[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
Twelfth in an influential series, this volume gathers ten papers from a three-day conference organized ten years ago by the University of Lausanne. Eight of the ten focus on Greek texts; one explores the Hebrew Bible and another Latin verse epitaphs. With varying success, each chapter juggles three further concepts prominent in the book’s title and section headings: narration, performance, and (a somewhat underdefined) “mythic-ritual poetics.” Together they display the range of thinking accommodated by the familiar (perhaps increasingly overextended) pairing that occurs in the series title, Orality and Literature in the Ancient World.
The introduction highlights ways in which verbal art can substitute for rituals. An old Jewish parable taken up by Jean-Luc Godard’s Hélas pour moi aptly frames observations on Pindar and Philostratus. Forgoing any definitions, the editors nevertheless show awareness of the extreme fluidity of “myth” and “ritual,” while suggesting we should pay attention to how they function as “energetic forces that interact and merge with the literary text” (8). “Performed narrative,” for them, is an umbrella term covering centos, biblical texts, and epitaphs, one that aligns with other modes, like images. One nagging question about “performance” (i.e. what is it not?) never arises here.
Elizabeth Minchin usefully deploys sociolinguistics and discourse analysis to examine stories in the Iliad that leverage personal memories for the purpose of persuading an addressee. These moments, as she points out, move the plot forward, but often speech is not efficacious. Work by Hugo Bowles on storytelling and Harvey Sacks on “tellability” helps Minchin articulate the similarities among a diverse set of speeches that includes Andromache’s plea to Hector (6.413-30) and Nestor’s advice for his feuding colleagues (1.260-73), as well as Phoenix’s recollections (9.444-95) and Achilles’ interaction with Thetis (1.396-407) and Priam (24.602-17). Such snapshots of memory range back about 80 years, Minchin estimates: characters speak of their own experiences or what they have heard from participants in the past events. It would be interesting to compare this with estimates for the time-depth of Homeric poetry itself, and for non-poetic oral traditions. Jan Vansina, for example, finds that oral stories preserve accurate information over a span of 200 years (“the grandfather’s grandfather” rule).[1]
Gregory Nagy offers a synthesis of his various contributions over five decades regarding the relationship between Sapphic poetry and Homeric verse, particularly as this emerges in Sappho 44. Metrics and diction are key to his finding that this poem interacts with an independent, parallel epic tradition rather than somehow deriving from it. Internal analysis, first, shows how the poem’s stichic glyconics expanded by two dactyls (glyc 2da) relate to the strophic “lyric” meter of Poem 94 (glyc 1da). Subsequent external analysis (especially of Vedic meter) supports a “dual etymology” for the Greek hexameter, as a convergence of so-called Aeolic meters and of dactylo-epitrite (both used by Pindar). The comparative view dissolves the lingering convention that has walled off “epic” from “lyric.” The lyre-playing Sappho looks much more like the gusle-playing epic performers studied by Milman Parry and Albert Lord.
Niall Slater’s richly detailed study traces the rocky pathway to the textualization of ancient Athenian comedies, from the selection of producers and poets, to rehearsals, to initial multimedia staging, and beyond. Anecdotal evidence leads him from stories of comedians stealing each other’s materials (Eupolis from Aristophanes, and vice versa) to moments of reperformance (the Frogs given a rare state-authorized re-run; comic characters singing snatches of earlier stage hits). He explores the still-puzzling evidence for team efforts–poets having their plays produced by others (e.g. Aristophanes through Philonides) or co-operating with rivals (as Eupolis claimed to have done with his Aristophanes). While the processes that transmuted one-shot comic works into durable texts remains hazy, Slater’s comprehensive collection persuades one about the fairly widespread availability of written versions at an early period, even as purely oral transmission (especially of the songs) continued on a parallel track.
The material aspects of originally verbal performance engage the next five authors (the last in Part I, and all those in Part II). Jasper Gaunt compares a number of vase-paintings of the Circe episode in the Odyssey, with careful attention to the types of animals depicted in the goddess’ menagerie. Pigs and boars (the hero’s crew) can be accompanied by wolves and lions or panthers (beasts mentioned at Od.10.212 who may actually be unfortunate humans previously metamorphosized by the witch’s magic wand), but also by horses, roosters or goats. Indications of diverse sounds (signaled by nonsense inscriptions on the pots) and the knowledge that satyr plays and comedies (by Aeschylus, Dinolochus of Syracuse, Anaxilas, and Ephippus) did center on Circe make Gaunt think that even mid-6th century cups featuring animals (in addition to the well-known “animal chorus” vases with their horses and dolphins) could point beyond the symposium toward early evolutionary stages of drama.
Saundra Fleury explores the interaction of ritual and poetry in representations of the Eleusinian mysteries. While reminding us that the Homeric Hymn to Demeter cannot be read as an uncomplicated depiction of Eleusinian realities, she still maintains that the poem is “an act of cult having its own ritual function” (112) (ignorant though we are of its performance situation). Her main focus is the epopteia (a second stage of participation, for those already initiated), with an important discussion of this still-mysterious Eleusinian institution. Given its richly metaphorical extension by philosophers, but the paucity of attention in other sources, Fleury suggests epopteia may have been restricted to an elite. Her application of the notions of Great and Little traditions (familiar from Robert Redfield) is useful for understanding further what may have gone on at the famous international attraction.[2]
Claas Lattmann revisits two Delphic hymns that most likely date from 128/7 BC, a remarkable pair of inscribed texts from the Treasury of the Athenians that preserve the original accompanying musical score. He usefully summarizes previous work, meticulously reads the compositions line-by-line, discusses the relationship between the two, and then focuses on the telling differences between these works, as products of both a one-time live oral performance, but also of the elite literate aesthetic we have come to identify as “Hellenistic.” In Lattmann’s nuanced view, the poems represent two distinct blends of the paian with another hymnic type—one time with the hyporchema, the other with the prosodion–and he sketches out a performance reconstruction scenario that would accommodate such unusual hybridization. A detailed case study in myth-ritual interaction, this essay will be essential for future work.
Ruth Scodel argues against Joseph Day’s influential idea that we should read inscribed epitaphs as an organic extension and evocation of funeral rituals. Her careful analysis ranges through texts in Peter Allan Hansen’s Carmina Epigraphica Graeca (and a few from SEG) making a number of valuable corrective points about situations, mood, and speech-framing. The language of lament on the stones, for instance, is more distancing than re-enactive; the verb olophuromai does not necessarily denote vocal expression of grief; a ritualized reading cannot cover the lines on the Ambracian polyandrôn (SEG 41.540)—a cenotaph—or do justice to the elegiac pity evoked by the 6th-century monument of Mnasitheos from Akraiphia, Boeotia (SEG 49.505T). Scodel’s extended reading of the famous inscribed Phrasikleia statue (CEG 24) carefully distinguishes its direct ventriloquism (“I am the sêma of Phrasikleia”) from the reader’s subsequent speech-act that alone can ensure the girl’s eternal name (she will always be called kourê).
Dylan Bovet offers the only Latin-centered essay, a reader-response approach that explores the way in which verse epitaphs can be experienced as intertextual performances that often foreground their own potential oralization. Three exemplary close readings (of Carmina Latina Epigraphica 1278, 973, and 1404) raise interesting questions about the relationship between material culture, ritual, and verbal art. Bovet’s focus is on the language concerning mos maiorum, especially in gendered discourses; through the variety of epitaphic strategies (dialogue, direct speech, impersonation) he uncovers a “continuous mythopoesis of Roman values.” An important section of the explication deals with the theme of the mortuus silens, the one who cannot speak; a larger thesis could easily be spun out of this fascinating insight.
The volume concludes with two chapters devoted to more markedly religious discourse (although the uneasy relation between “ritual” and “religion” has not been interrogated by any of the essayists here, any more than it has in the broader field). Raymond Person, Jr. combines conversation analysis with the idea of metonymic reference in an excellent close reading of Deuteronomy 26:1-11, on the first fruits offering. One of the few contributors here to acknowledge John Miles Foley’s notion of “traditional referentiality,” he shows how the part (the Hebrew text) stands for a whole (story and ritual) in such a way that recitation of the former summons up the entire law of God and the narrative of the Exodus. Furthermore, the multimodality of the performed text, with its emphatic series of commands to place objects, go to the priest and make a presentation not only evokes the primal grant of a land flowing with milk and honey, but (in Person’s view) helped the rite survive even after the destruction of the Temple, when the pragmatic features originally imagined (e.g. the physical location for the offering) no longer existed.
Anna Lefteratou muses on how Jesus and the Scamander came together poetically in the 5th-century AD Homeric Centos of the Empress Eudocia. The fourteen lines to which she devotes close attention recall in their diction the epics, the Bible and the exegetical traditions attached to both, especially on the topic of baptism ritual. Book 21of the Iliad, with its mighty river that doubles as a god provided fertile poetic ground for the stitcher of the late-Greek pastiche: the attuned reader would have seen double (if not triple) in this overlay. In this imaginary world, even Calypso can blend into the Virgin Mary. Lefteratou compares Eudocia’s technique to that of Callimachus and, beyond the purely dictional echoes, demonstrates how Eudocia was well aware of contemporary views uniting literature with art. Late Antique baptism rituals in the Holy Land give yet another dimension to the concatenation of performances.
It is difficult to encapsulate this variegated collection, but worth highlighting some larger questions toward which its thoughtful chapters point us. Why does “performance” (however we define it) get preserved? To what extent are the artisans who transmit these now frozen verbal acts transforming “originals” (if the concept applies)? How might disparate genres take different paths but illuminate one another? What are minimal and maximal limits on “myth” and “ritual”? Or are these merely modern impositions onto a body of ancient phenomena for which such terms are inadequate? Finally, how can one leverage ethnography and comparative studies about textualization–something very few of these essayists show interest in doing?
Authors and titles
Introduction: Anton Bierl, David Bouvier, and Ombretta Cesca
Part 1: Orality, Narration, and Performance in Poetry and Images
- Elizabeth Minchin, Memories Become Story: On the Poetics of Persuasion in Homer’s Iliad
- Gregory Nagy, Song 44 of Sappho as Shaped by Oral Traditions
- Niall W. Slater, “Modified Rapture!” In and Out of Orality in Staging Comedy
- Jasper Gaunt, Between Symposium, Stage, and Papyrus: The Story of Kirke in Archaic Greek
Part 2: Performance, Mythic-Ritual Poetics, and Writing
- Sandra Fleury, Writing the Unspeakable: How Did the Greeks Write about the Eleusinian Mysteries?
- Claas Lattmann, Between Athens and Delphi: The Performance and Poetics of the Delphic Hymns
- Ruth Scodel, Epitaph and Ritual
- Dylan Bovet, The Text, the Reader, and the Voice: Roman Mores in Verse Epitaphs
Part 3: Performance and Mythic-Ritual Poetics in Christian Texts
- Raymond F. Person Jr., Multimodality and Metonymy: Deuteronomy as a Test Case
- Anna Lefteratou, Jesus’ Baptism in the Scamander: Homeric Intertextuality and Christian Ritual in Eudocia’s Homeric Centos
Notes
[1] Vansina, Jan. 1985. Oral Tradition as History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
[2] Redfield, Robert. “The social organization of tradition,” The Journal of Asian Studies 15.1 (1955) 13-21.