Laughing at Homer
Epithets and (Epic) Humor
This post is a continuation of my substack on the Iliad. Following the completion of book-by-book posts entries will fall into three basic categories: (1) new scholarship about the Iliad; (2) themes: (expressions/reflections/implications of trauma; agency and determinism; performance and reception; diverse audiences); and (3) other issues of texts/transmission/and commentary that occur to me. As a reminder, these posts will remain free, but there is an option to be a financial supporter. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis.
Plato, Ion 535 d8-e6
Socrates: Do you think that most of your audience members are in their right mind when you are working your performance on them?
Ion: Well, I know this especially well. For I am watching them every time from my platform as they weep and wondrous faces as they are surprised by the stories performed. It is really important that I pay close attention to them: if I make them mourn, then I will laugh a bit myself when I get my money. But If I make them laugh, then I will weep myself, because I have lost the money.”
ΣΩ. Οἶσθα οὖν ὅτι καὶ τῶν θεατῶν τοὺς πολλοὺς ταὐτὰ ταῦτα ὑμεῖς ἐργάζεσθε;
ΙΩΝ. Καὶ μάλα καλῶς οἶδα· καθορῶ γὰρ ἑκάστοτε αὐτοὺς ἄνωθεν ἀπὸ τοῦ βήματος κλάοντάς τε καὶ δεινὸν ἐμβλέποντας καὶ συνθαμβοῦντας τοῖς λεγομένοις. δεῖ γάρ με καὶ σφόδρ' αὐτοῖς τὸν νοῦν προσέχειν· ὡς ἐὰν μὲν κλάοντας αὐτοὺς καθίσω, αὐτὸς γελάσομαι ἀργύριον λαμβά-νων, ἐὰν δὲ γελῶντας, αὐτὸς κλαύσομαι ἀργύριον ἀπολλύς.
Should Homer make us laugh? If we completely believe Plato’s depiction of the rhapsode Ion in the eponymous dialogue, then we might imagine that ancient audiences expected to experience fear, sorrow, surprise, and wonder during a response to Homeric poetry, but not laughter. Looking into the epics itself for clues isn’t much help: laughter in Homer seems especially cruel, as when the gods mock a shambling Hephaestus in book 1 or the Achaeans laugh at Oilean Ajax’s fall into manure during the funeral games.
There are some sweeter moments of surprise, as when Hektor and Andromache laugh when baby Astyanax cries out at seeing his father in full bloody armor, but even that scene is mixed with sorrow: Andromache’s laughter turns to tears as she thinks about her son’s future. Indeed, laughter in epic often marks things and people as out of place. In the Odyssey, laughter is serious business: Penelope’s laugh in the Odyssey, as Daniel Levine argues, is a mark of her confidence and superiority over the suitors; Telemachus similarly uses laughter to cloak his true intentions, according to Stanley Hoffer; the suitors’ laughter, on the other hand, has been seen to show their depravity and their lack of understanding of their situation.
These approaches to Homeric ‘humor’ focus on reconstructing from internal evidence the place and meaning of laughter within the epics. Laughter is assumed to be the province of other genres, ill-fit to the major themes of the Homeric epics and thus barred from proper audience responses. Yet, since when is humor ever really about propriety?
When Plato’s Ion declares that his audiences only pay him when he makes them cry, can we trust either the rhapsode or the philosopher to be covering the full range of responses to Homer in all sorts of performance contexts? Homeric matters were surely the objects of laughter in other poetic genres and other performance forms like Old Comedy? Epic parody was a genre in ancient Greece that seems to have had its own festivals and competitions. Why should we assume that the only responses to epic were tears?
“My Lover’s got humor
She’s the giggle at a funeral” -Hozier, “Take Me To Church”
The impetus for this brief survey is Richard Benson’s article on “Homeric Epithets that Seem to be Humorously Ironic.” This article’s title grabbed me because it enters into one of the defining debates of Homeric studies in the 20th century, namely the relationship between traditional diction/morphology and the ability for individual performers to craft contextually specific meaning. When Milman Parry first offered his overview of formulaic epithets in Homer, the focus was supposed to be on how large-scale poetic composition was possible without writing. Over time, opponents to oral-formulaic theory focused on imagined restrictions to ‘innovation’ and creativity, focusing in particular on whether epithets (think, swift-footed Achilles) could have contextual rather than purely functional meaning. The ‘epithet’ issue was used as a way to deny the compositional importance of oral-formulaic theory while also preserving a model of authorship and authority (the single genius) that is largely inappropriate to oral-derived poetics. (See earlier posts for more on oral-composition, etc, but the big names are Milman Parry, Albert Lord, John Miles Foley, and Greg Nagy; Ruth Scodel’s Listening to Homer is also an important entry in the discussion).
Elton Barker and I walk through some of this history in Homer’s Thebes where we examine the irony of swift-footed Achilles in Iliad. At a basic level, all language is formulaic and repeated and all creative artists push these restrictions or work within them to create surprise, delight, or wonder. Homeric language is no less amenable to manipulation by a skillful performer than any other art form, it just works differently and relies on audience knowledge and familiarity with its conventions. In this, it is no more complex than opera, classical music, or modern comedy, which is so contextually and linguistically bound as to be practically untranslatable.
In his article, Benson goes through some of the history of the discussion of epithets, following an argument from James Arieti about the use of the epithet “godlike” for Paris at Iliad 3.16-37. He walks through four different ironic applications of epithets and identifies 33 ironic epithets in the Iliad and the Odyssey, with the majority appearing in the Iliad. A good deal of these uses are in character speech. Readers might disagree with all of the analysis and may look elsewhere for a more theoretical discussion of humor and Homeric poetry, but this article is a good introduction to thinking about epithets and irony in Homer.
When I read Homer with students, I emphasize honoring any responses on the first engagement. The goal is to imagine and explore what is possible in reacting to the epics. The next step is to evaluate to what extent a given response is plausible for ancient audiences. Audiences knew Homeric diction and habits far better than we do, the surprise of a misplaced or uniquely used term, or the accumulated irony of an epithet used in fast, awkward repetition, would have a very different impact on them than it does on us. Even more importantly, audiences with different beliefs about the gods, with different cultural backgrounds, with affinities for different genres, or audiences from different classes (aristocratic vs poor, enslaved vs free), genders, or abilities, might respond differently. Just so, it is ever more important for modern audiences to expand our sense of the possible when it comes to Homeric reception before deciding we know what was probable.
Short Bibliography
n.b. this is not exhaustive. please let me know if there are other articles to include.
Benson, R. D. (2021). Homeric Epithets that Seem to Be Humorously Ironic. Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, 29(1), 35–62. https://doi.org/10.2307/arion.29.1.0035
Brown, Christopher G.. “Ares, Aphrodite, and the laughter of the gods.” Phoenix, vol. XLIII, 1989, pp. 283-293.
Caleb M. X. Dance, ‘Laughing with the gods : the tale of Ares and Aphrodite in Homer, Ovid, and Lucian’, Classical World, 113.4 (2019-2020) 405-434. Doi: 10.1353/clw.2020.0037
Guidorizzi, Giulio. “The laughter of the suitors: a case of collective madness in the Odyssey / transl. by Lowell Edmunds.” Poet, public, and performance in ancient Greece. Eds. Edmunds, Lowell, Wallace, Robert W. and Bettini, Maurizio. Baltimore (Md.): Johns Hopkins University Pr., 1997. 1-7.
Halliwell, F. Stephen (2008). Greek laughter: a study in cultural psychology from Homer to early Christianity. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Pr.
Halliwell, Stephen. “Imagining divine laughter in Homer and Lucian.” Greek laughter and tears : antiquity and after. Eds. Alexiou, Margaret and Cairns, Douglas. Edinburgh Leventis Studies; 8. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Pr., 2017. 36-53.
Hoffer, Stanley E.. “Telemachus' « laugh » (Odyssey 21.105): deceit, authority, and communication in the bow contest.” American Journal of Philology, vol. 116, no. 4, 1995, pp. 515-531.
Konstan, David. “Laughing at ourselves: gendered humor in ancient Greece.” Laughter, humor, and the (un)making of gender: historical and cultural perspectives. Eds. Foka, Anna and Liliequist, Jonas. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 13-29.
Donald E. Lavigne, ‘Bad Kharma: a « fragment » of the « Iliad » and iambic laughter’, Aevum Antiquum, N. S., 8. (2008) 115-138. Doi: 10.1400/210042
Levine, Daniel B.. Γέλῳ ἔκθανον. Laughter and the demise of the suitors. Univ. of Cincinnati, 1980.
Levine, Daniel B. “Penelope’s Laugh: Odyssey 18.163.” The American Journal of Philology 104, no. 2 (1983): 172–78. https://doi.org/10.2307/294290.
Miralles, Carles. “Laughter in the Odyssey.” Laughter down the centuries. 1. Eds. Jäkel, Siegfried and Timonen, Asko. Annales Universitatis Turkuensis. Ser. B, Humaniora; 208 - Annales Universitatis Turkuensis. Ser. B, Humaniora; 208. Turku: Turun Yliopisto, 1994; 1994. 15-22.
Siegfried Jäkel, ‘The phenomenon of laughter in the Iliad’, in Laughter down the centuries. 1, ed. by Siegfried Jäkel and Asko Timonen, Annales Universitatis Turkuensis. Ser. B, Humaniora, 208 - Annales Universitatis Turkuensis. Ser. B, Humaniora, 208 (Turku: Turun Yliopisto, 1994; 1994), pp. 23-27.
Strangely enough, in Russian the adjective "гомерический" ("Homeric") is most commonly applied to laughter.
I agree that humor is often overlooked in the Iliad which has quite a lot of both humor and irony. The episode in which Diomedes wounds Aphrodite and Ares and their reception back on Mt. Olympus is one example. Another scene plays out in Book II when Agamemnon tests the troops and tells them to go to the ships and sail home. To his great surprise, they completely fail the test by rising en masse, running to the ships, hoping to embark for home as soon as possible. This scene always had the feel of a "Keystone Cops" affair, highlighting the incompetence and poor leadership ability of Agamemnon. And surely there is irony the tragic death of Patroclus which owed much to Achilles' plan to get his own back after Agamemnon dishonored him. He asks Zeus to ensure that many Achaeans would pay for his ατιμη by sending "forth to Hades many valiant souls of heroes, and made them themselves spoil for dogs and every bird." Achilles suffers greatly from his μένις which was not what he intended at all.
Being laughed at, or mocked, is another kind of laughter which the listening or viewing audience may not find funny. Within the story, we watch characters laugh at the misfortune of another as in your example of the gods laughing at Hephaestus; it casts those laughing at the expense of the other in a negative light. In Euripides' Medea, one of her greatest fears is that her enemies will laugh at her. It drives her to slay her own children to revenge herself on her faithless husband. And in Sophocles' Ajax, Athena says to Odysseus, "And is not the sweetest mockery the mockery of enemies [ekhthros]? "
And Odysseus in a rare gesture of empathy says to her,
“But I entirely pity the wretched man, although he is my enemy, because he is shackled by the yoke of a terrible delusion. It makes me think of my own lot, no less than that of this man: for I see that we are nothing but phantoms or fleeting shadow, while we live.”
Humor in ancient Greek classics is multidimensional.