There are a number of allusions in the passage just recited (4.155-305), containing Helen’s dosing of the nēpenthes pharmakon, the ‘drug of no sorrow’, which may be lost on readers new to the Odyssey or new to the story of Troy from any source. I feel a duty by you to be a good gossip, and at least allude to these allusions, insofar as they seem central to Homer’s dramatisation.
The question of allusion in Homer is a vexed one, or at least one that is prone to considerable sophistry in the circle of professional Homeric Studies. Some moderns might even deny that the actual repeating of a line or phrase involves any necessary evocation of earlier uses, in that ‘formulas’ are thought to be part of an ongoing improvisational process, a means of filling up metrical lines as one advances the recounting of a story. Conscious allusion by means of these repeated phrases would be beyond the remit of an improvising bard; they are a necessity of the craft, only tangentially an aesthetic asset, if at all. Or so it was sometimes thought.
Of course repetition is part of the fabric of any and all music. I think it is difficult to speak empirically and definitively about consciousness of intent in musical discourse. But there is little doubt that the ancients understood the Homeric epics to be musical events, and Homer himself refers to the act of delivering his poetry, as ‘singing’. There is much repetition in singing that is, shall we say, more structural than allusive, but also some that is most decidedly, and pointedly, intended. Repeating a chorus, for example, is just a thing we do. But in some songs, the return of a repeated line builds its significance in direct, pointed, and sometimes completely ineffable ways. Think of Bob Dylan’s With God On Our Side. The effect of each appearance of ‘God on our side’ as the lyric unfolds cannot be charted or scaled by a critic; the profundity of the impact of the line’s return on its meaning can only be witnessed and acknowledged. “But I can’t think for you, you’ll have to decide/Whether Judas Iscariot had God on his side.”
There are a couple of passages that repeat like refrains through the Odyssey. One we have already met: the story of Penelope setting up a great loom, and weaving a web by day but unpicking it at night, to prolong the stalemate with her suitors. I think the re-echoing of these lines works like a refrain, building in significance by being re-sung, and by bookending the passages in between.
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