The stated aim of Isabella Nova’s book is to provide an account of the Homeric poems in image and text from the 7th century through the 5th century BCE. While her study of the texts from this period is partial, she does offer a comprehensive canvas of the visual material in our record that depicts characters and episodes that appear in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Accordingly, Nova’s book is an invaluable resource, insofar as it gathers together a database of Homeric paintings from precisely the period when the Homeric poems transformed from oral performance pieces into the textual artefacts that resemble the poems we currently possess. Moreover, her analysis of this material is always circumspect, as she provides context for each image and never overstates the relevance of the Homeric material that might inform our interpretation of any given image. Nova is not here breaking new ground. Her book will necessarily draw comparison with earlier forays into this subject by Snodgrass, Lowenstam, Latacz, and others.[1] Where Nova differentiates herself from these works is her focus on reception across media. In this respect, Nova’s book represents a signal contribution to our ever-widening appreciation of the dynamic forces at work in archaic and classical Greek culture and the centrality of the Homeric poems in the cultural expression of Hellenism during these periods.
Nova’s study is broken down into three major parts. She begins Part 1 at Lefkandi in the 10th century, suggesting that in Euboea there may have been an audience for the recitation of the Homeric poems. Likewise, Euboaean colonization may have been responsible for the earliest dissemination of the Homeric poems we can document in the 8th and 7th centuries. By the 6th century, evidence begins to proliferate that there are texts of the Homeric poems circulating: she notes the innovations in Corinthian painting and, especially, the back and forth between Xenophanes and Theagenes of Rhegium in Magna Graecia. Nevertheless, Nova, following Nagy, argues that the oral tradition lived on even after the Homeric texts were written down and that these two facets of Homer’s influence were coexistent for some time.[2]
Nova explores epic themes and subjects in visual iconography from the 7th through 5th centuries in Part 2. In the course of her discussion, she canvasses the various ways one can make sense of the fact that in the exact period that we think the Homeric poems were coming into a written form, scenes from these two poems begin to proliferate in the visual record across the ancient Mediterranean. The question concerns directionality of influence. Here we have a spectrum of opinions ranging from early ideas that these images prove the existence of a stable Homeric text already in the 8th century to Snodgrass’ rejection of any knowing or meaningful correspondence between the two media to Lowenstam’s more circumspect conclusion that the Iliad and the Odyssey would have been but two of many sources for our painters’ inspiration and none would have been authoritative on its own. Nova pushes this further by suggesting that it is not impossible that the artists themselves produced original material that made its way into the Homeric poems later. The entire gamut of possibilities, then, should remain on the table, even if this makes our task in delineating what is especially “Homeric” in this period much more difficult. This is an entirely sensible proposition; it almost certainly accounts for the actual lie of the land in the 7th and 6th centuries BCE.
Part 3 then concludes Nova’s study by examining epic themes and subjects in Athenian tragedy. Nova considers the way in which tragedy is Homeric, given that we have evidence for only a limited number of plays that treat specifically Homeric episodes from the Iliad and Odyssey (Aeschylus’ Iliad and Odyssey trilogies; Sophocles’ Nausicaa, Phaeacians, and Niptra; Euripides’ Cyclops and the Rhesus). In this respect, Nova considers tragedy to be a continuation and inheritance of the oral tradition, so that all tragedians in the broadest sense are Homeric. The arrival of the Homeric texts in Athens caused an explosion of Homeric scenes to be depicted on ceramics, but Nova insists that the greater attention to subjects present in the Homeric poems does not reveal any strict adherence to the Homeric version of these episodes. There is, however, a remarkable overlap between the iconographic and tragic record: Homeric episodes that take off in Attic painting are the same ones that appear on the Athenian stage, while the particular interpretation of Homeric characters is shared across media, e.g. Achilles is marked for his cruelty; his relationship, perhaps sexual, with Patroclus becomes central. In the final analysis, it is clear that in the 5th century the Homeric version of episodes is well known by both tragedians and painters, but also that none of them felt obliged to follow the Homeric version exclusively, regularly changing details and names of characters. In fact, the dissemination of the Homeric texts in Athens causes artists and tragedians to focus all the more on variant traditions in their receptions of Homer.
Nova’s analysis comes across at times as almost reflexively contrarian, denying wherever possible the significance of any intertextuality involving the Iliad, the Odyssey, and our visual and textual record. Throughout her book, Nova approaches her material in the spirit of Quellenforschung with an eye to showing where the Iliad and the Odyssey are avoided, modified, or transformed. She regularly notes how any given artefact or text evinces elements that do not align perfectly with what we find in the Homeric poems. She makes much of these divergences—so much so, in fact, that the reader often gets the sense that Nova wants to minimize, sometimes completely, the influence of the Iliad and Odyssey on the material she analyzes. Her emphasis here is very much indebted to the conservatism of Snodgrass. This is all very useful as an exercise in outlining how later artists and authors exhibit their own innovations in the shadow that Homer cast over Greek culture. The problem, of course, is that this shadow exists, no matter how much Nova may want us to ignore it or downplay it.
A frustrating aspect of Nova’s book is its unbalanced scope. With respect to the textual material from her chosen period, Nova confines herself primarily to 5th-century texts, mainly tragedy, with one minor excursion into epinician poetry (Bacchylides 13). She does not discuss the relationship between the Homeric poems and Old Comedy, nor their relationship with Hesiod or archaic lyric. Admittedly, there are few topics more consuming or enormous than the literary reception of the Homeric poems, which would require, in Robert Lamberton’s words “writing a history of Greek and Latin literature from the perspective of Homeric influence.”[3] When one engages in an undertaking like Nova’s, of necessity one cannot aim for absolute comprehensiveness. At the same time, the impossibility of such a task does not exonerate an author from the dictates of due diligence. By avoiding discussion of the poetic reception of Homer before the 5th century, Nova severely curtails the impact of her arguments concerning the visual record during this period.
A case in point: Nova categorically minimizes any Homeric associations in the 7th century representations of the Blinding of the Cyclops by appealing to popular “folktale” rather than to the Homeric Odyssey.[4] Consideration of contemporaneous poetry complicates her argument. If, as Nova argues, there is no connection between the Homeric Odyssey and the Aristonothos crater from Caere, one wonders how it is that specific elements (e.g. five attackers, the last one lifting up his body and using gravity and his own strength) are precisely paralleled at Odyssey 9.383-8. Here it is helpful to remember that recent years have seen a robust body of scholarship emerge that is devoted to exploring the relationship between the Homeric poems and other archaic poets.[5] The incorporation of minor details from the Homeric poems like what we see on the Aristonothos crater is precisely paralleled by lyric poetry from the turn of the 7th century e.g. Stesichorus, whose incorporation of such Homeric details is widely recognized as purposeful and proof that he and his audience were engaging with the Homeric poems as texts.[6] This is not to say that in the situation of the Aristonothos crater (or, for that matter, in any other situation that Nova canvasses in this book) we must insist on the primacy of the Homeric Odyssey—it very well could be that this element was introduced into the tradition by Aristonothos or the school he represented. But the idea that these are two completely independent narratives created in isolation from one another does beggar belief. Cultural production is never conducted in such a vacuum– especially in a landscape as interconnected as the archaic Mediterranean, especially when we have an analogous textual example from south Italy to parallel this visual one in Etruria. Nova avoids such nuance completely.
On the other hand, Nova’s relentless focus on the divergences from the Homeric poems in the record she explores at times reveals genuinely novel results. One of her particularly rich case-studies involves the delivery of Achilles’ new weapons. The images we have of this scene from the 5th century usually differ from Homer in the exact same way that Aeschylus’ Nereids appears to have differed from Homer’s. How do we account for this? Should we downplay the influence of Homer completely? If that is even possible, do our images then depict Aeschylean innovation? Or did Aeschylus take his ideas from our vases? Do we have independent representations of the same interpretation of Homer’s Achilles? Nova favors the last option and minimizes the Homeric model completely, arguing that the popularity of this scene in the visual record of the 5th century suggests a tradition that transcends the Homeric Iliad. It does remain unclear, however, if we are meant to read these images as innovative appropriations of Homeric material or specimens of a tradition that is wholly alternative to the Homeric one. It seems impossible to sustain an argument that any cultural product from the 5th century that dealt with material covered in the Iliad could be received without Homeric mediation on the part of the viewer or reader. Such was the influence of the Homeric poems on Greek culture by this later date. While I appreciate Nova’s drive to free our visual record from the tyranny of the Homeric texts, we must acknowledge the basic reality here: at some point, certainly by the 5th century, Homer simply was Greek culture and necessarily would have been the primary reference point for anything having to do with Achilles or Odysseus. One might also quibble with the specifics of her analysis —Aeschylus’ Iliad trilogy for all its differences from the Iliad itself must be fundamentally and primarily Homeric, not only because of the numerous allusions to the Iliad we can document across its fragments, but because the author’s famous dictum about his tragedies being but slices from the Homeric banquet makes little sense if his most explicitly Homeric tragedies are supposed to have come from an alternative tradition entirely. Nevertheless, Nova’s overarching point can stand as the contribution that it is: the outsized influence of the Homeric poems on Greek culture in the 5th century did not block streams of influence from other sources and these other sources are especially prominent precisely when Homeric references are most obvious.
All in all, then, Nova’s book is a successful contribution to the library of work devoted to the reception of Homer in antiquity. Scholars of mythographic art, Homerists, and those who work on reception, especially of the Homeric poems, will learn much from Nova’s study. The Herculean work of accounting for the influence of Homer on subsequent culture will, of course, remain for us all to shoulder, but the load has now been lightened by Isabella Nova.
Notes
[1] Snodgrass, A. 1998. Homer and the Artists: Text and Picture in Early Greek Art. Cambridge. Lowenstam, S. 2008. As Witnessed by Images: The Trojan War Tradition in Greek and Etruscan Art. Johns Hopkins; Latacz, J. 2008. Homer: Der Mythos von Troia in Dichtung und Kunst. Munich.
[2] See especially Nagy, G. 1990. Pindar’s Homer. The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past. Johns Hopkins and Nagy, G. 1995. Homeric Questions. UT Austin.
[3] Lamberton, Robert. 1992. Homer’s Ancient Readers. The Hermeneutics of Greek Epic’s Earliest Exegetes. Princeton: vii n. 1.
[4] We have four instances of this scene that all date the the mid-7th century: from Eleusis (LIMC, s.v. Odysseus n. 94); from Argos (LIMC, s.v. Odysseus n. 88); the Aristonothos crater from Etruria (LIMC, s.v. Odysseus/Uthuze n. 56); and another Etruscan pithos (LIMC, s.v. Polyphemus I 27bis).
[5] See especially Nelson, T. 2023. Markers of Allusion in Archaic Greek Poetry. Cambridge, which does not appear in Nova’s bibliography.
[6] On the Iliad in the Geryoneis, see Lazzeri, M. 2008. Studi sulla Gerioneide di Stesicoro. Naples, 254–68; Curtis, P. 2011. Stesichoros’s Geryoneis. Leiden, 146–51; Castellaneta, S. 2013. Il seno svelato ad misericordiam: esegesi e fortuna di un’immagine omerica. Bari, 49-59; Davies, M. and P. J. Finglass, eds. 2014. Stesichorus: The Poems. Cambridge, ad frr. 15-17, 19; Kelly, A. 2015. “Stesichorus’ Homer.” In Stesichorus in Context, edited by P. J. Finglass and Adrian Kelly, 21-44. Cambridge, esp. 35-9; Eisenfeld, H. 2018. “Geryon the Hero, Herakles the God.” JHS 138: 80–99, esp. 91-3; Nelson 2023 (see note 5): 56-8. On the Odyssey in the Nostoi, see Davies and Finglass 2014: 475-81; Kelly 2015: 39-41; and Carvalho, S. 2022. Mythical Narratives in Stesichorus: Greek Heroes on the Move. Berlin, 99-104.