The Epic Rhapsode and his Craft: Homeric Performance in a Diachronic Perspective by José M. González

Abstract

REVIEW ESSAY The Epic Rhapsode and his Craft: Homeric Performance in a Diachronic Perspective. By JOSÉ M. GONZÁLEZ. Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2013. Pp. xii+821. Paper, $27.50. ISBN 9780674055896. s with other productions from the Center for Hellenic Studies, this book resides freely accessible online (http://chs.harvard.edu/CHS/article /display/6127). But all Homerists should own a copy of González’s learned achievement, as should anyone interested in the performance of ancient Greek poetry. Those working on Greek rhetoric will wish to study Part V and should poke around elsewhere as well: in exploring the interactions between rhapsodes, actors and orators, González’s book intersects with David Sansone’s treatment of the interactions between drama and rhetoric.1 The book aggregates and analyzes material scattered in publications of varying degrees of accessibility. For instance, Part I brings together all the strands in the writing poet vs. dictating poet vs. evolutionary model debate. Part IV brings us up to speed on who the homēristai were and what the tekhnitai and the epōn poiētēs did and includes a catalogue of all references to historically attested rhapsodes. González presents a diachronic study of the rhapsode and examines the changing nature of rhapsodic performance over several centuries. If the book ranges far and wide, it is also a product of a specific time and place: it defends and builds on the work of Gregory Nagy.2 Readers skeptical of Nagy’s work should not think they can skip this book. As these opening paragraphs have aimed to make clear, the book’s utility is extensive. I will first summarize the book and then single out a few sections for further comment. Coming in at 821 pages, this book is three or four monographs in one. The following summary of its contents, especially of Parts II through V, will take some time, but the reader will benefit from knowing not just what González talks about but what he thinks of the subjects he addresses. 1 D. Sansone, Greek Drama and the Invention of Rhetoric (Chichester, 2012). 2 See, for example, G. Nagy, Homeric Responses (Austin, 2003) 1; cf. C. Watkins, How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics (New York, 1995) 173. A BOOK REVIEWS 495 Part I, “The ‘Homeric Question’,” defends Nagy’s evolutionary model for the gradual fixation of the Homeric poems by going after popular alternatives: a dictatedtextthatservedasanarchetypealreadyinthearchaicperiod;awritingoral poet who wrote out a text that became an archetype already in the archaic period. Chapter 1 argues that the literature of the ancient Near East or of the Phoenicians doesnotsupportthetheorythatanarchetypaldictatedtextemergedinthearchaic period.Chapter2declaresthatnotasinglepaintingonavasepointstothefixation of a standard text in the archaic period,and Chapter 3 that technological obstacles militate against the production of a written text at that time. Chapter 4 suggests thatlinguisticanalysisdoesnotsupportthenotionofEuboiaasthesiteofanearlyarchaic fixation of the poems, and Chapter 5 makes the same point as Chapter 4 but focuses on inscriptions and on the notion of an 8th -century book hand behind theinscription on theNestorCup.Chapter6 roundsoutPartI:neitherreferences to the dispute between Athens and Megara over Salamis nor references to the work of Theagenes of Rhegion back up the idea that a standard written text emerged in the (early) 6th century BCE. Part II, “Rhapsodic Performance in Pre-Classical Greece,” begins with Chapter 7’sdiscussionof“HomertheRhapsode.”HereGonzálezaddressesnotionalfixity.3 Oral poets and their audiences believe that every time a poet performs he generates the same oral text as he has and his peers have in the past and will in the future. In the Homeric case, “this fixity derived from the well-known kinship between poetry and prophecy” (177). Faith in notional fixity comes from a belief in the poet’s divine source (186), and, accordingly, “the epic tradition, notionally spoken by the Muse or Apollo, could not possibly change from one divine telling to another” (201). This sense of the sameness of each performance plays an important role in the ultimate assignation of the poems to a single author and in thegradualtextualizationofthepoetry.Italsoindicatesthetruth-valueofthesong. In chapter 8, “Hesiod the Rhapsode,” González focuses first on the poet as a mantis. Like the divinely inspired seer...