The Homeric Narrator and His Own Kleos
The Homeric Narrator and His Own Kleos
The Homeric Narrator and His Own Kleos
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Abstract
The Homeric narrator's celebrated reticence about his own person, work,
and aspirations has led scholars to call him modest. In this paper I argue
that there are enough implicit or indirect signs which point at a Homeric
narrator himself aspiring to kleos, just like the heroes he celebrates.
The task of Homer is to keep alive the memory of the klea andr?n,
the 'glorious deeds of men'. This is hardly a controversial state-
ment,1) although nowhere does he himself say as much, unlike
Herodotus, for example, who writes his history 'in order that the
important and remarkable achievements produced by Greeks and
barbarians will not become devoid of fame (aklea)\ or Pindar, who
offers his song as 'long-lasting light for achievements of great strength'
(0. 4.10). The idea that singing the klea of others might bring the
poet himself kleos is also often expressed, e.g. by Ibycus, who promises
Polycrates 'undying fame (kleos) as song and my fame (kleos) can give
it' (282.47-8). But again, not by Homer. The paradoxical conclu-
sion must be that although Homer is the most famous poet of
ancient literature, the history of poetic fame, in the sense of a poet's
self-promotion, seems to begin only after him.2)
* This is an
expanded version of a paper I gave in Leuven. I wish to thank
S.R. van der Mije and M. de Pourq for helpful suggestions, Barbara Fasting for
correcting my English.
1) Cf. Goldhill 1991, 166: "That the declaration and preservation of kleos is a
crucial function of the poet's voice in ancient Greek culture is a commonplace".
2) Cf. Bendey [1713] 1938, 304: "Nor is there one word in Homer that presages
or promises immortality to his work, as we find there is in the later poets Virgil,
Horace, Ovid, Lucan and Statius"; Stroh 1971, 235: "Von diesen Stellen abgese-
hen [Iliad 6.237-8, etc.] spricht Homer nicht von der verewigenden Macht seiner
Dichtung"; Stein 1990, 266.
3) Kranz 1967, 8.
4) Lord 1960, 102.
5) A recent paper by Scodel (2004) also discusses Homer's modesty, by which
she refers, however, to another aspect of his work: his refusal to engage in a dis-
cussion with his predecessors, as does e.g. Pindar.
6) On Phemius and Demodocus as his alter ego's, see esp. Fr?nkel 1969, 6-27;
Marg 1971, 11-23; Thalmann 1984, 122-33; and Ford 1992, 101-25; on Odysseus
the 'singer', see Thalmann 1984, 170-80 and Segal 1994, 86-95.
Since a bard often claims the past or a god as the source of his infor-
mation, he is not in a position to make any great claims for himself.
But this does not mean that heroic poetry is necessarily anonymous,
or that bards are always too modest to claim their creations for them-
selves. In fact they are often far from modest, but even if they were,
their audiences would not allow them to remain unknown . .. However
anonymous their poems may be, the bards themselves are often well
known, and that makes it unlikely that they disclaim any share in
works of their own composition.9)
7) See Bowra 1952, 404-5; Lord 1960, 101, 151-2; Kranz 1967, 31; Ford 1992,
23-31.
8) See Snell [1948] 1960; Maehler 1963, 34; Rosier 1980, 289-93; Stein 1990,
1-5.
9) Bowra 1952, 404.
1. The Muses
It may seem strange to start with the Muses when arguing for
the Homeric narrator's self-consciousness, since
they traditionally
have been as the very symbol of his modesty.
seen The Muse-invo-
cations, especially those at the opening, seem to point explicitly at
the Muse as the one who is speaking: ????? ae?de, ?e?, ??????de?
??????? and "??d?a ??? e??epe, ???sa, p???t??p??. And yet, when
we look at the
history of scholarship on the Homeric Muse, we
may note an interesting development leading towards the emanci-
pation?indeed the self-assertion?of the narrator vis-?-vis his god.
Let me start at the beginning and quote an early (1934) analysis of
the relation of narrator and Muse, which attributes responsibility
for the poem almost completely to the god: "Nicht der Mensch,
der Dichter schafft das Werk, sondern die Gottheit, des Dichters
besondere Schutzgottheit, mit einem Wort: sein Gott selbst schafft
das Werk oder ist mindestens in irgend einer Weise wesentlich daran
beteiligt. Entweder ist der Dichter nur Empf?nger der g?ttlichen
Kraft oder Instrument der Gottheit, die durch ihn das Werk schafft,
oder der Dichter erh?lt von seinem Gott die Gabe des Dichtens, . . .,
oder sein
Gott steht ihn durch seinen Rat in besonders schwierigen
F?llen bei."11) At some stage, scholars began to stress the fact that
it is only in the Muse-invocations at the beginning of the poems
that the narrator is completely dependent on the Muse, and that
10) Ford 1992, 28. The proems he is referring to are something different from
the Muse-invocations with which the Iliad and Odysseyopen.
11) Falter 1934, 3-10; quotation from p. 3. The same view in Kranz 1967,
10-7; Schadewaldt 1959, 78-9; Kambylis 1965, 13-6; and Lenz 1980, 27.
12) De Jong 1987b, 45-53. Similar analyses in Verdenius 1983, 38-40; Murray
1983, 11; P?tscher 1986; Rito?k 1989, 342-3; and Segal 1994, 138.
13) For discussion and scholarship on this important aspect of the Homeric
epics, see De Jong 2001, ad 8.487-91.
14) Cf. also Finkelberg 1998, who states that "the traditional poet saw himself
as a mouthpiece of the Muses" and "no element in the song . . . would be con-
strued by the audience or the poet himself as the poet's 'creation'" (27).
15) Ford 1992, 31-9, quotations from pp. 38-9.
spread in time and place. Kleos canbe spread by the heroes them-
selves, acting as narrators (Odysseus) or amateur-singers (Achilles),
but those best suited to perpetuate the kleos of men are the pro-
fessional singers, because of their relationship with the Muses.16)
Later poets will not hesitate to describe?and promote?this hence
fact e.g., Theognis
explicitly, (237-52), who tells the subject of his
poetry, Cyrnus, that his name will be spread over the whole world
and will not die after his death, thanks to the gift of the Muses
which escorts him, i.e., thanks to his immortalization in (Theognis')
poetry.
Thus in principle the task of a poet is to further the kleos of
others. But the Homeric narrator twice indicates that songs them-
selves may also partake of kleos?, in Odyssey 8.73-5:
16) For general discussions of Homeric kleos, see Maehler 1963, 10-3, 26-7;
Segal 1994, 85-109; Edwards 1985, 71-91; Goldhill 1991, 96-166; Olson 1995,
1-23.
17) And cf. the fact that singers are called pe?????t?? in Odyssey1.325 and 8.83.
I also draw attention to Odyssey8.497-8, where Odysseus promises to tell other
people about Demodocus' divine talent, in other words, to spread his fame.
18) De Jong 2001, a? 8.74.
to his own poem: at that time (when Odysseus visited the Phaeacians)
songs about the Trojan war and the nostoi of the other heroes were
famous, now (in his own time) his song is heard, which, because it
is about the nostos of the last Greek to come home (cf. Od. 1.11-5),
is the newest and hence deserving of kleos.?)
19) Cf. Nagy 1974, 12: "I believe that the poet of the Odyssey is here [in Od.
1.351-2] making a self-conscious reference to his own genre, or even to his com-
position". Whether ?e?t?t? can also have a connotation of originality is a mat-
ter of debate. Pro: Beye (1966, 79) and Danek (1998, 60); contra: Hose (2000, 8).
The two passages make clear that epic poetry need not necessarily always deal
with the remote past; cf. Latacz 1996, 83, who remarks that comparative research
on epics shows that they do incorporate recent events, and Crielaard 2002. Now
the Homeric narrator does indicate at other places that his subject matter belongs
to the remote past, so, if my self-referential interpretation of the two passages is
right, this would show him here not looking back at his poem from his own tem-
poral vantage point, but forward from the other poems inside his poem to his
own poem, which forms their culmination; see Thalman 1984, 162-3.
20) Cf. //. 2.119; 3.287; Od. 22.255; 24.433.
'yes'.22)
According to Ford, however, these passages provide more proof,
in addition to the Muse-invocations, that the narrator is renouncing
responsibility for his own poem, instead attributing it to the gods,
who would create the destiny of a mortal and the song which
both
recounts that destiny.23) This seems to me an untenable interpretation,
both because the Greek in Iliad 6 clearly suggests that the 'men of
future generations' (not the gods) will make/sing the song about
Helen, and because in Odyssey 1.347-9 Telemachus explicitly dis-
tinguishes between fate (for which the gods are responsible) and
24) Scholars are divided as to who is the referent of oi: Penelope, Odysseus, or
both. For discussion (and older scholarship), see Edwards 1985, 90; Katz 1991,
20-9; and Goldhill 1991, 100. I opt for the traditional analysis, which takes Penelope
as the referent, accepting the consequence that at this point the Odysseyis seen as
primarily Penelope's (rather than Odysseus') song.
25) Cf. Russo, Fernandez-Galiano & Heubeck 1992, ad loe. Ford takes lines
196-7 as 'the gods will fashion a song for men on earth', but it seems more likely
that ?p????????s?? has a local sense (cf. the clearly parallel ?p' a????p??? in 201).
26) Cf. Finley 1978, 3; Thalmann 1984, 169; Edwards 1985, 90-1; Katz 1991,
20-9.
27) Murnaghan 1987, 125; Goldhill 1991, 101; Danek 1998, 487.
e? d? ?? ?e??
?st?e?e ta?? pe???a??? ??t? ??????,
afa?e?? a? d?te? ??? a? ?????e??e? a?
???sa?? ???da? d??te? ?st???? ???t??.
'And yet had not the gods turned the world upside down, we should
have acquired no significance, and should have remained unsung,
instead of giving themes of song for future generations.'
4. The Achaean wall, or the (songs last longer than monuments9 motif
28) R?ter 1969, 254: "Indem Od. . . . sich selbst r?hmt, r?hmt er zugleich die
Odyssee und ihren Dichter, denn Dichtung und Dichter sind es ja, die seinen
Ruhm zum Himmel tragen. Der Dichter jedoch zugleich mit seinem Helden sich
selbst und sein Werk." Schadewaldt (1959, 80-1) and Taplin (1992, 88) also take
Iliad 2.325 (the kleos of the portent at Aulis will never die) as self-referential, to
my mind unconvincingly.
29) Other instances of the 'subject of song for future generations' motif are
found in Theognis 251-2; Euripides Alcestis 445-54, Supplices 1225, and Theocritus
Idyl 12.11; these do not, however, refer to (future) epic song or Homer. My col-
league from the French department, Dr. Jelle Koopmans, drew my attention to
an instance of the motif in Chansonde Roland 1466, where Roland exhorts Olivier
at the beginning of the batde: "Male chan?un n'en deit cantee" ('Let no unfavor-
able song be sung about it', sc. our behaviour in the batde).
30) I was inspired here by Ford (1992, 131-71), although I do not share his
conclusions (see n. 34). Cf. also the highly illuminating chapters four and five in
Ideally, these future people not only see the grave-mound but also
recall the deeds of the man buried there, in the way wishfully
described by Hector (//. 7.84-91):
Ford 2002, where again I do not accept his conclusion on p. 116 that "Homer
does not draw explicit analogies (positive or negative) between the monumental-
izing of poetry and the tangible monument of stone or bronze"; although he writes
"explicit" analogies, he means in fact all analogies, also implicit ones. Crielaard
(2002, 249-56) also points at objects which in their 'biography' preserve the mem-
ory of heroes, e.g. Iphitus' bow {Od. 21.13-41); these passages, however, never con-
tain the key-word kleos.
~
31) Cf. also Od. 11.75-6 12.14-5; //. 7.84-91; 11.371-2; 16.456-7.
likely that his memory is fed by epic poetry. Indeed, the combina-
tion 'glorious Hector' is one of the standard ways in which Hector
is referred to in the Iliad. Thus the suggestion is that poems are an
everlasting.
Is the same opposition already present in Homer? I think it is.
For this we must turn to the long external prolepsis in which the
narrator describes the fate of the wall around the Greek ships after
the fall of Troy (//. 12.17-30):
32) Corcyra, end of the sixth century BC. Quoted in Peek 1955, 25.
33) De Jong 1987a, 77-8. See also Scodel 1992, 58-9, who speaks of an 'anti-
epitaph' (in that Hector rather than the man buried is praised). She suggests that
in Homer's time real epitaphs already existed but that Homer, wanting to depict
a pre-literate heroic society, instead inserted this oral pendant.
34) There are many other interpretations of the significance of this unique
excurse on the destruction of the wall: 1) according to Aristotie and many schol-
ars in his wake, the poet removed what he had created himself, so as to prevent
his hearers from going and looking for the wall of which there was no trace; 2)
Scodel (1982) compares the passage to Flood-myths, and suggest that the wall puts
the Trojan war into a remote past and marks the end of the era of the heroes;
3) Ford (1992, 147-57) takes the wall to represent the Iliad and suggests that Homer
resisted the idea of fixation of his text through writing and showed via the destruc-
tion of the wall that such fixation does not work.
further and say that without the Iliad, not only the memory of the
wall, but that of the martial exploits of the race of semi-divine men
at Troy (symbolized in the above passage by their ox-hide shields
and helmets) would have been lost. As Reinhardt
puts it: "Was
Poseidon verrichtet, ist das Werk der ewigen Natur. Das Menschen-
werk geht unter im Ewigen. Das Grosse, das geschah, lebt nur noch
im Gedicht."35)
A later fellow poet, Propertius, will spell out what the Homeric
narrator leaves implicit (Elegy 3.1.25-34):
35) Reinhardt 1961, 267-9, quotation from 269. Taplin (1992, 140) adds: "Poetry
is imperishable, provided that?unlike the wall?it has attracted divine favour. The
poet prompts the thought that it is significant that the gods have not obliterated
the Iliad!"
36) Propertius' poem forms part of a series of passages which suggest that the
kleos of the Homeric heroes is entirely due to Homer: cf. Pindar Nemean 7.20-33;
Theocritus 16.51-7; 22.218-20.
Does the Homeric narrator even foresee for himself and his poems
the kind of immortal kleos which later poets claim, most famously
Horace in Ode 3.30.1-7 (? have finished a monument more lasting
than bronze ... I shall not wholly die, and a large part of me will
elude the Goddess of death')?37) In the past most scholars would
have answered 'no' (see my note 2), and recently Ford has reiterated
this position:
Often without thinking we assume that Homer would have ended his
dictation or writing with the same feeling as Horace, when he penned
the epilogue to three books of odes. . . Yet I do not see much trace
of such an attitude in Homer. . .To assume that the availability of
writing would have automatically brought with it expectations of
Horatian perfection and enduringness may be a no less apocalyptic
fantasy than the notion of a 'literate revolution' in which the tech-
nology of the alphabet instantaneously transformed thought and
speech.38)
37) For an overview of such claims (mainly from the side of Roman poets), see
Stroh 1971.
38) Ford 1992, 135-6 and again in Ford 2003, 19: "I shall argue that it is
significant that only very late in the fifth century we find songs being approached,
studied, and enjoyed in the form of texts?fixed and isolated verbal constructs
demanding a special form of appreciation and analysis".
39) Despite the fact that the volume in which Ford's 2003 paper appeared
argues against such a strict dichotomy. Cf. Yunis 2003, esp. 10: "Oral and writ-
ten phenomena are found mixed in complicated, unpredictable ways".
40) Dowden 1996, 48.
been claimed that even in the case of oral poetry there must have
been such a thing as re-performance:
There is every reason to suppose not merely that all the archaic and
early classical poetry that survived into the Hellenistic age was orig-
inally performed orally . . ., but that most of it was often re-performed
subsequent to the first production. Otherwise, what would be the
point of the poet's universal claim, from Homer to Pindar, that they
conferred lasting and widespread glory, kleos, on the subjects of their
songs.41)
Achilles does not specify that his everlasting kleos is due to his appear-
ing in poetry, and in his commentary Griffin writes: "Do we really
believe that Achilles, at such a moment, is presented as talking
about himself as a literary figure?"44) He is clearly sceptical. I myself
am more inclined to answer this question with a 'yes', on the basis
of the self-referential passages discussed in section 3. An appealing
analysis of what is going on in these Unes is given by Edwards:
Indeed, not only is the Iliad announced, its immortality is also pro-
claimed. If Achilles is promised immortality, this can only be because
the Homeric narrator foresees immortality for his own poem, along
the lines later set out explicitly by Virgil (A. 9.446-7):
Conclusion
44) Griffin 1995, ad 9.412-3. He is in fact reacting to the thesis that ????? ?f??-
t?? would be an Indo-European technical terminus for kleos bestowed by poetry;
for a summary of the discussion on this thesis, see Olson 1995, 224-7.
45) Edwards 1985, 78.
narrator indirectly promotes his own person and poems via the
Muses, suggests that poetry, including his own, can itself attain that
most coveted heroic asset kleos, makes his own anticipated work
by
his heroes, and hints that while monuments are subject to the ravages
of time, his poems, made with divine assistance, are indestructible,
indeed themselves partake in and thereby confer immortal kleos.
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