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EPEIUS IN THE KITCHEN: OR ANCIENT GREEK FOLK TALES VINDICATED

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 March 2014

Malcolm Davies
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Extract

Bertold Brecht's wonderful poem Fragen eines lesenden Arbeiters (Questions from a Reading Workman) begins by posing (or making his ‘reading workman’ pose) a number of awkward questions:

      Wer baute das siebentorige Theben?
      In dem Büchern stehen die Namen von Königen.
      Haben die Könige die Felsbrocken herbeigeschleppt?
      Und das mehrmals zerstörte Babylon –
      Wer baute es so viele Mal auf?
      Who built seven-gated Thebes?
      In books one only finds the names of kings.
      Did the Kings haul the blocks of stone all the way up?
      And Babylon, the much-destroyed city –
      Who was it built it up again so many times?

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 61 , Issue 1 , April 2014 , pp. 91 - 101
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 2014 

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References

1 Dover, K.J., Fifty Years (and Twelve) of Classical Scholarship, ed. Platnauer, M. (Oxford, 1968)Google Scholar, 123 = Greek and the Greeks. Collected Papers (Oxford, 1987–8), i.191.

2 All translations from Brecht's poem are my own.

3 Brecht, B., Letters, tr. Manheim, R., ed. Willett, J. (London, 1990)Google Scholar, 341.

4 For details see the forthcoming commentary by M. Davies and P. Finglass, The Poems of Stesichorus, shortly to be published by Cambridge University Press.

5 This detail, too, will be treated in Davies and Finglass (n. 4).

6 Griffin, J. (ed.), Homer. Iliad Book 9 (Oxford, 1995)Google Scholar, on Iliad 9.168; see also his note on verses 223–4.

7 Kailaspathy, K., Tamil Heroic Poetry (Oxford, 1968)Google Scholar, 262.

8 See in particular Schmidt, M., Die Erklärungen zum Weltbilds Homers und zur Kultur der Heroenzeit in den bT Scholien zu Homer, Zetemata 62 (1976)Google Scholar. For pre-Aristarchean interest in the topic see, e.g., the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus (SVF, iii, fr. 708), quoted below p. 95. For his appropriate interest in the concept of the ‘simple life’, see frr. 705–15; for his interest in Homeric problems in general, see frr. 769–77.Translations of Chrysippus and the Homeric scholia quoted in the present article are my own.

9 See in general Schmidt (n. 8), 159–72, on what he calls ‘Das einfache Leben’ (‘the simple life’). The relevant Greek word is haplotes (‘simplicity’). For a list of its occurrences in the Iliadic scholia, see Erbse, H., Scholia Graeca in Homeri Iliadem (Berlin, 1969–88)Google Scholar, vi, Index III, s.v. For some instances, with discussion, see Schmidt (n. 8), 170 ff.

10 For a list of the occurrences of the word autourgia in the Iliadic scholia and for selected examples with discussion see Erbse (n. 9), vi, Index III, s.v.; Schmidt (n. 8), 166 ff. Since even the gods, or at least Poseidon, are credited with this capacity (scholion on Il. 13.35, where that god drives his own chariot) and since we are shortly to see the similarities between the worldview attributed to Homer in certain scholia and that of folk tale, it is amusing to note that, in the latter, ‘not only simple girls and women wear their aprons to work and for ornamentation; princesses, queens, empresses – even nixies, the Virgin Mary, and God do as well’ (Röhrich, L., Folktales and Reality, tr. Tokofsky, P. [Bloomington, 1991], 194, emphasis addedGoogle Scholar).

11 See Schmidt (n. 8), 161, nn. 7–8.

12 Ibid.

13 Röhrich (n. 10), 194. The book was originally published as Märchen und Wirklichkeit (Wiesbaden, 1956)Google Scholar.

14 For a recent study of this figure, with full bibliography, see Wilkins, J., The Boastful Chef. The Discourse of Food in Ancient Greek Comedy (Oxford, 2000)Google Scholar.

15 Griffin, J., ‘The Epic Cycle and the Uniqueness of Homer’, JHS 97 (1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 41 = Cairns, D. L. (ed.), Oxford Readings in Homer's Iliad (Oxford, 2001)Google Scholar, 369. For a defence of the relevant Iliadic passage against charges of inauthenticity, see Kelly, A., ‘The Ending of Iliad 7: A Response’, Philologus 152 (2008), 5–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Page, D. L., History and the Homeric Iliad (Berkeley, CA, 1959)Google Scholar, 312.

17 Edwards, M. W. (ed.), The Iliad. A Commentary. Volume V. Books 17–20 (Cambridge, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Actually anticipated by Leaf's commentary (London, 1902), 321, whose slightly less sympathetic phrasing is worth recalling: ‘if it were not for the predominant interest in questions of feeding throughout the book, one would suppose 43–44 to be a later gloss. As it is, the author [whom Leaf was reluctant to identify with Homer] seems to have thought it right that the all-important commissariat department should not lack its bard. He therefore explains that the non-combatants are employed as helmsmen when at sea and as superintendents of supply on shore. They are usually too much engaged in official duties, it seems, to waste time on attending assemblies.’ The second sentence seems to echo Dr Johnson's famously unsympathetic critique of English metaphysical poetry (in his Life of Cowley): ‘a coal-pit has not often found its poet’ (he continues: ‘but that it may not want its due honour, Cleiveland has paralleled it with the sun’) (Johnson, S., The Works of the English Poets, vii [London, 1810], 19Google Scholar).

19 See Griffin (n. 15), 41=369.

20 See, for instance, my article ‘Food and Feasting in Homer: Stylisation and Realism’, Prometheus 23 (1997), 97–107Google Scholar. For a recent general monograph on food and its social functions, see Wrangham, Richard, Catching Fire (London, 2011)Google Scholar. An interesting review by Alexander Murray (Oxford Magazine 322 [Hilary Term, 2012], 11–13) draws out the social implications of the decline of commensality in Oxbridge colleges.

21 For a compendious list of those passages in Homer where heroes are said to perform menial tasks and those where servants or slaves are, see Hainsworth, B. (ed.), The Iliad. A Commentary. Volume III. Books 9–12 (Cambridge, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar on Il. 9.202.

22 Röhrich (n. 10), 213.

23 On this folk-tale figure, see my article ‘“Unpromising” Heroes and Heroes as Helpers in Greek Myth’, Prometheus 37 (2011), 108–27Google Scholar. On ‘Ashlad’, see my remarks in ‘“From Rags to Riches”: Democedes of Croton and the Credibility of Herodotus’, BICS 53.2 (2010)Google Scholar, 40.

24 On the blackened hero in general, see Miller, D. A., The Epic Hero (Baltimore, MD, 2000)Google Scholar 278 ff. and 283 ff. My quotation regarding Rainouert comes from 275 f. It is interesting that on 276 ff. of this discussion of folk tale's ‘anti-heroes’ Miller proceeds to discuss the phenomenon of the ‘coward knight’: there was a tradition of the proverbial cowardice of Epeius (see Pfeiffer on Callimachus fr. 197.2; for the comparative form of the proverb ‘more cowardly than Epeius’, see N. Zagagi, Tradition and Originality in Plautus, Hypomnemata 62 [1980], 44 ff.). Where this idea originated is unclear, but a coward may also be a braggart waiting to be unmasked, and the Epeius who wins the boxing match in the Iliadic Funeral Games for Patroclus is certainly a braggart. For boastfulness as a typical feature of the chef in antiquity, see Wilkins (n. 14).

25 Eduard Fraenkel was a little too categorical in his refusal to contemplate the possibility that a reference to Epeius already occurred in Plautus’ Greek model, though he was, of course, right to observe that this fragment's metaphorical use of the Latin term legio is a Plautine idiom (Plautinisches im Plautus [Berlin, 1922], 71 = Elementi Plautini in Plauto [Florence, 1960], 97 f. = Plautine Elements in Plautus [Oxford, 2007], 70) and to emphasize Varro's accompanying statement that the phrase Epeius fumificus serves ‘only to indicate any cook at all’.

26 OCD 2 s.v. ‘Epeius’.

27 See my remarks in Davies, M., ‘Two Medieval Saints' Lives and the Judgement of Paris’, Prometheus 30 (2004)Google Scholar, 126, where I should have pointed out that the pattern in question is allowed for by Vladimir Propp in his famous monograph The Morphology of the Folktale, tr. Scott, L. (Bloomington, 1958)Google Scholar, 110, where he exemplifies the pattern with ‘Ivan [the archetypal hero of Russian folk tales, who] sets out after a steed but returns with a princess’.

28 Detlev Fehling is particularly eloquent on this topic in his book Herodotus and His ‘Sources’ (Leeds, 1989)Google Scholar, 209 f., against the notion that there could be ‘some unalterable traditional oral narrative repertoire drawn on by authors of all lands and ages. This view, long cherished by literary scholars, must now be considered out of date. Above all, it must be realized that modern collections of folktales can tell us absolutely nothing about the subjects of oral narrative in earlier times. Like written literature, oral narrative is subject to changes in fashion; and the folktales of the modern period are the products of nostalgic romanticism, not relics of some primeval stage in the development of the human mind…there is no such thing as an oral tradition stable over a long period of time’ (this is a translation and development of a position first expressed in the German original of the monograph, Die Quellenangaben bei Herodot [Berlin, 1971])Google Scholar.

29 West, M. L., Immortal Helen (London, 1975)Google Scholar, 15 = Hellenica (Oxford, 2011–13)Google Scholar, i.94f.

30 Röhrich (n. 10), 193ff.

31 For the claim that they have, see e.g. Anderson, G., Fairytale in the Ancient World (London, 2000)Google Scholar, passim.

32 Aristarchus is not likely to have invented the concept of ‘the simple life’ (we know that the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus was a forerunner in this: see above n. 8), nor are generations of, for instance, Silesian peasants likely to have had access to the fragments of his ideas preserved in Homeric scholia.