Homer’s Text and Language [illustrated] 0252029836, 9780252029837

Table of contents :
TEXT ..............3
The Homeric Text and Problems of Multiformity ..............25
Wests Iliad ..............40
Different ..............75
Emerging ..............110
Questions ..............131

Citation preview

HOMER'S AND

TEXT

LANGUAGE

GENERAL

EDITOR

Gregory Nagy Harvard University EDITORIAL

BOARD

Olga N. Davidson Brandeis University Bruce Lincoln University of Chicago Alexander Nehamas Princeton University A list of books in the series appears at the end of this book.

Homer's Text and Language

GREGORY

UNIVERSITY URBANA

NAGY

OF AND

ILLINOIS

CHICAGO

PRESS

© 2004 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America

§) This book is printed on acid-free paper.

c54321 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nagy, Gregory. Homer's text and language/ Gregory Nagy. p. cm. - (Traditions) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN0-252-02983-6 (acid-free paper) 1. Homer-Criticism, Textual. 2. Epic poetry, Greek-Criticism, Textual. 3. Greek languageEtymology. 4. Homer-Language. I. Title. II. Traditions (Urbana, Ill.) 2004 PA4037.N348 883'.01-dc22 2004011786

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Abbreviations

IX

Introduction

Xl

PART 1.

2.

vu

I:

TEXT

The Quest for a Definitive Text of Homer: Evidence from the Homeric Scholia and Beyond The Homeric Text and Problems of Multiformity

3. Editing the Homeric Text: West's Iliad

3 25

40

4. Editing the Homeric Text: Different

Methods, Ancient and Modern 5. Aristarchean Questions: Emerging Certainties about the Finality of Homer's Text PART

II:

75

110

LANGUAGE

6. The Name of Achilles: Questions of Etymology and "Folk-Etymology"

131

7. The Name of Apollo: Etymology and Essence 8. An Etymology for the Dactylic Hexameter

144

9. Ellipsis in Homeric Poetry

157

Bibliography Index

177

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I offer my warmest thanks to Ryan Hackney, Casey Due, and Christopher Dadian, to whom I am grateful for all their help in editing the final version of my text. I am also very grateful to Joycelyn Peyton, who created the index. I dedicate this book to my students, who inspire my research.

ABBREVIATIONS

A through .0 a through w BA/BA, Esametro GM GMZ HQ HR

IC MHV N plus year OBI PH pp PR VMK

Iliad I through XXIV Odyssey i through xxiv Best of the Achaeans = N 1979/i999 [with new Introduction] Fantuzzi and Pretagostini 1996 Greek Mythology and Poetics = N 1990b Grafton, Most, and Zetzel 1985 Homeric Questions = N 1996b Homeric Responses = N 2003a Janko 1998a Parry 1971 Nagy plus year Blackburn et al. 1989 Pindar's Homer= N 1990a Poetry as Performance = N 1996a Plato's Rhapsody and Homer's Music = N 2002a Viermannerkommentar 'four-man commentary'

INTRODUCTION

The Homer of Homer's Text and Language is a metonym for the text and the language of the Iliad and the Odyssey.' The empirical basis for all that we know about Homer is this text, this language. What I offer here is a book about this Homer. It is a set of essays rewritten and reintegrated with one central aim in mind: to show how the text and language of Homer derive from a system, an oral poetic system. That is my deduction. My overall method, however, which has been shaped by over three decades of research on Homer, is more inductive than deductive. Inductive thinking about the facts of Homeric text and language has become for me a story in itself, and this book is my attempt to tell such a story. In Homeric. studies, there is an ongoing debate centering on different ways to establish the text of Homer, different ways to appreciate the poetry created in the language of Homer. This book takes a stand in the midst of that debate. The stakes are high, not only because Homer remains such an indispensable figure in the canons of world literature but also because so much about Homeric poetry is still unknown or uncertain. In an age of information technology, the debate has only intensified, and the stakes have been raised ever higher. Two of the essays rewritten in this book appeared originally in an electronic journal, The Bryn Mawr Classical Review.2 The second of these two essays, which was a review of a recent edition of the Homeric Iliad,3provoked a reply that was published in the same 4 electronic journal. The electronic trail leads further. The writer of that reply went on to incorporate a rewritten version into a printed book,5 but then, in 1. By "metonym" I mean an expression of meaning by way of connecting something to something else, to be contrasted with "metaphor:' which I define for the moment as an expression of meaning by way of substituting something for something else. 2. These essays are N 1998b and N 2oooa, rewritten here as Ch.5 and Ch.3 respectively: http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr /1998/ 1998-07-14.html and http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr / 2000/2000-09-12.html. 3. N 2000a, reviewing West 1998b. 4. West 2001a, replying to N 2000a: http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcrho01/2001-o9o6.html. 5. West 2001a, incorporated into the printed book of West 2001b, on which I have more to say in Ch.4.

xi

Xii

I N T RO D U CT I O N 6

response to my review of that book, which I published in a printed journal, that same writer chose the same electronic journal for a new reply, combining it with his reply to another review of the same book, which had also been 7 published in the same electronic journal. From the start, the technological aspects of this debate caught the attention of popular media: for example, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung took note of the publicity sparked by the 8 electronic publication of my original review. Electronic publishing has not only intensified the ongoing debate over 10 Homer. 9 It has also accelerated the rush to engage in the debate. All that rush needs to be counterbalanced by a slow and careful rereading of arguments central to the debate. Homer's Text and Language addresses such a need by returning to the debate in the form of a printed book, to be complemented by an electronic version of the same book. The printed version offers an opportunity to engage in the kind of slow and careful rereading I have in mind. I should add here my opinion that electronic publishing in the Classics need not be used merely to promote the intensification of debate for the sake of debate: I advocate alternative uses, focusing on enhanced ways of 11 reading and reflecting on ancient texts. An opportunity to reflect is also an opportunity to reposition the ongoing debate. In practicing the profession ofliterary historian and critic, I must be both straightforward and open to dialogue. In maintaining a critical outlook, I will need to be direct in some of my criticisms. In developing my central argument, that Homeric poetry derives from a system, an oral poetic system, I find it necessary to highlight my disagreements with some contemporary Classicists. On some points, they too disagree with me-or with each other; on many other points, there is general agreement. If I became preoccupied, however, with tracking all the agreements and disagreements, the aim of my book would be lost. Homer's Text and Language tells its own story in the form of a unified positive argumentation. 6. N 20036, reviewing West 20016. N 20036 is rewritten here as Ch.4. 7. West 2004, replying to Rengakos 2002 and N 2003b. Both Rengakos and Nagy reviewed West 2001b. N 2003b is rewritten here as Ch.4. 8. Schloemann 2001, assessing the review of West 1998b by N 2000a. 9. For an electronic publication of the Introductions and the Bibliographies for Volumes 1 and 2 ofN 2001h, Greek Literature (both of these volumes concern mainly Homer), see N 2001g: http:/ /chs.harvard.edu/chs_pubs/ninevol/index.htm. 10. For example, the printed publication by Kullmann 2001 of his review of Latacz 2oooa/b/c and 2001 on Homer was soon countered by the electronic publication of counterarguments by Latacz 2002: http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2002/2002-02-15.html. n.A case in point is the concept of"multitext;' to which I will turn at a later point.

INTRODUCTION

In the course of my argumentation, I hope to address a wide variety of questions of interest to students of literature in general, not only to Classicists in particular. What do our text of Homer and its variants really stand for? What were the norms of composition, performance, and editing that shaped the poetry as we now have it? How does tradition operate on the interactive levels of synchrony and diachrony? 12 For my argument to be effective, I need to engage with specialized studies grounded in the realities of Homeric text and language-and with the technical terminology that goes with those studies. The terminology of text criticism is introduced gradually as the reading of Part I proceeds. Then, halfway into the book, Part II begins to introduce a further set of terms having to do with linguistic reconstructions, or "etymologies:' To read through the whole book in sequence, then, is to acquire at least two different kinds of complex technical language currently being used in Homeric research. What sustains the reading, however, is not the gradual acquisition of these complex technical languages but the central argument itself, which remains simple in its essence: that the text and language of Homeric poetry derive from oral traditional poetry. The central argument is driven by three special interests: the systematic nature of oral poetry; the interplay of tradition and innovation in this kind of poetry; and the realities of actual performance. The first interest goes to the heart of my ongoing research on the history of Homeric reception. By combining the insights of Milman Parry and Albert Lord with the general methods of structural linguistics, I aim to show that the system underlying the making of Homeric verse enables us to appreciate the Homeric editorial practices of the ancient world. My second interest, concerning the interplay of innovation and tradition, runs closely parallel to the first: once we recognize the ways in which creative performers analogize and extend analogies within a tradition, we can break free from rigidly confining ideas of a single "Homeric genius" as the ultimate source of a once-and-for-all fixation of the Homeric text. Thirdly, my interest in the dynamics of performance motivates my re-examinations of the "origins" of the hexameter, as well as my analysis of the precious information contained in the Homeric scholia, that is, in the marginal notes we find preserved in ancient papyri and, more pervasively, in medieval manuscripts. In these scholia, traces of generations of past performances can be detected still. On the terms "synchronic" and "diachronic;' see Saussure 1916.117: "De meme synchronie et diachronie designeront respectivement un etat de langage et une phase d'evolution:' 12.

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I NT R O D U C TI O N

Chapter One plunges the reader into the intricacies of the Homeric scholia-and what they can tell us about the ancient transmission of Homer. A key to understanding this transmission is the research of one particular ancient expert in the text and language of Homer, Aristarchus of Samothrace, director of the Library of Alexandria in the middle of the second century CE. The first five chapters accentuate the work of this man. Already in the first chapter, I start building an argument about the variant readings attributed by later sources to Aristarchus: most of these readings, as I strive to show, derive from his practice of comparing and collating Homeric scrolls available to him. Aristarchus relied as much on such outside information as he did, famously, on explaining Homer "out of Homer" (Homeron ex Homerou is, on applying his intusaphenizein 'clarify Homer out of Homer')-that 13 itions about the underlying system that animates the poetry. If my argument holds, I will be justified in saying that the work of Aristarchus has preserved for us traces of authentic variations in the performance of ancient Homeric poetry. Chapter Two offers a clarification of the term "multiform" and its applications in the study of traditional oral poetics. It makes a connection between Lord's notion of multiformity and the variations we find in the Homeric text as we know it. Some of these variations are insignificant, while others are of great significance. One sure sign of significant variation in Homeric poetry is the occasional highlighting of a given variant by the poetry itself: for example, a variant can be rhetorically "focalized" in contrast with other variants. Chapter Three is more technical in content, examining in detail Martin West's edition of the Homeric Iliad. The results of this examination are essential for the overall argument initiated in Chapters One and Two: that the variations in wording as we find them in Homeric texts stem ultimately from variations in formulaic composition stemming from many centuries of ongoing Homeric performances. Chapter Four continues an ongoing debate with West by articulating some essential differences between his view of the Homeric text and mine. I argue that this text reflects a poetic system, and that editors of Homer need to work out a system of their own in their ongoing efforts to understand that system. For West, on the other hand, the Homeric text reflects no system, and he feels no oblig