Classical Epic Tradition

I. A Map of the Terrain

I A MAP OF THE TERRAIN T HE classical epic tradition begins for us with Homer, and there are times when the reader of Homer, confronted by the inexhaustible riches which the Iliad and the Odyssey contain, is tempted to believe that the rest of European literature is merely a commentary on the first of its masters. Such a feeling would not be new; already in the ancient world Homer had been compared to a spring from which all other poetry gushed. 1 The wealth and variety of language, the subject matter ranging from the battlefields of Troy to the lonely fight against the elements, the characters as diverse as Achilles and Penelope, the tones of solemn majesty, satire and every intervening nuance-these are the qualities offering to the reader even now that panorama of things human and divine which made its author to later Greeks simply "the poet." I It is the destiny of such towering figures to compel others to come to terms with them. The sincerest flattery is imitation, and "Homer" 1 Compare Ovid, Amores Ill. 9. 25-26 and Georgius Pisides, Exp. Pers. I. 66 If. This was evidently a Byzantine topos: cf. Eustathius in A. B. Drachmann's edition of the Scholia Vetera in Pindari Carmina, vol. III (repr. Amsterdam 1966), p. 286. Further parallels are collected by T. B. L. Webster, Hellenistic Poetry and Art (London 1964), p. 145 and note 1, and by D. A. Russell, 'Longinus' On the Sublime (Oxford 1964), p. 116. The far-reaching influence on medieval and Renaissance criticism of the De Homeri Vita et Poesi attributed to Plutarch should also be noted here. Cf. Quintilian XII. 11. 21; E. R. Curtius, Europiiische Literatur und lateinisches Mitlelalter (Bern 1948), p. 211.-The vast mass ofmodern Homeric scholarship is surveyed, for example, by A. Lesky, A History ofGreek Literature (Eng. trans., London 1966), pp. 14 If., and "Homeros" (RE, Supp. 11, 1968), cols. 687-846; and by G. S. Kirk, The Songs of Homer (Cambridge 1962). The most important contribution to the understanding of the Iliad in our time has been made by W. Schadewaldt: cf. his Iliasstudien, Des XLIII Bandes der Abhandlungen der philol.-hist. Klasse der sllchsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, or. VI (Leipzig 1938). The distinction between the scholarly and the literary problem made by Johannes Th. Kakridis, Homeric Researches (Lund 1949), is essential. Among more recent work, the English-speaking student will particularly wish to consult Howard Clarke, Homer's Readers (Newark, London, Toronto 1981); Jasper Griffin, Homer on Life and Death (Oxford 1980); C. W. Macleod, Homer, Iliad Book XXN (Cambridge 1982). 3 4 A Map of the Terrain sometimes meant to the Greeks, not merely and cleanly the poems we now know, but a broadly defined volume of epic poetry on varying themes drawn from the legendary past. Reaction against the heroic values lauded by this aristocratic poetry began as early as Archilochus, who praised the kind of general that Homer's first audience would have classed with Thersites. Xenophanes objected to the moral ideals enshrined in the Homeric poems,2 and found a later voice to support him in Plato, who invented a theory of narrative technique to justify his disapproval.3 Cast forth from the ideal state as little more than a liar, the "educator of Greece" was defended by Aristotle, but even so, rather ambiguously. Were the Iliad and the Odyssey superior to their imitations? Yes, said the Poetics. Was the epic genre the highest kind of literature, as previously maintained at least implicitly by those who thought the best poet must write the best sort of poetry?4 No, came the answer, and by a surprising paradox the best kind of poetry was declared to be tragedy, a genre of recent Athenian invention and one exported on a limited scale to the Greek world by comparison with the all-prevailing recitation of Homer's epics. Even so, Aristotle was ultimately on Homer's side. One of the seminal texts of European criticism, the Poetics nowhere sowed more fruitfully than in the brilliance with which its author distinguished, among a mass of indeterminate epic writing, what could rightly be attributed to Homer. Aristotle's canon of Homeric work was more catholic than ours, and included the now lost Margites, a poem in mixed meter with a comically stupid hero. The authenticity and superiority of the Iliad and Odyssey were based on two chief considerations . The first was that those epics selected...