The Ordeals of Homeric Song

In a recently published work,¹ Richard Seaford has offered one of the most ambitious efforts yet to address the social and ritual contexts of the Homeric epics and to interpret the cultural significance of the epics as they assumed the approximate form in which we know them. The basic point of Seaford's complex argument is that the Iliad and Odyssey should be seen as parallel developments to the public funeral and the cults of the heroes.² These public death rituals were encouraged by the developing polis in correlation with its legislative discouragement of elaborate private funerals;³ the city's twofold project to regulate mourning had as its object the replacement of the socially divisive emotions aroused by private funerals with the socially unifying emotions aroused when the dead were conceived of as equally related to all of the city's constituents. The songs of Homer were part of this selfsame civic project: "In the individuals they celebrate (ancient, Panhellenic heroes), in the context of their performance (the public festivals), as well as in being a (rhapsodic) contest, the Homeric recitations at Athens can be said to cater for (sic) the kind of cohesive public emotion that also accompanied the development of hero-cult and the public funeral at the expense of the once magnificent private funeral."⁴

Seaford's book represents a brilliant synthesis that will deservedly occupy a focal position in the ongoing discussion of Homer and the ancient city. Nevertheless, two of the papers in the present volume, which were conceived before the appearance of Seaford's book, indicate directions from which attempts to criticize or at least modify Seaford's position can be expected. Peter Rose's account of the developing city as a scene of domination of the countryside by an urban elite finds social division along lines of class rather than kinship, and reads in the Iliad an opposition of voices rather than a harmonious cohesion. The present paper, like Seaford's book, regards the Iliad as a ritual performance conducive to civic unity, but it emphasizes the role of the gods in both Homeric song and civic cult, where Seaford emphasizes the heroes. In doing so it also investigates the spiritual dimension of the ritual in its own right, where Seaford focuses upon its civic utility.⁵

The Gods in the Iliad

Nobody knows how much Homer's audiences believed of what he told them about the gods. The possibility that the Muses might lie was acknowledged as early as Hesiod (Th. 27) and no doubt earlier. Skepticism about Homer's gods prompted the first literary criticism known to us, the allegorizations of Theagenes. But the strict believability of mythic song has little to do with its spiritual impact. The words of the Muses have a power of enchantment. Audiences respond to them not merely as if they believed in the events described, but as if they were actually present to behold them.⁶ The significance of Homer's gods, therefore, lies as much in the experience of succumbing to their charms as in their credibility. Accordingly, an account of them must ask how Homer positions his audience toward the gods, what sort of spirituality he fosters. We can approach this question through examination of their role in Homer's narratives; this paper will concentrate upon the Iliad.

Most of the critical facts concerning the gods in the Iliad are already well known.⁷ Yet in much recent writing about Homer these facts, and the gods as a whole, are neglected. In Pindar's Homer, for example, Gregory Nagy states that "the praise of Homeric poetry is restricted to the heroes of the distant past."⁸ Since, according to Nagy, is the very essence of epic song,⁹ it is not clear where the gods would come into the picture. Of course Nagy does accord a role to the gods in his highly original interpretation of early Greek epic,¹⁰ but it is hardly the central role that their position in the Iliad and Odyssey would suggest.¹¹

According to Penelope (Od. 1.338), singers make famous...