Homer’s ‘Set List’: Imagining a Performance of the Iliad
Part 3: Analysis, Neoanalysis, and the Set List
This is a continuation of my substack on the Iliad. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis. Last year this substack provided over $2k in charitable donations.
This post is part three of three looking more closely at the proposition that our Iliad is made up of a series of songs or ‘episodes’ put together in a monumental performance. The first part looks at some of the internal evidence for performance and provides some historical context. The second part explores how much support there is for this model in the classical period. The third part offers some remarks on how this approach may or may not be different from neoanalysis and begins to sketch out how our Iliad may be broken up into songs or episodes.
In earlier posts, I have surveyed some internal evidence for episodic composition of the Homeric epics and later literary and iconographic support as well. The basic idea is that the epics themselves show smaller songs with recognizable titles or themes at home in the larger arc of the Trojan War potentially combined into narratives of longer duration (as in Odysseus’ tale of his own experiences to the Phaeacians in the Odyssey). Later authors like Aristotle and Aelian start (or continue?) a tradition of talking about the epics as composed of smaller episodes to support this.
I find the model attractive because it can help us understand how multiple performers of Homer could come together for a major event (like the Panathenaia in Athens) and sing longer epics that are like the poems we have from antiquity. Of course, this model does not explain how such performances would lead to our text. In addition, I want to be very clear that I don’t think this process was necessarily one of a majority of fixed songs. Nor do I think it would have occurred once or yielded the epics we have so easily.
Analysis vs. Neoanalysis
I preface this post with those initial caveats because the episodic thought experiment has led to some navel gazing. A question that I struggle to resolve for myself is how the approach I am taking may be differentiated from earlier scholarly frameworks like analysis or neoanalysis. At some level, many of the ideas will seem similar, but there are some contrasting foundational assumptions. Let me try to walk through what I think the differences are and see if they make sense.
Analysis was an approach to Homer that dominated near the end of the 19th century and for the first quarter of the 20th. The Analysts were primarily opposed to Unitarians. The latter group argued for the artistic unity of the Homeric epics against the growing consensus of scholarship in general that the Iliad and the Odyssey as we have them were not the products of a single author (or authors for each poem). Due to stylistic inconsistency, textual variations, and other aesthetic judgments based on the features of more modern literary authors, scholars had established that the epics we have couldn’t possibly be the product of individual minds.
As a response to this, Analysts sought to show how editorial intervention had changed the poems or how various songs had been edited together to create the epics that survived antiquity. Often Analysts were in search of the most “original” or ancient core of either epic and as a result endeavored in part to identify where parts of the epics we have came from. The poems of the so-called epic cycle were often seen as likely sources for sections that were otherwise added or adapted to the core stories of “The Rage of Achilles” and “The Homecoming of Odysseus”. Unitarians labored to show the “artistic unity” of the poems we have against this onslaught. The sheer volume of discrepancies and the lack of ‘scientific rigor’ in the Unitarian approaches rendered their arguments mostly romantic and easily undermined in the face of the ‘evidence’ provided by the Analysts.
The advent of oral-formulaic theory through the work of Milman Parry and Albert Lord and many others shifted the debate radically. In a simplistic summary, oral-formulaic theory countermanded questions about consistency, style, and the difficulty of composition offered by the Analysts in an evidence-based way that appealed to the scientific bent of scholarship coming out of the 19th century. A great deal of Homeric scholarship from the 1930s into the 1970s was engaged either with fleshing out the details of oral-formulaic theory or with coming to terms of how it shifted our notions of authorship, textualization, and transmission.
Neoanalysis eventually emerged as scholars returned to questions of the relationship between our epics and other narrative traditions. Neoanalysis does not generally claim that the epics we have were made up by editing together other narratives, but instead explores how the parts of the Iliad and Odyssey that we have may have drawn on other poems (or poetic traditions) such as the Aithiopis or the Kypria. This approach has been pretty fruitful in showing how our epics draw on motifs, plots, and scenes that we believe were in other lost poems. But often, neoanalytic claims betray older analytic motivations. Erwin Cook summarizes some of these tensions well in his work on Iliad 8:
“Analytic scholars such as Wilamowitz used the episode to support their argument that Book 8 was “late” because it echoes accounts based on the Aithiopis in which Nestor again suffers a chariot wreck, and his son, Antilokhos, rescues him at the cost of his own life.9 An assumption underlying this argument is that one account is “imitating” the other. The derivative account is inherently “inferior” to its model, and betrays its dependency in part by its aesthetic shortcomings, including its imperfect integration into the narrative. For example, the Neoanalyst Wolfgang Kullmann accepts Analytic claims about the relative priority of the two episodes, though he avoids the Analytic conclusion that the Iliadic passage is interpolated by arguing that the Aithiopis is earlier than the Iliad.”
My reservations about Neoanalysis have generally been (1) that the approach too often assumes that the Iliad or Odyssey are drawing on poems that were prior to them (therefore in some way more original and authentic) and (2) that a great deal of the evidence we have for the contents or even existence of these poems comes from scholarship that developed to explicate the Iliad and the Odyssey. There’s an essential circularity to claiming that the Homeric epics are based on material that only ended up being preserved in reference to the Iliad or the Odyssey. If we imagine epic performance as lasting hundreds of years in many different contexts, it seems tenuous to me to make significant compositional claims based on secondary evidence when many thousands of other performances may have helped shape their character. In addition to this concern for circularity, I think the hierarchical models favored by such approaches tend to create stemmata and trees that look like manuscript traditions and not the flowing and circulating of motifs, ideas, and structures that could make it very likely for a song we imagine as late to have actually influenced something we conceive as earlier while they were both in the process of developing into their final forms. (And to add more apprehension to this: the very notion of a final form is ill-fit to composition in performance.)
Episodicism (?)
Overall, it should be clear that I am not fundamentally opposed to the notion that the epics we have integrate material that existed prior to their final performances and textualization. My basic contention is that we cannot really know anything other than the poems we have and it is more fruitful to imagine that even if we have an Iliad that was influenced by an Aethiopis, each of the story traditions that these poems represent went through innumerable iterations that influenced each other. As a result, pointing to a scene in our Iliad and claiming it was based on a specific scene in a specific poem thoroughly misconstrues the nature of oral-derived poetry. (Many Neoanalysts are certainly proponents for the orality of the Homeric epics, of course.)
Given these distinctions, then, how is imagining our epic poem coming together through the performance of discrete episodes related to Neoanalysis? Some of the assumptions are certainly the same, namely that there were more or less fixed story traditions within the Trojan War narrative myth and that these traditions were recognizable to audiences.
I believe that this approach is different in two basic ways. First, I am exploring how the Iliad is made up of smaller parts to explain its compositional unity and not assuming the priority of any given part over another. Second, I am not proposing that the individual episodes are fixed and portable objects, but rather different song traditions with recognizable features that could be performed independently of the whole if needed. Unlike the Analysts, I am not proposing that there is a core and original Iliad that this process will be able to identify. Unlike some Neoanalysts, I am not trying to reconstruct how the Iliad was based on or made up of earlier poems. Instead, I am trying to imagine what it might look like over time to have a more or less regular list of episodes that could be performed as part of a larger performance. Karol Zieliński (2023, 664) presents a somewhat stronger articulation:
“If, as we have already demonstrated, the songs of the cycle showed a given episode in the context of the whole Trojan War, then it follows that they must have retained a certain degree of independence. The presentation of these episodes in sequence must have taken place on special occasions, e.g. during great festivals like the Panathenaia. But the independence of a song depicting a given episode from the perspective of the whole war could have been possible only because the thematic range of the cycle had already been established and familiar, so it seems that the principle of sequential presentation is deeply rooted in Greek tradition.”
(I must also confess to worrying that the distinction I am attempting to draw is too fine to be a difference that makes a difference. There are many different shades of Neoanalysis. This approach certainly contrasts with that of Martin West in The Making of the Iliad where he sees the integration of different narrative traditions as a very writerly pursuit. But there would be far less tension with the work of scholars like Christos Tsagalis whose approach is more flexible and in tune with oral traditional theory).
Here again, I think the Apologoi—books 9-12 of the Odyssey—can provide an instructive example. Imagine Odysseus’ audience in Skheria: they have no notion of Odysseus’ tale as a series of discrete episodes that may have had an independent existence in different story traditions. Instead, they experience a coherent narrative with many turns, all functioning in the service of explaining how Odysseus ended up on their island. The parts have different length and importance: the Cyclops episode and the Nekyia are longer and much more detailed than the tale of Aeolus or the Lotus-eaters. Circe’s island presents a beginning, middle, and end that is much more well-developed than the brief tales of the Laistrygonians or the Kikones. But they are connected through the narrative conceit of sea-faring in a way that renders them separate even as part of a whole. At the same time, they are thematically connected to the epic as a whole: the scenes end with the deaths of Odysseus’ men after they eat the cattle of the sun (anticipated by the proem in Odyssey 1) and Odysseus swept up on Calypso’s island, where the external audience finds him in Odyssey 5.
Now imagine the 10 scenes of the Apologoi as a set list in a live performance. It would take very little effort for a seasoned group of performers to musically “sample” or anticipate parts of the 9th and 10th songs at the beginning of the set. The songs could be blended together smoothly or abruptly as the performance required, giving the sense of functioning as a single composition even when the individual songs may have come from different places. In the context of one performance, moreover, the musicians might adapt the songs to fit one another in a way they might not if they were performed in a different order or individually.
The Iliadic Set List
I have spent a good deal of time talking about the idea. Now it is time to make it a little more concrete and see what comes of it. I have reached out to a few friends to help explore methods for testing this, both quantitative (using statistical language modeling) and qualitative (thinking about thematic and artistic aspects). I am also trying to figure out how to use analogical methods too: to really think about how modern professional musicians “stitch” their performances together.
For now, here’s a list of the books of the Iliad and the episodes we have some reason to believe would have been identifiable in antiquity, based on evidence in ancient literature, art, and scholarship.
Book || “episode/Song”
1 Overarching: Rage of Achilles + Ransoming of Briseis + Strife of Agamemnon and Achilles
2 False Dream +Thersites +Catalog of Ships
3 Teichoskopia + Duel of Menelaos and Paris + Helen and Paris in the Bedroom
4 Oath Breaking (Pandaros) +Epipolesis
5 +Diomedea / Aristeia of Diomedes +Wounding of Aphrodite + Theomachy
6 Hektor’s Visit to the city + [Glaukos and Diomedes as an independent episode]
7 Duel between Hektor and Ajax
8 Echoes of the Aethiopis
9 Embassy to Achilles
10 Doloneia
11 Aristeia of Agamemnon + Wounding of Diomedes
12 Teikhomakhia
13 Fighting by the Ships/Battle of the ships
14 Dios Apate
15 Echoes of Succession Myths
16 Patrokleia
17 Fight over the body: Menelaos v. Hektor over Euphorbus
18 Arms of Achilles / Shield of Achilles
19 Reconciliation (?); Achilles talks to his horses
20 Aeneas vs. Achilles
21 Theomachy
22 Achilles Kills Hektor + Achilles mutilates the body
23 Achilles kills captives + Contest for Patroklos
24 Ransoming of Hektor + Laments of Hecuba and Andromache
I have italicized a few episodes I want to identify but can’t find good support for.
For me, what is surprising in this list is not so much that there is some support for an episode in nearly every book, but that there is so little support for books 8 and 15, which have been identified by scholars like Bruce Heiden as really important to the structure and themes of our particular Iliad. In addition, even a cursory review of the material shows much that is not accounted for. The greater portion of the episodes identified in antiquity accord with the epic’s first third (where it seems to engage the most with the traditions that precede the war). There’s a compositional echoing of the Odyssey here as well: both epics seem to be more fluid and strange in their second halves than their first. Scenes like Agamemnon’s intervention in the sparing of Adrastus in book 6 may be special to this version of the Iliad and therefore more significant for its interpretation. Political scenes like those in books 1, 2, 9, 19, and the beginning of 24 that people like Elton Barker have shown are crucial for understanding the Iliad’s politics also seem underrepresented in the episodic tradition.
None of this vitiates the thought experiment–instead, I think it provides a really unique chance to reconsider again that dynamic relationship between the Iliad we have and the performance traditions that produced it. Thinking about the relationship between the synchronic moment of that performance and how singers came together to respond to their audiences and their times is one of the things that not only keeps the Iliad alive for me, but keeps its study vital.
Next steps include mapping out the line numbers for the episodes and interstitial parts, doing more research to see if other song traditions have been overlooked, and then taking turns with others working on this process, and pushing through the various frameworks for thinking about this reimagined performance. If you’re reading this and have thoughts, please share them. Like the epics in their composition, their interpretation is something that happens best with many people taking turns.
Bibliography: As Always, not exhaustive. Also, shared bibliography for all three posts.
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