The Iliad and Its Contexts: Introduction

The postmodern moment of academic life has been an anxious one for scholars of “Homer.” The standard object of research in the humanities has become intertextuality, embracing the interaction and, especially, the conflict among all forms of symbolic discourse, but with special emphasis upon those varieties whose aims are anything but aesthetic. What used to be called “works” of “art” and “literature” now attract much more attention from scholars wishing to display the implication of these modes with the ordinary business of society than from anyone interested in the sensuous, emotional, and spiritual characteristics that once seemed to set them apart, both as a class from other symbolic modes and as “works” from one another. I confess to a sense of loss in this movement that mingles with gratitude for our gains in understanding the institutional dimensions of our lives together, and indeed how art exercises its power. But my purpose here is to indicate the difficulty that has faced Homerists who wish to contribute to these gains, rather than to lament a decline in the appreciation of the Iliad and the Odyssey. For a scholarly agenda that calls for situating these texts amidst the public discourses of a precise historical moment confronts the fact that the evidence needed to do so scarcely exists. The sublime isolation of “Homer” from the power negotiations of a real cultural setting may be an illusion, but it is an illusion forced upon us by the scanty historical record and not by humanist criticism. Nobody is going to be writing a Homeric version of Nothing to do with Dionysos?, much less Renaissance Self-Fashioning; but they will try, albeit anxiously.

In this environment the search for a historical situation for the Iliad and the Odyssey has sometimes taken on a desperate, even circular character, as the hypothesis of a certain kind of intertextual dynamic leads to a redefinition of evidence that supports the original hypothesis. It may not be a coincidence that support for a late sixth-century date for the textual fixation of the epics has grown, contrary to all linguistic evidence, at the very time when a later date would conveniently furnish more material for a politicized reading of their significance. With conflict a desideratum, the diversity of heroes, mythologies, and poets is sometimes imagined as pitting rival traditions against one another in a polemical free-for-all fought for high ideological stakes; yet would it ever occur to anybody that in deploying the mythologies and registers of the satyr play, as well as a diversity of tragic myths, the poets of Athenian tragedy were conducting polemics against themselves? His preoccupation with the Athenian demos has never to my knowledge fostered suspicion that the “Old Oligarch” was a populist; yet one still meets the naive assertion that the Iliad’s preoccupation with princes and the absence of common folk from its cast of characters mirrors the solipsistic outlook of an aristocracy. From this stand-point the questions of how these princes are presented, and the implications of their presentation, may become conveniently but misleadingly simple to answer. Too frequently one finds speculations about the environment of Homeric epic accorded more attention than the poetic texts, whose significance can always be reduced to an effect of whatever institution is understood to have regulated their production and circulation.

Amidst these excesses, the intratextual deconstruction of Michael Lynn-George, the sensitive retrobelletrism of Jasper Griffin, and the imaginative narratology of Nancy Felson-Rubin bring welcome refinements in understanding. Yet the difficulty of reliably setting “Homer” in a social context cannot become an excuse for giving up the effort. Not that there is much risk of seeing “Homer,” or any poet, imminently repedestalized. But the very power of the Iliad and Odyssey compels us to seek the cultural matrix that elicited their composition and experienced their most immediate and deepest effects. No doubt about it, Homeric epic was diminished and obscured by the accident that preserved it whole but left its environment in pieces. In default of a persuasive alternative, the view that the Iliad and Odyssey reflect images of this environment remains a dangerous...