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

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS The Epic Rhapsode and His Craft: Homeric Performance in a Diachronic Perspective. By Jos e M. Gonz alez. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies (Hellenic Studies 47). 2015. Pp. xii, 821. This is a big book—666 pages of text, 154 of backmatter—because it is four books in one: an up-to-the-minute re-assessment of the “Homeric Question” (Part 1); a survey (Part 4) of post-classical rhapsody, with a prosopography of “stitchers of song” (the etymology of rhapsoidos that González affirms); a monograph-size analysis of some passages in Aristotle’s Rhetoric (Part 5); and an intricate, persuasive argument that no firm barrier divided “creative” singers from allegedly “reproducing” reciters of epic (Parts 2–3). González rightly says one can skip the first 170 pages and still read the rest “with profit” (6). The scholarship is impeccable, deeply grounded, and at times breathtakingly broad. Several results are of prime importance, and one can count many secondary gains (along with a score of cavils). In sum, González has given renewed prominence to vital topics, energetically clearing away intellectual deadwood and building an impermeable foundation for further explorations. The book is not an easy read: its bulked-up footnotes, at times covering two pages, its sustained attention to minor details not relevant to the outcome, its frequent quotation of secondary as well as primary sources (including untranslated French, German, Italian, and Latin), and its distracting, if at times fascinating, divagations all demand from the reader an epic appetite to digest every word. Yet, as with mountaineering, the resulting panorama is worth the labor. Such is the level of reference and argumentation that serious climbing here will be limited to professional Hellenists with a stake in the game, not the general reader or scholar of other literatures. Five major divisions comprise fourteen chapters. Part 1 (The “Homeric Question”) in six chapters expertly tackles several problems that have caused doubts about a slow crystallization and relatively late (sixth-century b.c.) fixation of the texts. Rightly skeptical about the possibilities for oral dictation, González points out that even such a transcription (usually imagined as an eighth-century product) would not have been instantly canonized, nor would it have arrested ongoing developments in composition-in-performance. Detailed rebuttals of dictation scenarios by Richard Janko and Martin West,1 and of alleged Near Eastern parallels, are followed by a demolition of the visual evidence previously used to argue that artists already in the seventh century were “illustrating” a fully-formed Iliad or Odyssey. The skins of eighty-six goats would have been required to record the Iliad (“with margins, not including Book 10,” 77) by the author’s calculation; papyrus was rare; and the existence of a single universally respected manuscript any time before the late sixth century is made unlikely by the profusion of divergent quotations even much later. Appeal to the “Euboian connection” to rescue an early-archaic textualization and counter Athenian control of Homer also fails. The fatal blow to this idea (held in some 1 R. Janko, “The Iliad and Its Editors: Dictation and Redaction,” CA 9 (1990) 326–334; M. L. West, “Archaische Heldendichtung: Singen und Schreiben,” in W. Kullmann and M. Reichel (eds.), Der Übergang von der Mündlichkeit zur Literatur bei den Griechen (ScriptOralia 30; Tübingen 1990) 33–50. PHOENIX, VOL. 71 (2017) 1–2. 174 BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 175 form by West, Wathelet, Ruijgh, and Powell)2 is delivered through a bracing twentyfive -page analysis of compensatory lengthening as it affected earlier consonant clusters (*-rw-, *-nw-, etc.) within Attic and West Ionic. In short, one would expect a definitive Euboian text to preserve formulaically embedded forms without a lengthened first vowel (e.g., xenos rather than East Ionic xeinos)—clearly not the case with our Homer. This learned and elegant segment is worth giving advanced students as a model of technical argumentation. Two further densely detailed chapters (Five and Six) complete the deconstruction. A review of inscriptions before 650 b.c. convincingly undercuts both Cassio’s claims about alleged West Ionic forms in Homer and the widespread assumption that the famous “Nestor’s...