Wounding and Death in the'Iliad': Homeric Techniques of Description 9780715629833

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WOUNDING AND DEATH ** IN THE Homeric Techniques of Description

Wolf-Hartmut Friedrich Translated by Gabriele Wright and Peter Jones Preface by Peter Jones Appendix by K.B. Saunders

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First published in 2003 by Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd. 61 Frith Street, London W1D 3JL Tel: 020 7434 4242 Fax: 020 7434 4420 [email protected] www.ducknet.co.uk

© 2003 by Wolf-Hartmut Friedrich Translation © 2003 by Peter Jones and Gabriele Wright Appendix © 2003 by K.B. Saunders All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the pubhsher. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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ISBN 0 7156 2983 2

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Typeset by Ray Davies Printed in Great Britain by Bookcraft (Bath) Ltd, Midsomer Norton, Avon

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Contents ix xi

Foreword Preface by Peter Jones Introduction

[5] 1

I. Phantasmata II. Truth to Life Additions to I and II: A. Pseudo-Realism B. Low Realism III. Strict Style Appendices I. The Duels in T and H II. Harpalion and Lycaon III. Sarpedon IV. N : S : n

[11] 7 [30] 23 [43] 34 [52] 41 [64] 53 [84] [97] [103] [113]

71 82 88 97

103 [120] 127

Notes Index

131 131 137 147 151 153 161 162

Appendix by K.B. Saunders Introduction Phantasmata Pseudorealism Low Realism Other Problematic Wounds Conclusions Notes

References in square brackets are to the original page numbers of Friedrich’s text.

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Preface

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Peter Jones Friedrich argues that different styles in the Eiad indicate different authors. His conclusions will not find many supporters: indeed, since the need to believe in a single composer of the Iliad seems to be almost an article of faith in western scholarship at the moment, it is hard to think of any case that would. The fact that Homer’s poetry is oral in nature certainly weakens, if it does not destroy, many of the tradi­ tional arguments for multiple authorship, but that single fact does not automatically preclude the possibility that the work of more than one oral poet may help to constitute today’s text. After all, we can at the moment say nothing for certain about the conditions of the production of epic poetry in Homer’s time, let alone how the Eiad came to be in the form we have it. But if we were to make any case at all for multiple authorship, my sense of the matter is that style would be an important determining factor. However far one may justify the content of \j/ 297- co 5481 on thematic grounds, for example, I find its stylistic ineptitude quite inconsistent with most of the rest of the Odyssey.2 In this context it is interesting that oral stylistics is a field that remains, if not exactly virgin, then pretty thinly ploughed.3 Such judgements can be perilously subjective, and Friedrich is well aware of the problem. His Introduction is suitably scathing about earlier efforts to carve up the Eiad stylistically and aesthetically (see e.g. [5-7]),4 and his own solution is to produce stylistic and aesthetic, or value, judgements by restricting himself to comparing like with like - in this case, battle scenes [8] - and distinguishing between authors on grounds of the varying levels of plausibility or implausibility of the wounds and deaths suffered by the heroes [10]. This is where the medical interest of Friedrich’s work lies. Two points need to be made. First, as Kenneth Saunders argues in his Appendix, Friedrich’s categories range over a spectrum of physical possibilities, so that his distinctions between 'fantasy’, ‘pseudo-realism’ and low realism’ are not as sharp as they might be. Second, though Friedrich does indeed argue on medical grounds for the plausibility xi

i Preface or otherwise of a wound, he had no strict need to since, for literary purposes, it is the effect of the description on the imagination of the reader that counts. Herein, of course, lies the potential weakness of Friedrich’s analysis: what seems plausible or implausible to him may not in all cases have seemed so to the poet (just as, indeed, the death of Thoon will appear fantastic to the twenty-first-century doctor, but a layman might see little more to it than a hearty blow to the spine). For all that, since ancient scholia thought it worth commenting on some of the grislier wounds, often for moral purposes, the awareness of different styles of wounding is not a modern prejudice. We may summarise the situation today as follows: it is rather as if a doctor, an art-historian and a man-in-the-street were to react to (say) all the arrow wounds in all the paintings of St Sebastian’s martyrdom. The categories likely’ and 'unlikely’ would have different meanings to all parties (diagnosis of the consequences for St Sebastian of an arrow piercing the liver would not come into the art-historian’s thinking, for example, nor would artistic genre come into the doctor’s thinking, and neither criterion would come into the layman’s), but the conclusions of the one would not necessarily invalidate the perceptions of the others. By way of exemplifying Friedrich’s method, I take the scenes in which a warrior, and/or his attendant charioteer, are killed, after being rendered somehow helpless [llff.]. The scene in which Idomeneus kills Asius and Antilochus then kills Asius’(nameless) attendant who is at his wits’ end, hunched up in the chariot (N 387ff.), seems to Friedrich a model piece of action. But the scene at II 399ff., where Patroclus kills Pronous and then his terrified, hunched attendant Thestor, seems to him far less satisfactory: Thestor’s terror is not related to Pronous’ death, and Thestor (who is named) is a nobody anyway, elevated into importance by being pictured in a lengthy simile which describes him as being hooked and lifted out of the chariot like a fish out of water, an image Friedrich finds fantastic. Things worsen at E 576, where Menelaus kills Pylaimenes ('standing stock still’, for reasons Friedrich guesses may be related to the 'terrified attendant’ theme); and Antilochus then kills his attendant Mydon with a sword-blow to the head. Friedrich points out that the poet does not make clear that Pylaimenes is even in, or indeed anywhere near, his chariot at the time, and finds the death of Mydon even more fantastic - falling out of the chariot to stick upside down in the sand before being kicked over by the horses. Friedrich now turns to N 434ff. Here Alcathous is not in a chariot, but on foot. He too is incapable of action - this time because Poseidon has put him in a trance and shackled his limbs - and his armour gets a special mention because it 'rings out drily’ as the spear cuts through into his heart, xii

Preface whose ‘dying palpitations shook the spear to the very b u tt’.5This, says Friedrich, is a magical, nightm arish scene, full of special effects.

On this basis Friedrich starts to cast his net wider over the poem, and gradually it emerges [40] that much of N and S is a combination of realistic and unrealistic warrior-actions, that the realistic episodes relate only to the wounding and retreat of Priam’s sons, and the additional material helps to delay the major battle between Ajax and Hector, which should surely start at N 802 but does not in fact occur till S 402 (in which, as a climax to the ‘retreat’theme, Hector too, the most important of Priam’s sons, gives way). Friedrich draws some parallels with the series of Greek woundings in A, and concludes that fantastic scenes, constructed by some other poet, have been added to the realistic scenes in N and S, and that one of the purposes is to highlight heroes like Meriones, who are generally associated with such scenes and whom he sees as typical of ‘newcomers’ to the epic, introduced in its final stages; not being able to compete with the established heroes, they are described in such way as to offer stronger literary stimuli to the audience [78] .6 In other words, small-scale analysis by style can have wider ramifications for conclusions about composition. This summary pursues only one thread among a large tapestry, but it shows, broadly, how Friedrich works. It is, of course, ironical that at one point he uses the phrase ‘variation and theme’ in relation to scenes like the death of Asius’charioteer and its multiforms [17], since in musical composition that phrase celebrates above all unity of authorship. But Friedrich also talks in terms of ‘motifs’, language with which neither the musician nor the oral critic would have complaints. And this, surely, is the point. Friedrich’s method of work­ ing is entirely compatible with that of the oralist - comparing scenes in terms of motifs - even if the oral critic would deny that it is thereby possible to reach conclusions about authorship of the sort to which Friedrich is drawn. Indeed, Friedrich’s work is used consistently by Bernard Fenik in his definitive Typical Battle Scenes in the Iliad (.Hermes Einzelschriften 21, Wiesbaden 1968), and even Fenik, com­ mitted to the view of an oral Homer as he is, still acknowledges that there may be something to be said for e.g. Friedrich’s view of interfer­ ence in N and S. Fenik writes (157): ‘The traditional explanation for this situation [i.e. why Hector and Ajax do not fight at N 382] is simple: the section between lines N 832 and S 402 has been inserted into an originally unified context, splitting it apart and arresting its conclusion. It is, indeed, difficult to escape the conclusion that something has gone seriously awry here, however it may have happened. The xiii

Preface feeling that N 832 and 5 402 belong together is further strength­ ened by their stylistic relation, as Friedrich has established. One of the stylistic categories that he isolated is what he calls ‘biotischer Realismus’. This is a manner of describing things or events simply and straightforwardly, but with an eye for detail. It is to be contrasted, for example, with that style which describes details that are weird, fantastic, or grisly, or the monumental style where details are held to a minimum and only what is necessary or most important is described. Friedrich concludes [39, this translation]: Tor if we contemplate all the passages in which books N and E show the “true-to-life” style which observes meticulously, is concerned about motivation, and is sober rather than effusive, then from all the individual fights, the following stand out: [40] The death of Asius and his charioteer N 384-401; Deiphobus’ appearance N 156-8, his attack on Idomeneus N 402-12, but above all his wounding and his retreat N 527-39; Helenus’ duel with Deipyrus, his attack on Menelaus, his wounding, retreat and nursing by Agenor N 576-600; Hector’s attack N 803-8 (cf. N 145-8), his duel with Ajax, his wounding, fainting and rescue E 402-39 (his awakening is to be included, O 240-3). This selection according to stylistic criteria brings to­ gether material which is separated by much material of a different nature. This obscures the idea which links together the pieces that have been emphasised: Priam’s sons are wounded one after the other....’ These are startling observations, and a check of all the fighting in N and S will show that Friedrich is right. This particular stylistic tendency appears only in these two books and, with the exception of N 384-401 (the death of Asius and his charioteer), it is always in connection with one of the sons of Priam, who are wounded one after the other. Other explanations for this stylistic phenomenon besides ‘disturbance of the original context’ are possible. The poet could have had scenes in mind from another poem, his own or somebody else’s, from which he borrowed, and where these men’s woundings were related in this particular style.7 Perhaps the deaths and woundings of certain persons were more fixed in the tradition, stylistically and otherwise, than we might expect. But the transition from one of these stylistically identifiable sections to another where the style is different, and vice versa, is not abrupt or difficult elsewhere as it is here between N 832 and E 402. It is this combination of stylistic relatedness and the abrupt break at N 833, plus the thematic connection of N 832 with E 402, that forces the conclu­ sion that some violent disturbance has taken place.’ xiv

Preface This is, I think, striking confirmation that Friedrich’s approach to style is on the right lines; and Janko too, even though he rejects the idea of interference in this passage, finds persuasive Friedrich’s style-based analysis [25] that ‘the crescendo of horror contributes to the [Trojan] rout’.8 If Friedrich’s general approach to style is, then, compatible with oral practice ^nd may still be able to make a useful contribution to our understanding of it, what of his broader concerns with layers of authorship? fiere the case is more difficult to make. Yet I still think there is much that oral poetics can learn from the now old-fashioned analytical view of Homeric epic, Friedrich’s or anyone else’s. First, then, a very brief review of the history of analysis. In his Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795), the German scholar F.A. Wolf decisively articulated what some other scholars had felt for some time: that more hands were involved in the production of our Iliad and Odyssey than just the one.9 His reason was that Homer could not have used writing. His poems must therefore have been preserved by rhapsodes, whose faulty memories and desire to intervene corrupted the original words. Further, in Wolf’s view, no oral poet could produce works of such size: for who on earth could ever listen to them? So he concluded that Homer composed short, oral lays c. 950 BC; that these were taken over and expanded by rhapsodes for four centuries; and (when writing became available) enlarged even more by ancient literary editors, who put the poems in the form we have them today and were responsible for their high degree of artistic unity. The job of scholarship was therefore to decide what was Homeric, and what was not - the Homeric question. ‘Analysis’had begun, and with it the long battles between analysts themselves and the wider conflict between analysts and ‘Unitarians’, who were committed to the view that there was one, and one composer only, of the Iliad}0 Howard Clarke provides a useful summary of the main theoretical hares that Wolf’s successors set running.11Did Homer, for example, compose one or more short songs himself, or did he assemble short songs composed by others into a larger structure? Was the Uiad once a brief poem - say, about Achilles’ anger - which was then expanded? If so, was it expanded by the addition of episodes, or by enlarging existing episodes? And where did Homer feature in all this? Further, what evidence did one prioritise to determine an answer to these questions - language? logic? style? history? How far should we apply our canons of taste to a primitive illiterate like Homer? Analysts used images like peeling away layers (as of an onion) to get to an original core, or sorting out pieces (like a puzzle), or dough into which new ingredients were blended, or a house with superstructures added, or a series of layers, like a cake (see e.g. [80-1], where Friedrich himself xv

Preface comes up with the idea of a three-colour, and at times strongly speckled, stylistic ‘map’). But we are all oralists now. We take the view that, by and large, a single ‘Homer’ was responsible for the Iliad as we now have it; that its unique size is indicative of a special poetic effort, generated by whatever inclinations and social and poetic circumstances; that ‘Homer’comes at the end of a tradition of oral story-telling going back hundreds of years (so that ‘Homer’has, in a sense, inherited the work of hundreds of earlier oral poets); and that his art consists in the unique way he has re-worked these traditional, typical materials devised to enable the oral poet to recite in the first place - from phrase and sentence at one level to ‘theme’ and story-pattern at larger levels - into the masterpieces we have today. Images of onions, houses, dough and cakes are irrelevant to this unique, individual process though perhaps they would not be if we had any evidence of what an Riad looked like in the hands of earlier poets. The strength of the German analysts in my view is that they imagine all sorts of alternative, shorter Riads which might pre-date our Riad, and then try to trace their development into our Riad by suggesting (on various, often aesthetic or logical, grounds) how the expansion took place. In so doing, analysts had to envisage the narrative implications of earlier Riads with, and without, the epi­ sodes that our Riad possesses. This surely is the point at which oralists should become interested, since addition, expansion and contraction of episodes is at the heart of oral epic technique and thoroughly exemplified in the Riad we possess. What, for example, would the Riad lose without (say) Thersites, the catalogue of ships, the duel between Ajax and Hector in 0, or the seduction of Zeus? What does it gain, with them? On the much larger scale, if you assume that the earliest Riad told how Achilles, insulted by Agamemnon, withdrew from battle, lost Patroclus to Hector and returned to take successful revenge, the poet could have got by without any of the ethical dimension that our Riad possesses. Much of the first half of the Riad would therefore have been redundant. But if you want to explore the idea of what an insult might mean to a man like Achilles, and you conceive of an embassy to Achilles and his rejection of it, then not merely do you add I but you must also add © in order to motivate the embassy in the first place. What then if you conceive of an Achilles so enraged by Patroclus’ death that he refuses to hand back Hector’s corpse? That will require the poet to think about how to end the tale - it will no longer be a mere revenge story - and will generate further ethical considerations that may motivate Q. and deepen exploration of the person of Hector (and therefore, perhaps, suggest the idea of Z). A poet who wanted to use xvi

Preface the interaction of the heroes further to create a framework within which to e.g. examine the rights and wrongs of the Trojan war will then probably find a place for Menelaus, Paris and Helen - and Pandarus too.12 And so on. I hasten to add that I am not proposing that the Iliad was constructed like this, or that these were the thought-processes that motivated the poet of the Riad: I simply point out that in purely narrative terms one decision leads to another, and that oral poetry is by its very nature a highly fluid form. This is wfiere the sort of analysis beloved of nineteenth-century scholarship can, in my view, be so stimulating. To ask in the light of Friedrich’s work e.g. ‘what would be the implications for the structure of our Riad if it did not have N S O in their present form, or if Meriones and Meges did not feature, or if Sarpedon died in E’ is not to ask counter-factual questions for the sake of it but is to force oneself to confront the narrative implications of different sorts of Riads and in so doing to understand more clearly the structure and priorities of this one. One could do worse, for example, than start by considering the implications of Walter Leaf’s analysis of the Riad in his great com­ mentary on the poem (Macmillan 1886-8), especially the table in vol. II, p. xi with its eight columns, each (broadly) representing a different poet’s contribution. On Leaf’s analysis, the real star of the show, introducing 0 , 1 and Q. and adding much of X, seems to me to be poet IIIB, but authorship is not the point: this sort of analysis opens up major narratological questions about the Riad that oral poetics should (in my view) be trying to address, but currently does not.13 N otes 1. We use Friedrich’s convention for indicating books of the Riad and Odyssey, i.e. letters of the Greek alphabet, capitals for the Riad, minuscules for the Odyssey. 2. See P.V. Jones and G.M. Wright, Homer: German Scholarship in Trans­ lation (Clarendon 1997), pp. 38-41, and the translation of Erbse’s essay on the linguistic problems associated with the end of the Odyssey (263-320). R.D. Dawe, The Odyssey: Translation and Analysis (Book Guild 1993) takes these matters very much further in a shamefully enjoyable 879 pages, wielding his flaming obelos against the True Believer to awesome effect. 3. See e.g. R.P. Martin, The Language of Heroes (Cornell 1989) passim, especially pp. 159ff. 4. References in square brackets are to the page numbers of Friedrich’s text. 5. Translations from Homer: The Riad by E.V. Rieu, revised by Peter Jones (Penguin 2003). 6. Nasty slayings are restricted to Agamemnon and Achilles alone among

XVII

Preface the major heroes, but Friedrich thinks that only Achilles possesses the elemental passions and contradictions of character that makes sense of a first-rank hero indulging in such terrible behaviour [60-1]. 7. This comes as close as it could to Friedrich’s view - Friedrich would argue, however, that this insertion did disturb the original context, and was therefore probably someone else’s work. 8. See R. Janko (ed.), The Iliad: a Commentary, Books 13-16 (Cambridge 1992), pp. 212-13. 9. Prolegomena ad Homerum has now been translated from its original Latin, with introduction and notes, by Anthony Grafton, Glenn Most and James Zetzel (Princeton 1985). 10. J.A. Davison’s ‘The Homeric Question’ in A.J.B. Wace and F.H. Stubbings (eds), A Companion to Homer (Macmillan 1963), p. 254, describes the fury with which the Unitarian views of D. Mulder in his Die Ilias und ihre Quellen (1910) were greeted by analytical critics and points out how meas­ ured they now seem: (i) the Iliad is a unified work with a unified plan; (ii) inconsistencies arise from the problems raised by the massive poetic task Homer had set himself; (iii) the poem comes at the end of a long evolution; (iv) its sources are works produced during that evolution; (v) only a few of these had any connection with Troy; (vi) much of the work of the Iliad was turning the non-Trojan into Trojan tales; (vii) such work demands a single poet, not an editor or committee or random process like interpolation. Mulder, of course, was writing well before oral practice was understood. 11. H.W. Clarke, Homer’s Readers: a Historical Introduction to the Iliad and Odyssey (Associated University Presses 1981), a brilliant account of the way Homer has engaged readers’imaginations over two millennia, discusses German ‘analysis’in ch. 4. 12. J.B. Hainsworth, The Idea of Epic (California 1991), talks of the ‘greatness of soul’ as a defining feature of epic (8-10). 13. It should be clear that I use ‘narratology’ here in the sense that the German tradition uses it: the logic of the linear structure of the plot and the way the material has been arranged into a story, with its episodes (and their relationships), its anticipations, retrospectives, digressions, mis-directions and so on.

xviii

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Introduction

Translators'note: numbers in square brackets indicate original page numbers of Friedrich’s text.

[5] About one hundred and fifty years ago F.A. Wolf established that the Iliad and the Odyssey do not differ from each other just stylisti­ cally, but that each of the two epics combines several styles in itself, with the fohowing words: 'In the poems themselves there is diversity. Shortcomings in the art of writing etc. would not be a reason for saying that it could not have been written by one person; but he who can read the whole weh cannot but find this diversity. The first books of the Iliad have far more calm and naturalness than the last ones, the last ones from Book 18 onwards are far stormier and more poetical. It is quite the opposite with the Odyssey, where from Book 16 onwards the books are often stale’ (F.A. Wolfs Vorlesungen iiber die vier ersten Gesange von Homers Eias, ed. by L. Usteri, Berne 1830, p. 11). The father of German Homeric criticism was not the only one to hold this view.1Chr. G. Heyne, who was attacked so fiercely by him, stated the same conviction in volume 8 (pp. 770ff.) of his great edition of the Iliad of 1802, as did G. Hermann in his Orphica of 1805 (p. 687).2 As early as 1795 in his famous Prolegomena, Wolf himself had maintained (p. 137) that the last six books of the Eiad differed strongly from the preceding ones and then (p. 138) had emphasised rightly that such variety could exist very well alongside a general family likeness within ah hexameter poetry, including the Hymns. The Homeric poems, he wrote, ‘aequabili in universum ... facie fallunt. quippe in universum idem sonus est omnibus libris, idem habitus sententiarum orationis numerorum’.3 Although Wolf suggested to his listeners that the diversity of the individual parts of the epic implied more than one author for the Eiad as well as [6] the Odyssey, he had still been wary in the Prolegomena of substantiating his hypothesis on a stylistic level as well. Rather, he quotes an important warning there (p. 137): ‘Ruhnkenius quidem, optima sententia dicta, res, inquit, a peritis sentiri potest, imperitis, quid sit, explicari non potest.’4Lachmann acted correspondingly. He 1

Wounding and Death in the Iliad certainly sensed the diversity within the Iliad and took it for granted without a second thought, but for his theory of its construction he brought other observations to bear, e.g. contradictions within the narrative. His doubt whether aesthetic impressions could be used in scholarly work was only too understandable. At that time, aesthetic distinctions implied distinctions in authenticity as well, and no agreed judgements could be reached at all, particularly about individ­ ual episodes. Wolf already lamented the disagreement on this matter and, for all the brevity of his suggestions, Hermann did not manage without polemics (against Schneider’s Argonautica of 1803). R. Volkmann, the historian of the movement created by Wolf, therefore got everything off his chest with the words: 'Whereas J.G. Schneider without a second thought sees in Book 18 the sorry effort of an imitator, ... Lehrs ... cannot find enough praise ... specifically for the beauty of this book ... They are the same books in which Schneider fails to notice the author of the first books ... which Wolf ... at the same time declared to be stormier and more poetical, therefore at least more beautiful than the earlier ones. This sort of thing certainly . makes the mind boggle’ (Geschichte u. Kritik dev Wolfschen Proll. z. Horn., Leipzig 1874, p. 145). If Volkmann were to survey the literature on Homer today, the eight decades which have gone by since would give him at least as much reason to shake his head as the eight decades he was looking back on. One should simply compare several judgements about the death of Patroclus!5 By finding the last books of the Iliad 'more poetical’ than the first ones and finding a good many things towards the end of the Odyssey 'stale’, he did work with value judgements6but still not, as most of his successors [7], exclusively with them; he rather tried to classify the different styles, at least approximately, with terms such as 'calm’ and 'stormy’. One can doubt whether one can avoid asking the question about value-judgements at all; the history of Homeric philology shows that it must be very difficult even just temporarily to distinguish neatly between stylistic and value categories. How­ ever, instead of making this distinction, it would be easier to establish one elementary condition under which characterisation as well as value judgements, and indeed any type of judgement, can be made. It is easiest to pronounce on stylistic and value judgements if one compares like with like, or content which is as similar as possible. For anyone who wants to grasp the artistic differences between pieces which are completely different in terms of content must first investi­ gate which of the actual divergences (for instance of vocabulary) could be caused by the subject matter, and which ones need not be caused 2

Introduction by this; and only in particularly favourable cases will he be able to say from the outset whether, at the end, we will be left with a solid argument, and not merely an appeal to a feeling for style. Perhaps Bethe, for instance, felt the difference between the seduction of Zeus and the reawakening of wounded Hector correctly (even though he certainly judged it wrongly);7 but such feeling is of no use as an argument. ^ Conversely, anybody is at liberty to declare, on the basis that the subject-matter is completely different, that things are artistically homogeneous which, at first and also at last sight, seem so distinct from each other as anything might be from anything else in the Iliad. It was a paradoxical spectacle when, in his famous work about the Hiad and Homer, a Homeric critic as critical as Wilamowitz connected the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles (A) with the deception of Zeus (E) and thought that he recognised in both the unmistakable mark of the same genius.8 It is true that anyone who assumes that there are several Iliad poets could assert here that both episodes are outstanding in their own ways, and equally deserved the name of the most illustrious author, that of Homer. But this would not be a proof of stylistic affinity at all, and one could also argue about equal value on a poetic level. [8] Therefore we will use the kind of passages which, though expressed differently, are similar in terms of content or at least sufficiently comparable. Since such similarity is generally likely to last for only short stretches of narrative, we shall have to make do with smaller passages of similar content, which are not simply repe­ titions.9 The similes, which are the obvious choice here, have the disadvantage for us that they are too unevenly scattered and too frequently detachable from the context of the narrative. We therefore prefer the battle scenes, which offer more than enough in terms of thematic repetition and poetic variety. Since our path leads us amongst others in particular through the least popular parts of the Uiad we may hope to be able to draw attention to matters which to date have received less consideration.10 It is an encouraging rather than a discouraging fact that aesthetic judgement about Homeric battle depictions in their entirety does not vary any less than in the case, as we have seen, of individual episodes, e.g. the death of Patroclus. Margarete Riemschneider recently wrote in a pugnacious essay (Homer, Entwicklung und Stil, Leipzig 1950, p. 99): ‘When you take an overall view of the many battle books - if you have the courage to be unbiased - you cannot help thinking that there was actually nothing which was further from the mind of this most famous battle narrator of all times and countries than war and battle’, and furthermore (p. 101) she calls Homer’s battle descriptions 3

Wounding and Death in the Uiad ‘strange and unwieldy’.11But Sainte Beuve, about whom it can hardly be said that he does not have the courage to be unbiased, had affirmed in 1856: ‘quand on lit YEiade, on sent a chaque instant qu’ Homere a fait la guerre’,12 and medical experts, whose works we shall use extensively, have again and again extolled the realism of the Homeric descriptions of death and wounds. Frz. Albracht too (Kampf und Kampfschilderung bei H., Progr. Naumburg 1895, II, p. 1) admittedly expressed himself carefully: ‘Homer is a poet and not [9] a military author ... but the poet and his audience have an understanding of battle and war’, but his view still cannot be reconciled with M. Riemschneider’s. As is so often the case, the contradiction can be explained by the unjustifiable generalisation of individual observa­ tions which are actually correct: there are convincing examples of realistic as well as unrealistic descriptions in Homer,13and both one and the other party are in the right, as well as in the wrong (although not to the same extent). So careful distinction is necessary here. The question whether one and the same poet can deal with his subject with such variation, and use means of representation which are so different, is to remain unanswered for the time being. The comparison of what is thematically comparable has been familiar to the educated since H. Wolfflin’s Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (since 1915); in classical philology R. Heinze has car­ ried it out particularly thoroughly and successfully.14 Where the radically different nature is already given - if we are dealing with different artistic forms, different authors or recognisably early and late works of the same author - the use of this procedure suggests itself, but not within the same work where such radical differences are not a datum but emerge only as the result of the investigation. Not that this method is alien to criticism of the Eiad. For instance, almost seventy years ago E.H. Meyer compared Apollo’s arrow shot with that of Pandarus, and by means of these two episodes tried to distinguish between two epic styles.15Now we intend to replace such isolated observations with a connected series of experiments. Like any other poem, the Eiad can be read either as poetry, i.e. for its own sake, or as a document, i.e. for the sake of [10] other things. A commentary, to which a few contributions are supposed to be provided here, would have to attempt to do justice to both claims. If neverthe­ less the antiquarian examination here comes second to the literary one, that is not only because of the restricted inclinations and knowl­ edge of the author, but essentially because of his prejudice that the latter has to precede the former. Admittedly, the Eiad can in many cases be readily examined as evidence for past conditions, opinions and materials; but in many places it resists this approach and fobs off the researcher with answers which, when you look at them more 4

Introduction closely, turn out to be completely ambiguous. As much as one feels that one owes a debt of gratitude to past and present people dealing with Homeric realia (in the widest sense), one will still often notice that they approached the texts too innocently. Right at the beginning, in the first chapter, we shall become acquainted with a Homeric style from which one can hardly glean any conclusive evidence about ancient wea^pns or ancient conceptions of the soul. As a result, one will do well* to exclude it from examination for the time being and, even afterwards, to call it in only with the strongest of reservations. We shall therefore consistently occupy ourselves with the relationship of statements to a reality which can still be experienced, or also reconstructed, today, not because we might regard it as the highest intention of art to portray nature as faithfully as possible, but because further information is vouchsafed by closeness to or distance from nature. In fine art, closeness and distance might often be given to us with such immediacy that one does not need to say a word about it, whether e.g. the anatomy of a mediaeval figure in a garment, or the statics of pieces of architecture presented in an illuminated book, are accurate or not. But here, where we have to shape the picture for ourselves first and can only learn by the process of investigation how far the statements are aiming at clarity, coherence and comprehensi­ bility and how far they are able to achieve their intention, we must after all assume a simple reality and always ask anew about its validity16

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I. Phantasmata

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