This book is a translation with light revisions of Iliada i jej tradycja epicka: studium z zakresu greckiej tradycji oralnej. (Wroclaw: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2014).
This is a difficult book to summarize. It presents many years of thought, informed by wide reading, about oral epic, and it pursues many tangential points that demand extra effort to follow (the discussion of the historical background of Homer, for example, seems unnecessary for the rest of the argument). The opening sections would be especially difficult for a reader not already familiar with debates in recent Homeric studies, and some discussions lack the concrete examples that would make them easier to understand, although these appear later. Homerists will need to read the book. It is available online, but I gave up and obtained a hard copy.
Zieliński is fully committed as a neoanalyst but also as an oralist. He is not concerned with how the poem came to be written down and does not think that the performance of such a long work would be a problem. He does not want to treat similarities between the Iliad and cyclic narratives as reflections simply of a shared pattern—one version is primary—and extensive passages consist of arguments against such interpretations. This distinguishes his position from that of many oralists. He also does not see Homeric passages as mere imitations or assume written or fixed texts as their sources, or see them as inferior versions, and this sets him apart from many neoanalysts. This is the central argument. The book invites comparison with Currie’s neoanalytic and controversial Homer’s Allusive Art, but although both books argue for a connection between the Iliad and the Memnon-story, they are otherwise very different. [1] The argument emphasizes both that an audience hears the narrative in real time and the importance of allusion, and suggests that oral epic is more like film than like modern reading.
There is hardly a page of this long book where I do not disagree, and hardly a page where I do not need to rethink one of my views. So, for example, he suggests that Achilles responds favorably to Priam because Priam comes to him personally, unlike Agamemnon in Book 9, and that his reaction stands in vivid contrast to that of Agamemnon in Book 1. The connection among these episodes is familiar, but this argument made me consider the connection in a new way. While I am not convinced that coming personally is crucial for Achilles’ agreement, it is obviously essential for the meaning and emotional effect of the poem, and the argument made me see something that I had not seen before, the effect of Priam’s very peculiar visit—by night, with only one herald, to Achilles’ shelter, surely not the usual way to conduct such a mission—while Chryses addresses the entire assembly.
Sometimes, the book articulates ideas that seem intuitively right. It argues that the Trojan War cycle is not really constructed chronologically, but on the recurrent narrative pattern that an obstacle to the capture of Troy must be removed before the Achaeans can take the city, most often when a new ally arrives (Rhesus, Penthesilea, Memnon), but also, of course, Hector, Paris, or the Palladion. This narrative structure can expand the story almost infinity. Zieliński also points out that the story is mostly a beginning and an end. I do not really understand how this works for the non-Trojan archaic epics except the Oechaliae Halosis, but it is truly helpful for thinking about Troy. He emphasizes how all individual epics gain their meaning from the whole, which he calls the Cycle (and it is worth thinking about how this is similar to but not quite the same as J. M. Foley’s “notional epic”[2]).
Zieliński’s neoanalytic side is usually maximalist—that is, he almost always assumes that prehomeric oral tradition can be reconstructed using later evidence. For example, at 332-33 he presents a summary of the Teuthranian adventure built by combining Proclus’ summary with Pindar, Quintus, Pausanias, and Homeric scholia, and draws parallels with the Iliad. He accepts the claim that Thersites was a traditionally elite character. Sometimes he is similarly maximalist in his use of parallels from other oral epic traditions, treating as strong evidence what others would probably see as suggestive. He also sometimes treats ideas as fully established that to others may seem possible, or even plausible, but by no means certain, and sometimes argues for these interpretations much later (e.g. that Patroclus at Il. 9.190–191 is waiting for his turn to sing).[3] More significantly, he sometimes acknowledges that the first song of Demodocus (Od. 8.77–79) does not say what Achilles and Odysseus quarreled about, but in other passages treats as fact the scholiast’s “they say” that they argued about whether force or intelligence would take Troy. On the other hand, he fully accepts that traditional material is adapted to its contexts, and he goes farther than I would in seeing both Iliad and Odyssey as innovative in the characterization of the protagonist.
He argues that when Diomedes rescues Nestor in Iliad 8, the audience should recall Antilochus’ rescue of his father (as transmitted in the Aethiopis) and notice both similarities and differences. The allusion, which he argues evoke “images”—visualizations of actions—, produces suspense. The book argues that Diomedes’ fight with Hector at Il. 11.349–67, followed by his wounding in the foot by Paris, would evoke the image of Achilles’ death, which is then represented again in the death of Patroclus, and that the effect is that of dread. The repetition of elements from the same primary version is a technique, a feature rather than a bug.
Although the concept is appealing, the example as presented does not entirely convince me. During his aristeia, Diomedes surely in some ways stands in for Achilles. Yet his blow to Hector’s helmet incapacitates Hector only for a moment, and it is clear immediately that Paris has only wounded Diomedes. I do not believe that an audience experiences dread here, especially since anyone who perceives similarity with Achilles is also likely to know that Diomedes returned home safely. To be sure, what is called “anomalous suspense” is always possible, and perhaps an audience would feel uneasy at Il. 5.410-414, when Dione comforts Aphrodite by threatening Diomedes. We need, I suspect, to combine this view of how adaptation of primary images works with a nuanced interpretation of all the factors that contribute to audience responses. (Also, the emphasis on images at times seems to deny that language has any function at all, although I do not believe that Zieliński means to go that far.).
In my opinion, there would be less disagreement if the book’s claims were not so absolutely framed. The book says “never” where I would say “rarely,” “must” where I would say “usually chooses.” For example, on 518–19 he says that the disgraceful proposal to return home is “a conventional element of a certain epic pattern,” which the performer can modify, but not omit. In the Iliad, it is clearly thematic, but since we have no other representatives of this pattern, we cannot know that it is a convention, still less an essential one. Often the reader can simply modify the point, and oralists have long been trained to look for the value in neoanalytic scholarship and simply reframe what is meaningful in their own terms: “earlier text” is replaced by “tradition”—for Zieliński, not a general totality but specific traditional narratives. In some passages, however, Zieliński concentrates so intensely on the significance of allusions for the experience of the audience that he ignores other signals within the text that would affect their response. Even if memory of the Memnon-episode is an important factor in how the audience understands the aristeia of Patroclus, so are the explicit predictions of Zeus and the narrator. Diomedes may indeed echo both Achilles and Antilochus, but audience expectations of narrative outcomes that belong to these models will also be affected by context within the poem and by what they know about Diomedes.
Some arguments perplex me. Proclus tells us that in the Aethiopis Thetis predicted “the events having to do with Memnon,” and in the Iliad Nestor suggests that Achilles might be staying out of battle because of something his mother has told him (Il. 11. 794–5). This leads neoanalysts to assume that in earlier traditions Achilles refused to fight, but not because he was angry, but because of a warning from his mother about Memnon. Zieliński thinks that the anger of Achilles in the Iliad is an innovation (563). I am not sure that this is wrong, but I am also not convinced that the prophecy is the primary form, since quarrels and anger are clearly a recurrent theme, and the book does not present the complex problems of how an epic could make Achilles stay out of battle because he feared death without damaging his heroic stature. On the other hand, Zieliński’s discussion of how Homer reflects and modifies traditions of Achilles’ invulnerability and the magic qualities of his armor is mostly persuasive (I would suggest that magic armor always has a vulnerability, so that counter-magic is not the only way it can be overcome).
To me, the book is least convincing in addressing Homeric ethics and characterization in relation to the tradition. When Zieliński suggests that Odysseus during the Embassy actually wants Achilles to leave so that he himself can be the best of the Achaeans, I feel completely befuddled—Odysseus cannot want the Trojans to burn the ships. Sometimes, Zieliński uses modern concepts that in my view distort the way Homeric heroes function, as when he calls “self-sacrifice” a basic characteristic of the hero, a description that seems anachronistic. Surely the hero accepts the risk or sometimes the certainty of his death in exchange for glory, and since it is a wider community that grants and maintains renown, glory is typically won by deeds that serve it. But it is not exactly, or not entirely, for the group that he dies. Zieliński characterizes the Achilles of the Iliad’s backstory as humble, modest, gentle, and altruistic, because Achilles says that he received poor compensation and apparently did not object (Il. 1.167–8), and because he took prisoners and buried Eëtion. But Achilles’ own angry expression of how he was treated is unlikely to be entirely accurate, and in any case could indicate pride as much as humility: he did not need the rewards to show his superiority because he believed that everyone recognized it anyway. Taking prisoners could be a function of his lack of personal resentment against Trojans. The book’s views of both Achilles and Agamemnon are not entirely wrong, but they are overly schematic.
One characteristic of this book I wish that I saw more often in the scholarship: Zieliński’s love for the Iliad shines through.
Notes
[1] Currie, B. 2016. Homer’s Allusive Art. Oxford.
[2] Foley, J. M., 1999 Homer’s Traditional Art. University Park PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 42.
[3] Gonzales, J. M. 2013. The Epic Rhapsode and his Craft. Center for Hellenic Studies: Washington, D. C., 372–75.