Menelaos Christopoulos
Abstract
In this contribution I focus on some particular aspects of the Homeric Epigrams related to the poetical persona of Homer. By reading the Epigrams one can easily see the care taken by the author of the pseudo-Herodotean Life of Homer (in which the Epigrams are included) to give a persuasive association between the poems themselves and the particular circumstances of Homer’s life in which they are supposed to have been composed. As the Homeric Epigrams are falsely ascribed to Homer, what they actually do in the history of classical literature is borrow the impact of the greatest Greek poet and in exchange supply their supposed creator with the biographic historical evidence which he lacks.
This contribution advances some thoughts concerning the Homeric Epigrams, a group of short epic poems which have been – falsely – attributed to Homer and are supposed to depict particular moments of his life. The whole corpus of these poems is preserved in a Life of Homer, a text dated approximately between the first and the second centuries CE, at least eight centuries later than the historical period in which Homer may have lived;1 the authorship of this Life is (also) falsely ascribed to Herodotus. As noted in the relevant scholarship, some of the poems of this corpus are separately included, sometimes slightly altered, in other sources such as two Plutarchean or pseudo-Plutarchean studies (μελέται), three anonymous Lives (Vita Romana and Vitae Scorialenses), a Life of Homer initially incorporated in Proclus’ Chrestomatheia, the Suda Lexicon (s.v. Homer) and finally the Certamen (Contest between Homer and Hesiod).2 It goes without saying that most of these Epigrams are older than the Testimonia in which they are included. Some of them are better known, such as the Epigram for Midas (no. 3), one of the best-known of the collection,3 the song for the pot-makers (no. 14),4 the longest of all, or the song of Eiresione (no. 15),5 a folk-song which, together with the other two just mentioned, are less related to the story of the pseudo-Herodotean Life.6 In this chapter I will try to focus on some particular aspects of the Epigrams which better illustrate their supposed relationship with the poetical persona of Homer, who is more often perceived as a mythical figure rather than a historical one.
It should be first recalled that the pseudo-Herodotean Life of Homer narrates the birth, the growing up, the coming of age and the many wanderings of the boy who was born in Smyrna by the river Meles and who was for that reason first named Melesigenes; later, once he was definitely blinded, he was given the name Homer (Ὅμηρος), as the inhabitants of Cuma (Κύμη), where he later resided, used to call blind people. According to the Lives’ narrative, before being struck by blindness, Homer visited Etruria, Spain and mainly Ithaca, where he familiarized himself with the local tradition on Odysseus; when he definitely lost his eyesight, he left Smyrna, where he had already earned a great reputation as a poet, and visited Teichos, Cuma, Phocaea, Erythraea and Chios where he settled, got married and begot two daughters. He then decided to visit the mainland of Greece. He first moved to Samos, then to Ios, hoping to sail from there to the Greek mainland and in particular to Athens; but he never attained this target since he finally succumbed to the illness which was already keeping him in Ios; it is in this island where he was finally buried by the sea-side.
By reading the Epigrams one can easily see the care taken by the author of the Lives to give a persuasive relationship between the poems themselves and the particular circumstances of Homer’s adventures in which they are supposed to be composed.7 This involves also the main questions raised already in antiquity concerning Homer’s origin, birth and descent. On these precise questions some verses of the fourth Epigram give, perhaps, an interesting response:
Οἴῃ μ’ αἴσῃ δῶκε πατὴρ Ζεύς κύρμα γενέσθαι
νήπιον αίδοίης ἐπὶ γούνασι μητρὸς ἀτάλλων.
ἥν ποτ’ έπύργωσαν βουλῇ Διὸς αἰγιόχοιο
λαοὶ Φρίκωνος, μάργων ἐπιβήτορες ἵππων,
ὁπλότεροι μαλεροῖο πυρὸς κρίνοντες Ἄρηα, 5
Αἰολίδα Σμύρνην ἁλιγείτονα ποντοτίνακτον
ἥν τε δι’ ἀγλαὸν εἶσιν ὕδωρ ἱεροῖο Μέλητος.
ἔνθεν ἀπορνύμεναι κοῦραι Διός, ἀγλαὰ τέκνα,
ἠθελέτην κλῇσαι δῖαν χθόνα καὶ πόλιν ἀνδρῶν
οἱ δ’ ἀπανηνάσθην ἱερὴν ὄπα, φῆμιν ἀοιδῆς 10
ἀφραδίῃ. τῶν μέν τε παθών τις φράσσεται αὖτις
ὄς σφιν ὀνειδείῃσιν ἐμὸν διεμήσατο πότμον.
κῆρα δ’ έγὼ τήν μοι θεὸς ὤπασε γεινομένῳ περ
τλήσομαι, ἀκράαντα φέρων τετληότι θυμῷ.
οὐδέ τι μοι φίλα γυῖα μένειν ἱεραῖς ἐν ἀγυιαῖς 15
Κύμης ὁρμαίνουσι, μέγας δέ με θυμὸς ἐπείγει
δῆμον ἐς ἀλλοδαπῶν ἰέναι ὀλίγον περ ἐόντα.
To what a fate did Zeus the Father give me a prey even
while he made me to grow, a babe at my mother’s knee!
By the will of Zeus who holds the aegis
the people of Phricon, riders on wanton horses,
more active than raging fire in the test of war, 5
once built the towers of Aeolian Smyrna, wave-shaken neighbour to the sea,
through which glides the pleasant stream of sacred Meles;
thence arose the daughters of Zeus, glorious children,
and would fain have made famous that fair country and the city of its people.
But in their folly those men scorned the divine voice and renown of song, 10
and in trouble shall one of them remember this hereafter,
he who with scornful words to them contrived my fate.
Yet I will endure the lot which heaven gave me even at my birth,
bearing my disappointment with a patient heart.
My dear limbs yearn not to stay in the sacred streets of Cyme, 15
but rather my great heart urges me
to go unto another country, small though I am.8
According to the pseudo-Herodotean Life, this fourth Epigram was composed in Cuma, where Homer, still named Melisigenes, moved to, hoping to find in this city what he had not found in his birthplace Smyrna: a place to live, to practise his art and to earn his living. And, indeed, as soon as he arrived there, his poetry immediately earned the profound admiration of its listeners. What the poet wished and what the inhabitants asked from the authorities’ Council, was to keep Homer there for ever at the city’s expense. By offering the wandering artist a home, the city would take advantage of his increasing artistic reputation. But when the issue came to the Assembly, an influential member of the Council strongly objected by arguing that if such petitions were encouraged, the city would soon become full of useless ‘homers’ (μὴ ὁρῶντας) and the claim was refused. The bitter reception of the news by Homer is reflected in the lines 8–17 of the Epigram where it is stated that the daughters of Zeus, the Muses, born in Smyrna, wished to glorify Cuma (that is, through his poetry) but the inhabitants refused the Muses’ sacred voice, an unwise decision that would soon bring regrets to those who took it and, in particular, to the very one who first advanced it. As for me, says the poet, I’ll carry on the fate allotted to me when I was born. By the line 13, the poem runs back to the idea expressed in the two first lines, where there is again question of the fate allotted to the poet when he was yet a baby sitting on his mother’s knees. The imagery itself is familiar, almost a frequent commonplace. But, who actually is this mother? What the Life says about her9 and what the Epigram only implies is a very interesting story. According to this story, when the Aeolian Cuma was founded, a young man from Magnesia, Melanopos, moved there, got married and begot a daughter named Cretheis. After her parents’ death, Cretheis remained under the tutorship of Cleanax, a trusted friend of her father. In spite of Cleanax’ thoughtful surveillance, Cretheis got pregnant by a young man whose identity remained unknown; Cleanax sent her to Smyrna, in the house of Ismenias, a friend of his, and it is in Smyrna that Critheis gave birth to her baby, Melesigenes, named, as mentioned, after the river Meles where the birth took place. Cretheis then married Phemios, a teacher of letters and music, who took excellent care of Melesigenes’ inherent talent. After the death of Phemios and, later on of Critheis, Melesigenes, alias Homer, became himself a renowned poet and teacher. This is, briefly, the story told about Homer’s mother, Cretheis.
The refusal of the inhabitants of Cuma to accept Homer as the city’s guest could indeed be associated with a wider issue concerning social attitude towards poets. According to M. Lefkowitz,10 this attitude could already be detected in perceptions of the archaic period. This theme is also inserted in various forms in Epigrams 1, 2, 6, 8, 14, some of which could be dated as early as in the fifth century BC.11
In the fourth Epigram the idea of the mother advanced in the first two verses leads to the idea of motherland, a frequent association which, however, becomes particularly significant in the case of Homer. In contrast to the usual epic – and Homeric – convention according to which a person is introduced into the narrative through the mention of his paternal descent (patronymic), the origin of Homer is traditionally defined through maternal descent (metronymic); what is more, the identity of his father in the relevant traditions is either persistently silenced or uncritically attributed to the numerous names of a long list of virtual candidates. It is perhaps interesting to mention that in the first of the Plutarchean Lives (4), Homer is represented as asking for an oracle revealing his paternal origin; the answer to his quest is quite significant “you seek your fatherland but what you have got is a motherland.”12 The antagonism among the Greek cities claiming the birth of Homer could be one of the reasons explaining why the authors of these sources restrained themselves from choosing a name for the poet’s father; as the institutional framework of the archaic cities was more or less patriarchally structured, any paternal identification would be attached to a certain city and voraciously challenged by those favouring a different origin of Homer. Most versions on the identity of Homer’s father indicate either a god like Apollo,13 or an adequate hero such as Orpheus,14 Musaeus15 or Thamyris,16 or the river Meles himself,17 or even persons issuing from his poems such as Telemachus.18 The same idea explains the long catalogues of names often cited to reveal Homer’s possible father where no conclusive verdict is finally expressed (dozens of possible fathers are listed for instance in the Certamen in such a way that any possible choice is condemned in advance). Ephorus’ version19 on the other hand is one of the most unusual ones in that it suggests that Homer is the result of his mother’s rape by her uncle who, afterwards, married her to Phemios. However strange this version may be, it is once more stressing the maternal descent in Homer’s genealogical tree.
The same maternal-orientated priorities pertain to most versions concerning the poet’s offspring. The pseudo-Herodotean Life mentions20 two daughters, of which one died unmarried and the other married a man from Chios, a version which allowed the Homeridae of Chios, the local corporation of singers, to refer to Homer as to their venerated founder. A variant version narrated by Pindar21 (preserved through Aelian)22 claims that Homer gave his son-in-law, Stasinus, a whole epic poem, namely the Cypria, as an inheritance (dower), a story that ascribes also the Cypria to the authorship of Homer; as far as we know this is the only case of spiritual inheritance ever registered in antiquity. In the Suda we read another name for Homer’s son-in-law, Creophylus, who, in other versions, is only a friend of the poet.23 I. Tzetzes24 names Homer’s wife Eurydice and Homer’s daughter Arsiphone; he also mentions two sons: Seriphon (Σερίφων) and Theolaos (Θεόλαος). Even if tradition never granted Homer a proper father, his own fatherhood has been solicited retroactively by most archaic epics, either preserved or not.
Coming back to our fourth Epigram, it is interesting to observe that in the same way that the city of Cuma was supposed to become but never became Homer’s birthplace, in the same way it was supposed to become but never became his residence and the focus of his poetic glory. Out of the seven cities that claimed to be Homer’s birthplace (Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, Pylos, Argos, Athens) the Epigrams and the pseudo-Herodotean Life finally made their choice: Smyrna. Pylos, Argos and Colophon are not mentioned at all, Athens remained a prospective destination, whereas Chios earned only the title of the poet’s place of residence. This rich topography is further enlarged by the various stop-overs in Homer’s wanderings mentioned in the pseudo-Herodotean and the other Lives. Many of these places are, of course, involved in the long story of Homer’s origins as Markwald’s (1986); Graziosi’s (2002) works have shown.
The mention of the river Meles in line 7 is a straight reminder of the poet’s precise birthplace. The story of Homer’s birth by the river and the mention of the Muses in the following line are probably associated (though it is hard to say in what sense) with a Hellenistic idea that Homer is the river of poetry whence all the other streams of poetic speech spring out (Callim. H. Apoll. 105–113). As for Homer’s identification with the Muses who appear to originate from Smyrna themselves, not only does it convey the idea of the poet’s direct inspiration from the Muse but also strengthens the accusation against the Cumaeans who reject not the poet’s but the Muses’ intention to glorify the metropolis of Smyrna, since, in historical terms, Smyrna was a Cumaean colony founded by Phricon. By denying Homer, Cuma, the metropolis, denies her own ‘children’ and with them, also, the glory of the Muses; the idea of the mother in lines 1–2 is now reversely projected in the relationship between the metropolis and the colony.
The Cumaeans’ decision belied Homer’s expectations to find in Cuma a safe place to live. These expectations were expressed already in the short second Epigram supposedly composed on his way to Cuma. A quick reading of the second Epigram25 shows its inner poetic relationship with the fourth through the precise virtues expected from the Cumaeans, aidos, thymos prophron, metis ariste. None of them has been found, and this leads not only to the poet’s deception but, also, to an idea which makes its entrance in the fourth Epigram (lines 11–12) and ascends further and beyond the others: a reciprocal justice, a somewhat strange lex talionis, which announces, through a poetic insight, a severe punishment for the bad behaviour manifested towards the poet.26 This is the case in Epigram 14, where the potters are threatened with total and vile destruction of their pottery and their furnace if they fail to award the singer for his song,27 or Epigram 12 where the priestess of Kourotrophos28 is condemned to a total eclipse of erotic pleasure for her rude and arrogant words to Homer when she met him at a cross road, to cite two examples out of many.
The last picture of Homer given by the pseudo-Herodotean Life is at the seaside of Ios where the poet, already sick, is waiting for a boat to sail to Athens. It is in Ios where the author places the well-known episode with the fisher boys who, when asked by the poet what they caught, answered, “what we caught we did let go, what we did not catch we carry” (=not the fish but the lice on their heads).29 It is obvious, not only by the picture of the hero waiting for a boat at the seaside of an island to sail to Greece, but also from the whole itinerary of the poet related in the text, that the Homer of the Epigrams and of the pseudo-Herodotean Life is conceived as ‘a man of many wanderings’ whose encounters, acquaintances and experiences are inspired and sometimes named after the narrative of the Homeric epics and mainly the Odyssey. But in contrast to Odysseus who achieves survival and recognition through wanderings which definitely lead him to an irreplaceable homeland, the pseudo-herodotean Homer achieves survival and recognition through many replaceable substitute homelands, which lead him to a definite wandering.
The Homeric Epigrams are not the works of Homer; what they do in the history of classical literature is borrow the impact of the greatest Greek poet and in exchange try to supply their supposed creator with the historical biographic existence which he lacks. For classicists, the scholarly value of the Homeric Epigrams is taken for granted but their pure literary value is not. The Epigrams had to ‘lie’ about their authorship to be sheltered in a proper Life of Homer. To gain respectability, the Life itself had to lie about its own authorship and pass as a work of Herodotus. This pair of lies is what I find interesting and, in a way, moving about these texts. If the Epigrams and the Life had given their not prestigious but real author’s name, who knows if they would be today preserved? However dear genuineness may be to us, we must admit it is not the only way to preserve some texts. Sometimes, lies work better.
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Notes
1
On the historical and fictional depiction of Homer’s persona in the imperial period, see Kim (2010); see also Skiadas (1965). On the wider theme of history’s intricate interrelation with fiction and myth, see the Preface to the present volume.
2
See Gigante (1996); see also West’s Introduction in West (2003).
3
See Bassino (2019) 176–180; Livingston and Nisbet (2010) 42–45; Bakker (2016) 195–204. On the way funerary stones or statues address the readers of their engraved epigrams, see Svenbro (1976).
4
See Compton (2006) 72–74; Day (2019).
5
See Compton (2006) 72–73.
6
For an overall analysis of the Homeric Epigrams, see Markwaldt (1986); Christopoulos (2007).
7
Gregory Nagy discerns three periods in the ongoing reception of the Life of Homer tradition (pre-Athenocentric, Athenocentric, post-Athenocentric); see Nagy (2009).
8
Transl. by Evelyn-White (1936).
9
Vita Herodotea (Homeri Opera V, Allen) 5–33.
10
Lefkowitz (1983) 17.
11
For this theme in Greek Literature, see Compton (2006).
12
Πατρίδα δίζηαι, μητρίς δέ τοι οὐ πατρίς ἐστιν.
13
Suda s.v. Homer.
14
Certamen 4.
15
Gorgias 82B 25 DK.
16
Certamen 3.
17
EG 3305 / 146 CP.
18
Certamen 3, Anth. Pal. 14.102; see Bassino (2019) 118–130.
19
Jacoby 70 F 1.
20
§§ 343–345.
21
Fr. 265 Schroeder, 280 Bowra.
22
VH 9.15.
23
See Burkert (1972).
24
Chil. 13.636.
25
Αἶψα πόδες με φέροιεν ἐς αἰδοίων πόλιν ἀνδρῶν. / τῶν γὰρ καὶ θυμὸς πρόφρων καὶ μῆτις ἀρίστη.
26
The theme of the hostile treatment towards a poet in the Greco-Roman world – but also in the Indo-European tradition – is explored by Compton (2006).
27
See Compton (2006) 72–74; Day (2019).
28
On certain ‘matron’ aspects of some female deities, including Kourotrophos, see Hadzisteliou-Price (1978); Simon (1987).
29
Ὅσσ’ ἕλομεν λιπόμεσθα, ἃ δ’ οὐχ ἕλομεν φερόμεσθα. On the general function of riddles in Greek antiquity, see Ohlert (1912); Pucci (1996); Schneider (2020). On this particular riddle, see Pucci (1996) 20–29; Levine (2002/2003).