Greek Literature

Extract

‘Who, pray, had previously collected literary references to cucumbers?’ Martin West once again hits highly quotable form in his commentary on the Trojan poems of the Epic Cycle (50). (The answer, of course, is no-one – so Athenaeus’ evidence is unlikely to be derived from a secondary source.) A characteristic boldness of hypothesizing is also on display. For example, West puts a name (Phayllus) to the (pre-Aristotelian) compiler who assembled and summarized the epics of the cycle. Since he credits Phayllus with conjectures about the names of the poets (27), one might expect a certain fellow-feeling on the part of West. But the naming of the poets, ‘not based on any established consensus or firm tradition’ and drawn from sources that ‘cannot have been unanimous or decisive’, is described in terms that sound reproachful: ‘bluff assertiveness…bold constructionism’. καὶ κεραμεὺς κεραμεῖ κοτέει καὶ τέκτονι τέκτων, / καὶ πτωχὸς πτωχῷ ϕθονέει καὶ ἀοιδὸς ἀοιδῷ (‘So potter is piqued with potter, joiner with joiner, / beggar begrudges beggar, and singer singer’). Which of Hesiod's rivalrous professions (Op. 24–5) has most affinity to scholars engaged in conjecture is, perhaps, open to debate; but the ἀοιδός (‘singer’) peeks out from West's own exercises in creative writing. Admittedly, he provides only one extended piece of Greek verse composition (201–11), but prose summaries are supplied on at least ten occasions (e.g. 183: ‘It is possible to imagine a defiant speech on these lines: “Leaders of the Achaeans…”.’). Acknowledging that his ‘imaginative reconstructions’ are ‘highly speculative, a flight of fancy’ (281), West pleads that they ‘serve to illustrate how the thing could have been done’. But since it could have been done otherwise, these reconstructions also serve to plant in readers’ minds an insidiously vivid but possibly misleading image. As West observes in another context, ‘the reconstruction of Wilamowitz…goes too far beyond the evidence’ (94). The same could be said, for example, of West's identification of passages in the Iliad and Aethiopis that are ‘variants on the Iliad poet's original, unwritten account of Achilles’ death’ (149): West's own confidence in this hypothesis fluctuated in The Making of the Iliad (G&R 59 [2012], 245–6) between confidence (‘doubtless’, 346) and caution (‘may have’, 390). On a point of detail: Aristotle does not describe the Cypria and Little Iliad as ‘episodic’ in Poet. 1459a37 (60): he explicitly says that they are about ‘a single action’, a judgement which excludes ‘concatenation…without organic connection’ (166). Yet, whatever one's reservations, West's scholarship is, as always, profound, original, and indispensably provocative. Moreover, this book provides an added bonus in the form of an exercise in another of West's areas of expertise: readers must become textual critics, transposing a misplaced line of text (308) and emending the puzzling reference to an ‘undermined species of stingray’ (309).