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| ISBN-13: | 9780806157290 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Oklahoma Press |
| Publication date: | 08/24/2017 |
| Series: | Oklahoma Series in Classical Culture Series , #54 |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
Singing with the Aid of the Muse(s)
1.1 Three Openings and a Reopening
The Iliad and the Odyssey each open with an invocation:
Sing, goddess, of the anger of Achilleus, the son of Peleus, an accursed anger. (Iliad 1.1–2)
Tell me, Muse, of a man of many ways, who wandered far and wide, when he had sacked the sacred city of Troy. (Odyssey 1.1–2)
These opening invocations subordinate the narrator's voice to that of a higher authority — in the first case, the "goddess," and in the second case and more specifically, the "Muse." This subordination gives the narrator's voice, as the vehicle for that authority, an unassailable authority of its own. The two openings differ in the way in which the invocation is linked to the first unfolding of the subject of the narrative. The seven-line opening of the Iliad unfolds with a strong sense of order and brevity. The subject, "the anger of Achilleus," is at once presented by the narrator to the Muse, characterized as "accursed," and set in context. First its consequences are shown: pain, death, and mutilation for the Achaeans, and the working out of the plan of Zeus (Iliad 1.2–5). Then a fixed starting point comes: the moment when Achilleus and Agamemnon first quarreled (Iliad 1.6–7). No mention is made of the narrator or the reader.
The opening of the Odyssey is couched more in terms of a personal conversation: "Tell me, Muse." The word "me" can be felt to embrace both the narrator, as he begins his task, and also the reader, as the reader shares in this process. The ten-line opening presents the story of "a man of many ways," a man as yet unnamed: his versatility, his many wanderings, many experiences, and many sufferings on the way home. Here is a story with many strands to it, a story of human resilience, but a story also of failure and of divine punishment for wrongdoing. The introduction already gives a taste of this material in the specific fate of Odysseus's companions, who, despite their leader's best intentions, lose their homecoming through their own wicked folly (Odyssey 1.6–9). At the outset, a context is set for the narrative. The events about to be unfolded are a sequel to events earlier in the man's life, "when he had sacked the sacred city of Troy." This point is discussed in chapter 8.3. Within the vast field of human experience opened in the first nine lines, it is now the Muse who is presented by the narrator with the choice of a starting point: "Start at some point in this, goddess, daughter of Zeus, and tell it to us too" (Odyssey 1.10). The word "too" can be felt to contribute to the sense of a shared story, a story that is, in some sense, already "there," already known to the Muse, even before the start of its telling involves "us too" in it.
The opening of the Aeneid is expressed in still more personal terms, and it reverts to the idea of singing. Now the narrator begins, not with an invocation to the Muse, but with a confident declaration in the first person: "I sing of arms and the man, who from the shores of Troy / was the first to come to Italy, an exile by fate" (Aeneid 1.1–2). The eleven-line introduction of the Aeneid begins by presenting the subject of its narrative in two halves: "arms" and the travels of an as-yet unnamed "man." With the lightest of touches, this opening suggests comparison both with the Iliad and with the Odyssey. The Aeneid, like the Iliad, will be concerned with "arms," and its starting point will be "Troy." But, as with the opening of the Odyssey, the mention of Troy acts as a point of departure, a starting point for a further sequence of events. The "man" of whom the Aeneid's narrator sings is, in some ways, like the "man" presented at the start of the Odyssey: he has far to wander, and in the course of his wanderings he suffers much from a god's (in his case, Juno's) divine anger. Unlike Odysseus, however, he is not traveling back home but is in search of a new home for himself and his people. His journey, aided by fate, takes him from "Troy," from defeat, destruction, and exile, through renewed suffering in war, to the founding of a new city and ultimately a great new nation, the narrator's own nation, "Italy" with its capital, "Rome" (Aeneid 1.1–7). Here, as in the opening of the Odyssey, is a narrative that draws attention to the size of its subject, but now it does so, not in the context of the many-sided nature of individual, human experience, but rather in the context of a grand narrative: the story of the birth of a nation (Aeneid 1.33).
After the initial, seven-line outline, which discreetly offers the reader a simultaneous comparison with the Iliad and the Odyssey and confidently stakes out its own territory, the narrator turns to make an invocation to the Muse:
Muse, relate the causes to me; from what damage to her divinity, from what sense of pain the queen of the gods impelled a man of outstanding duty to endure such misfortunes, to enter upon so many labors. Do such fits of anger belong to the celestial spirits? (Aeneid 1.8–11)
Whereas the Iliad tells of the working out of Zeus' plan, and the Odyssey tells of divine punishment for wrongdoing, divine involvement in the narrative of the Aeneid is of a more problematic nature. Here is a story of undeserved human suffering and, at first sight, of inexplicable divine anger. A further comparison can now be made between the three openings. After Achilleus and Agamemnon have been introduced in the opening seven lines of the Iliad, the narrative uses a question-and-answer technique as an opening gambit: "Which of the gods brought them to fight in this quarrel? / Leto's and Zeus's son" (Iliad 1.8–9). And at once the narrative is launched. The Aeneid's opening eleven lines, by contrast, end by posing a sad, unanswered question in which the address to the Muse allows the narrator to share with the reader an editorial response to the subject of his narrative. Unlike the narrator of the Odyssey ("Tell me ... tell it to us too"), however, the narrator here does not share his narrative so directly with the reader. Instead, he introduces into the narrative his own voice in dialogue with the Muse. In doing so, he introduces a sense of openness, the sense of an important question raised but left unanswered, before giving the starting point of his narrative by turning aside to introduce another ancient city, Carthage, and by explaining Juno's love for that city and the reasons for her deep-seated hatred of the Trojans and their future descendants. The reasons for Juno's hatred belong partly in the world of history (Aeneid 1.12–22) and partly in the mythological world inherited from her Homeric counterpart, Hera (Aeneid 1.23–28). This combination of motives helps immediately locate the narrative of the Aeneid midway between these two worlds.
Neither the Iliad nor the Odyssey has a clearly marked halfway point in its narrative, but the Aeneid, devised from the start in the form of twelve, distinct books, does contain such a structural break: a reopening. This fresh start does not come with mathematical precision at exactly the halfway point. The narrative extends across the end of Aeneid 6 and into the start of Aeneid 7 before coming to a pause at line 36, as Aeneas and his companions reach the mouth of the Tiber. At this point there is a substantial invocation specifically to Erato, the Muse associated with love:
Come now, Erato, I will set out who were the kings, what the state of affairs and what the condition of ancient Latium, when a foreign army first brought a fleet to the shores of Ausonia, and I will recall the origins of the first fighting.
You, goddess, you advise your bard. I will tell of bristling wars, I will tell of battle lines, of kings driven to death by their proud spirits, of the Tyrrhenian contingent and of all Hesperia forced to take up arms. A greater order of events is born to me, a greater work I set in motion. (Aeneid 7.37–45)
Now that the wanderings of Aeneas and his companions in search of their promised land are over, the narrative makes a fresh start. The narrator devotes eight and a half lines to this reopening before setting out the background for this second, Italian phase of his story and introducing a new set of characters and circumstances (Aeneid 7.45–106). Central to these new circumstances are the advent and spread of war between the Trojans, now presented from a fresh viewpoint as "a foreign army," and the local Italian population. The move to the second part of the Aeneid thus marks, in broad terms, a change of emphasis — from wanderings to the "arms" heralded at its opening — and hence a heightening of its subject matter to a full, epic grandeur reminiscent of the Iliad, the pinnacle of the epic genre. By her presence at this carefully controlled turning point in the narrative, Erato suggests a different nuance in the presentation of what is the traditional, Iliadic subject matter of "kings, fighting, death and proud spirits." She even creates a slight but effective dissonance, as this new material is given its introductory fanfare. The narrator, who now styles himself "bard," confidently sets out his coming subject matter and proclaims a new and greater creation on his part. In the midst of this confidence, however, a call comes to the Muse Erato for advice and, by implication, for help to stop the narrative from becoming too historical and military, and thus too heavy. Instead, a hint is given that even the traditionally elevated, epic subject matter of the second half of the Aeneid will, like its more widely ranging first half, incorporate narrative involving the subjects of love and marriage, and almost at once this is borne out. King Latinus is introduced in midline (Aeneid 7.45), followed by his daughter, Lavinia, together with the complications surrounding the family's wedding plans for her (Aeneid 7.52–80). And so the narrative of the second half of the Aeneid is launched.
1.2 Lists of Fighting Forces
Communication between the narrator and his Muse enables him, in different ways in the three poems, to introduce the subject of his narrative and, in the second and third of them, to make contact with the reader. Renewed invocations occur both in the Iliad and in closely similar contexts in the Aeneid; they do not occur in the Odyssey. The first and most substantial of them, in the second book of the Iliad, takes up ten lines and introduces the great list of Achaean leaders and the contingents brought in their ships to fight at Troy:
Tell me now, you Muses whose dwelling is on Olympos — for you are goddesses, you are both present and know everything, while we hear only its fame and do not know anything — who the leaders and the captains of the Danaans were. As for the host of men, I could not speak of it or name it, not if I had ten tongues and ten mouths, a voice that never stopped and a heart of bronze, unless the Olympian Muses, daughters of aegis-bearing Zeus, were to give me the memory of how many came to Troy. Now I will tell of the leaders of the ships and of all their ships. (Iliad 2.484–93)
Here the narrator of the Iliad makes the first of his rare appearances ("Tell me. ... Now I will tell"). In doing so, he places himself firmly in the same, limited, human world as the reader ("we hear ... and do not know"). The human world has no direct access to the relevant, detailed knowledge of the past needed at this point, and so the narrator must rely on tradition ("fame"). The Muses, on the other hand, in their omnipresence and omniscience, transcend human limitation. Through their communication with the narrator, they make possible for him a task otherwise far beyond human power, namely, the recording of the vast numbers involved in the expedition to Troy. They do this by their gift of "memory." As at the opening of the Iliad, the invocation authorizes the narrator to speak, but now it goes beyond that and guarantees that the great detail he is about to go into cannot be challenged. At the same time, the tone of gently self-mocking hyperbole ("not if I had ten tongues") prevents this rare focus on the narrator himself from becoming too serious an intervention within his narrative.
Passages combining a strong sense of movement and colorful description surround the lists of Achaean and Trojan forces (Iliad 2.441–83, 780–815; 3.1–14), and these passages set the two lists in context as the moment of encounter between the two armies approaches. Whereas Iliad 1 plunges the reader into the middle of the Trojan War, Iliad 2–4, as Griffin (1980) notes, take the reader back to the early stages of the war, though with no suggestion of a break. The placing of the two lists, particularly the huge list of Achaean forces, creates an effective hiatus as the tension in the narrative mounts. As the two great armies deploy and prepare to confront each other, they are not presented as anonymous, undifferentiated masses; instead, each of the regional contingents, each of their leaders, and the places from which the men under their command have come, are closely identified. The result is a vast and powerful collection of proper names. Part of this power lies in a fundamental aspect of communication: naming. Presented on this scale, a list of proper names of people and places, together with supporting, statistical details and some element of description, shows a world endowed with order and significance. The small-scale, local level and the whole, vast picture complement one another. Here is something fixed and lasting: a timeless commemoration that brings individuals, their followers, and their homes to life. The sense of shared existence and shared endeavor is carefully set between, on the one hand, the preliminary scene of disastrous discord among the Achaean high command and the near collapse of the campaign and, on the other hand, the relentless killing and destruction once the fighting begins. Within the overall architecture of the Iliad, the list of Achaean forces, placed toward its beginning, is complemented toward its end by the involvement of the whole surviving Achaean army in the funeral games, arranged in honor of Patroklos by Achilleus (Iliad 23.257–24.2). Also created here is a sense of broad, geographical space and diversity, which contrasts with the insistent concentration of focus on the war zone: the shore, the camp, the battlefield, and the enemy city. In this context of commemoration, with its wide-ranging associations, the proper names are endowed with their own resonance. They are, with the aid of the Muses and metaphorically speaking, given the power to sing.
A further, brief invocation comes immediately following the line that signals the end of the list:
These then were the leaders and captains of the Danaans. Which one stood out as the best, you tell me, Muse, among the warriors and horses who followed the sons of Atreus. (Iliad 2.760–62)
The answers to these two related questions are at once given by the narrator (Iliad 2.763–68). These winners, however, owe their place of honor to the absence of Achilleus, (Iliad 2.769–73). Were it not for his angry withdrawal from the fighting, Achilleus would have been the outright winner in both fields. After the account of the massive, collective military presence, given with amazing attention to detail, the focus switches to the one, crucially absent figure, who, together with his contingent of men and horses, is now idling his time away, out of the fighting (Iliad 2.771–79). After the great list, the reader is thus led back with gentle irony to recall the starting point of the Iliad, the anger of Achilleus and its consequences.
As well as celebrating the Muses' power to aid the narrator through the gift of memory, the list also contains a striking instance of their power to do the reverse: to bring a singer to an abrupt and devastating halt and to take away his divine gift and the memory of his skill. This stands out as the only instance within the list of an elaboration of details that have no direct connection with the fighting. A series of place names (Iliad 2.591–94) comes to an end with Dorion:
and Dorion, where the Muses, meeting Thamyris, the Thracian, stopped his singing, as he came from Oichalia, from Eurytos of Oichalia. For he boasted and declared that he would win, even if the Muses themselves, the daughters of Zeus, who holds the aegis, were to sing, and they became angry and paralyzed him and took from him the divine voice and made him forget his lyre playing. (Iliad 2.594–600)
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Communication, Love, and Death in Homer and Virgil"
by .
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments,
Introduction,
1. Singing with the Aid of the Muse(s),
2. Singing and Celebration,
3. Supernatural Singing,
4. Sons and Mothers,
5. Helen and the Men in Her Life,
6. Parting,
7. Communicating with the Dead,
8. Deaths and Endings,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,