralocal perspectives, Greek poetic traditions—the Homeric tradition included—provided a matrix for the interplay of these same points of view.^^6 A story told by Herodotus about the tyrant Kleisthenes of Sikyon illustrates the way in which epic poetry could be invested with local significance, notwithstanding its relatively Panhellenic orientation: at war with Argos, Kleisthenes reportedly banned rhapsodes from performing in his city, on the grounds that the “Homeric” verses they performed praised the “Argives” (5.67).^^7 Herodotus’ anecdote draws attention to another crucial aspect of the tension between epichoric and Panhellenic perspectives. Far from being a solely abstract phenomenon, in the performance culture of archaic and classical Greece, this tension was always experienced and expressed concretely, in the framing, execution, and reception of particular performative events. A variety of factorsPage 206 might influence the relative orientation, Panhellenic or otherwise, of a given event, including the institutional or ritual context (rhapsodic contests at the Great Panathenaia, for example, would have a more Panhellenic cast than similar contests at the Brauronia...

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