Listening to Homer in Antiquity

On Friday night (22nd of March) The University of Queensland's Classics and Ancient History Society participated in the world-wide reading of Homer's Iliad as part of the thirteenth Festival Europeen Latin Grec. While the attendance could have been better, we were running up against multiple events on campus, and despite my running late to organise it, we had people attending whom I'd never seen at one of our events before. I decided that in addition to the reading, I'd present something about how listening to Homer was something variously experienced in antiquity. This blog is primarily that presentation.
In addition to my presentation, we read book 18 of Homer's Iliad, each of four readers reading a different translation: the Penguin Books 1966 translation, the Loeb Classical Library version, Alexander Pope's rhyming couplets, and Chapman's early 17th century poetic translation. We made some jokes about how often the rhyming couplets of Pope and Chapman failed to rhyme, but speaking with some attendees after the conclusion, my attention was drawn to something I had not realised; despite to frequent lack of rhyming in Chapman's translation, his meter was apparent to listeners. As Chapman was read by me last, there was little dialogue as the majority of the last 150 lines of book 18 are the description of Achilles' shield. Some audience members noted that they got "caught up in the rhythm of the work" and only when Vulcan spoke to Thetis and she left Olympus did they get drawn out of the rhythm. I was amazed to hear them say this, because I had not consciously recognised the meter despite reading it. It was a wonderful accidental discovery that could only be realised by listening to Homer.Below is an amended "script" of my presentation from Friday night.

Listening to Homer in Antiquity

For Homer, the boundary between recitation and reading has become less sharp.

Peter Parsons, 2012, “Homer: Papyri and Performance”, p. 17.

By reading Homer and people listening, we are tapping into a tradition millennia old.

The very concept of listening to epic poetry is as old as epic poetry itself. Consider the first song sung by the “minstrel” at the Phaeacian court in the Odyssey:

...the Muse moved the minstrel to sing of the glorious deeds of men, from that lay of which the fame had then reached broad heaven, the quarrel of Odysseus and Achilles, son of Peleus, how once they strove with violent words at a rich feast of the gods, and Agamemnon, king of men, was glad at heart that the best of the Achaeans were quarreling; for thus Phoebus Apollo, in giving his response, had told him that it should be, in sacred Pytho, when he crossed the threshold of stone to inquire of the oracle. For then the beginning of woe was rolling upon Trojans and Danaans alike through the will of great Zeus. This song the famous minstrel sang;

Homer, Odyssey, Book 8, lines 73-83.

We did not sing, but the very act of listening to poems like the Iliad is as old as the Iliad itself. There is a great deal of argument about whether or not the Iliad and Odyssey were oral traditions, but if you accept that idea as many scholars do, the act of listening was as big an element in the construction of these poems as the act of their recitation.

Now the minstrel here was called an ἀοιδός, a singer, but this was not the only kind of performer of epic poetry in antiquity.  I spoke about two other types of performers who allowed people to listen to Homer: Rhapsodes and Homeristai.

Rhapsodes

Rhapsodes were professional poetry reciters. While they primarily recited Homer, they also included other poets’ works within their repertoires. 

This term first appeared in the fifth century BCE, and their name literally meant “song-stitcher”. It is thought be some that the early efforts of these “song-stitchers” helped to formulate the Iliad and Odyssey from oral traditions into a more standard work which was eventually written down. I love the term “song-stitcher” as it gives a sense that these men might have originally composed works by drawing on various traditions; I imagine it being something like extemporaneous jazz performers drawing upon various traditions within their art to eventually form what we consider “standards”. This early history of the rhapsodes is unfortunately lost to us.

So what about what we do know?

Well we know what they look like. Here is the depiction of a rhapsode on an Attic red-figure neck amphora. 

It is thought to date from 490-480 BCE and you might be able to just make out the words of his first line is written coming from his mouth: “Even so once in Tiryns...” (an unplaced epic fragment only known from this pot). While this is an Attic pot, it was excavated from an Etruscan tomb in Vulci.

Please note the staff held by the rhapsode. Our evidence for its association with these performances is earlier than the word rhapsode itself. The Greek poet Hesiod (circa 700 BCE) described it thus:

So said the ready-voiced daughters of great Zeus, and they plucked and gave me a rod, a shoot of sturdy laurel, a marvellous thing, and breathed into me a divine voice to celebrate things that shall be and things that were aforetime; and they bade me sing of the race of the blessed gods that are eternal, but ever to sing of themselves both first and last.

Hesiod, Theogony, line 29-34.

Please note that there are also words on the plinth on which the rhapsode here stands on for his performance. This states: “He is handsome”.

The idea that the rhapsode couldn’t be ugly and successful is hinted at in some of the texts which have survived. 

Plato puts the following statement in Socrates’ mouth:

I must say I have often envied you rhapsodes, Ion, for your art: for besides that it is fitting to your art that your person should be adorned and that you should look as handsome as possible, the necessity of being conversant with a number of good poets, and especially with Homer, the best and divinest poet of all, and of apprehending his thought and not merely learning off his words, is a matter of envy; since a man can never be a good rhapsodewithout understanding what the poet says. For the rhapsode ought to make himself an interpreter of the poet’s thought to his audience; and to do this properly without knowing what the poet means is impossible. So one cannot but envy all this.

Plato, Ion, 530b-c.

Now do not come away with the impression that Socrates truly admired rhapsodes; he goes on the dialogue to completely rubbish poor Ion the rhapsode.  Another former student of Socrates, Xenophon (Symposium, 3.6), puts the following words into Socrates’ mouth in response to the question 

'Do you know any tribe of men more stupid than the rhapsodes?'

'No, and the reason is clear: they do not know the inner meaning of the poems.'

But you also must not get the impression that this was an entertainment of the ancient world’s lower classes. According to the second century CE writer Plutarch, the following exchange took place at the wedding celebration of King Ptolemy the first, so in the late fourth century CE.

The rhapsode was the talk of everybody – the one who, at the wedding of Ptolemy who, in marrying his own sister was considered to be committing a deed unnatural and unholy, began with the following words: ‘And Zeus summoned Hera his sister, his wife’

Plutarch, Table Talk, 736e, Quoting Iliad, Book 18, 356.

This indicates that at the wedding of one of the most powerful men in the classical world at that time, a rhapsode was either a member of his entourage or was hired to provide entertainment at his wedding. 

We also know a little about the competitions that rhapsodes entered. In addition to the references to both the Epidauros and Athenian competitions that the rhapsode Ion was described as competing at in Plato’s dialogue, we have numerous inscriptions from all over the Greek world. These inscriptions records prizes for or winners of rhapsode competitions throughout the religious festivals of the Greek world. And of course at each of these, multiple rhapsodesperformed and were listened to. From these inscriptions we know that these continued down into the late second or early first century BCE, but then disappear (West 2010, 10).

They then reappear in festival inscriptions in the second century CE and continue possibly as late as the fourth century, but we can’t be sure that the natures of these performances were the same as the earlier ones of this name.

Homeristai

The second kind of Homer performance I want to tell you about are somewhat different. That is the performances of the Homeristai. These were performers who re-enacted Homeric scenes as a kind of troupe. You will often find these performances described as “low-class”, but that is often a term used by scholars who have focussed their attention on ancient literature and tend to view it as something better. These performances were enjoyed by a far broader audience. While we might enjoy a night at the theatre, the performance of Homeristai is the guilty pleasure we binge watched on the weekend; this was one of the popular entertainments of the ancient world. 

A Homeristai might not be immortalised on a Grecian urn, but he can be the figure on a piece of papyri, like this one from Oxyrhynchus from the second century CE (P. Oxy. XLII.3001). 

Interestingly, we know that a Homeristes was paid 448 drachmae to perform at games in Oxyrhyonchus (P. Oxy. III.520) in the same century, an amount which was list than that given to a mime performer (not mime as we know it), but significantly more than the money provided to a pantomime dancer; despite some of the hate these performers received from the intellectuals of antiquity, some of these performers were getting on very well.

So what was their performance like?

We have a description from Petronius’ Satyricon (59) which described it thus:

A troop came in at once and clashed spear on shield. Trimalchio sat up on his cushion, and when the reciters talked to each other in Greek verse, as their conceited way is, he intoned Latin from a book.

The attitude of Homeristai included in this work should not be taken at face value because this description is made to make the rich former slave, Trimalchio, look like a buffoon, but we get an image of multiple performers re-enacting Homeric stories in costume, and armed. 

The also seem to have been a little “method” in their acting, as bleeding was a part of their presentation. Now we know tomatoes were not available in antiquity, and as such, these performers did not have a great deal of options for the provision of fake blood. As a result, they used the real deal. According the dream interpretation manual of Artemidorus (4.2):

...for just as the Homeristai make wounds and draw blood, without any intention of killing, so also does the surgeon.

We also know that they used both real and prop weapons in their performances. Thanks to a second century CE ancient Greek novelist, Achilles Tatius, we get a glimpse:

Now there was among the passengers one of those actors who recite Homer in the public theatres: he armed himself with his Homeric gear and did the same for his companions, and did his best to repel the invaders. ...We saw there [in the Homeristai’s chest] a cloak and a dagger; the latter had a handle a foot long with a very short blade fitted to it not more than three inches in length. Menelaus took out the dagger and casually turned it over, blade downwards, when the blade suddenly shot out from the handle so that handle and blade were now of equal size; and when turned back again, the blade sank back to its original length. This had doubtless been used in the theatre by that unlucky actor for sham murders

Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Clitophon 3.20.4-5 and 6-7.

We even find graffiti in the backrooms of theatres in the Roman period, in this case at Aphrodisias in Caria, stating that in a particular room the equipment of one Demetrius the Homeristes was kept. 

When we consider these hints together, we get an impression of multiple performers from Petronius, but individuals named or described elsewhere. 

However, we know that mime performances included multiple people, but only a single mime is written on the Oxyrhynchus papyrus account. The amounts paid would make sense that they were for multiple performers, 476 drachmae for the mime and 448 for the Homeristes, especially in comparison to the 100 and something 4 drachmae for the dancer, a solo performer if you don’t include musicians.

The Homeristes in Achilles Tatius’ novel had enough arms to arm multiple people on the ship against pirates.

And Demetrius the Homeristes at Aphrodisias needed a whole room for his props. 

It seems obvious that these performances did require multiple performers.

So how did these performers use the text of Homer?

We have been fortunate to have some papyri survive which seem to have been adapted for theatrical performance, perhaps those of Homeristai. The most famous example is that of the so-called Bankes Homer (see below).

This papyrus is a copy of most of book 24 of the Iliad which has its speeches identified with a character’s name in the margin, including the narrator or poet as his own character. The text has been rewritten for use with multiple performers rather than a single rhapsode.

In all, ten examples of papyri which have been prepared in this manner have survived, dating from the first to third centuries CE, and all but one feature the text of Iliad.

~~~~~~~~~~

Listening to Homer was something done for centuries in antiquity. I don't know whether Chapman's or Pope's translations were recited by their authors, but the sometimes odd rhyming attempts made them a little awkward for us, but it was well worth doing. We took a break for refreshments midway through, but I approximate that it took us an hour to read through the book.

Bibliography

Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Clitophon, tr. S. Gaselee. Harvard University Press, 1969.

Homer, The Odyssey, tr. A. T. Murray.  Harvard University Press, 1919.

Hesiod, Theogony, tr. Hugh. G. Evelyn-White. Harvard University Press, 1914.

B. Grenfell and A. Hunt 1898 Oxyrhynchus Papyri Volume III, Egypt Exploration Fund

Plato, Ion, tr. W.R.M. Lamb, Harvard University Press, 1925.

Petronius, Satyricon, tr. Michael Heseltine, Harvard University Press, 1913.

Plutarch, Table Talk, 736e (this translation is from Nagy 1996).

Xenophon, Symposium, trs. E. C. Marchant, O. J. Todd, Harvard University Press, 1979. 

Charlotte Roueche, 1993 Performers and Partisan at Aphrodisias in the Roman and Late Roman Periods, Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies.

Gregory Nagy 1996 “Homer as Script” in Poetry as performance: Homer and beyond, Cambridge University Press, pp. 153-188.

Parsons, Peter 2012 “Homer: Papyri and Performance” in eds. G. Bastianini and A. Casanova I Papiri Omerici, Studi e Testi di Papirologia N.S. 14 pp. 17-27.

Martin L. West 2010 “Rhapsodes at Festivals” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphikvol. 173, pp. 1-13.

A little more information regarding the images, including better quality images, here can be found here:

Rhapsode amphora.

Homeristes papyrus

Bankes Homer.