Chapman's Ironic Homer

Abstract

Chapman's Scoptic HomerIn Thomas Randolph's The lookingglasse, published posthumously in 1643, Alazon and Eiron-two characters who personify excessive and defective extreames of Truth-have a chat about Homer (1643, 50). Alazon claims for both himself and his interlocutor a Homeric genealogy, boastfully dubbing himself the of age and calling Eiron Achilles, a label which Eiron rejects with characteristic mock-humility: No, I am not Achilles: I confesse / I am no coward (50, 51). In conversation that follows, Alazon and Eiron each lay claim to Homeric origins of contrary rhetorical vices they embody. As they discuss their favorite authors, Eiron mentions his partiality for historians such as Tacitus and Machiavelli and then proclaims, There is no Poetry but Homers Iliads, an assertion difficult to accept at face value since, as we are forewarned at beginning of scene, Eiron is rather apt to dissembl[e] his qualities (54; 50). As might be expected from a character wont to arrogatile] that to himselfe which is not his, braggart Alazon protests that he, and not Eiron, is true heir of Homer's Iliad, crying out, Alas! 'twas writ i'th' nonage of my muses (50; 54). Yet Alazon's claim that Iliad is cradle of boastful, rather than ironic, speech, is complicated by his own predilection for false boasts, as weU as by fact that-as Aristotle points out in his treatment of alazoneia and eironeia in Nicomachean Ethics-boastful and mock-humble dissimulations of ironist are sometimes awfidly hard to teU apart (1982a, 103; 241-45). Since Randolph's Alazon and Eiron are both distinguished by untrustworthiness of their claims-one deviates from virtuous mean of truth by making false boasts, while other offend[s] in denying a truth-the scene ends without any resolution to question of whether Homeric epic gives birth to boastful speech, ironic speech, both, or neither (1643, 50).The competing claims to a Homeric heritage made by Randolph's personifications of alazony and irony read like an epitome of George Chapman's translations of Iliad and Odyssey, first complete English translation of Homer, which was produced in a half-dozen installments between 1598 and 1616. Throughout prefaces and commentaries to his Iliad and Odyssey, Chapman devotes particular attention to Homer's use of two rhetorical tropes, ironice and scoptice, latter term meaning scoffing, derisory, or sardonic. Chapman's commentaries constitute a large-scale effort to establish both kinship and difference between ironic and scoptic and to justify literary and ethical fitness of each trope. The vast majority of Chapman's marginal glosses on speeches made by Homer's characters focus on admonitory, caustic, sardonic, or otherwise scoffing speech: he notes, for example, sharpe of Hera, railing of Thersites, Helen's chid[ing] of Venus and her bitter reproofe of Paris, rough speech that Sthenelus deUvers to Agamemnon and rebuke that he receives in return from Diomedes, and sharpe jest made by Pallas to Zeus.1 In his marginal notes, Chapman marks so many examples of insultation that his commentary reads like a primer for would-be satirist who wishes to master rhetorical figure that his contemporary George Puttenham alternately terms Insultatio, the Disdainfull, and the Repochfull or scorner (1936, 209-10). It is rare for Chapman to pass silently over Iliad's numerous episodes of verbal combat. In margins of three-way flyting match of Book 11, for instance, Chapman highlights a riveting voUey of abusive epithets by noting how insults on Hector and Paris insults on Diomed in an exchange so vehement that it has prompted some recent scholars to argue that it demonstrates Paris'-and Homer's-kinship with iambic traditions of poetic blame and invective that grew out of religious rituals of archaic Greece (Nicoli 1998a, 225; Suter 1993, 8). …