Homer and the Poetics of Hades by George Alexander Gazis

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 363 Homer and the Poetics of Hades. By George Alexander Gazis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2018. Pp. xi, 253. George Alexander Gazis's book is a welcome addition to the growing scholarship on the ancient Greek Underworld. It is based on the author’s doctoral dissertation at Durham University and consists of seven chapters organized in two parts. Through close readings of most Homeric passages pertaining to Hades, Gazis looks within the tradition of the Iliad and the Odyssey to identify a poetics unique to Hades, governed by its impenetrable darkness and informed by the experience of heroic afterlife. Gazis introduces opposing pairs, such as Muses/Hades and light/darkness, as structural elements of this poetics and argues that Hades, as a poetic domain inaccessible to the Muses and to all Olympian gods, provides an alternative context where “the mainstream epic tradition can be discussed, re-evaluated, and recast as the shades of the dead reflect upon their story and relate to us their own very personal experience of the epic past” (13). The Introduction offers a comprehensive overview of the concept of Homeric enargeia in ancient and modern scholarship. This thorough presentation of Homeric vividness and its incompatibility with darkness also serves as a theoretical basis for the subsequent discussion of the invisibility of Hades, on which Gazis places special emphasis. After connecting the Homeric narrative about the cap of Hades (Il. 5.844–845) and the etymology of Hades as A-idēs to poetic attestations of the utter isolation of the Underworld, the author proceeds to explore Hades’ presence in the Iliad. In Part 1, Chapter One argues that the Iliad, despite its focus on light and brightness, keeps Hades in the background as a prerequisite to kleos. Nevertheless, Hades’ associations with glory are notably absent from Patroclus’ address to Achilles during the latter’s dream in Il. 23.59–107, which is discussed in Chapter Two. Gazis reads the dream scene as a poetic (and metapoetic) statement on the relationship between the two heroes as they interact for the last time in the Iliad, asserting that their conversation “across the divide of the living and the dead” (48) allows internal and external audiences of the Iliad a precious glimpse into Achilles’ acceptance of his own mortality through the death of his nearest and dearest. According to Gazis, this acceptance also entails a distinct reformulation of the heroic experience, centered on emotion and detached from warlike splendor. Part 2, Chapters Three to Seven, delves into the Odyssean Underworld, viewing it as a space where conventional poetic vision, traditionally granted by the Muses, is no longer acting as a source of bardic inspiration. Gazis’s argument for a poetics of Hades is made most compellingly here as he explores the “experimentation with voice and genre which is made possible by the Underworld setting of Odyssey 11” (83), as well as the performative possibilities of Hades. As a poetic resource, the Underworld has a liberating effect on both context and content, giving the poet the freedom to experiment with un-epic sentiments and lyric overtones evoking Sappho or Stesichorus. Gazis revisits all of Odysseus’ encounters in the Nekyia against the backdrop of an antagonism between a poetics of vividness, portraying the world of the living, and “a poetics of darkness, which favours inwardness and personal experience” (102). This tension is illustrated in the death narratives of Elpenor (102–108) and Agamemnon (167–181), where the shade’s perspective comes into stark contrast with the version provided by an external source. The author skillfully demonstrates that this contrast evolves into a powerful display of personal feelings in the “Catalogue of Heroines” and into passionate 364 PHOENIX revisionism in the “Catalogue of Heroes,” examined in Chapters Five and Seven respectively . Chapter Five offers an in-depth analysis of the stories of the fourteen heroines Odysseus meets after the encounter with his mother. By diligently juxtaposing the hero’s eyewitness account with the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women and other traditions, Gazis explicates how the poetics of Hades enables the characters to supply only the information that completes their profiles as they wish to construct them, according to their...