HOMER: ἄσβεστος γέλως (două episoade: Iliada, I, 597; Odiseea VIII, 459)

Abstract

I have often wondered, like many others, where the expression “Homeric laughter” comes from and what is hidden behind it. The spectacular career of the expression, which naturally does not appear in the Homeric epics, can be traced right back to the Iliad and Odyssey. I have insisted on two episodes in which the expression occurs (ἄσβεστος γέλως), one at the end of book I of the Iliad, the second in the Odyssey, book VIII. The gods are involved, Hephaestus in both situations, Ares and Aphrodite in the episode of the Odyssey, and people are also involved for whom this kind of laughter is not characteristic. What is Homeric laughter? The classical expression is ἄσβεστος γέλως, it can be translated by “inextinguishable” or “irrepressible mirth”. The phrase seems to come in English from German – “Homerisches Gelächter”, “unauslöschliches Gelächter” and in German from French: “le rire homérique”, as it appears for the first time in the memoirs of Baroness d’Oberkirck: “le rire inextinguible”. Homeric laughter is, therefore, “inextinguishable”, “unquenchable”, we owe the Latin formula to Ovid, the one from Metamorphoses - superi risere. As for Homer, we know he had no good reason to laugh, Homer couldn’t laugh in a Homeric manner anyway.