The following are lines of Penelope’s, from Homer’s Odyssey:
δαιμόνι’, οὔτ’ ἄρ τι μεγαλίζομαι οὐδ’ ἀθερίζω,
οὔτε λίην ἄγαμαι · μάλα δ’ εὖ ϝοἶδ’ οἷος ἔησθα
ἐξ Ἰθάκης ἐπὶ νηϝὸς ἰὼν δολιχηρέτμοιο. 23.174-6
Divinity, neither am I somehow magnifying myself, nor do I mean to vex,
Nor am I even so amazed—but dammit, I know you, what you were,
When you left from Ithaca upon a ship of lengthy oar.
She is speaking to Odysseus, who has just slaughtered her suitors, bathed, and generally revealed himself. But she has still to play her bed trick on him, which finally convinces her that it’s him. That comes at the end of the speech beginning with these lines. Note the sequence I’ve set in bold in the middle line: there are three straight syllables with a circumflex sign upon their vowels. You do not need my new theory of the Greek accent, involving the law of tonal prominence, or even to know much about ancient Greek, to suspect that something unusual is going on there musically. Poetry does not usually have many consecutive accented syllables; there is usually an alternation of stressed syllables, in music or poetry. English rhythms like iambs, and Greek tragic verse is iambic too. But here we have three straight circumflexes, whose sign signifies that the voice rose and then fell in pitch, with a kind of distinctive ‘break’ (κλάσις) in the middle. It is a rare, distinctive triple emphasis. There is only a handful of such sequences in all Homer’s poetry.
And yet there are three other such sequences just in Penelope’s speeches alone! About Telemachus:
νῦν αὖ παῖδ’ ἀγαπητὸν ἀνηρείψαντο θύελλαι
ἀκλέα ἐκ μεγάρων, οὐδ’ ὁρμηθέντος ἄκουσα. 4.727-8
But again, now, my son, beloved—they snatched him up, the storm winds,
An unknown out of his rooms, and I didn’t even hear of his setting off.
νῦν αὖ παῖς ἀγαπητὸς ἔβη κοίλης ἐπὶ νηός,
νήπιος, οὔτε πόνων ἐὺ εἰδὼς οὔτ’ ἀγοράων. 4.817-18
Again now my son, beloved, stepped aboard a hollow ship,
The fool, not knowing his way around real work nor public business.
And later she addresses the suitor Antinous, who has been plotting to murder her son. She reminds him that Odysseus once gave his own father safe haven:
τοῦ νῦν οἶκον ἄτιμον ἔδεις, μνάᾳ δὲ γυναῖκα
παῖδά τ’ ἀποκτείνεις, ἐμὲ δὲ μεγάλως ἀκαχίζεις·. 16.431-2
That’s whose home you’re eating up, right now, with no payment; you pursue his wife
And mean to kill off his son, and it’s me most greatly that you grieve.
The three circumflexes capture her animus. One is therefore obliged to speak of a motif characteristic of this Homeric personage, and no other. Penelope’s mode of expression is prosodically—musically—tonally—marked. It is analogous to a signature line in opera, a melodic motif that identifies or evokes a character, even when they are off stage.
And ‘off stage’ she is, when Athena evokes Penelope at the council of the gods. At the beginning of Book 5, soon after the two passages above, Athena quotes Penelope’s repeated phrase and its distinctive accentuation as she exposes the suitors’ plot:
νῦν αὖ παῖδ’ ἀγαπητὸν ἀποκτεῖναι μεμάασιν
ϝοἴκαδε νισόμενον · 5.18-19
But oh! Now there’s his son—beloved—they’re keen to murder
As he’s on his way home:
The evocation by the performer is unmistakable, though Penelope’s name is not mentioned. She is there in her circumflexes.
Athena also shares these repeated circumflexes with Odysseus. When she meets Odysseus on the Ithacan shore, on his return, she reveals herself with this line:
νῦν αὖ δεῦρ’ ἱκόμην, ἵνα τοι σὺν μῆτιν ὑφήνω. 13.303
And now, here again come I, so that I may weave with you a cunning plan—
Later, when it is Odysseus’ turn to reveal himself to Telemachus, he says the following:
νῦν αὖ δεῦρ’ ἱκόμην ὑποθημοσύνηισιν Ἀθήνης, 16.233
But right now, here again come I, by the suggestions of Athena:
Surely the echoing of the consecutive circumflected contonations, the prosodic inflection we observe and register here, reflects a real connection by design between the characters of Penelope, Odysseus and Athena, and indeed the Homeric performer himself. Breath and harmony unite these characters with a tactile immediacy that seems only possible at the musical level of the representation of the psyche. One cannot see bottom for the significance of this signature echoing for one’s assessment of the composer and the composition, and the kind of mimesis they are trying to achieve. “Now again here I come” stands as an emblem of the performer instantiating in the moment of song the reality of Athena’s authorial consciousness, embodying in living mimesis her connection to the personas of both Penelope and Odysseus. The three straight circumflexes ‘take you there,’ immediately, in the way a distinctive line of melody invokes every time in history that it has ever been sounded or sung. Such unities of representation seem only to be possible through music, and it is essential that Homer’s composition be recognised at last for its musical art and intention.
The presumption of an oral tradition or composing-in-performance adds nothing of substance, taste or interest to this fact of the manifest nature of Homer’s text. This prosodic motif rides above the words and is not tied to a formula; it reflects a level of composition in no way connected to verbal formulas, let alone metrical ones. There is an immediacy to the communication of song. The circumflexes speak, and speak to a very specific effect that intrudes to call attention to itself in the normal run of dactylic hexameter rhythm, in service of making vivid and sonorous for an audience the metaphysical connection, for lack of a better way of putting it, between these three beings: Penelope, Odysseus, and Athena. Beyond this sonority, the first person voice telescopes these three beings into the body of the performer stepping forth before you. It is not perhaps appropriate to speak of the breaking of a fourth wall: there is no dramatic illusion, the Homeric rhapsode is always a soloist standing before you playing all the parts. It is primarily through the harmonic motion in his words, the song itself, that the performer earlier becomes Athena becoming Penelope, and then Odysseus becoming Athena: “Now here again come I.”
I am now recovering well from my transplant, as is my donor wife, and I am keen to renew Singing Homer with the burgeoning northern spring. I would like to begin the Odyssey again, but perform the whole epic this time, in episodes. I wish to retrace my steps because I am keen to apply the insights I discussed in the post ‘The Articulated Breath of Homer’ to a complete rendering. I am also excited to do the whole thing in my English as well. Stay tuned! “Now here again come I.”
How glad I am that all went well.
All the best to you both!