Swallow Songs and Defective Lines
Sound and Sense in Homer
This post 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. Don’t forget about Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things. Here is its amazon page. here is the link to the company doing the audiobook and here is the press page.
When Odysseus tests his restrung bow, the process is compared to someone stringing a lyre. The metapoetic content of this scene has not been missed: at a moment when Odysseus turns from using stories (=songs) to effect his homecoming, when he transforms from ‘singer’ back into warrior, the simile briefly collapses identities, reflecting the singer in the warrior’s pose. There’s more to the scene too: after the stringing, Odysseus plucks the string and the narrator tells us that it sings “like a swallow”. The verb for singing is often marked in Homeric poetry as the act of a bard like Phemios, Demodokos, or even Achilles, and it also introduces epic itself, famously in the first line of the Iliad “sing [aeide], Goddess, of the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles”.
Homer, Odyssey 21.407-412
“Just as a man who knows both lyre and song
easily stretches a string on a new peg
as he attaches the twisted sheep-gut to both sides
just so, without haste, Odysseus strung the great bow.
He took the string and tested it with his right hand.
And it sang beautifully with a voice like a swallow.
Then, a great grief overcame the suitors, and everyone skins’ turned.”ὡς ὅτ’ ἀνὴρ φόρμιγγος ἐπιστάμενος καὶ ἀοιδῆς
ῥηϊδίως ἐτάνυσσε νέῳ περὶ κόλλοπι χορδήν,
ἅψας ἀμφοτέρωθεν ἐϋστρεφὲς ἔντερον οἰός,
ὣς ἄρ’ ἄτερ σπουδῆς τάνυσεν μέγα τόξον ᾿Οδυσσεύς.
δεξιτερῇ δ’ ἄρα χειρὶ λαβὼν πειρήσατο νευρῆς·
ἡ δ’ ὑπὸ καλὸν ἄεισε, χελιδόνι εἰκέλη αὐδήν.
μνηστῆρσιν δ’ ἄρ’ ἄχος γένετο μέγα, πᾶσι δ’ ἄρα χρὼς
The sound does not stop there: the poem’s internal audience responds to the sound. It inspires grief among the suitors as their skin grows pale. This moment confirms, to an extent, that Homeric poetry anticipates an emotional response to sound and offers, perhaps, a synaesthetic aspect as well as we move through senses from sound, to emotions, to the sight of skin turning under the influence of anxiety and fear.
One of the ironies of Homeric studies since the advent of oral-formulaic theory is how little prepared most of us who write from this perspective are to talk about Homeric poetry as part of a sound scape, from an aural perspective. This is, of course, not universally true. Ancient authors like Dionysius of Halicarnassus or Eusthathius often remarked on the sound quality of Homeric poetry. Dio Chrysostom insists that Homer had ample control over the sounds of words to shape their impact and meaning (12.69). Prior to oral-formulaic theory, the debate largely attended the tension between traditional word shapes and sounds and the possibility of ‘Homer’ intending a specific effect (see Shewan 1925 on alliteration and assonance). There is some interest in such questions following the work of Parry and Lord too.
David Packard argued, for instance, that Homeric poetry manipulates the “harshness” of consonants for different contexts and meaning, against the claims of Walter Leaf and W.B. Stanford that many of the sound effects in Greek poetry are incidental or accidental. (Of course, these approaches focus overmuch on what performers may have been trying to do rather than the impact of the sounds on audiences.) I would insist that the sounds of Homeric poetry were no more accidental or incidental than word choice and poetic structures: but rather than being a specific feature of a performer’s intention, they had to have been part of the reciprocal development of performance in a song culture. W.B. Stanford, who is dismissive of what modern readers can hear in Homeric verse, nevertheless asserts that “Until the fifth century B.C., all Greek poets made their poems for hearing, not for seeing, for the ear and not for the eye. Poetry was social rather than private being usually sung, recited, or performed at religious ceremonies, festivals, feasts, or entertainments” (1981, 127).
Sound is certainly not incidental to meaning! Homeric poetry is invested in different kinds of wordplay that makes associative and non-linear connections (see the overview in Louden 1995 and Ahl 2002). Amy Lather (2017) supports the compositional importance of sound in exploring the depiction of music in early Greek hexameter–meaning arises from patterns and contrasts that are available to us from careful reading (and speaking aloud) but would have been implicit for audiences trained in hearing the music of Homeric poetry. We have little we can say about the performance itself: beyond the shape of words and the impact of consonants and vowels, I can also imagine the sonic repertoire available to any musician as part of bardic practice: changes in volume, speed, pitch, and rhythm stir the emotions and animate the space between the singer and their audience.
Tanvi Solanki writes persuasively of the importance of aural philology in her article about Johann Gottfried Herder’s experience of reading Greek aloud. Tanvi cites Herder: Herder goes on to write that ‘every one of Homer’s pictures is musical: the tone reverberates in our ears for a little while; if it should begin to fade, the same string is struck and the tone rings out once more, this time with greater force; and all the different tones combine to create the harmony of the picture'. Solanki argues that listening may help collapse cultural differences: “The practice makes explicit the insight that the act of listening was enculturated; the degree to which acoustic nuances could or could not be perceived varied among distinct peoples, which differentiated it too from the haptic and the optical. These variations among ‘ears’ served as the basis to unite, divide, and hierarchize communities. ”
I started thinking about sound in Homer again while reading Bill Beck’s recent “Homer’s Verbal Mimesis in the Iliad’s Exegetical Scholia” (GRBS, 2023). Beck provides a really interesting survey of comments on Homeric use of sound in the scholia. Beck divides this summary into three parts: scholia that look at the potential impact of tmesis (when compound words are split up, with other elements interposed), the correspondence between the sounds of words and what they describe (onomatopoeia), and the potential effects of rhythm in the Homeric line.
Beck shows how ancient scholars see disorder or constraint in grammar/diction as indicating disordered actions or disrupted psychology or compressed/constrained actions respectively. Ancient commentators, according to Beck, also saw correspondence between harsh sounds and harsh actions, sonorous sounds and the sea, and liquid (l/r) with the water. Beck observes that ancient critics were less interested in rhythm than modern readers are (implying, I might imagine, less attention to exactitude of prosody that we see in some modern scholarship, and more tolerance for variation). Still, there are some trends---largely dactylic lines implying faster movement or continuing action while spondaic lines (those with fewer dactyls or ending with all long syllables).
My favorite example here comes from a scholiastic comment on the meter of Iliad 12.208 (Τρῶες δ᾽ ἐρρίγη-σαν ὅπως ἴδον αἰόλον ὄφιν), which is ‘defective’ (ending in a trochaic rhythm). The T scholion suggests that rather than being a mistake, this line is intentionally affective, aimed at prompting a different response in the audience:
In other words, by making the line metrically defective, so that its final foot not only defies expectations but also demands explanation, Homer inspires in his audience a feeling analogous to the perplexity felt by the Trojans when presented with an anomalous and portentous phenomenon. What the metrical shape of ὄφιν elicits in readers is precisely what its referent provokes in the Trojans. (2023, 101).
Regardless of whether we accept this argument and don’t dismiss it as creative misreading, the moment asks that we take the sounds of Homeric poetry more seriously.
Short bibliography on Homeric Sounds
AHL, FREDERICK. “WORDPLAY AND APPARENT FICTION IN THE ‘ODYSSEY.’” Arethusa 35, no. 1 (2002): 117–32. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44578452.
Barea Torres, Cristóbal. “« Tanto como alcanza un grito » : voces y ruidos en la épica homérica.” Faventia, vol. 43, 2021, pp. 7-20.
Calero, Luis. “El paisaje sonoro en la « Odisea ».” Graeco-Latina Brunensia, vol. 25, no. 2, 2020, pp. 33-45. Doi: 10.5817/GLB2020-2-3
Cullhed, Eric. “Movement and sound on the shield of Achilles in ancient exegesis.” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, vol. 54, no. 2, 2014, pp. 192-219.
Kondylaki, Vasiliki. “Les paysages sonores des funérailles d’Achille : à propos des Néréides et des Muses dans l’« Odyssée » et dans les « Posthomériques » de Quintus de Smyrne.” Gaia, vol. 22-23, 2020, pp. non paginé.
Lather, Amy. “The sound of music : the semantics of noise in early Greek hexameter.” Greek and Roman Musical Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, 2017, pp. 127-146. Doi: 10.1163/22129758-12341296.
Louden, Bruce. “Categories of Homeric Wordplay.” Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-) 125 (1995): 27–46. https://doi.org/10.2307/284344.
Packard, D. W.. “Sound-patterns in Homer.” TAPA, vol. CIV, 1974, pp. 239-260.
Russo, J. A.. “Is oral or aural composition the cause of Homer's formulaic style?.” Oral literature and the formula. Eds. Stolz, B. A. and Shannon, R. S.. Center for the Coordination of Ancient & Modern Stud.. Ann Arbor (Mich.): University of Michigan, 1976. 31-71.
Sansom, Stephen A.. “ Divine Resonance in Early Greek Epic, knowledge, affect.” American Journal of Philology, vol. 142, no. 4, 2021, pp. 535-569. Doi: 10.1353/ajp.2021.0019
Shewan, A. “Alliteration and Assonance in Homer.” Classical Philology 20, no. 3 (1925): 193–209. http://www.jstor.org/stable/263057.
Stanford, W. B. “Varieties of Sound-Effects in the Homeric Poems.” College Literature 3, no. 3 (1976): 219–27. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25111142.
Stanford, W. B. “Sound, Sense, and Music in Greek Poetry.” Greece & Rome 28, no. 2 (1981): 127–40. http://www.jstor.org/stable/642860.
Tanvi Solanki, ‘ Herder hears Homer singing’, Classical Receptions Journal, 12..4 (2020) 401-424. Doi: 10.1093/crj/claa007
Tsagalis, Christos. “ Style and construction, sound and rhythm: Thetis' supplication to Zeus (Iliad 1.493-516).” Arethusa, vol. 34, no. 1, 2001, pp. 1-30.
Tsagalis, Christos C.. “The dynamic hypertext: lists and catalogues in the Homeric epics.” Trends in Classics, vol. 2, no. 2, 2010, pp. 323-347.