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Trustees of Boston University Homer: The Very Idea Author(s): James I. Porter Source: Arion, Third Series, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Fall, 2002), pp. 57-86 Published by: Trustees of Boston University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20163887 . Accessed: 16/06/2014 02:16 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Trustees of Boston University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Arion. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 91.229.229.162 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 02:16:40 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Homer: The Very Idea

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Trustees of Boston University

Homer: The Very IdeaAuthor(s): James I. PorterSource: Arion, Third Series, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Fall, 2002), pp. 57-86Published by: Trustees of Boston UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20163887 .

Accessed: 16/06/2014 02:16

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Trustees of Boston University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Arion.

http://www.jstor.org

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Homer: The Very Idea

JAMES I. PORTER

The fixed point around which the Greek nation crystal lized was its language. The fixed point around which its

culture crystallized was Homer. Thus in both cases we

are having to do with works of art.

?Nietzsche

And the blindness?

?Vico

Ahe iliad and the ODYSSEY have been required

reading in Western culture from its first beginnings, despite the complete mystery surrounding the circumstances of their

date and authorship, and despite their obvious flaws and

blemishes?the inconsistencies, repetitions, irrelevancies, and

so on?which have led to their impeachment as products of a

single mind. All the uncertainties about Homer and his po ems notwithstanding, their place in the cultural imagination in the West has been unrivalled. Indeed, as secular texts with

no pretensions to revealed truth, and yet conferred with

nearly Biblical stature, their status in world literature is al

most unique.1 How can we account for their standing and

their enduring attraction? Whatever the answer, approaching the question will involve confronting the monumentality of

the two poems?less their quality as great works of literature

than their role as cultural icons, as signifiers of value, and as

landmarks in the evolving relationship between literature and

culture. To look at Homer in this way is to consider his

place?the very idea of Homer?in the culture wars of antiq

uity and modernity. A perspective such as this is an invitation

to study the intellectual and cultural history of value, and

that is how I would like the following remarks to be under

ARION I0.2 FALL 2002

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58 HOMER: THE VERY IDEA

stood. Homer will, in a sense, merely be our guide.

Any discussion like this must needs be selective and,

inevitably, reductive. My own treatment will be limited to a

selection of developments within the English- and German

speaking worlds, starting with a glance back at predecessors in antiquity where the patterns for Homer's modern recep tion were first set. The discussion will be threaded by three

recurrent themes: first, the persistent classicism of Homer, de

spite every tug of pressure in the opposite direction; second, the elements of disavowal that go into the construction and

sustaining of Homer's ever-imaginary identity; and third, more implicitly than explicitly, the sheer allure and inaccessi

bility of Homer and, what proves inseparable from this, the

sheer fascination of watching how the story of Homer's re

ception continually engages those who contribute to its mak

ing. Looking at Homer in this way, as an object of cultural

production, can throw a valuable light on the logic of cul

ture, quite apart from any canonical virtues his poems may be felt to have. For leaving aside the nearly self-evident tru

ism that what is finally at stake in the contests over Homer

are the identities of the various combatants involved, surely Homer's greatest attraction has to lie not in his greatness, however that comes to be defined, but in his utter mystery and unreachability. Indeed, if there is any value at all to

"Homer," it lies in the very indeterminateness of his defini

tion, in his insolubility, which has provoked intense reflection

and so too has served as an instrument of endless debate,

contest, and redefinition. One suspects, in other words, that

with Homer the ancients and moderns have made a rather

telling choice of object for contention, one that ceaselessly authorizes the imaginative work of culture. Culture is not

just an arena of contestation. It is a deviously calculating and

self-enabling thing. Before going on, we might pause to consider whether

Homer hasn't outlived his usefulness to culture. Have we

reached the end of the line? Is it true, as a small but vocal mi

nority think, that although he was once a burning issue,

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James I. Porter 59

Homer is now "dead" and that it was the study of the clas

sics that killed him, thanks to the waves of trendy theory,

multiculturalism, and cultural nihilism which have finally

swept over classical studies themselves and turned Homer, the one-time fountain of value and meaning?of classically centered knowledge?into a meaningless bibliographical cita

tion? It is a bit hard to make out just who Homer is in this

account, because much of the time Homer seems to stand for

nothing less than the sanctity of the Classical Tradition itself.

The assumption seems to be that Homer is prior to the de

bates about him, and that he somehow persists through the

din of debate to emerge victoriously alive?until recently. One problem with this complaint is that it imagines, wrongly, that Homer was ever a stable entity from which a sure base

of culture and learning could flow. (Homerizein, "to Homer

ize," after all can mean "to lie.")2 It also tends to idealize

classical antiquity, and to blind us to the fact that classical

studies seem to be constitutionally in crisis.3 But it ought to

be clear that "Homer," in the desired sense, cannot have pre ceded the debates as to his worth. He was, on the contrary, the product of those debates, and his survival was predicated on them. In fact, if we wish to take Homer as an emblem for

classics in the largest sense, then he has to be equivalent to

these debates. He is not the argument that the Homeric po

ems, and by extension the classical cultures of Greece and

Rome, have an intrinsic worth. Rather, he is the very dispu tation of the question (valuable to whom, and for what rea

sons?)?less what survives the argument than the survival of

the argument itself. In any case, to read Homer in this sym bolic way is to extend the very form of argument that gave rise to him in the first place.

Here we might as well ask, "Has a person been made out

of a concept or a concept out of a person?" This precise ques tion was the centerpiece of Nietzsche's inaugural lecture at

Basel from 1869, "Homer and Classical Philology." The

problem named by Nietzsche was one that was racking the

nineteenth century, both inside and outside of the academy.

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6o HOMER: THE VERY IDEA

At issue was not the Homeric Question alone (Who com

posed the epics, when, and where? Are they by a single au

thor or the product of a tradition, if not a committee?, and so

on), but rather something deeper that was driving the ques tion. What Nietzsche was exploring was the entire attitude of

modernity to the study of "the so-called 'classical' antiquity," that "buried ideal world" which classics was trying to exca

vate and to bring to light in the contemporary present.4 The

problem of Homer encapsulated this larger worry. It would

be wrong to take the Homeric problem as an artifact of nine

teenth-century anxieties and as something that has been ban

ished to irrelevance today (even if the particular form it

assumed at the time was such an artifact). Quite the contrary, the problem has flourished from antiquity into the present. "Homer" has been good to think with. Or at least, some

thing to think with. Not Homer, but the very idea of Homer.

Nor does this interest show any signs of abating. 5

Following in Nietzsche's wake we can try to give some

content to the concept of Homer, and in this way trace its

history, or rather the history of this particular fascination, the sheer power of which still needs to be accounted for. For

surely other relics of antiquity are equally mysterious and

unfathomable as Homer has proved to be. So alongside my overview of Homer's reception I want to add a further spec

ulation, namely that Homer is, and probably always was

from his baptismal naming, an idea of something that re

mains permanently lost to culture?whether this be a Heroic

Age, an ideal of unattainable poetic excellence, or a vague sense of some irretrievably lost past. It was only natural that

Homer, the narrator of Troy, should become inseparably linked to the violent destruction of Troy. That destruction

was complete, and its memory was traumatic for the ancient

world?and, in different ways, remained this for the modern

world. So let us first consider briefly how Troy might have

functioned as a trauma for Greece?not in a clinical sense,

but in an imaginary sense, one that works through the

artifices of cultural memory?and then take up Homer's

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James I. Porter 61

connection to this memory, which (all speculations aside) is

an integral element of Homer's reception. After that, we can

turn to some of the implications these questions have had for

modernity.

HOMER IN ANTIQUITY

Troy had two connotations in antiquity. It was known either

as Homer had described it (as a vital, flourishing civilization, albeit one that was pitched on the brink of disaster) or as it

appeared in dim memory and on the ground, by reference to

its aphanismos, or obliteration. Troy's sacking was first

mythologically and then conventionally the start of history, the ground zero of relative dating within human time (in

deed, marking the end of the Golden Age, it was tied to the

unrepealable separation of mortal from immortal time), and

so history began, oddly, in an obliteration.6 There is a lesson

to be learned here, and it was frequently drawn. The orator

Lycurgus could invoke the memory of Troy in monitory

tones, reminding the Athenians in 331 of their former dire

peril at the hands of the traitorous Leocrates: "Who has not

heard of Troy? Who does not know that Troy?once the

greatest city of its age, and the queen of Asia?has remained

for all time uninhabited, since once for all it was razed by the

Greeks?"7 Troy for Lucan, centuries later, was a paradoxical lieu de m?moire: it was a place where "even the ruins have

perished" (etiam periere ruinae).s In between stretched a long

literary tradition of allusions to the destruction of Troy, but it

was Homer, not other poets, whose name was soldered to the

catastrophic memory of Troy. Together, they became a fixed

point around which Greece's idea of itself would take form.?

It is ironic, or simply telling, that the Greek sense of identity formed itself around a possible fiction.

The loss that Homer vividly recalls, being total and quasi

mythical, is effectively primordial, lying at the root of time.

It was a loss that the Greeks experienced not only in the face

of Troy (or Troy's absence) but also in the person of Homer.

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62 HOMER: THE VERY IDEA

What was Homer's relation to Troy? A survivor? A witness?

Conventionally he was neither. If Homer's poems stood for

the historical loss they also recalled, Homer the poet could

only embody this loss, not merely in his memory of the past, but above all in his distance from it. Compare the following verses from the start of the Catalogue of the Ships, which is

a locus classicus for those keen to demonstrate that Homer

records the past:10 "Tell me now, you Muses . . . / [For] we

have heard only the rumour (k?eo?) of it and know nothing. I

Who then of those who were the chief men and the lords of

the Danaans? / I could not tell over the multitude of them

nor name them, / not if I had ten tongues and ten mouths"

(//. 2.484-88; trans. Lattimore). Although these verses are

standardly taken as a sign of Homer's deference to the

Muses, the opposite suggests itself: it is the deference that is

feigned, not the ignorance.11 Nor is Homer, eager to make

up for what he doesn't know, innocent of deliberate

anachronism, a fact that gradually came to the awareness of

the poems' readers only in the modern age.

Representing a loss that could not be confirmed but only

imagined, the reality of the Trojan war could be doubted, at

least in its details if not as a whole.12 What is more, as if by attraction and then by identification, Homer was himself felt

as a strange loss, as grand and distant as Troy, and it was in

evitable that he should assume mythic proportions. One an

ecdote, probably Hellenistic in origin, relates how Homer's

poems suffered near-total destruction due to fire, floods, and

earthquakes, as though Homer were not a text but a place.I3 No other ancient author?and few places?enjoyed this kind

of catastrophic fame.^ The survival of Homer's poems, it

was felt, was in ways too good to be true. How real, in fact, was Homer? The historicity of Troy could be doubted in an

tiquity, but we have no direct evidence that Homer's his

toricity ever was. Still, the ancient view of history was plastic and accommodating in ways we can barely follow. Though never conceded to be a fiction, Homer was in fact treated as

both real and fictional at the same time: his historicity was

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James I. Porter 63

etched around the borders with transcendental hues, and

consequently Homer became more than real?he became

surreal. Whether or not we can ascribe their attitudes to

Homer to precritical belief or to shrewd disavowal (which is

fully consistent with the attitude of historicism), slowly the

Greeks began the work of framing a monumental Homer, a

Homer that was at once a museum housing a library of po

etry, an empty cenotaph, and a workshop of ceaselessly new

cultural attainments. In this enterprise, they were building on the tendencies to revere, monumentalize, and idealize the

Iliadic past which were the norm in the archaic period even

prior to the creation of the Homeric poems.15 The modern

reception of Homer took its cue from here.

Tempting as it is to connect Homer's momentous effect on

antiquity to a displaced, buried memory of the past which he

came to embody, as if through a kind of transference of emo

tion, this can only be a speculation. But there is no specula tion in saying that the uncertain question and meaning of

"Homer" was the source of anxieties and debates through out the whole of antiquity, which gave rise to a veritable

Homer-industry not much different from our own. One need

only think of Demetrius of Scepsis in the Troad, a provincial

antiquarian contemporary with the Alexandrian scholars at

their zenith, who wrote a monstrous, now lost, work in

thirty volumes devoted, at least in part, to establishing the

true location of Troy. This polemical and proudly local work

was a commentary on a mere sixty-two lines of the Cata

logue of the Ships (the Trojan portion, 17. 2.816-77). The

fury of Demetrius' historicism is telling (no doubt of differ

ent things).16 But it is only one exaggerated instance of a

widespread tendency with roots in ancient legends and lore

and in the earliest rationalizations of Homer.

Troy's location was widely debated, if not its reality. Simi

larly, and indeed in parallel, Homer was himself a contro

versial entity, as much a myth as a person, but always a

legend (the son of a river, of one of the Muses and Apollo, or

of divine poets, he died unable to solve a child's riddle or

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64 HOMER: THE VERY IDEA

from the debility of old-age), and ultimately a potent sym

bol, idea, and a prize. *7 From Hesiod and Callinus to the

Second Sophistic, the ancients do seem to have generated a

good deal of their culture around the mere hypothesis of

Homer.18 At the end of the line there is Lucian, who in his

True Stories interviews the ghost of Homer in the Elysian

Fields, pressing him about his origins (which Homer reveals

to be Babylonian) and about the truth of his poems. Lucian

was laughing at the entire Greek tradition's desire to "really know" the truth about (an irrecuperably dead) Homer. Nor

was he saying anything new, or anything the tradition didn't

already know about itself. A clear predecessor is the tongue in-cheek Contest of Homer and Hesiod, the product of Alci

damas in the fourth century, but rooted in earlier speculation about the lives and deaths of the two premiere poets of

Greece. Moreover, if, as is likely, Homer's name was added

to his poems as an afterthought, once they became fixed as

texts, it seems equally likely that this is when the contests

over his identity were launched.z? That is, Homer became

uncertain, literally lost to memory, the moment he was

named and found.

THE MODERN IDEA OF HOMER

The permanent loss of Homer, the loss he came to stand for

and embody, is an abiding element of his reception, but it is

one that was felt more acutely as time went on. The moderns

took their cue from the ancients, following the canonical

lines of reception and research laid down in antiquity,

though it was the particular achievement of modernity to

name Homer finally as the idea that he always had been. Gi

ambattista Vico first articulated the view, well before Niet

zsche, that Homer was not a person but an idea (un' idea)

created by the Greeks (though believed in by them), in his

Scienza Nuova Seconda (1730; ?873). The denial of

Homer's historicity is for Vico tied to a denial of the his

toricity of the Trojan war as one more fiction from antiquity

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James I. Porter 65

("it never in the world took place"), but this doesn't prevent Homer from being somehow more real than Troy. Troy after

all has vanished, while Homer's poems have not. But this

can't be right. After all, the Trojan war is no less "a famous

epoch in history" for its never having happened. And so, in

the last analysis, both Homer and Troy have to be equally real. Vico here is playing out the logic of disavowal that

would typify Homer's reception for centuries to come, which

runs: "He was the best poet ever, but he never existed (and here are the proofs for both claims?his poems)."20 Vico's

simpler hypothesis, anticipating F. A. Wolf by half a century, is better known: it is that Homer's poems were the final

product of a long tradition of oral composition and compi lation (?805). But his sinuous, uncertain logic is equally an

anticipation of Wolf and the analytical tendency (see be

low)?and, I would wager, of most readers of Homer today. It is the logic of the MacGuffin (an impossible, non-existent

object), which as Hitchcock recognized, governs larger parts of our lives than we are usually prepared to admit: ideas

may be false and events may not occur, but their effects can

be real, and at times they can even be more compelling than

the truth.21 Thomas De Quincey nicely caught this logic in a

wry moment of his essay "Homer and the Homeridae"

(1841): "Some say, 'There never was such a person as

Homer.'?'No such person as Homer! On the contrary,' say

others, 'there were scores.'" Incidentally, if you are wonder

ing how to say MacGuffin in Greek, you need only think of

the eidolon or phantom of Helen that, Stesichorus assures

us, was the object that the Greeks fought over and the Tro

jans defended at Troy. But then, he wasn't blind like Homer.

THE MODERN HISTORICITY OF HOMER

It is tempting to say that one of the great achievements of

modern thinking about Homer was its discovery, during the

latter half of the eighteenth century, of the historicity of

Homer and his world, but this is only half of the story. For

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66 HOMER: THE VERY IDEA

once it dawned on modernity that it might be possible to lo

cate Homer in space and time, and in a way that antiquity never could, it remained to come to grips with this realiza

tion. Locating Homer had innumerable implications, nor

was it necessarily a desirable thing. To return to the lan

guage from which we set out, we might say that the trau

matic loss that was embodied by Homer in classical

antiquity became the traumatic prospect of Homer's possible

recovery in the modern world. Formerly a comfortable no

tion, for instance an icon of na?ve genius of the sort that

Goethe and Schiller could romanticize, Homer?the very

idea of him?suddenly became problematic, threatening, and consequently a source of anxiety. In this anxiety was en

capsulated the whole of modernity's relationship to the clas

sical past, and so too its own historical self-image. That there were obstacles to making Homer historical is

not hard to see. The inherited idea of "Homer" did not read

ily lend itself to historicization. How can one confront an

idealization (which Homer plainly was) with reality? Ar

chaeology eventually held out the promise of a solution, but

this in turn created further dilemmas and no solutions. Rein

serting the encumbered Homer of tradition into history was

an arduous affair. Much of the progress (if that is the correct

word) was made reluctantly, and often with as much back

tracking as advances.

Coming face to face with Homer the historical reality was

painful, because it brought with it a "feeling of derealiza

tion" and "estrangement" (Entfremdungsgef?hl) of the sort

that Freud experienced when he stood for the first time

among the ruins of the Acropolis, an object of his fantasies

from early childhood, and said to himself: "So all this really does exist, just as we learnt at school!" The thought was

puzzling, because Freud could not recall ever doubting the

existence of the Acropolis as a child. Searching for deeper

explanations for his reaction, Freud rejects the most obvious

one, namely that he had, in fact, doubted its existence. The

fantasy of the classical ideal required it of him. Nor was

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James I. Porter 67

Freud's reaction exceptional. J. P. Mahaffy records his dis

tinct disappointment upon finally laying eyes on the Acrop

olis, in his widely popular travel guide, Rambles Through Greece (1876; 2nd ed. 1900). His self-analysis is brutally frank: "the first visit to the Acropolis is and must be disap

pointing," he warns the prospective traveler, because "there

is, in fact, no building on earth which can sustain the burden

of such greatness."22 Equally revealing is how quickly?a short page later?disappointment is overcome and ideality

restored, albeit in the key now of tender melancholy: "so at

last we tear ourselves from it as from a thing of beauty, which even now we can never know, and love, and meditate

upon to our heart's content."

Homer in the modern age had much the same status as the

Acropolis?as would, eventually, Troy. An idealized object, Homer bore an uncomfortable relation to historical reality. His reality was both affirmed and denied by classicism, both

desired and unwanted, as was the case of all classical ideals.

Nevertheless, Homer occupied an uneasy place apart in the

modern classicizing paradigm, and the strains showed. He

came too early to be compared with the fully developed clas

sicism of Phidias and Sophocles, but given his paradigmatic role even in the fifth century Homer's classicism could not be

denied. In some ways prototypically classical, in another

sense Homer could be felt to be both more and less classical

than the classical authors of the fifth century?more authen

tically and more pristinely classical, if also representing a

simpler, naiver, less developed form of classicism. At one end

of the spectrum, there was a view like Humboldt's (and, a

century on, Jebb's), which was that "one should dwell at

length not only on the periods in which the Greeks were

most beautiful and most cultivated," but also, and "above

all, on the first and earliest periods. For it is here that the

seeds of the true Greek character actually lie; and it is easier

and more interesting to see how in the sequel that character

gradually changes and finally degenerates. "23 Historical con

tingency is at once admitted and erased in the essence of the

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68 HOMER: THE VERY IDEA

Greek character, which gives the essence of the human mind, while Homeric psychology could be left unexplored?in

part, for fear of what might be discovered there.

What they were warding off was the opposed extreme,

which finds in Homer a prehistoric childlikeness that is more

na?ve than even children can be. (A caricature of this view

was developed by Bruno Snell in The Discovery of the Mind

[1946; English translation 1953].) These are not really op

posed views; they are merely two faces of a single coin. Both

derive from the Romantic classicizing paradigm of Homeric

mentality, which gives rise to two mutually incompatible pic tures: the view of the Homeric individual as something less or

more than a whole person. As a rule, the ancient Greek, and

prototypically the Homeric Greek, came to be viewed either

as an early and superseded instance of the universal self, an

(as it were) imperfectly formed and undeveloped version of

the self, or as a lost ideal of selfhood that may or (more fre

quently) may not be reattained in the modern present (the self that was once, but no longer is). And behind these two

views lies the ambivalent construction of the ancient Greek in

relation to the modern self. The realization of either fantasy

promised to bring with it incalculable terrors. And with the

onset of archaeology, thanks to the energies of Heinrich

Schliemann at Mycenae, Tiryns, and above all at the symbol

ically laden Troy, that promise finally seemed to be about to

be made good. But not if others could stop him first. Richard Claverhouse

Jebb, the leading classicist in the English-speaking world and

future editor of Sophocles, was one of Schliemann's fiercest

opponents. What business did he have getting involved? At

stake in this contest, I believe, was more than a battle be

tween academic insiders and outsiders. Schliemann's work

pitted archaeology, the study of material culture and physi cal remains, against philology, the study of literary culture

and ideas, although this alone cannot have been decisive

(Jebb was a vocal supporter of the founding of two British

archaeological institutes, one in Athens and the other in

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James I. Porter 69

Rome). Schliemann's digs presented an additional threat:

they probed into archaic Greece, pushing the envelope of the

modern contact with classical antiquity into the furthest

reaches of Bronze Age, well beyond what anyone gazing at

the Elgin marbles, which were hung in the British Museum

in 1816, could imagine. But above all, it was Schliemann

who, beyond anyone else, presented to the modern world

the specter of a Homer redivivus: now Homer would be

shown not to be a phantom, but to have been a material re

ality, as solid as the foundations of a rediscovered Troy. Would he even be recognizably Greek any longer? How

Schliemann imagined Homer to have been is unclear. But

what he unearthed was both excitingly and frighteningly

strange, and Jebb would have none of it. He disputed Schlie

mann's methods and challenged his findings. At the formal

center of the dispute was the location of ancient Troy: His

arhk according to Schliemann, Pmarba?i according to Jebb

(who sided with Demetrius of Scepsis, while singing his

praises).24 Mahaffy, backing Schliemann, would align Jebb with "those who are playing Demetrius' part," and by the

strangest of inversions the nineteenth century found itself

thrown back into the mid-second century bce.25

But unlike Demetrius, the skeptical Jebb was ultimately unconcerned with the location of ancient Troy. He wanted

to dispute the location of Homer's Troy. In particular, what

was in dispute was the reality of the acropolis, not of Athens

now, but of Troy. That is, it was the question whether His

arhk, lying flat on the plain, could possibly have been

adorned with the "lofty" and "beetling" acropolis of the Il

iad (Homer's Pergamus). Schliemann had to give up this pos

sibility early on in his digs. In May of 1873, ne made a first

revision: "what I last year considered to be the ruins of a sec

ond storey of the Great Tower are only benches made of

stones joined with earth."26 Against his own will, Schlie

mann's Homer was being brought down to ground level, a

veritable humiliation. Two years later, in his book on Troy he added: "the city had no acropolis, and Pergamus is a pure

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70 HOMER: THE VERY IDEA

invention of Homer."27 Jebb comments drily, "For Dr.

Schliemann, who believed in the historical accuracy of the Il

iad, ... [an admission like] this must have been somewhat of a trial." Troy was not the Acropolis; it could lay no claim on

the classical imagination. But Jebb still wasn't satisfied.

Homer's Troy, according to him, was a work of the fancy, a

pure poetic invention by Homer. As he resoundingly put it, "'Homer's Troy,' in the sense of an actual town described by a poet recording historical fact, has not been found at

Hissarlik, and will never be found anywhere."28 Schliemann, for his part, wouldn't budge. At most, he would make the re

markable allowance that "Homer can never have seen Il

ium's Great Tower, the surrounding wall of Poseidon and

Apollo, the Scaean Gate or the Palace of King Priam. ... He

knew of these monuments of immortal fame only from

hearsay."2? And still Homer was the best source of evidence

for identifying the finds at Troy! In return, Jebb would play the classicizing card that trumped all others: sublimation, by

claiming that "it is in taking a bird's-eye view from a height, not in looking around on the level, that the comprehensive truth of Homeric topography is most vividly grasped.

Homer is as his own Zeus or his own Poseidon, not as one

of the mortals warring on the lower ground. "3? This move,

conflating Homer with a perspective offered up by his po ems?which is to say with their sovereign consciousness?

was a well-rehearsed element of the classical tradition, from

Robert Wood to Schiller, Goethe, and Hegel. The problem for classicism was not reducing Homer to a notional exis

tence (to the idea of his poems); it was detaching that con

cept from the substance of the poems. For that would mean

the materialization of Homer, and his loss of reality?his ex

posure as an idea(l). Were there space, one could trace parallel developments in

philology, for which the Homeric texts had begun to appear as something like an archaeological site, with layers of his

tory built into them in a palpable stratigraphy: the disparate effects of multiple compositional layers (some, including

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James I. Porter 71

Jebb, would call these "strata") and the intrusive hands of ed

itors could all be felt in the poems. Thanks to classics, starting with F. A. Wolf's Prolegomena to Homer (1795), Homer had

become a scientific object, in the form of a question. Thanks

to Homer, classics had become again what it always had been, an object of uncertainty and doubt. But what is even more im

portant, classics would never again be free of historical and

material contingency. One of the more profound results of this process was the

inevitable detachment of Homer from the stuff of his epics: Homer was now firmly located centuries away from the sto

ries he sang. But surely one of the more curious upshots of

this process was that Homer could now be viewed as a com

plete stranger to the past he retold, or else, insofar as he was

moved to counteract historical loss (for instance, by preserv

ing archaic details, whether or not he grasped their mean

ing), as something of a proto-archaeologist in his own

right.31 The past was a foreign country indeed. Homer had

become its alienated witness, and in his alienation he stood

closer to "us." But just how close do we want to get to

Homer?

ON NOT TRANSLATING HOMER:

ARNOLD, NEWMAN, AND PARRY

As a final illustration of the dilemmas this kind of proximity and overproximity of Homer to the present created, I want

to offer a sketch of two oddly connected instances of the

modern approaches to Homer: Matthew Arnold's Victorian

quarrel over Homeric translation and Milman Parry's revo

lutionary discovery of oral composition. What we will find

here are different strategies of keeping Homer at an appro

priate distance, now mediated through the question of his

translatability. In late i860 and early 1861, Matthew Arnold, the Oxford

Professor of Poetry, delivered and then published a series of

lectures called "On Translating Homer." The lectures had a

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72 HOMER: THE VERY IDEA

single purpose: to air criticisms of the 1856 translation of the

Iliad by Francis W. Newman, professor of Latin at University

College London (and brother to the future cardinal), and to

propose a new theory of translation as a counter to existing

English renderings, from Chapman, Pope, and Cowper to

Newman and other Victorians. Newman's position is laid out

in his Preface and is easily summed up. The Greeks, but in

particular Homer, are marked by their "eminently childlike

simplicity" of mind. The style of Homer, being in Newman's

words "quaint, garrulous, prosaic, low," and, above all, "an

tiquated," matches this mentality perfectly.32 The poetic form

most suited to rendering these qualities is the old English lyri cal ballad, with its Saxon sounds and its alternating four and

three beats to a line. The result is the following: "Chestnut

and Spotted! noble pair! / farfamous brood of Spry-foot! II In

other guise now ponder ye / your charioteer to rescue // Back

to the troop of Dana?, / when we have done with battle: //

Nor leave him dead upon the field, / as late yet left Patro

clus."33 The end product may be strange, but that is the in

tended effect. Indeed, Newman's translation is prefaced by a

two-page "Glossary" of the more antiquated terms, not un

like a Greek textbook of Homer for beginners. Arnold's objection is total: Newman has it all wrong.

Homer is neither quaint nor antiquated in Greek, nor should

he sound like this in English. He is, on the contrary, "noble,"

"simple," "plain," "rapid," "natural," and "transparent."

"An appropriate meter" is needed to capture the aesthetic and

ethical qualities of Homer's language; the meter must be

Greek; it must be authentic; it must, therefore, be the hexam

eter.34 The result will read something like this (in Arnold's

sample counter-translation): "Xanthus and Balius both, ye

far-famed seed of Podarga! // See that ye bring your master

home to the host of the Argives // In some other sort than

your last, when the battle is ended; // And not leave him be

hind, a corpse on the plain, like Patroclus" (166). Newman

replied in a hundred-page essay in the same year, and Arnold

shot back with a concluding scientific postscript ("Last

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James I. Porter 73

Words"). The debate is fascinating, as much for the ground that the two critics share as for their unbridgeable differences.

What they share?and I am compressing, for the debate

gains in clarity as it rumbles on?is a fundamental accord

around the single duty of translation: it should faithfully ren

der, in Arnold's phrase, "the general effect" and "impres sion" that Homer's verses produce on the ear and mind of its

hearers, without seeking to render the particulars of Homer's

verses themselves.35 What is to be captured is less the sound

or the meaning than the "moral character" of the sound and

the poetry. For Newman, this means rendering the effect of

the strangeness of Greek relative to English; his translation is

meant to be "a historical one": it creates, or else recreates, the effect of a historical alienation.16 Only, what is odd about

his model of estrangement is this: it works by analogy, while

the analogy works by familiarity and identification. (The form of choice is after all the popular "national ballad me

tre," and it is "a likeness of moral genius which is to be

aimed at."37) Newman's aim is "to rear a poem that shall af

fect our countrymen as the original may be conceived to have

affected its natural hearers." The point of reference is Sopho

cles, and then Robert Burns: for "every sentence of [Homer] was more or less antiquated to Sophocles, who could no

more help feeling at every instant the foreign and antiquated character of the poetry than an Englishman can help feeling the same in reading Burns' poems."38 Readers today must

identify with the classical ear in order to appreciate Homer's

preclassical antiquity. But the relative antiquity of Homer in

the Periclean age, itself already separated by a "chasm" from

Homer,39 has become an "absolute" antiquity for the mod

ern-day Victorian, and so Homer appears today as a "poet of

a barbarian age" ("odd" and "illogical," and comparable

only to an "African tribesman of the Gold Coast," he can be

"disgusting and horrible occasionally"), whence his "inex

haustibly quaint [and] very eccentric" diction.4? After all, Newman pleads, "a crag must not be cut like a gem."41 It

seems odd that Newman's reader should identify with the be

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74 HOMER: THE VERY IDEA

mused Sophocles, both of them joining hands in the face of a

distant Homer, but that is how Newman will have it. New

man's Homer is to be filtered through a classicizing lens; but

through that lens he will appear hoarily antique. Arnold has a different view. He is willing to concede, in a

way that Newman would not, that Homer is forever histor

ically and aesthetically lost to us ("we cannot possibly tell

how the Iliad 'affected its natural hearers,'" not even in the

fifth-century [98, 100]), and so the next best thing is to

strike a compromise and "to try to satisfy scholars" (117):

"they are the only tribunal in this matter: the Greeks are

dead" (99; italics added). For Arnold, too, translation is me

diated by identification. Only, the target of the identification

for the reader is not the classical Athenian poet, but the

modern classical scholar, whether he be "the Provost of

Eton, or Professor Thompson at Cambridge, or Professor

Jowett here in Oxford." What the translator should aim at is

to recreate the "feeling which to read the original gives them" (99; italics added), which is to say gives informed and

poetically sensitive modern scholars, for "the scholar alone

has the means of knowing that Homer who is to be repro duced" (117). Rendering the impression that Homer makes

on the informed modern-day reader, the translation will be a

kind of simulacrum, not of the original songs in their origi nal sound, but of the experience of reading Homer's Greek

today. The verses will scan as hexameters (difficult though it

be to render a quantitative accent in an accentual language like English),42 so as to remind us that we are dealing with a

Greek original, and to give a sense of the epics' flow and

movement (104-5). ^ut tne English will be as clear and

limpid, and as natural and direct, as Homer's language is to

the contemporary fluent reader of the original. No glossary is needed. Readers will get a fully digested Greek in English

form, and so they can enjoy Greek and remain Greekless all

at once.

Arnold's solution to the Homeric problem of translation is

no accident of theory gone awry. His program is fundamen

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James I. Porter 75

tally a pedagogical one, and it goes along well with his lib

eral politics and with the social mission of English criticism

generally. Classics is dying as a field, but literacy is rising, he

notes on the first page. Translation will make the classics

available to everyone. But more to the point, translation can

serve education by offering the make-believe experience of

reading what is increasingly a dead language: the untutored

ear is to be treated to a surrogate experience of the classics.

What it receives (learns to understand, even hears) is no

longer Homer, but rather Homer's monumentality: Homer

will be read, "not indeed as part of a classical course, but as

the most important poetical monument existing" (97)?even if ultimately what is rendered is nothing more than a feeling,

or rather the illusion of one: "we feel, or imagine we feel, even though it be unsupported ..." (199). This last remark

is Arnold's, but he may as well have been speaking for New

man too, who likewise sought to create the effect of an "il

lusion. "43 After all, both agree that a gulf of "time, race, and

language" separates us from Homer, "who belong[s] to an

other world," even if Arnold, but not Newman, wants to

call this world "classical" (135). For both critics, Homer stands off in a remote distance

from us today. A case in point has to do with their attitudes

to Homer's meaning. Both concur that the meanings of

Homer's individual words are all too frequently opaque

(which is to say, lost and irrecoverable), and that ultimately what a good translation renders is not meaning but atmos

phere, feeling, and style. But whereas Newman's translator

seeks to capture the strangeness of words whose meaning has vanished, Arnold perceives no obstacles to a translator, for whom nothing in Homer is so opaque as to lie beyond

capture. For Arnold, a reader's practiced enjoyment will an

nul all philological scruples, whether of meaning or of the

Homeric Question (which he declares both insoluble and ir

relevant [99-100]): "the uncertainty of the scholar about the

true meaning of certain words can never change this general

effect, . . . whatever the scholar's doubts about the word

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76 HOMER: THE VERY IDEA

may be. . . . Poetically he feels clearly about the word, al

though philologically he may not" (i82).44 This curious act

of open disavowal, which goes hand in hand with an

affirmation of Homer's singular personality and a character

ization of his original "mind" and "voice,"45 reenacts a con

ventional ambivalence of classical scholarship from Wolf

onward, an ambivalence that was driven by diverging aes

thetic and philological impulses.46 But that is not the point I

want to emphasize here. Rather, I want us to concentrate on

the opacity?the loss and lack of meaning and sense?that

joins these two impulses before they turn into philological doubt and distance or into aesthetic pleasure and (illusory) contact with the past. Another example, this time from the

early twentieth century, will help reinforce the point. In 1928, a young American graduate student from Berkeley

published two doctoral theses in French. A quick succession

of essays in English followed, until his untimely death in

1935. The work of Milman Parry changed the face of Home

ric studies even more dramatically than Wolf had. What he

demonstrated, in scientific detail, was the nature of Homeric

composition: it was oral, traditional, the work of generations, and formular (built around modular noun-epithet combina

tions that slotted into fixed metrical positions). It is often said

that Parry transcended the stale debates of the nineteenth-cen

tury Homeric Question, for instance that he made otiose the

endless debates without issue between those who argued the

unity of the extant poems and those who saw only layers of

sedimented accretions.47 Nothing could be further from the

truth. In Parry, the Homeric Question is reduced to its barest

essentials and made achingly relevant again.

Parry, the hard-hitting statistician, gives the sense that

with his work one can get almost an archaeological glimpse of the oldest and indelible layers of the Homeric tradition,

practically its unconscious memory and poetics. Parry's the

ory carries out the logic of Wolf's reduction of Homer: it se

verely constrains the role of the poet as an originator of

diction or meaning, let alone of poetic effect; the poet is re

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James I. Porter 77

duced to a spokesman of the rhapsodic tradition that pre ceded him, as its last incarnation, virtually as its effect or

product. But at the same time, this puts the Homeric com

poser (whom Parry conventionally dubs "Homer") in an

awkward position vis-?-vis his own tradition: how much of

this tradition is Homer actually aware? As a machine of

memory with limited aesthetic scope, his materials emerging from the deepest lava flows of epic time, does Homer even

understand what he sings?

Parry stares down this question directly in his first English

language publication, "The Homeric Gloss: A Study in Word

Sense," from 1928. There, he isolates to his satisfaction a

category of words whose meaning is obscure to Homer and

his audience. Oddly, the starting point is made up by those

phrases whose meaning is obscure, if not utterly opaque, to

ourselves.48 In any event, the gloss or sub-category of orna

mental epithets Parry defines as "adjectives used attributively without reference to the ideas of the sentences or the passages where they appear," and whose meaning leaves us "in the

dark" (241). These are words like otxpuyeTOio (used seventeen

times of the sea and once of the air) or ?vcma? ("evidently an

adverb"), where the l?xica draw a blank and no amount of

guessing will prove a scholar right or wrong. But why should

these words be unknown to Homer and his audience? One

pressing reason is the need to preserve intact the Homeric hy

pothesis itself. In a word, the datability of Homer is founded

on the absolute undatability of some of his language. Take

away the premise of layers of archaism unto obscurity, and

the entire hypothesis that Homeric composition transpired over generations collapses on itself.49 Homer has to have

come after the tradition, and he has to be ignorant of some of

what preceded him. He has to become a poet of memory without access to what he remembers.

This reduction fits hand in glove with the theory of a re

duced Homeric persona. As Parry asks, anticipating a

reader's puzzlement, "Did Homer, then, accept blindly, as an

unchangeable part of the traditional style which he inher

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78 HOMER: THE VERY IDEA

ited, a large number of words concerning whose meaning he

was completely ignorant?" (248). The answer is, plainly, Yes. Accordingly, "the meaning of the fixed epithet has thus

a reduced importance: it is used inattentively by the poet, and heard by the auditor in a like manner" (249); its effect

is one of "rapidity," of a mere incidence of sound (the term

is originally Arnold's [428]); it is both familiar, from its re

peated occurrences, and strange; its uses tend to be "irra

tional"; it is necessarily "vague" (249), but also associated

by habituation to meaning of another kind, or rather to a

sense of meaning: the auditor (and Homer is and is not his

own auditor for Parry) can "pass rapidly over the ornament

glosses, feeling in them only an element which ennobles the

heroic style," and that somehow confirms through its great

antiquity the very antiquity and epic distance of the poetry

itself; "he is fully alive to their sense, but scarcely heedful of

their meaning," and so on (250). Not content to leave Homer

blind, Parry bestows him with the illusion of clairvoyance: "It may be considered as certain that Homer thought he un

derstood the ornament glosses" (248). But that is just an

other form of blindness. So ends the article on the Homeric

gloss. But how generalizable is this isolated anomaly to the

rest of Parry's theory?

Completely, I want to suggest. And it is here, or already, that Parry's theory starts sounding strangely familiar, at once

Arnoldian and Newmanian?not surprisingly, given that

Parry cites Arnold's essay in a handful of places. A section of

his doctoral thesis from 1928 even asks, "Can the Fixed Ep ithet Be Translated?" and the answer is, predictably, No, and

it doesn't need to be.5? Nor is this all. Ornamental epithets that take the form of glosses, far from being an aberrant mo

ment of the epic experience, are in fact symbolic of that ex

perience as a whole: here the auditor listens with, as it were, a third ear, feeling more than hearing (let alone comprehend

ing) what is sung. That is, while ornamental epithets, unlike

glosses, have a fixed and knowable meaning for the original audience or for ourselves, they share a crucial feature of the

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James I. Porter 79

gloss, which is that their meaning is not their essential char

acteristic. The gloss is a word whose meaning is unknown

but irrelevant to its effect; the ornamental epithet is a word

whose meaning is known but is nonetheless irrelevant to its

effect (cf. 241). In another essay, from 1933, Parry extends

his readings to the problem of the "traditional metaphor in

Homer" (phrases such as "watery ways," "winged words,"

"rosy-fingered dawn," and "silver-footed Thetis"), which

then can be taken to reflect back again, in their "typicality," "the diction as a whole" (370). These are metaphors that es

sentially are behaving like fixed formulas. They recall noth

ing so much as "the true fixed metaphor [that] has not

existed in English poetry since the days when Anglo-Saxon was spoken" (367) and that was resurrected in the age of

Dryden. A further subset are fixed metaphors with no clear

meaning: "Kaprrvcc, 'heads' for 'peaks'; a ship 'running'?

eGeev; a wave 'howling'??a%e; a god, 'standing over' a city?

auxtft?e?riKac," and so on (373). What these words have in

common is that they are not marked as metaphors, and in

lacking this mark of metaphoricity they lapse into the com

mon parlance of "simply epic words"?they signify nothing in particular, beyond the fact that they belong to an epic dic

tion. Obscure though not exactly opaque, they tell us that we

are in an epic world. That is why they are "traditional": they show us how oral poetics works?not according to the ro

mantic rules of poetic genius and novelty, but through the

anonymous byways of inherited patterns. What they convey is

not meaning, but something else: "charm," "music," a

"mood," a sense of epic and heroic "nobility," the "distant

and wondrous." In effect, these are words that have ceased to

signify. Their only function is that of connotation, in which

they exhaust themselves, meaninglessly. No longer semantic in

their own right, they have become what they always were?

music: "[Epic] poetry thus approaches music most closely when the words have rather a mood than a

meaning. . . .

Though the meaning be felt rather than understood it is

there. ... It is an incantation of the heroic" (374-75; italics

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8o HOMER: THE VERY IDEA

added).

Now, traditional metaphors are not opaque glosses of the

ornamental epithet category, which express no centrally fixed

and identifiable idea. They express an idea, only one that is

lost, or rather irrelevant (the way "the formulaic line which

expresses the idea 'at dawn' always brings in the epithet

po?o?aKTU?o?," which expresses no idea at all)^1 In this re

spect, they are exactly like typical epithet combinations, the

standard building block of Homeric diction. But, looking back from the metaphor over to the gloss and then back to

the epithet formula where everything began, we can realize

how even the fixed epithet captures what is formulaic about

Homer's diction: it conjures up the very fixity, the tradition

ality, of a living oral tradition itself (cf. 249), and ultimately it isolates nothing more than the inner quality of noble, epic

poetry itself?its "quality of 'propriety,'" which in time

tended to minimize, if not eliminate altogether, questions of

meaning. 5z

Parry's Homer is an oral poet in every sense of the

word. Surrounded by sounds and driven by them, "he is led

by the habitual movement of his voice to these formulas, . . .

guided by his feeling for what there is in common in the

sound of ... a system" of sounds (324). So understood, oral

poetry, with its habits of audition (listening for the sound) and its reinforcing of structures of feeling at the expense of

sense, not to mention its ideological attractions (nobility, heroic ethos), folds back into the conventional ideology of

the classical ideal and all that this entails.53

Parry's enduring Phidian and Winceklmannian biases are

elsewhere transparent.54 His clinging to the improbable no

tion of Homer's singular, authentic voice is a further index of

his aesthetic and ideological affiliations. We've already seen

how Parry moves effortlessly from the aberrant to the central, from the opaque to the heroic and the noble. What he has

designated, through philological reduction, is a zone of aes

thetic enjoyment that, in contrast to the prohibitions on logic and meaning, is directly apprehensible to the reader or listener

of Homer. It is a zone that is defined by what could be called

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James I. Porter 8i

the materiality of Homer's voice; what it covers is less a zone

of significance than a zone of signifiance that turns out to be

utterly characteristic of Homeric poetry and of our experience of it. Parry's deepest aesthetic insights into Homer are moti

vated by an attunement to this very feature of epic diction, which is to say its quality of sound and voice, insofar as these

are evocative of a "heroic" character ("the quality of epic no

bility"). This feature of epic diction is instrumental in produc

ing what we might call an "epic-effect." One of these effects

is Homer himself: the voice of Homer that somehow, despite all the intervening layers of mediation, can be directly heard

by us today ("one . . . has the overwhelming feeling that, in

some way, he is hearing Homer" [378]). A questionable Homer, to be sure, but it is what Parry's

answer to the Homeric Question is ultimately all about. The

poems have a "unity" that can be discovered only once we

have grasped "Homer's idea of style and poetic form," that

is, once we correctly adjust our idea of Homer. Oral theory and poetics are foundational to this understanding (269).

Philology here has sanctioned itself with an appeal to tradi

tional aesthetic ideology. It has historicized, we might say, that ideology, by rooting it in an experience that is both our

own and definitionally Greek. Science finally beholds itself

in a mirror, and like Narcissus is content with what it sees.

An ideal scientific object in every sense of the word, Homer

is nothing other than the modern idea of what is ancient

about antiquity?a thought we can feel, or imagine we feel, but can never really know.

NOTES

This essay is preliminary to a longer study in progress.

i. The point is well made by Walter Burkert, "The Making of Homer in

the Sixth Century BC: Rhapsodes Versus Stesichorus," Papers on the Amasis

Painter and his World (Malibu 1987), 43. Vergil enjoyed a similar status in

the Latin Middle Ages; see Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and

the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton 1953). 2. ourpi??ev \j/?\)?ea6ai Hsch. Cf. Arist. Po. 1460a!8-19: "Homer has

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8i HOMER: THE VERY IDEA

taught the rest of the poets how to lie."

3. At least from its modern inception in Wolf and his immediate succes

sors (see James I. Porter, Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future [Stanford

2000]), if not also earlier. Compare Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Homerische Untersuchungen (Berlin 1884), 381-83, lamenting the demise

of classics under the flood of irrelevant discourses that were swamping the

Homeric Question at the time: poetics, Vo7&er-psychology, politics, anthro

pology, and not least, philology. "Homer is currently not much read as a

poet. . . . How many adults still read him for edification? . . . Homer is a

force, but one that is exhausted." "But," he adds, not without a certain pi

quancy, at least "the Homeric Question is popular." Then comes a dis

paraging parallel, comparing his own day with the spiritually and culturally exhausted era of the Alexandrian scholars.

4. Friedrich Nietzsche, "Homer und die klassische Philologie" [1869],

Philologische Schriften 1867-1873 [1982], in Kritische Gesamtausgabe,

Werke, ed. Georgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin 1967-),

2.1.247-69.

5. Last year through April 2002, a large itinerant exhibition on Troy and

its history was mounted in Stuttgart, Braunschweig, and then in Bonn, Ger

many. See the catalogue volume Troia?Traum und Wirklichkeit, Arch?olo

gisches Landesmuseum (Baden-W?rttemberg 2001) and the archived

web-site: http://www.troia.de/. See also Michael Wood's BBC production

(1985) and book (In Search of the Trojan War, revised ed. [Berkeley and

Los Angeles 1998]); and finally, the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to

Homer, edited by Robert Fowler. Readers of U. S. News online (http://

www.usnews.com/usnews/doubleissue/mysteries/quiz.htm) can, as of this

writing, take a "Mysteries of History" quiz and try the following question:

"3. Who was the first person to doubt that Homer was the single author of

The Iliad and The Odyssey} Aristotle; F. A. Wolf; Herodotus; Vico?" For

the correct response, see below.

6. See Hes. Op. 90-1736; [Hes.] Ehoeae fr. 204 M-W; Cypria fr. 1 Allen; Schol. Horn. D //. 1.5; Eur. El. 1282-3, etc.; Wolfgang Kullmann, "Ein

Vorhomerisches Motiv im Iliaspro?mium," Philologus (1955) 99.167-92; Ruth Scodel, "The Achaean Wall and the Myth of Destruction," HSCP

(1982) 86.33-50; and below on Arist. fr. 162 Rose. Eratosthenes and Apol lodorus began their chronographies with the fall of Troy (1184/3); Dem

ocritus dated a work of his to "73? years after the capture of Troy" (D. L.

9.41). This symbolic view of history had implications for later poets; see

Denis Feeney, "Mea Tempora: Patterning of Time in the Metamorphoses," Ovidian Transformations: Essays on the Metamorphoses and its Reception.

Cambridge Philological Society, Suppl. 23, eds. Philip Hardie, Alessandro

Barchiesi, and Stephen Hinds (Cambridge 1999), 13-30 and Giancarlo

Mazzoli, "Qualie Praeistorie? Catullo, Lucrezio," L'Antico degli antichi,

eds. Guglielmino Cajani and Diego Lanza (Rome 2001), 133-40.

7. In Leocr. 62, trans. Jebb.

8. Luc. 9.969.

9. One need only glance at the northern Parthenon frieze in Athens, with

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James I. Porter 83

its decorative motifs from the Iliad. For later appropriations, see Froma I.

Zeitlin, "Visions and Revisions of Homer," Being Greek Under Rome: Cul

tural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire, ed. Si

mon Goldhill (Cambridge 2001), 195-266.

10. E.g., Walter Leaf, Troy: A Study in Homeric Geography (London

1912), 13; Denys Page, History and the Homeric Iliad (Berkeley 1959).

11. See Kirk, comm. ad loc, subsuming Homer's ignorance under his

"solemnity."

12. Examples run from Stesichorus to Thucydides to Dio of Prusa. Cf.

Aristotle's comment on the Achaean wall at the ships, which he says never

existed, because "the poet who created it [viz., made it up] (jtXaoa?) de

stroyed it (fj<|)aviaev)" (fr. 162 Rose). In this tradition, the wall is plainly emblematic of?literally, a "metaphor" of (cf. u?xct(j)?peiv ?o-oXetai)?the traceless obliteration of Troy itself (see Schol. Horn. 17. bT 7.445 and

12.3-35), t>ut also ?ftne event's susceptibility to fictional manipulation (cf. the conflation of the two kinds of making, x?yv T?ixou t%iav rcoie?v with xe

iXorcoiia, etc.).

13. Schol. in Dion. Thrac. 29.16-30.17 Hilgard; Cic. De Or. 3.137; Vit.

Horn. 4.13-13.

14. We do occasionally hear of lesser places, some of them mentioned by Homer, that have vanished, e.g., Strab. 8.8.2 (in the effort to verify Homer's

references to three former cities), or Paus. 10.33.8 on Parapotamii, another

paradoxical lieu de m?moire.

15. See J. N. Coldstream, "Hero-Cults in the Age of Homer," JHS (1976)

76:7-17; Anthony Snodgrass, Archaic Greece: The Age of Experiment

(Berkeley 1980); S. C. Humphreys, "Death and Time," Mortality and Im

mortality: The Anthropology and Archaeology of Death, eds. S. C. Hum

phreys and H. King (London 1981), 261-83; Carla Antonaccio, "The

Archaeology of Ancestors," Cultural Poetics in Archaic Greece: Cult, Per

formance, Politics, eds. Carol Dougherty and Leslie Kurke (Cambridge 1998), 46-70.

16. One of his motives would undoubtedly have been to resolve the ques tion of whether Aeneas' descendants ruled the Troad after the fall of Troy, and if so, where (Scepsis was Demetrius' preference) and for how long (see Strabo 13.1.52).

17. Cf. Certamen, passim; Athen. 125 D ("risen from the mud"); and A. P.

2.715, an epigram that confesses Homer's origins to be "unknowable," while

Homer is a godlike hero beyond earthly location.

18. For the term "hypothesis," see Nietzsche (note 4), 256.

19. Cf. Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker, Der epische Cyclus, oder die home

rischen Dichter. 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Bonn 1865), 1.120; M. L. West, "The In

vention of Homer," CQ (1999) 49.2.364-82.

20. Cf. ?823: "But this does not make Homer any the less the father and

prince of all sublime poets" (Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Gi

ambattista Vico: Translated from the 3d ed., 1744, eds. and trans., Thomas G. Bergin and Max H. Fisch [Ithaca 1948], 281).

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84 HOMER: THE VERY IDEA

21. Hitchcock in Fran?ois Truffaut, Hitchcock, with the collaboration of

Helen G. Scott (New York 1967), 98-100: the term MacGuffin "might be

a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man

says, 'What's that package up there in the baggage rack?' And the other an

swers, 'Oh, that's a MacGuffin.' The first one asks 'What's a MacGuffin?'

'Well,' the other man says, 'it's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scot

tish Highlands.' The first man says, 'But there are no lions in the Scottish

Highlands,' and the other one answers, 'Well then, that's no MacGuffin!' So

you see, a MacGuffin is nothing at all." Examples of the MacGuffin in film

would be the Maltese Falcon, or the uranium in Notorious (which could

have been diamonds), the mistaken identity at the beginning of North by

Northwest, or "the little tune of The Lady Vanishes." According to Hitch

cock, the MacGuffin can be ignored as soon as it has served its purpose, but

it rarely does this, and instead it tends to become the object of endless fas

cination, despite its being "empty, nonexistent, and absurd." See further

Slavoj Zi?ek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London 1989), 184.

22. J. P. Mahaffy, "The Site and Antiquity of the Hellenic Ilion." Journal

of Hellenic Studies (1882), 3.69-80, 89. See also page 90: "The traveler . . .

has come a long journey into the remoter parts of Europe; he has reached

at last what his soul had longed for many years in vain: and as is wont to

be the case with all great human longings, the truth does not fulfil his de

sire." Sigmund Freud, "A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis"

[1936], Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud (Lon don 1964), 22.239-48. I owe Mary Beard the reference to Mahaffy. See

now Mary Beard, The Parthenon (London 2002).

23. Wilhelm von Humboldt, Werke in f?nf B?nden, eds. Andreas Flitner

and Klaus Giel (Darmstadt 1960-81), 2.22; Richard Claverhouse Jebb, Homer: An Introduction to the Iliad and the Odyssey, (6th ed., Boston

1902; ist ed., 1887), 38: "The Homeric Greek exhibits all the essential

characteristics and aptitudes which distinguish his descendant in the histor

ical age," which is to say the Homeric Greek is in his essence a classical

Greek, but only potentially so.

24. Richard Claverhouse Jebb, "Homeric and Hellenic Ilium," Journal of Hellenic Studies (1881), 2.7-43, 34?35, calling Demetrius' lost work "one

of the most wonderful monuments of scholarly labour which even the inde

fatigable erudition of the Alexandrian age produced."

25. Mahaffy (note 22), 78.

26. Leo Deuel, Memoirs of Heinrich Schliemann: A Documentary Por

trait Drawn from His Autobiographical Writings, Letters, and Excavation

Reports (New York 1977), 204.

27. Richard Claverhouse Jebb, "Homeric Troy," The Fortnightly Review, n.s. 35 (1 April 1884) 433-52, 436 (citing Troy and its Remains: A Narra

tive of Researches and discoveries Made of the Site of Ilium, and in the Tro

jan Plain. By Dr. Henry Schliemann. Tr. with the author's sanction [London

1875], 18).

28. Richard Claverhouse Jebb, "The Ruins of Hissarlik," Journal of Hel

lenic Studies (1883), 4.147-55, 155. Similarly, Eduard Meyer, Geschichte

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James I. Porter 85

von Troas (Leipzig 1877), e.g., 106: "That this [se, Homer's] Ilion never

once stood on earth is proved beyond refutation by Schliemann's excava

tions." The destruction of the vastly scaled-down historical Ilium necessi

tated its reconstruction and inflation in the poetic fantasy: whatever truth

lay behind the legends, "seeing the ruins in the Homeric age was no longer

possible" (108), let alone necessary?one wonders whether Homer's blind

ness isn't a quiet confession of this fact?and "accordingly, the [ancient]

claims that [Troy] had completely vanished from the face of the earth were

fully justified" (106, n. 1).

29. Deuel (note 26), 210.

30. Richard Claverhouse Jebb, "A Tour in the Troad," The Fortnightly

Review, n.s. 33 (1 January-i June 1883), 514-29, 520.

31. Cf. Andrew Lang, Homer and His Age (London 1906), 1-14.

32. Francis W. Newman, The Iliad of Homer, Faithfully Translated into

Unrhymed English Metre (London 1856), iv; cf. also xvii.

3 3. Francis W. Newman, Homeric Translation in Theory and Practice: A

Reply to Matthew Arnold, Esq., Professor of Poetry, Oxford (London

1861), 30.

34. Matthew Arnold, "On Translating Homer" [1861], The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor 1960-1977),

1.97-216, 142. References to Arnold will henceforth appear parenthetically in the main body of the text.

35. Arnold (note 34), 98, 101, 118,182. The effect, being general, which

is to say a matter of inarticulate feeling, can at the same time have a pecu

liarity all its own (cf. 105; 128).

36. Arnold (note 34), 98; Newman (note 32), xv-xvi.

37. Newman (note 33), 22; Newman (note 32), xvii; italics added.

38. Newman (note 33), 35-36.

39. Newman (note 33), 35 and 37.

40. Newman (note 32), iv; Newman (note 33), 14, 48, 56, 59, 73; cf. 86,

95, etc.

41. Newman (note 33), 24.

42. Arnold (note 34), 151-53, 193-95; cf. Newman (note 32), xvii. If

you detect a slight circularity here, you are not far from wrong: "The mod

ern hexameter is merely an attempt to imitate the effect of the ancient hexa

meter, as read by us moderns" (198; italics added); cf. Newman (note 33),

6-19; 42.

43. Newman (note 32), xv; Arnold (note 34), 97-98.

44. Following the same logic, a footnote reads: "Our knowledge of

Homer's Greek is hardly such as to enable us to pronounce quite

confidently what is idiomatic in his diction, and what is not, any more than

in his grammar; but I seem to myself clearly to recognise ..." Arnold (note

34), 155 n. 1.

45. Arnold (note 34), 109, 205; Newman (note 32), iv.

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86 HOMER: THE VERY IDEA

4 6. Wolf had killed Homer, for instance, by arguing that the Iliad was the

work of later redactors, but then resurrected him through his philological

sensus, by claiming to be able to detect the genuine and original Homeric

portions of the poem. Unlike Vico or d'Aubignac, Wolf never denied the

historical existence of Homer, a point that Nietzsche was quick to make

against him. See Friedrich August Wolf, Prolegomena to Homer, 1795, trans. Anthony Graf ton, Glenn W Most, and James E. G. Zetzel (Princeton

1985), 117 n. 84, rejecting d'Aubignac's conclusion from 1715, and Wolf's

later review of Vico, "Giambattista Vico ?ber den Homer." Museum der Al

terthums-Wissenschaft (1807), I:555-7?? Nietzsche (note 4), 256.

47. Adam Parry in Milman Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse: The

Collected Papers of Milman Parry, ed. Adam Parry (Oxford 1971), li.

Henceforth, references to this volume will be by page only.

48. The starting point is doubly odd, in that Parry has difficulties ren

dering the meaning of the term "gloss" itself, which he finds in Aristotle but

not in the sense he wants it to have, while Liddell and Scott's definition of

the term yX?coa, which refers to Aristotle, is likewise deficient in his view

(241). Just when, we might like to ask, do we know what a word means?

49. "To what great antiquity must we assign Homer, if we would sup

pose that he naturally understood the ornament glosses ... ? This antiquity

it is easy and necessary to accept for his language, but difficult to believe in

for himself" (245; cf. 22).

50. Parry (note 47), 171; cf. also, 126-27.

51. "[It] is not being used because of its meaning" (373). It is worth not

ing that Aristotle would have disagreed: "It makes a difference whether the

dawn is called 'rosy-fingered' or 'purple-fingered'" (Rhet. 3.2,1405^9-10)? but then, Aristotle's ear was already corrupted by a classical sensibility,

Parry would doubtless reply, as he ventures to say elsewhere (cf. esp. 365

and 374).

52. Not surprisingly, this was the gist of Arnold's view of the epithet too,

whose aesthetic terminology (rapidity, nobility, feeling, and the like) Parry

closely, and no doubt consciously, parallels. (Parry commends Arnold's ap

preciation of Homeric style: 428 n. 47; cf. 172, 250, 306, etc.) Interestingly

enough, the debate between Arnold and Newman often seems to gravitate

toward the question of how to understand and render the fixed epithet

(Arnold [note 34], 183; Newman [note 33], 63, 86). More could be said

here, but suffice it to say that Parry's view of the epithet owes a good deal

to this Victorian quarrel, and on both sides of that debate.

53. See James I. Porter, "Feeling Classical: Classicism and Ancient Liter

ary Criticism," forthcoming.

54. xxiv-xxv; 417; 424-25; 427; 431.

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