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The Shield of Homer
Narrative Structure in the Iliad
By Keith Stanley PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1993 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06938-8
CHAPTER 1
Form and Interpretation in Homer
(1) The Shield of Achilleus as a Problem in Interpretation
When in Iliad 19 Achilleus rearms himself to avenge the death of Patroklos, the shield he carries into battle is like no other in the poem. Only one, Agamemnon's, is described in similar if far briefer detail (11.32–37); but instead of its symbols of violence—Gorgon, Terror, Fear—the scenes Hephaistos has worked onto the shield for Achilleus present an artfully balanced conspectus of human life: cities at peace and at war, seasonal vignettes of plowing and harvest, of herding and its losses, seen against the encircling River of Ocean and the cosmic order of sun, moon, and stars (18.478–608). The most immediate of several apparent paradoxes here is that Achilleus' return to battle is motivated not by the ideal of stability that seems to resolve the elements of conflict in these scenes, or by an impulse to aid his fellow Achaians, but by an overwhelming and self-destructive desire for private revenge. Ancient readers as early as Euripides noted a striking disjunction between the artwork and the purpose it is meant to serve. The contrast is implicit in Achilleus' own reaction to the divine gift (19.16–19), which both inflames his anger (min mallon edu cholos) and delights him with its craftsmanship (terpeto ... echon theou aglaa dora.... tetarpeto daidala leusson).
Modern scholars, reluctant to follow the model of Achilleus as Hephaistos' ideal reader, have been more responsive to the craftsmanship than to the anger. Modern discussion of the former may be fairly said to begin in 1766, with the several chapters of Lessing's Laokoon devoted to the Shield. Here Lessing waxes epigrammatic: "Since the shield had to be made, and since the necessary never comes from the hand of divinity without grace, the shield had to be embellished." But instead of asking how this might be reconciled with the necessities of the poem, Lessing contents himself with a note on the success of Homer in making "his shield the very essence of all that had happened in the world by means of but a few pictures"--in contrast to Vergil's pedantic attempt to "introduce the whole of Roman history in a shield," which is in any case lost on Aeneas, who gazes on the work of Vulcan characteristically oblivious to history (rerum ignarus: Aeneid 8.730). Constrained by the critical issues of his day, Lessing is more concerned with the correct number of the scenes, whether they were disposed on both sides of the shield or only one, and the relevance of the Shield to the current debate over the role of narrative in painting and in poetry. A change in the Homeric text suggested not quite thirty years later might have challenged Lessing to respond with a more considered view of Hephaistos' choice of subjects.
In his 1795 Prolegomena ad Homerum, F. A. Wolf argues, on the testimony of Athenaeus, that a passage from the Odyssey should be restored at Iliad 18.604, adding to Hephaistos' scene of dancing youths and maidens the figure of the "divine bard" accompanying them with his lyre and his song. If Wolf is right, we have a further paradox in the contrast between the poet on the Shield and the poet of the Iliad, who seems more concerned to follow the ruthless course of Achilleus' revenge than to linger on scenes of peaceful festivity. Is there a disjunction also in the poet's use of his craft? Is the poet of the Iliad wholly committed to the celebration of a world of violence and retribution, or is there some way in which we can view the Shield as Homer's also? In other respects the Shield and the poem are not mutually exclusive: There are at least reflections, or anticipations, of the action of the Iliad in Hephaistos' scenes of a fight by a river, a watch from the walls of a city at war, and the dragging of a corpse before it; and the question of a division of the spoils of the city (510f) will be echoed in Hektor's despondent review of his alternatives as he faces Achilleus at 22.119ff. But just how the vision of the Shield can be said to be comfortably integrated with the poem is harder to define without a clearer idea of that vision—and, as we shall suggest, of the poet's point of view in the epic.
The problem of the Shield thus provides a focus on the problem of the poem, where in similes and asides the joys of peace are frequently set against the knotted cruelties of battle, but where reconciliations, when they come (Achilleus' with Agamemnon, with Priam), merely seem to accept a world of violent means to violent ends rather than ensure a recovery of peace. Our perennial difficulty is one of encountering the text on its own terms, and in this regard Lessing is both a help and a hindrance. In differentiating our response to the organization of a painting and that of a poem, he notes that we apprehend a work of art by viewing "its parts singly, then the combination of parts, and finally the totality," in a rapid operation unavailable to the poet, who must take us "from one part of the object to the other in the best possible order." Even in discussing writers of his own period, Lessing regards poetry as a succession of "arbitrary symbols," not a visually retraceable text; although one can always repeat and vary the act of visual appraisal, the elements of a poetic description are lost to the ear unless they remain in the memory. For Lessing, who assumes that the Homeric passage is to be taken as an actual ekphrasis (or technical description of a work of art), it is important to establish the best form of such description in poetry. Homer's achievement lies in presenting the coexistent elements of the Shield in a sequence not of mere enumeration but of actual creation, "thereby making the living picture of an action out of the tedious painting of an object." In representing this action, the poet distinguishes one scene from the next by various phrases that describe the god contriving, placing, making, or elaborating each element in a succession that prevents us from the detached contemplation invited by Vergil's account of the shield of Aeneas, where the shield is produced merely "for the sake of its decoration."
Lessing's perception of the importance of sequence in the Homeric narrative and the way it is articulated is indispensable; but in emphasizing the consecutive at the expense of the coexistent, he deprives us of a total view of the Shield. We have no clear sense of the formal relationship of its scenes and therefore its meaning, which we tend to locate in the unavoidable interaction of sequence and coexistence—much as in speech itself meaning derives from the interplay between a temporal series of words and their atemporal syntactic relationship. And Lessing fails to address the further question of the relationship between the representation (or text) attributed by the poet to the artist and the text (or representation) attributable to the poet by the reader.
Attempts since Lessing to explore the significance of the Shield have tended to depart from the text however viewed, on the assumption that interpretation should proceed from emphases apparent in a reconstruction of the Shield as artifact, rather than in the arrangement of the poetry. Readings have therefore differed according to divergent visual designs, circular and rectangular. In heliocentric schemes, for example, the cities and the the seasons revolve about the astronomical cosmos that governs them, serving as reminders of the "passion, order, and the changeless inevitability of the world as it is" (Whitman); or the Shield "makes us think about war and we see it in relation to peace," and it "brings home the loss, the cost of the events of the Iliad" (Taplin). In Sir John Myres' scheme there is no center, only a continuous Anglo-Zoroastrian revolution of order and disorder which teaches us that "only when kings work together with gods, is evil enmeshed, and humanity safe; only when king and people work together, does man win his fight with lions or any assault of nature."
In purely graphic terms, such reconstructions are beset by difficulties inherent in the poet's refusal to specify the relative position of the scenes. In contrast to the earlier account of Agamemnon's shield—with three such indications in six lines—there is in the entire passage devoted to the shield of Achilleus only one, which places the River of Ocean at the rim (607f), repeating the reference to the "streams of Ocean" at 489, and thus concludes the description by binding it into a formal unity. The poet's decision to avoid calling attention to the physical design of the finished product in favor of the act of fabrication places emphasis on Hephaistos' point of view, as the poet presents it through his own verbal arrangement. In attempting to explain this decision and in order to recover the emphases created by this particular relationship of sequence and coexistence in the Shield as poetry, we shall need more than a sketch pad, a history of armor, and (Lessing's ultimate arbiter) a refined taste. As a first step, we shall have to equip ourselves with a little light philological armor of our own for a confrontation with the peculiarities of the Homeric style itself, lest we proceed, like Lessing and his successors, rerum ignari.
(2) Ring-Composition in Homeric Digressions
Fortunately our weapons are ready at hand, and we can be brief. Students have for some time recognized that the Homeric sentence is paratactic in character. A periodic (or hypotactic) style relates secondary elements in a statement to its more important ideas by means of elaborate grammatical subordination and suspension (the inevitable example is Ciceronian oratory, where suspension occasionally seems designed as much to obscure the facts as to make a point); parataxis simply juxtaposes one thought to another. Elements in this "threaded" or freely flowing series are joined most often by conjunctions or particles (gar, de) that render the editorial imposition of full stops somewhat arbitrary, failing the presence of a strong disjunctive, such as autar, or the correlative men ... de ("on the one hand ... on the other"). Like the Homeric sentence, Homeric narrative presents an ongoing series in which each successive action seems at first glance to receive equal status—just as time, in direct narrative, generally moves forward in an uninterrupted flow in which even simultaneous events seem to be treated as a linear sequence. The origin of this aspect of Homeric style has been related to a preliterate way of apprehending the world or, alternatively, to an oral singer's technical and quite practical need to avoid confusing his listeners (and himself) by frequent shifts in time or in elaborate stylistic subordinations.
A closer look shows, however, that even in linear movement forward in time, the poet describes certain actions with an exhaustive compilation of detail on one occasion, on another with a summary economy that reduces a series of discrete elements to one. This mixed treatment of the overall succession of events draws attention to process on the one hand, completion on the other. The poet may also interrupt and rearrange elements of his series to establish emphasis and contrast in patterns that range from simple to complex, in units small and large. But although he often exceeds the requirements of clarity in oral verse, our poet seldom disregards the storyteller's basic need to conclude a deviation from expected sequence with a return to the point of departure. The result is a ring-compositional style that creates not an "illusion of form" (von Groningen) but form consistent with its origin in an accretive parataxis.
The simplest interruption of narrative flow is found in the simile, involving a temporal suspension in which the poet compares A to B and then describes B in greater or less detail, before resuming the narrative with a return to A signaled by the conjunctive adverb thus (hos): "The troops advanced like a cloud, which etc.; thus did the troops advance." Extended interruptions occur in the form of flashback or foreshadowing, where the return to the present may be indicated by a phrase of reorientation, such as "but at this time" (tote de), that corresponds to the "thus" statement of a simile. Other digressive interruptions include recollections (as in Nestor's frequent evocation of the past), mythic paradigms (Glaukos' story of Lykourgos' impiety in 6.130–40, Agamemnon's myth of ate in 19.90–133), lists or catalogues, and descriptions of objects.
These more elaborate digressions are incorporated into the narrative by means of elements that are external or internal to the inserted material, used separately or in combination. External form, which sets the interruption apart from the main narrative like printed parentheses, is achieved by anaphoric ring-composition, in which the formula or phrase used at the point of departure is repeated as the narrative is resumed, much as in the thus-statement of a simile or the "but at this time" statement following a flashback or foreshadowing. An instance often cited occurs in Odyssey 19. While bathing Odysseus' feet, Eurykleia notices the trace of an old wound on his thigh: "she recognized the scar immediately" (392f, autika d' egno oulen). The phrase is repeated and expanded at 467f when, after the digression on the occasion of the injury, the poet returns to the main narrative with "this (scar) the old woman recognized, as she touched and caressed it with the flat of her hands" (ten greys cheiressi kataprenessi labousa gno rh' epimassamene).
Internal framing, or inclusive ring-composition, is created within the digression when a phrase used at the outset reappears at the end of it. In the same passage in Odyssey 19, the explanation at 393f, "the scar which the boar inflicted once with his white tusk when he went to Parnassos with Autolykos and his sons" (oulen, ten pote min sus elase leukoi odonti Parnesond' elthonta met' Autolykon te kai hyias), recurs with adjustment at 465f, "how the boar struck him with his white tusk as he went hunting on Parnassos with the sons of Autolykos" (hos min thereuont' elasen sus leukoi odonti, Parnesond' elthonta syn hyiasin Autolykoio). This combination of anaphoric and inclusive techniques has been termed a complex ring; and when more than one repeated element appears in either type of ringing, one may speak of multiple rings.
Finally, motivic ringing occurs when the poet frames a passage by repeating an earlier motif or its antithesis, or by resuming an activity or situation left in suspense, and may involve more than one pair of elements.
Methods of external ringing are not only used to incorporate digressions into the main narrative but may also define structural entities of a more extensive nature, as we shall see in our subsequent discussion. Within digressions, a sequence of fixed or similar phrases may emphasize the serial relationship between the elements of a catalogue or description, as in the account of Achilleus' shield, where, as Lessing notes, successive portions of the decoration are introduced by variants of "and then he (Hephaistos) placed on it...." (en d' etithei, etc.). The poet may also organize ordinary narrative in this way, as in the Epipolesis of Book 4 (251–421), where Agamemnon's progress from one contingent to the next is described with recurrent phraseology at the beginning or end of each encounter. This principle of internal ordering by formulaic repetition we may term "refrain-composition" (in an overdue domestication of van Otterlo's "Ritournellkomposition").
More complex internal organization may entail annular or interlocking arrangement. The simplest form of annular structure is the ABA pattern of similes; an extension of this pattern is evident when a speaker proposes two or more topics and proceeds to deal with them in reverse order. A well-known example—delightful in its artistic play despite the seriousness of the situation—appears in the first katabasis of the Odyssey (11.170–203). Here, to Odysseus' queries of his mother Antikleia (whether she died of old age, disease, or the gentle darts of Artemis? how are Laertes and Telemachos? is his property still intact? what of Penelope?), she responds to the questions hysteron proteron, ending with the response that she herself died not from old age but from longing for Odysseus. Annular structure is essentially a developed form of inclusive ring-composition, in which the second series of elements forms a balance in reverse order to the initial series (ABCD DCBA). A further extension of this technique, as we shall see shortly, is used in both digressions and the narrative proper to frame and thus set off for emphasis a central element (ABCD E DCBA). The components of these series will be separate entities generally enclosed by ring-structures of their own; their similarities—of A1 with A2, B1 with B2, etc.—vary from a relatively simple beginning and conclusion of an action to a more complex thematic or motivic relationship of parallel or contrast. As for interlocking order, the simplest form occurs in an interchange between two speakers, in which the initial pattern of address/response is repeated at least once (ABAB), though the structure itself is open and may continue indefinitely (ABCD ... ABCD ...). Here also a central element may be framed by its surroundings, with an isolating effect similar to annular emphasis, in the form ABCD E ABCD.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Shield of Homer by Keith Stanley. Copyright © 1993 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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