HUMANITIES 101 : THE ANCIENT GREEK WORLDFall Semester, 2006Gerald
V. Lalonde |
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HANDOUTS Additonal documents, not available in electronic form, will be distributed in class. ARCHAEOLOGICAL & HISTORICAL CHRONOLOGY OF ANCIENT GREECE* NEOLITHIC 6000-3000 SUBMYCENAEAN & PROTOGEOMETRIC 1100-900 GEOMETRIC 900-700 ARCHAIC 700-500 CLASSICAL 500-323 HELLENISTIC 323-2ND C.(ROMAN CONQUEST) * All dates are approximate (except 323, the year of the death of Alexander the Great) and B.C Laertes in the Odyssey Ed Moore recently asked about a question that came up in his section of Humanities 101. Paraphrase: "Since Laertes is still alive after Odysseus' homecoming, how is it that Odysseus, and not his father, was king twenty years earlier when he left for the war [so Bk. 2.47]?" From all of my reading about the "Homeric Question," I could not recall this specific problem, and I did not find it in Kirk's (The Songs of Homer) treatment of the anomalies of Bk. 24. I could not think of a satisfactory answer but found the question treated rather extensively in a section of the Pauly-Wissowa article on Laertes (RE XII, 1925, cols. 426-434,[Lamer]). The topic may never again come up in class, but I thought that since it was interesting and complex enough to have drawn out many German scholars, I would send to instructors of Hum. 101 some not closely differentiated paraphrase, excerption, and opinion of the article. The treatment is rather old, but it is extensive enough that I doubt that there are many revolutionary turns since 1925. Lamer seems to treat the responses to the problem somewhat in an ascending order of credibility and ends with his own views. Some opinions oversimplify the question and cannot adduce enough evidence from the text; e.g., Laertes was already old and weak when O. left [no evidence, except perhaps the fact that at some point he has retired to his country garden], and because O was the only son of an only son there are no kin to assume power and protect Penelope and the infant Telemachos. If that was the case, why did O leave his family so vulnerable. One might say that he did not know he would be gone so long—but the poet did. Some critics here bring up speculations about longevity; e.g: supposing that L. is as old as seventy when O returns; then he was about fifty when O left. Well, O must be close to fifty when he returns, and he is very robust. So why was L not also robust at fifty, and why would he have turned over the kingship to his youthful son. Some scholars have followed the 3rd-century critics, Aristophanes and Aristarchos, and would athetize the end of Bk 23 and all of 24 as the addition of a reviser of an earlier (some say Homeric) version of the poem. This part of the poem is certainly full of anomalies, even beyond the problems with L. The idea of a second struggle with the relatives of the suitors is anticlimactic, and, it is absurd, if there was really a threat, to leave Penelope unprotected at the palace and go out to seek the help of a decrepit father—even if he is miraculously rejuvenated by Athena. If O needed L, he could have had him brought to the palace. Some point also to linguistic evidence that these parts of the epic are anomalous. Some add the fact that L's persona is not developed earlier in the poem. Still, there are a number of passages earlier in the poem that refer to L as living at the time. It is of course possible that a reviser made additions to the rest of the poem to fit the addition of Bk 24. Still, these additions would have to be extensive, including not only those directly about Laertes but also the whole theme of Penelope's deceit in weaving L's funeral shroud. Another line of thinking, led by the Wilamowitz, also picks up on the 3rd-century grammarians, but asserts that Bk 24, rather than being an addition to a proto-Odyssey, was a remnant of an earlier version of the tale, a version in which L played a much stronger role in the earlier years of O's absence. In that version L would have been left in charge of O's young wife and son. In such a version it would make sense that L was also king in the earlier years of O's absence, but there is simply no evidence inside or outside the Odyssey of such a tradition, nor do the proponents of this interpretation explain how L became degraded from the early active character to the decrepit rustic. Another major Separatist theory states that if you raise at all the question of O's kingship, then you must be resigned to the conclusion that a living L can have been no original figure in the epic as we largely have it. This theory reacts to Wilamowitz and his company thus: if L played a strong early role in the story, he would have been left to protect Penelope and Telemachos. Since there is no evidence of this, Laertes must already have been dead when O. left for the war; this would explain also the tradition that O was then king. Proponents of this theory point to the fact that a tradition of the early death of Laertes survives in the Fabulae attributed to Hyginus and compiled in the 2nd century after Christ. Opponents argue that the text of Hyginus is corrupt and that, if there was such a tradition, it is highly improbable that it would have shown up only once and many centuries after the Homeric tradition. It would not be surprising, however, that the odd critic might conceive of a dead Laertes as the answer to the poem's anomaly. The proponents of the theory explain the living L and Bk 24 as the additions of a reviser who thought that the discrepancies that he created were outweighed by the poetic effect of the recognition scene of the old father and the long-lost son. But these discrepancies are many and great, and, as in the case of those who follow Aristophanes and Aristarchos, to get at the imagined Ur-Odyssey in which L dies early, one would have to expunge not only Bk. 24 but also all the other passages that imply a living L. Probably also, additions would have to be made—O. would presumably meet in the Underworld the shade of his father as well as that of his mother. Lamer, the author of the article in Pauly-Wissowa, suggested a more common-sense Unitarian view of the Odysseus-Laertes problem: If the question that engages critics—why L laid aside the kingship early and for no apparent reason—had scarcely been raised in so many centuries of intensive investigation of the poem, then we ought to maintain that the problem did not exist; i.e., pedantic intellectuals pose these questions, not the poetry-loving audience for whom the work was composed. The epics are full of things that one ought not to question: How do the heroes of the Iliad get away with making long, well-composed speeches in the heat of battle? How is Kalypso supplied with the divine sustenance of ambrosia and nectar on her island at the end of the earth, and how does she develop a sudden taste for mortal things when O. arrives? [Lamer's examples, however, seem a quite different sort from the imposing structural anomalies of the Odyssey, including those involving O, L, and the kingship of Ithaka.] Lamer asserts that the touching recognition scene of the long-missed O and the grief-bent L was a model for future anagnorismoi (recognition scenes in Greek tragedy), and the emotional effect it had on the hearer, even though he knew that O was king at the outset of the war, would not elicit a calculation of the ages of the characters and an inference that L had no reason to lay the kingship aside. In other words, errors that completely escape the notice of the audience are not errors. Even if they are errors, it is enough for the critic simply to recognize them, and not to solve the problem for the greater glory of the Odyssey by expunging them or by some other critical means. After all, the poem with its anomalies still remains beautiful. The final composer of the Odyssey as it endures was not a bungler. What good does it do to burden him with the error and remove the living Laertes from the poem in order to exonerate a supposed older composer?
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