Gods' Intervention and Epiphany in Sophocles

Abstract

As I have illustrated in three recent papers, the Iliad and the Odyssey use different emphases in presenting the physical figure of the gods when the divine beings intervene among mortals and are perceived as being there (epiphany). It is difficult to summarize a complex matter in a few words, but I may safely say that the Iliad does not invite its reader to imagine the shape and the form of the divine bodies and does not claim to describe them in their visible appearance, but either presents the divine beings in disguised human figures or covers their physical presence with extreme reticence. With a very few exceptions, the text lets us imagine nothing of the semblance of the epiphanic god. We confront, so to speak, a blank figure. Often the hero recognizes only the voice of the god: this is the only way through which Odysseus receives and recognizes the presence of Athena (II. 2.282, 6 6e ^vve,xE 0eFag 6ojn ()ov0oVTorag, and 10.512). Gods have a special voice that sometimes makes them recognizable even when they appear in disguise. The invisibility of the gods is not an easy concept. It is representable by language as the negative speech act that declares that their full manifestation is intolerable for human senses and unutterable. At the sight of the goddess's luminous beauty Metaneira remains without voice (aphthongos) (Hymn to Demeter 275-80). Accordingly, it is starting from their invisibility that their visibility becomes thinkable and imaginable, but it becomes so in the mode of its unutterability, in the mode of the unsayable. When in the Iliad the gods are imagined as presenting themselves disguised, they generally assume the aspect of a familiar figure, one that the hero to whom the god presents himself or herself easily recognizes. When the Iliad presents an anonymous disguise, as in 21.285, we know only that Poseidon and Athena look like men (andressi eikten) and nothing more. Tie Odyssey practically ignores the technique of the blank figure, and the recognition by the mere voice. This poem prefers the disguised epiphany that is staged in a lavish way. We have Athena in the disguised figure of Mentor, traveling with Telemachos through the Mediterranean