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* The Grammar of Reception * David F. Elmer 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. One activity in particular—collective decision making—takes pride of place in this regard, for it is by coming together to make decisions on matters of collective importance that a community gives shape to its goals, its guiding principles, and indeed to its very reason for being. At the center of this investigation of collective decision making stands a single word—the verb epaineîn—a word that plays a crucial role in the language and formulas used in the Iliad to describe the process of collective deliberation. This verb, and the associated noun epainos, which I will regularly employ as useful shorthand for the general social phenomenon indicated by the verb, are familiar from classical Greek, where they are rough equivalents for the English verb and noun “praise.”^ ^1 As Bruno Snell recognized, however, classical usage is an unreliable, even misleading, guide to the meaning of Homeric phraseology.^^2 Although later connotations and denotations, including “praise,” are not unrelated to the semantics of the Homeric verb, a proper understanding of its specific significance must be based solely on the facts of Homeric diction and formulaics, supplemented, where appropriate, by the evidence of archaic Greek poetry more generally.^^3 Even Snell’s own Lexikon des frühgriechischen Epos, grounded in his understanding of Wortfeldforschung, is somewhat too syntheticPage 22 to be fully satisfying.^^4 There the word is listed and discussed together with the unprefixed form aineîn. Analyzing simplex and composite forms together, the entry arrives at the primary meaning “to say ‘yes,’ assent.”^^5 This definition is adequate in a general way, but it also obscures an essential restriction on the usage of the form with epi -, which is, in all but one instance, used in a deliberative context to designate the response of the assembled group to the proposal of a speaker.^^6 The simplex aineîn, on the other hand, indicates a more general, more broadly defined kind of “approval”: one man’s endorsement of a particular goddess (in the Iliad’s sole reference to the Judgment of Paris, 24.30); collective approval for events that have already taken place (therefore lacking the properly deliberative dimension of epaineîn: Od. 16.380); the sanction granted by the “themistes of Zeus” for a particular course of action (Od. 16.403); and so on.^^7 As the above examples show, aineîn can take a variety of subjects and a variety of objects, often without any reference to the spoken word as a necessary medium. Epaineîn , by contrast, is firmly rooted in the domain of speech. It is usually used absolutely, but on the single occasion on which it takes a direct object, that object is specifically an utterance—a muthos (Il. 2.335). The connection, in this example, to muthoi provides an important indication of the word’s proper field of reference. As Richard Martin demonstrated in an exemplary monograph, the archaic Greek notion of muthos corresponds to what modern speech act theorists identify as a “performative”—a use of language that aims primarily not to describe but to bring about a certain state of affairs, so that the speech in question is itself an action with a determinable effect on the world.^^8 In the case of the muthos that occasions the sole use of epaineîn with a direct object, the speech act is Odysseus’ restoration of order in the Achaean camp after Agamemnon’s disastrous “testing” of the troops at the beginning of Book 2, which amounts in fact to a reconstitution of the Achaean body politic (the subject of chapter 4). But it is essential to recognize that Odysseus’ performative utterance, his muthos, is not in itself sufficient for the successful accomplishment of the speech act. J. L. Austin, whose influential How to Do Things with Words laid the foundation for the contemporary theory of speech acts, stressed that the performative utterance is only one component of the speech act as a whole, which requires in addition a number of so-called felicity conditions, many of which are independent of the speaker’s actual words...

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