Homer in Performance: Rhapsodes, Narrators, and Characters ed. by Jonathan L. Ready and Christos C. Tsagalis (review)

This is a thought-provoking panoply of approaches to Homeric performance, including essays on epigraphic, literary, and ceramic evidence for rhapsodic performance; on the poems' development seen in comparative perspective; and on the narration of the poems and speeches within the poems. The essays are for the most part of high quality, and the book is beautifully edited and produced, with a very useful bibliography.

Tsagalis (chapters 1 and 3) and A. Gangloff (chapter 4) collect epigraphic and literary evidence from the archaic through the imperial period, drawing on previous treatments, primarily those of J. González ( The Epic Rhapsode and His Craft: Homeric Performance in a Diachronic Perspective[Washington, DC 2013]) and M. L. West ("Rhapsodes at Contests," ZPE108 [2010], 151-172). This evidence, such as victor lists, is often not of a kind to enhance our understanding of the poems themselves. A fuller account of the Panionia, and of D. Frame's Hippota Nestor(Washington, DC 2009), might have enriched a reader's appreciation of M. R. Bachvarova's argument in her chapter "Formed on the Festival Stage: Plot and Characterization in the Iliadas a Competitive Collaborative Process." (Here I also felt the absence of E. Cook's The Odyssey in Athens[Ithaca 1995] on the Panathenaia.) S. D. Bundrick updates her earlier treatment of five vases depicting rhapsodes, suggesting that the painter of a certain vase around 500 bce"had seen rhapsodic contests in action" and painted his figures accordingly. Her intriguing discussion provoked the alternative thought that the vase is showing us drama that, in its turn, takes its cue from rhapsodes.

Bachvarova brings a wide range of evidence to bear on the early development of the Iliad. Supplementing Frame's 2009 discussion of the Panionia as central to that development, she proposes an earlier setting among competing dynasties near Troy. She connects the Iliad's alternating views of Hector to "bards with different allegiances attempt[ing] to elicit the audience's sympathy for various heroes." Scenes where Hector is obliviously triumphant may be traditional episodes "originating in a version of the epic tradition that allowed Hektor to receive unalloyed glory … performed in his honor for audience members who considered themselves to be descendants of the house of Troy" (172).

While earlier scholars have shown how various genres, including laments sung by women, are "woven into the fabric of the epic," O. Levaniouk, putting an impressive array of comparative evidence into dialogue with Homer and Sappho, makes plausible that female singers were not only woven into the epic but also themselves did some of the weaving.

J. P. Christensen, J. O'Maley, and L. F. Garcia, following Richard Martin, show how passages widely separated within the poem respond to and illuminate one another. Here "performance" largely denotes (following Bauman) an authoritative display of competence; they uncover speeches with increasing mastery or complexity. (Readers might wish to start with the treatment of performance theory in Ready's essay.) A. Kelly shows how the Homeric narrator gains authority by "a trick of misdirection," directing questions of truth and falsehood toward internal speakers. Ready draws on the model of "entextualization" developed by linguistic anthropologists to describe the strategies oral performers use to make their performances last by rendering them detachable from their context. In fine readings Ready points to such strategies being used by Homeric characters and by the narrator—and by the poet himself. One "entextualized" text, Zeus's catalogue of conquests, even influences the text that frames it. This example makes an interesting companion to D. Beck's expert illumination of the "fluidity" (208) in how a given context will affect what a given instance of a formula means or does not mean.

There is an assumption, perhaps intuitive, that individual voices making up the weave of the epic...