Pasts Imperfect (7.18.24)
Performing Homer, Han Propaganda, Keeping Cool, Mapping Myth & More
This week, Homer scholar and myth expert Joel Christensen discusses Homeric performances, the audience, and the state of scholarship on the bard. Then, a new digital project, MANTO, maps the thousands of places, people, and things in Greek myth; a new article on BTS, Homeric reception, sugar, and colonialism; Marvel Entertainment works with Lakota nation members to dub The Avengers; manipulating archaeology in China; a podcast defends Cleopatra; a cheeky Hermes is discovered in a sewer; new ancient world journals—and much more. Enjoy this last issue before we finally take our summer hiatus.
What Was Going on with Homeric Audiences? by Joel Christensen
Of the many problems that make up the so-called “Homeric Question”, the one that troubles me the most is what was going on with Homeric audiences. Homeric studies is dominated by “supply-side poetics”, by which I mean that so much of our scholarship has traditionally been consumed with the nature of the poet(s), the methods by which the poems were composed, and the stability of our texts. Indeed, while performance studies like those pioneered by Milman Parry and Albert Lord helped us think much more about oral composition and multiformity, our cultural focus on Homer as The Author has guided the questions we ask.
Of course, our academic preferences are only part of this obsession. We have almost no record of how Homeric poems were performed, much less who was in attendance when they were. Our dominant models are episodic performances from myth similar to those we see in Homer themselves, from the paradigmatic narratives offered by speakers like Nestor, Phoenix, and Achilles in the Iliad to the songs of Phemios and Demodokos in the Odyssey. Outside of the poems, there is good evidence for monumental performances of epic during events like the Festival Dionysia in Athens. But epic songs must have existed outside and in between these contexts. When we think about how audiences made meaning with epic, we need to think about repeated engagement over time in different contexts.
How did audiences engage with Homer? Reading 24 books of poetry presumes a different level of access to information and processing of meaning than listening to 18-22 hours of performance. Access to multiple performances matters too: a Hellenistic editor working through each line of the Iliad likely experienced a very different poem than a 5th century BCE audience member, even if the words were identical. We can guess from evidence in the poems and elsewhere that audiences reacted to the poems and shaped them through their responses. In Plato’s Ion, which provides one of our lengthiest, albeit somewhat polemical, testimonies to one approach to performing Homer, the eponymous rhapsode says that he pays close attention to his audiences because whether they laugh or cry impacts his earnings. He also says that he knows how to craft speeches suitable to men and women, to warriors and generals–but it is unclear whether he strictly means the content (the likeliest) or also the form/style/sound of the speaker.
There is some growing consensus that Homeric performance may have been “proto-tragic” in certain ways (and many that would have met Aristotelian standards), and I am steadily more sure that we need to think about audience responses to Homer from an affective perspective. Performances do things to people and what they do changes based on the nature of the community that provides the audience, the identity of audience members, and what everyone brings to the performance. When teaching Greek tragedy, I often use baseball as an example. People create narratives around careers and seasons, the characters of the players, the experiences of communities in watching teams flounder or succeed; and their own lives alongside games. Longtime fans follow each pitch, note the changes going on during the game, and can argue for or against the designated hitter. But a stranger can enjoy the majesty of a homerun, the ferocity of a strikeout, or the suspense of a full-count with two outs at the end of a game. And then there is this: the energy and emotion of watching a game with other people is totally different from piecing together events from a box score in the newspaper.
Like any athletic event, epic performance existed in a particular time and place and was shaped by the people who formed those spaces. My conviction here was reshaped and informed by the multiyear process of hosting Reading Greek Tragedy Online with Paul O’Mahony. As we discuss in our essay in the collection Pandemic Play, our notion of the community of interpretation that existed around tragedy in the ancient world was shaped by the dynamic of working for weeks with performers, translators, and scholars thinking about tragedy, developing a shared set of experiences around the plays, and allowing life and performance to influence one another during the first few years of COVID-19. Not only did our group knowledge of tragic content and performance change our conversations about the plays, but the identities of our community members and our shared experiences of the world influenced our understanding as well.
It is one thing to perform a tragedy a week; it is another to achieve the same engagement with sixteen thousand lines of poetry. Paul and I have fantasized about a maximalist approach to the the Iliad that we think of as “HomeriCon”, an interactive performance space where each book of the Iliad would get a different treatment. Imagine a conference center where you could move from a ‘performance’ of each book at will–perhaps a traditional stage play of book 1, a 3D performance of book 3 (from the Teikhoskopia to the duel between Paris and Menelaos), a video-game experience of one of the battle books, etc. It should be immersive; it could be iterative; and it would likely be overwhelming.
While we dream up experimental ways of thinking about Homeric audiences, we have the benefit of learning some from performers who have taken the work to heart themselves. I know there are many people out there doing amazing things with Homeric poetry in performance: Brandon Bourgeois has been fusing Homer and hip-hop for years; the Almeida theatre has sponsored performances of the Iliad and the Odyssey and less heralded artists have made performing epic their business for years. I have gotten to know some modern bards in recent years and in another post I have gathered the thoughts of Joe Goodkin, Bill George, Jay Leeming and Lynn Kozak on performing Homer in classrooms, at conferences, on stages and in bars.
These performers echo Plato’s Ion in some ways—there is a deep connection between performer and audience and a consciousness of creating a new experience in the recreation of the past. Listening to modern performers and audiences may not answer all of our questions about how Homeric epic was received in the past, but it provides us a different kind of beginning.
Video: A reading and discussion of the Iliad (translation by Stanley Lombardo, courtesy of Hackett Publishing Company), hosted by Joel Christensen with special guest Lynn Kozak. Featured performers include Tabatha Gayle, Paul O'Mahony, Rhys Rusbatch, and Sara Valentine. For more on oral performance and bibliography, see the end of this newsletter.1
Public Humanities and a Global Antiquity
The new linked open data Greek myth project, MANTO, maps the thousands of places, people, and things in Greek myth. You can also check out their podcast, “The Greek Myth Files,” as well as a blog exploring everything from “Mythic chronology in Pausanias” to “Matrilineal succession in Greek myth.”
In the newly published Classical Receptions Journal, Yanxiao He has a great article on “Performing Homeric islands: Homeric receptions in (post-)Hellenistic Asia,” which looks at interpretations of the Sophytos inscription, a Greek inscription found in what is modern Afghanistan dating to the 2ndC BCE; SEG_54.1568, “in comparison with the K-pop song ‘Sugar Rush Ride’ within the context of the cultural politics of sugar production in modern colonialism.” For more on K-Pop and Classics, make sure to go back to Yung In Chae’s splendid “Like Dionysus: BTS, Classics in K-Pop, and the Narcissism of the West” in Eidolon.
In the fashionable pages of Elle, they look at Dior’s Couture Show and its refashioning of the “goddess style.” In addition, the film Io Capitano (2023) can now be streamed online. The filmmakers summarize the Homeric tale as about Moussa and Seydou, “two young boys who struggle to find themselves amid the fraught landscape of their native Dakar, Senegal. Determined to forge new paths for themselves, the boys embark on an epic odyssey to Europe, cradling hope close to their chests.” Readers may also enjoy the musical stylings of Jorge Rivera-Herrans, creator of EPIC: The musical, which was inspired by Homer's Odyssey.
Over at Reactor, they report that Marvel Entertainment worked with Lakota nation members in order to dub The Avengers (2012). The project was part of the larger Lakota Language Reclamation Project. They pursued the translation after Marvel created a What If…? episode, “What If… Kahhori Reshaped the World” which addressed the questions of:
What if the Tesseract [i.e., the cube] fell to Earth before the colonization of America? In this situation, the Tesseract lands in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and is discovered by a young Mohawk woman named Kahhori. Utilizing the Tesseract’s ability to hop effortlessly between planets and stars, Kahhori goes on a “quest to discover her power.”
Characters spoke Mohawk and Spanish with English subtitles. The Disney+ series Echo, with Choctaw Maya Lopez played by Menominee and Mohican actor Alaqua Cox, is also dubbed into Choctaw.
On the radio waves, classicist Natalie Haynes stands up for Cleopatra with Jane Draycott, author of Cleopatra’s Daughter: From Roman Prisoner to African Queen. You might also want to revisit Shelley Haley’s splendid work on Cleopatra as well.
Uh oh, a white British pseudo-archaeologist was up to some lie-mongering shenanigans! But in the case of Netflix’s Ancient Apocalypse, Native American communities shut him down. After host Graham Hancock started touting some genuinely fringe/bonkers/prejudiced theories about an Ice Age society in the Grand Canyon, members of the Hopi Nation wrote to national park staff to urge them to deny filming permits to Hancock and his cronies. And they did! Oh, and I forgot to mention that Hancock’s son is a manager at Netflix? You have to love when there’s a sprinkle of nepotism at the end.
The Palestinian Authority on Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities has called for support to challenge the draft of a law “extending the powers of the Israeli Antiquities Authority [IAA] to antiquities in the occupied West Bank.” The PA described this as “creeping annexation laws” that take away heritage oversight from Palestinians. As Haaretz journalist Nir Hasson notes, “In recent decades, settlers have discovered the power of archaeology as a tool for seizing territory, shaping consciousness, attracting tourists, fundraising, and for dispossession and control.”
What in the colonizer? In The Economist, they discuss how China’s government is bending ancient history to support claims that Xinjiang, a hotly contested autonomous region under military rule, has always been a part of Han China. Mo’er is a 1,700-year-old ancient Buddhist stupa and temple outside the city of Kashgar. Government archaeologists claim that artifacts found at the site match the “Han Buddhist” style, and are now transforming Mo’er into a highly produced tourist attraction. (Here’s some cheeky propaganda.)
The Conversation runs an enchanting column called “Curious Kids,” where children can ask questions about the world and receive answers from researchers. Kendra, age 11, asked:
How was popcorn discovered?
Sean Rafferty, anthropologist at the University of Albany, answered the call. His best hypothesis:
It’s impossible to know exactly why or how popcorn was invented, but I would guess it was a clever way to preserve the edible starch in corn by getting rid of the little bit of water inside each kernel that would make it more susceptible to spoiling. It’s the heated water in the kernel escaping as steam that makes popcorn pop. The popped corn could then last a long time. What you may consider a tasty snack today probably started as a useful way of preserving and storing food.
Ah, the Fourth of July: I spend the day alternately housing buttered sweet corn and comforting the dog. This story from NPR’s Joe Hernandez reminds me of the origins of fireworks: chunks of bamboo loaded up with gunpowder and blown up to signal party time in first-century CE China.
We have reached the days of high summer, when Linda Ronstadt’s cover of “Heat Wave” plays on endless repeat in my neurodivergent brain. Instead of agonizing over the spike in my electricity bill, maybe I, Stephanie, should consider a solution from ancient history: the clay water pot. Nadeem Sarwar and Shreya Fotedar at Wired report on Indian companies working to restore cooling technologies from the past. Matka, earthenware pots used to store water, are inexpensive and require only the power of physics to operate: the water evaporates through the porous clay, cooling both the air and the water inside the pot.
New temple alert! Archaeologists from the Field Museum, led by Luis Muro Ynoñán, have uncovered a 4,000-year-old religious site in coastal Peru. In addition to the exciting new archaeological data, personal connections have become stronger. Muro Ynoñán says, “This is the story of my own ancestors. Both my mother’s and my father’s families come from this area, so it was really incredible to come face to face with these depictions of an ancient god that was so important for these ancient groups. My connection with it is so special, so deep.”
Lastly: this photo of the newly discovered Hermes statue is so funny to me.
New Antiquity Journal Issues (by @YaleClassicsLib / yaleclassicslib.bsky.social) Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions Vol. 24, No. 1 (2024)
Preternature Vol. 13, No. 2 (2024) NB Maxwell Paule, “Blood, Sweat, and Sex: A Note on the Erotic Power of Gladiator Sweat”
Byzantinische Zeitschrift Vol. 117, No. 2 (2024)
The Catholic Biblical Quarterly Vol. 86, No. 3 (2024)
Trends in Classics Vol. 16, No. 1 (2024)
Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History Vol. 11, No. 1 (2024) Interdisciplinary Approaches to Collapse, Resilience, and Resistance in the Ancient Near East
Anzeiger für die Altertumswissenschaft Vol. 78. No.1 (2024) #openacess
Journal of Biblical Literature Vol. 143, No. 2 (2024)
Journal of the History of Philosophy Vol. 62, No. 3 (2024)
Dialogues d'histoire ancienne Vol. 50, No.1 (2024) NB Anca Dan, et al. “Barbarians in Ancient Civilizations, 2”
Pylon Vol. 5 (2024) #openaccess
Phronesis Vol. 69 No. 3 (2024) NB Miira Tuominen, “Porphyry’s Account of Justice in On Abstinence”
Archäologie Weltweit No. 1 (2024) #openaccess
Early Medieval Europe Vol. 32, No.1 (2024)
Romanitas: Revista de Estudos Grecolatinos Vol. 23 (2024) #openaccess Vertentes da linguagem visual nas sociedades clássica e pós-clássica
Bulletin de correspondance hellénique Vol. 145, No. 2 (2022) #openaccess
Gaia Vol. 27 (2024) #openaccess Nomima 30 ans après. Épigraphie et histoire de la Grèce archaïque
Vetus Testamentum Vol. 74, No. 3 (2024)
Teiresias Journal Online Vol. 3 No. 1 (2024) #openacces
Novum Testamentum Vol. 6, No. 3 (2024)
Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft Vol. 18, No. 3 (2023)
Classical Receptions Journal Vol. 16, No. 3 (2024) NB Yanxiao He, “Performing Homeric islands: Homeric receptions in (post-)Hellenistic Asia”
Workshops, Lectures, and Exhibitions
Encylopedia expert Naomi Scott will be speaking on “Crowdsourcing a translation of Julius Pollux’s Onomasticon: methods and problems” for the Digital Classicist London seminar at the Senate House (Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU) on Friday July 19, 2024 from 5:00-6:00 pm London Time. You can book a spot in person here or watch it streamed online.
At Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, Mythic Time / Tens of Thousands of Rememberings, is now on display. The museum remarks that it is “a collaborative exhibition between artist Lina Iris Viktor and the Museum, which will be on view for the second half of 2024…Lina’s work unearths connections across time and cultures, from ancient Egypt to medieval illumination and indigenous Australian art.”
You only have a few more days to see Ancient Huasteca Women: Goddesses, Warriors and Governors, organized by the Secretaría de Cultura and Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia for the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago. The exhibit ends on July 21, 2024.
At the ARCE Northern California, Egyptologist Kara Cooney will be presenting “Recycling for Death: Coffin Reuse in Ancient Egypt and the Theban Royal Caches,” at 3:00 pm PT on August 18, 2024. You can email to register for the online version of the lecture here.
A Starter Bibliography on Homeric Performance by Joel Christensen
n.b this is not an exhaustive bibliography. If you’d like anything else included, please let me know.
Dolci, Ersilia. “Omero e Charlie Parker: le vie dei canti : per un’analisi dello stile formulare nella creazione estemporanea musicale.” Appunti Romani di Filologia, vol. 24, 2022, pp. 7-54. Doi: 10.19272/202202001001
Bakker, Egbert J.. “Homer, Odysseus, and the narratology of performance.” Narratology and interpretation: the content of narrative form in ancient literature. Eds. Grethlein, Jonas and Rengakos, Antonios. Trends in Classics. Supplementary Volumes; 4. Berlin ; New York: De Gruyter, 2009. pp. 117-136.
Brouillet, Manon. “Faire événement : l’épopée homérique comme spectacle rituel.” Pallas, no. 107, 2018, pp. 155-173. Doi: 10.4000/pallas.9037
Brouillet, Manon. “« Thambos » et « kharis »: constructions sensorielles et expériences du divin dans les épopées homériques.” Mythos, N. S., vol. 11, 2017, pp. 83-93. Doi: 10.4000/mythos.606
Collins, Derek Burton. “Improvisation in rhapsodic performance.” Helios, vol. 28, no. 1, 2001, pp. 11-27.
Dué, Casey. Achilles Unbound: Multiformity and Tradition in the Homeric Epics. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2018.
González, José M.. The epic rhapsode and his craft : Homeric performance in a diachronic perspective. Hellenic Studies; 47. Washington (D. C.): Center for Hellenic Studies, 2013.
Heiden, Bruce. “The ordeals of Homeric song.” Arethusa, vol. 30, no. 2, 1997, pp. 221-240.
Emily Allen-Hornblower, From agent to spectator : witnessing the aftermath in ancient Greek epic and tragedy, Trends in Classics. Supplementary Volumes, 30 Berlin ; Boston (Mass.): De Gruyter, 2015.
De Jong, Irene J. F.. “Homer : the first tragedian.” Greece and Rome, Ser. 2, vol. 63, no. 2, 2016, pp. 149-162. Doi: 10.1017/S0017383516000036
Dué, Casey. “Ἔπεα πτερόεντα: how we came to have our « Iliad ».” Recapturing a Homeric legacy. Ed. Dué, Casey. Hellenic Studies; 35. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Pr., 2009. pp. 19-30.
Irene J. F. De Jong, ‘Homer : the first tragedian’, Greece and Rome, Ser. 2, 63.2 (2016) 149-162. Doi: 10.1017/S0017383516000036
Karanika, Andromache. Voices at work: women, performance, and labor in ancient Greece. Baltimore (Md.): Johns Hopkins University Pr., 2014.
King, B. & Kozak, L. “#Patrochilles: Find the Phallus,” in The Routledge Companion to the Reception of Ancient Greek and Roman Gender and Sexuality, edited by Kenneth Moore, Routledge, 2022 pp. 41–57.
Kozak, L “Re-considering Epic and TV.” Sens public, 2021 https://www.sens-public.org/articles/1477/
Kozak, L. “Happy Hour Homer: On Translating and Performing the Iliad Live in a Bar,” in This is a Classic, edited by Regina Galasso, Bloomsbury Academic, Literatures, Cultures, Translation Series, 2023 pp. 51–8.
Kretler, Katherine L.. One man show: poiesis and genesis in the « Iliad » and « Odyssey ». [S. l.]: [s. n.], 2011.
Macintosh, F., & McConnell, J. Performing epic or telling tales. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2020
Macintosh, F., McConnell, J., Harrison, S., & Kenward, C. (Eds.). Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Marjolein Oele, ‘Suffering, pity and friendship: an Aristotelian reading of Book 24 of Homer’s « Iliad »’, Electronic Antiquity, 14.1 (2010-2011)
Stroud, T. A., and Elizabeth Robertson. “Aristotle’s ‘Poetics’ and the Plot of the ‘Iliad.’” The Classical World 89, no. 3 (1996) pp. 179–96. https://doi.org/10.2307/435178
Murray, Oswyn. “The « Odyssey » as performance poetry.” Performance, iconography, reception: studies in honour of Oliver Taplin. Eds. Revermann, Martin and Wilson, Peter J.. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Pr., 2008. pp. 161-176.
Nagy, Gregory. “Homer and Plato at the Panathenaia: synchronic and diachronic perspectives.” Contextualizing classics: ideology, performance, dialogue : essays in honor of John J. Peradotto. Eds. Falkner, Thomas M., Felson, Nancy and Konstan, David. Greek Studies. Lanham (Md.): Rowman and Littlefield, 1999. pp. 123-150.
Ready, Jonathan. Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.
Ready, J., & Tsagalis, C. (Eds.) Homer in performance: rhapsodes, narrators, and characters. University of Texas Press, 2018
Ready, J. L. Immersion, Identification, and the Iliad. Oxford University Press, 2023
Reece, Steve Taylor. “Homer's « Iliad » and « Odyssey »: from oral performance to written text.” New directions in oral theory. Ed. Amodio, Mark C.. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies; 287. Tempe, Ariz.: Arizona center for Medieval and Renaissance studies, 2005. pp. 43-89.
Reece, Steve. "Homeric Studies." Oral Tradition, vol. 18 no. 1, 2003, pp.. 76-78. https://doi.org/10.1353/ort.2004.0035.
Reece, Steve. “Toward an Ethnopoetically Grounded Edition of Homer’s Odyssey.” Oral Tradition, 26/2 2011, pp. 299-326.
Rinon, Yoav. Homer and the dual model of the tragic. Ann Arbor (Mich.): University of Michigan Pr., 2008 .
Rutherford, Richard. “Tragic form and feeling in the Iliad.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. CII, 1982, pp. 145-160. Doi: 10.2307/631133
Scodel, R. Listening to Homer: tradition, narrative, and audience. University of Michigan Press, 2009.
Graciela Cristina Zecchin de Fasano, ‘Μῦθος, ἔπος y canto: la « teoría » homérica sobre el género épico’, Argos, 24. (2000) 191-203.
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As fascinating as invigorating, thank you!)