A most striking prosodic moment in Homer is this one in the speech of Priam to Achilles, Iliad XXIV.505-6. It is perhaps the ultimate inspiration for Odysseus’ prosodic motif we discussed in the last post:
ἔτ-λην δ’ οἷ’ οὔ πώ τις ἐπιχθόνιος βροτὸς ἄλλος,
ἀνδρὸς παιδοφόνοιο ποτὶ στόμα χεῖρ’ ὀρέγεσθαι.
I dared what no one ever has yet upon the ground, no other mortal:
To reach my hand to the mouth of the man who slew my child.
As in the Odyssean outburst, the use of enclitics creates a most decided pattern. Enclitics are short dependent word-particles (like πώ) which ‘lean in’ (ἐν + κλίνω) to the words they follow, and which can release their accents as well as add accentual stimulus themselves according to special rules. To an extent they are more like suffixes than separate words, like -ward in English (toward, downward) indicating direction. Sometimes enclitics are positively emphatic, taking the heavy down-glide in pitch, despite the connotation of dependency in their grammatical name. The consequence is that here Priam’s line begins with five consecutive long syllables, all of them tonally dynamic, the final four tonally prominent in succession: (rising acute), barytone, circumflex, oxytone, oxytone, according to the new parlance. Again the sequence culminates in a feminine mid-line cadence.
Consider where exactly it is, however, that Homer has created and invested this prosodic extravagance: in the next line Priam describes the most unprecedented action described in all of Homer—perhaps in all of poetry and literature: “I reached my hand to the mouth of the man who slew my child.” His announcement in the line preceding calls forth also an unprecedented prosody in anticipation, in his emphatic awareness that what he dares to do has no precedent. The power of this speech and moment has never needed to be in Greek, or pitch-accented Greek, to announce itself. But is it not gratifying in a slightly extraordinary way, to find this razor’s stab of accentuation reinforcing the overwhelming pitch of the moment, in the tonic and dynamic substance of the old man’s line? It is an accentual epiphany. If the Odyssey is the later poem, the characteristic ‘Odyssean ejaculation’ may well be a conscious rhythmic ‘sampling’ of the power of this half-line, first heard in such poetry from Priam at this riveting moment in the denouement of the Iliad.
The glass is always half empty for oralists. They will not permit a Mozart among the folk. A significant reason for this must be that they simply do not recognise the Homeric poems as tonally specific entities; instead they live and teach in a meta-world where Homer’s is the world’s only purely metrical poetry. Their concern seems not so much with what was actually sung as with what could have been substituted in the composition without changing the intent or the effect. It is not a natural starting point for the assessment of a composer, singer or audience. Even an improviser wants you to pay attention to what he actually lays down, not what he might have done, especially if he has to fix any unintended ‘inconcinnities’ in retrospect. We have demonstrated a level of musical intention and choice, and a level of musical characterisation and dramatic effect heretofore unknown and unsuspected in the Homeric medium and idiom. This should start to make plausible, and indeed instinctual, the notion that Homer’s text—whatever its relation to the written versions we inherit—was composed as a musical score to instruct and direct performance. The quantitative syllabic conventions of measurement, combined with the accentual notation, provide a complete instruction for the timing and pitching of each and every line of Homer. As we apply the law of tonal prominence directly to Homer’s text, the musical patterns which emerge from this reading and sounding will make the best and most compelling case for the idea that Homer’s text was scored in advance for performance. We shall see that lines need to be known as whole lines before they can be sung, especially because of the rhythmic syncopation of otherwise familiar names in Homer—phenomena that register in the atonal classicist’s approach as ‘metrical lengthenings’ or ‘alternative spellings’.
Once we permit ourselves a Mozart, we solicit also a physical orchestra from the ancient world. We know that there were citharodes and rhapsodes performing Homer. We imagine they did this in a public theatre rather than a dining room. Eventually these would have been the public amphitheatres that survive today in ruin. We may even imagine Homer a Mozart leaving behind city versions of his opera, like the source of the important manuscript from Massalia (Marseilles). What is not imagination but text, are the cues for rhapsodic performance embedded in the script, involving rôle playing most obviously, but also stage blocking and the artful use of a wand. My suggestion is simply that the Homeric poems we have, were composed for solo rendition in the ancient theatres that we know came to be.
Consider King Lear’s ‘Never, never, never, never, never!’ It is the anti-iambic line, the anti-line, because each and every word in it denies the ictus. The preceding lines convey Lear’s grief in plangent iambs:
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
And though no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more.
Never, never, never, never, never.
The jolting of the dislocated rhythm conspires with situation and meaning to force upon the actor a transcendent histrionic moment, as Lear faces Cordelia’s death. We know this only because we know that ‘never’ has to be stressed on the penult, never the ultima. We take it for granted that we must know how to speak the language, how and where to stress the syllables, before we can begin to take in and register Shakespeare’s poetry. And yet the oral theory of Homeric poetics, and the entire oral tradition it postulates, completely ignores the accent marks transmitted in our best texts of Homer.
Eustathius is known as an allegorist. His style of interpretation has become quaint or otherwise out of favour, but it is not at all clear if there is an alternate, modern, scholarly consensus about—or even interest in—any empirical reality involved in Homer’s depictions of the named gods. All the same, Eustathius’ interpretation of the different gods as allegorising the poet’s different qualities and faculties, is illuminating about what ancient people perceived these qualities to be in Homer. That the Muses represent his knowledge (γνῶσις) or Hermes his reason (λόγος), or Athena his intelligence (φρόνησις) and cleverness (δεινότης), may be taken or left by modern critics, but few would deny these attributes to Homer himself—no matter how they take this author to be constituted, as an individual or somehow a tradition in space and time.
But the findings in this series of substack posts call special attention to Eustathius’ take on the great Apollo, that he represents Homer’s “tuneful craft” (ἐμμελὴς τέχνη). Here is a quality of Homer, apparently an obvious one in Eustathius’ day, his ‘intrinsic melodic art,’ that is all but lost on Homer’s modern reception, scholarly or otherwise. I take it Homer’s art of words, which broadcast also his knowledge, reason, and intelligence, was one which arranged them to bring out or otherwise exploit their in-built (ἐμμελής) tonal patterns. This is the only one of Eustathius’ allegorised attributes which speaks explicitly to Homer’s art (τέχνη), a marshalling of words that turns speech into song. There is the art of it: arranging the pitch-accented words (and enclitics) of your narrative into hexameters and within hexameter phrases, so that melody emerges, sometimes to thrill or merely to please, sometimes to evoke or to imitate, sometimes, as I have shown in these posts, even to indicate. Thus the accent marks invented by the teachers in ancient Alexandria, and the law of tonal prominence governing the performance of Greek words, may represent for modern text- or orality-bound Homerists both the remnant enigma, and the modern answer key, of an oracle of Apollo.
"And O O O O that Shakespeherian rag - it's so elegant, so intelligent"
In The Wasteland, the garden where lovers feel nothing, Eliot breaking into verse.
And are not these seeming gifts from above, these prodigies, not, in themselves, the inexorable forces of Nature?
A Queen rejoices in her peers
And wary Nature knows her own,
By court and city, dale and down,
And like a lover volunteers,
And to her son will treasures more,
And more to purpose, freely pour
In one wood walk, than learned men
Will find in glass in ten times ten.
It seems as if the breezes brought him
It seems as if the sparrows taught him,
As if by secret sign he knew
Where in far fields the orchis grew"
~Emerson