To read Chryses’ speech to the Achaians in silence is qualitatively different from facing a man who begs for his daughter’s freedom, gesturing pathetically towards you. It is this aspect of the Homeric poems that Kretler urges us to appreciate in her analysis of the Iliad and the Odyssey as scripts for performance.
In its focus on the poems’ performative intent, the volume under review complements a century of work on composition in performance and adds to a growing body of scholarship exploring the interactions between the Homeric narrator and audiences both inside and outside the story.
In the introduction, Katherine Kretler notes that Plato and Aristotle were impressed by the performative dimension of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and argues that they were struck in particular by the ‘uncanny or haunted quality of Homeric poetry’ (47), which is central to Kretler’s conception of Homeric performance.
Chapter 1 surveys the techniques by which the bard activated various performative dynamics. While some of these are clearly relevant to the experience of a live audience (for example, gestures, mapping story space onto performance space, shifting from narration to direct speech), others are less straightforwardly so (for example, the evocation of background stories, the use of ring composition, intratextual resonances and the creation of ethical dilemmas). While these effects can certainly be appreciated in performance, as they were intended to be, one may question the extent to which Homeric intratextuality or ring composition ought to be regarded as performative phenomena.
Chapter 2 analyses Phoinix’s speech in Iliad 9. Kretler reads the digression about Marpessa as a mise en abyme of Phoinix’s autobiography and argues that Phoinix effectively curses Achilleus by imitating the gesture with which Althaia punctuates her curse; with the same gesture, Kretler argues, the bard brings the curse into the performance space.
The first of two interludes argues that the chariot race scene in Iliad 23 connects Phoinix to the phoenix bird; Phoinix and the bird to Nestor; Phoinix, the bird and Nestor to the solar cycle, and hence to reincarnation, an associative web which Kretler regards as a relic of a ‘sun-worship context’ (181). Although no extant text connects Phoinix to the homonymous bird (or, for that matter, to the solar cycle), she finds corroborating evidence in Etruscan and Roman visual art.
Chapter 3 focuses on the relevance of the myth of Protesilaos for Hektor’s battle with Aias in Iliad 15 and Patroklos’ interaction with Achilleus in the next book. Kretler argues that Hektor’s contact with Protesilaos’ ship, physically imitated by the bard, activates the bard’s memory of Protesilaos’ resurrection, which informs his narration of the Achilleus-Patroklos story.
The second interlude argues that the Iliadic connection between Marpessa, Kleopatra and Protesilaos’ wife derives from their genealogical connection in a catalogic poem that served as a source for several Homeric catalogues and provided inspiration for the structure of the Iliad’s plot.
In chapter 4, Kretler examines the speeches of Odyssey 13–15, arguing that an appreciation of the bard’s engagement with extra-Homeric traditions helps us look deeper into the bard as both poet and social critic. Here as elsewhere, Kretler relies not only on fragments of archaic epic and classical tragedy, but also on Augustan, late antique and medieval accounts as evidence for traditions available to poets of the early Archaic period.
The book ends with a conclusion and two appendices. Appendix Aevaluates the evidence for objects that rhapsodes typically held. Kretler imagines a staff-wielding performer, but does not exclude the possibility that performers occasionally accompanied themselves on the lyre. Appendix Bdiscusses how the staff served as a multivalent prop with which performers could bring intradiegetic objects into the performance space.
Though Kretler maintains that the staff and the lyre could have been used to similar effect, her arguments throughout the book generally presuppose that the Iliad and the Odyssey were designed to be performed with a staff, in the manner of Plato’s Ion. These arguments are not invalidated if one pictures a seated singer accompanying himself on the lyre à la Phemios or Demodokos, but their impact and persuasiveness are diminished. Even if Homer’s intradiegetic bards need not represent contemporary performances, it is nevertheless striking that they are not shown to have any of the performative presence that Kretler attributes to the poems’ performers.
One question not treated by Kretler is that of how these poems were divided into digestible performance units. Though not strictly necessary for her argument, a discussion of the challenge of performing poems of such exceptional length would have been apposite, especially given her treatment of other realia of performance.
Kretler’s attention to the performative intent of these poems is productive, but her argumentation is likely to provoke in readers varying degrees of scepticism. Nevertheless, the book succeeds in turning our attention to an important but neglected aspect of Homeric poetry.
