Singing the Dead: A Model for Epic Evolution (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Singing the Dead: A Model for Epic Evolution Barry B. Powell Reyes Bertolín Cebrián . Singing the Dead: A Model for Epic Evolution. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2006. Pp. 173. US $62.95. ISBN 0-8204-8165-3 Tackling the tough problem of the evolution of epic one must have a strong sense of what happened in archaic Greece and the ancient Near East and of how texts came into being then. Certainly Greek epics did not "crystallize" like salt in a glass, as Bertolín Cebrián would have it (p. 3), but were dictated at a single time and place by illiterate bards to men trained in the very new and radical technology of the Greek alphabet, as argued by Milman Parry, Albert B. Lord, Richard Janko and many others. Working from a false model for text-formation, Bertolín Cebrián is from the beginning held from solving the problems she has chosen to address, and I found her book unpersuasive at many levels. Complicating her false model of text-formation, she raises from the dead such discredited interpretations as the "Pisistratean Recension," which never existed, and imagines that epic began after 1100 BC, which no one believes. Her affection for such neologisms as "illocutionary," "performativity," "self-referentiality," further muddies the waters to yield amateurish speculations about various matters. Considering the relationship between rite and myth, Bertolín Cebrián views rites as accompanying myths, but more conservative than them. Myths like to change. Bertolín Cebrián does not make clear what she means by "rite," but the religious act of sacrifice, the principle rite in Greek religion, was in fact rarely accompanied by myths in ancient Greek religion, so far as we know. We cannot connect one single Greek literary text with a known rite and certainly not the Iliad or the Odyssey. Bertolín Cebrián seems to confuse magical spells with rite. She sees a connection somehow between "rite" and choral poetry. Certainly such poetry was performed in public festivals, but was never a "rite" as was the slashing of an animal's throat and the consumption of its flesh. Bertolín Cebrián seems not to understand the all-male symposium as the natural setting for the delivery of elegy and lyric, but imagines that these forms of poetry took place, again, "in a ritual context" before being on occasion "secularized." Bertolín Cebrián's main argument is built on her vision of the initial [End Page 69] union of myth and rite. Epic grew from a specific rite, the lament for the dead (was this a "rite"?), though I was surprised to learn that such laments might blame as well as praise the deceased. Bertolín Cebrián appears unaware of the magical role of the lament in consoling the unhappy ghost, and through such practices as ululation of frightening the ghost away. She thinks that the purpose of the lament was to foster communal cohesion, which it no doubt did, and the willingness to die for the community, about which I am less certain. In any event, first came laments at the tomb, then the laments were separated from the tomb, then they incorporated narrative and indirect speech and became epic. Males created the epic, while females continued their ritual practice of lamenting the dead at tombs. That is where epic comes from. There is, however, no evidence that Greek epic, which also flourished at the symposium and probably at some public festivals, was ever connected with tomb-cult in any way. Epic was a form of entertainment, making use of traditional tales and other material, and no doubt enforcing public values, but has no plausible genetic relationship to lament. We are not sure what "rite" means, but just as well Bertolín Cebrián never makes clear what is meant by "epic." Nothing is said about dactylic hexameter verse, or the differences between Homer and Hesiod and what such differences imply in deciding what "epic" means. She places Homer two hundred years too late and does not understand the critical difference between dictated oral verse and poetry created in writing. Fanciful etymologies do more...