Syntactically it’s ok, but semantically I don’t know. ἀρα means ”as you would only expect”.
I still don’t quite understand Witte’s idea why the 4th foot needs to be joined to the 5th (thus preventing the bucolic diaresis, if you like).
As mwh points out, it’s not about preventing Bucolic Diaeresis (in which case it would affect 60% of the Homeric corpus). It goes back to Witte’s theory that the hexameter was originally a compound verse that came from a 4 foot (vierhebige Langvers) verse and 2 foot verse (zweihebige Kurzvers). In the process of uniting the two, it was customary to use a 2 syllable word form, which had the result of creating a syntactical unit. Here’s a copy of the page:
https://imgur.com/a/vjMdGC0
I’m pretty sure your German is better than mine, so perhaps you’ll get more out of it than I have so far.
Here is a copy of the page that mentions ἀπεθαύμασ’ ὄνειρον:
https://imgur.com/a/vP6or9u
Sean’s chicken and egg point is well taken, but I don’t think seeking metrical effects is at all high on the poet’s agenda.
To take Sean’s hypothetical pair:
- αφαρ δ’ αρ’ εθαυμασ’ ονειρον
- αφαρ δ’ αρα θαυμασ’ ονειρον
Avoidance of the first of these would be instinctive. It’s not as if the poet said to himself “Oh I mustn’t do that, it would break Hermann’s Bridge.” The extremely strong inhibition against |u—uu—— at verse end will be rooted in traditional (“formulaic”) patterns, as Witte recognized. It would be a mistake to think in terms of conscious choice on the poet’s part.
There’d be no inhibition at all against the second, from a metrical point of view (feminine caesura and bucolic dieresis). The only question is why αφαρ δ’ απεθαυμασ’ ονειρον was generated instead. The second excerpt from Witte just posted by Aetos goes a long way towards answering this. And if I’m not mistaken αφαρ δ’ αρα is alien to Homer, whereas αφαρ δ’ απεθαυμασ’ ονειρον, with the verb directly following αφαρ δ’, matches e,g. αφαρ δ’ ερεεινετο μυθῳ.
Is there a good, up-to-date survey of the several issues involved here (in particular the supposed process of oral composition and its interaction with metre)? I keep reading Parry summarised at third hand. Should I perhaps just go and read Parry himself or is that only the beginning?
I doff my cap - I am convinced.
David Chamberlain’s take from his commentary on book 6:
ἀπεθαύμασε: “greatly wondered at” (either because she senses the role of the god, or because she is surprised to discover it was a dream, not her friend); the prefix is generally taken as intensifying the verb. Admittedly that’s not a natural way to read ἀπό; I suspect the idea is “she wondered at the dream as it departed/as she awoke”.
As you suggest, reading Parry would be only the beginning. It’s much more complex now. You could try various entries in the Homer Encyclopedia put together by Margalit Finkelberg (there are several beginning with “oral”, and one for “Parry”). Foley is (or was) a big player here. A book I found very illuminating in the 70s was Michael Nagler’s Tradition and Spontaneity, applying the concept of sphota (which I’d never heard of). That answered a lot of questions for me and tied a lot of things together very satisfyingly; it may still be the best elucidation of “composition in performance.” Of course there’s no end of work been done since then. Greg Nagy has been preternaturally prolific (and increasingly repetitive) and has sought to own the Parry-Lord tradition, as differently has Richard Janko.
David Chamberlain is talking through his hat.. As LSJ says of ἀπό in compounds (ἀπό D.4), “freq[uently] it only strengthens the sense of the simple.” Witte knew that.
Thank you for being so generous with your time and experience, Michael - Nagler’s book is wending its way from Indiana to my shelves as I type. I’m looking forward to it.
We can leave Chamberlain and his hat on the naughty step for a couple of days 
Nagler: “All is traditional on the generative level, all original on the level of performance.” Thus he dissolves the conflict.
“Dad, how about fitting me out a good fast wagon so that I can go down to the river and wash my fine clothes, which have gotten all dirty.” (My translation, but think how far any translation falls short.)
Does she anticipate meeting a tall dark handsome stranger?
Or better, Does the listener/reader anticipate it?
I believe I also read Nagler’s book some years ago on mwh’s recommendation. I agree it was an eye-opening book (If I’m thinking about the right book that is ). I think you only need to read like the first half to get the idea, after which it becomes increasingly repetitive and/or hard to follow (or perhaps I got increasingly lazy…). But I’d say that to be fully able profit from that book you should first get a basic idea of Milman Parry and the oral formulaic theory. No need to read Parry himself, really - you can find a summary of his achievements in the Homer Encyclopedia, as suggested by mwh, or in the introduction of almost any scholarly Cambridge/Oxford commentary on Homer produced in the last 30 or 40 years or so.
Perhaps someone else can name a particularly good and concise introduction to Parry’s ideas, I have seen so many of them that I can’t really say which one is best.
I’m so intrigued by the difference between the impression we get of the wedding here
σοὶ δὲ γάμος σχεδόν ἐστιν, …
… χαίρουσιν δὲ πατὴρ καὶ πότνια μήτηρ.
(lines 27-30)
which seems like an administrative task she has to get through to make her parents happy,
and lines 66-67
αἴδετο γὰρ θαλερὸν γάμον ἐξονομῆναι
πατρὶ φίλῳ
- so much revealed in seven words! We don’t know what kind of man she’s imagining who sets her heart aflutter but from this point we know that her wedding isn’t just for propriety’s sake. There is love, or at the very least puppy love, at stake too. I think the reader can’t help imagining the ‘meet cute’ once we know this. Whether she expects to meet the tall dark handsome stranger on her trip to the pools or not, her dream seems to have spurred her into a state of wanting to be ready for such a meeting if it comes.
Thanks Paul - I’ve read summaries of Parry’s work and his field recordings in a few places, including a surprisingly detailed treatment in Adam Nicolson’s The Mighty Dead, but perhaps I would benefit from something more academic. I haven’t yet worked out a way to access the Homer Encyclopedia (apart from the free first page) with non-university credentials, but I’d like to read something that gives more nuance on the formulaic stuff than just ‘he noticed that formulae were used a lot and that these formed neat units for slotting into oral compositions’.
We don’t know what kind of man she’s imagining who sets her heart aflutter but from this point we know that her wedding isn’t just for propriety’s sake. There is love, or at the very least puppy love, at stake too. I think the reader can’t help imagining the ‘meet cute’ once we know this. Whether she expects to meet the tall dark handsome stranger on her trip to the pools or not, her dream seems to have spurred her into a state of wanting to be ready for such a meeting if it comes.
I don’t want to make myself unpopular by always questioning what I regard as blatant projection onto poor Homer’s text but this seems to be importing Mills and Boon in a wholly inappropriate way. I thought mwh’s post was a joke. Clearly I am missing something.
I find the whole of this episode disturbingly funny. It seems to me to be a parody of male heroic action. Men travel in chariots but women use a wagon. Men fight wars while women spin and do the washing. When Priam visits Achilles in Iliad 24 he takes a wagon but travels himself in a chariot. I think this episode from the Odyssey reveals a lot about the status of elite women. Romantic love doesn’t seem to figure at all. I realise that the oppositions are more complex but stated in this way I hope they serve as a counterbalance to the way others see this episode. You can be sure that poor old Nausicaa will be married to whoever makes the best offer to Alcinous, whoever maximises his τιμή.
Really, all I meant was that some kind introduction would be helpful before engaging that book.
Historically, marriages were arranged by the family in many if not most human societies, and they still are. Luckily we know how wrong everybody else is and has always been. The correct interpretation of this is of course that a poor young person (let’s not “girl” her, to avoid categorizing her according to the fallacious concept of gender) is being brutally exploited by her father the phallocrat without her even knowing it (here we can say “father”, because clearly he is a man, and thus we can name the guilty party).
I thought this might get your goat.
But look! Now we have two interpretations we can profitably compare in order to interrogate your use of ‘projection’.
I take your point, but I don’t see that this intertextual parody exists except in the broadest sense. There doesn’t seem to be any direct parody of the language used of chariots and battle when the mules and wagons are discussed. They seem to be treated quite matter-of-factly as a means to an end. In what way is Homer evoking this parallel unless we bring our own 21st century mores to the table to force the comparison? If this is parody then Homer is no Aristophanes.
What do you suppose is the object of the parody - women themselves or the inequality between men and women? The latter seems like a stretch but then the former seems unfair in this context.
This sentence needs considerable unpacking. Reveals - to whom, by what mechanism, to what end, deliberately or incidentally? Status - do you simply mean ‘their lot’ or something more? Elite women - Phaeacian elite women? ‘Greek’ elite women? Elite women throughout history?
“What you call love was invented by guys like me” - I just don’t buy that your parents exerting control over your marriage precludes love, infatuation, adoration, and that these things have only been possible since 1962 or whatever time limit you want to put on it.
This is not to say that to exist in a society where you are subjected to structural inequality and your parents exert significant control over who you marry has no effect on how you feel - we’ve all read our Greer and de Beauvoir - but to suggest that we can only love someone that we have had complete freedom to choose (what does this even mean?) is just a misunderstanding of human behaviour. I exist in a society where many parents have strong opinions about who their children marry - no socialists please, you can only marry a doctor or a lawyer - which influence their children’s decisions because they want to avoid falling out with their parents. It doesn’t stop them loving a person who meets their parents’ approval.
Whether greater freedom to choose who we marry leads to more loving marriages in every case - now there’s a question!
It is important to understand that pressures on women (and men) in terms of who they marry exist on a spectrum (or more likely some kind of 4 dimensional plane) from shotgun wedding to ‘I like him but my dad expressed a dislike for men with beards 10 years ago’. To cleanly separate our society from this other society is to turn this spectrum into a distinction. For a full exploration, written by a woman, of the interaction between the ‘gilded cage’ and genuine feelings of love and affection in a court where marriages are carefully arranged, I refer you to La Princesse de Clèves. See also Sarah Pomeroy’s comments on Book 6 lines 270-385 in the previous thread.
Although perhaps you consider all sex before the 60s to be rape or joyless procreation, in which case we can start a new thread about the Wife of Bath’s tale or Margery Kempe.
Edit: to be clear, no goat-getting was deliberately sought and no heffalump traps were laid - I genuinely think my sugar-coated reading is defensible
Here are some translations of 66-67.
“So she coaxed, too shy to touch on her hopes for marriage, young warm hopes, in her father’s presence” - Fagles
“So she spoke, but she was ashamed to speak of her joyful marriage to her dear father” - Lattimore
“She had no word to say of her own wedding, though her keen father saw her blush” - Fitzgerald
“She spoke in this way because she was too shy to mention to her father the subject of marriage and all it promises” - Rieu
I concede that Wilson reads this much more neutrally, and there is something interesting to be said about four men reading her hopeful expectation of marriage while a women leaves in the ambiguity about why she feels shy.
“She said this since she felt too shy to talk of marriage to her father” - Wilson
But her translation of Nausikaa doing an impression of a rude Phaeacian later is interesting:
“Better if she has found herself a man
from elsewhere, since she scorns the people here,
although she has so many noble suitors”
Nausikaa seems to believe, at least, that she has agency in the matter.
I think the translations you quote are valuable and illustrate how this romanticisation can creep into our understanding, and become part of the “meaning” of the text. That the four male translators augment the text in a broadly similar way is a stark contrast to Wilson and the Greek. I can understand why they translated it the way they did but it does reveal their expectations of this scene.
I think that when we hear Nausicaa speak it is as well to remember that this is a man ventriloquising. Moreover, she asks for the wagon because Athena has told her to. Rather than female agency I see conformity. There is a passage in the next session which I find subversive but again I thought it was also comic. But the Odyssey is such a rich text and so embedded in our culture that it would be extraordinary if we didn’t find many meanings.
In what way is Homer evoking this parallel unless we bring our own 21st century mores to the table to force the comparison?
As I have said before this is all we can do. There is no escaping the present and our “values”. I was sharing my act of reception, I make no claims that it should be yours. I wouldn’t argue very hard for my “reaction” but when I read this text again recently it stuck me forcibly and I thought it worth sharing.
Status - do you simply mean ‘their lot’ or something more? Elite women - Phaeacian elite women?
By status I mean how they fit into the hierarchy of the society depicted. And I was generalising about the elite women depicted in the Odyssey. Of course this tells us nothing certain about any “historical” “elite” “women”.
“What you call love was invented by guys like me” - I just don’t buy that your parents exerting control over your marriage precludes love, infatuation, adoration, and that these things have only been possible since 1962 or whatever time limit you want to put on it.
This goes back to our differing view of the tension between an alien past and a familiar present. If the past is alien then how can we understand it? How can we avoid collapsing the past into the present and imaging that the alien past is essentially the same as the present? All difficult questions but well considered by Martindale.
Sorry if this came across at all tetchy - I genuinely do think that I would benefit from something written by an expert rather than the more entry-level stuff I’ve read.
I can’t tell how much of this is ironic!
I want you to know that I keep asking questions about Martindale not to criticise but because you write very thoughtfully and passionately as his proselyte (not meant at all in a derogatory way - I think I’ve been proselytising on behalf of the eccentricities of I.A. Richards in a roundabout way). I really will read Redeeming the Text when I have a spare moment, but I’ve thought more about where our difference really lies in the meantime.
As far as you’ve laid out his theoretical position, I don’t see anything to disagree with. In fact, it’s all quite attractive. I particularly like the idea of these texts interacting 'backwards and ‘forwards’.
My real question is this: What does Martindale’s literary critical praxis look like?
Richards asks us to set aside the author’s biography, to look closely at the text and to engage in an act of performance which gives us the raw material for our conclusions. It is inevitably personal, and different reader response schools take this in different directions, but there is an assumption that these conclusions are, in part, ‘portable’ - that others can share aspects of your own performance and that you aren’t just describing a completely independent experience. This is an oversimplification and I doubt it’s news to you but it’s worth going over. I don’t find this approach is satisfying all the time but it has its benefits.
I don’t really see what impact Martindale’s claims have on our reading except to make us more self-aware about our own position within the web of reception. They don’t seem to suggest that any particular reading is inadvisable, in the same way that Richards would argue reading Woolf in the light of mental illness or Wilfred Owen in the light of military service is to be avoided.
I want to know how we can read differently in the light of Martindale, rather than just having a richer self-awareness during reading. Otherwise you may have to accept that I’m trapped in my Homeric Jilly Cooper novel (Mills & Boon was harsh) with no escape.
If Sean is trapped within his Jilly Cooper, just so is seneca trapped within his late-20th-century criticism. No way out. (Intertexuality and precision of critical language apart, I don’t myself find Martindale that much different from Richards, only less insightful and sensitive.)
But to go back a bit:
Sean already copied and engaged with this, and I hesitate to join the dialogue. But briefly: first, I didn’t mean my “tall dark handsome stranger” (the Mills&Boon bit) to be taken seriously; I tossed it in as perhaps too subtle a warning against clichéd over-romanticization. To talk of love is surely anachronistic. But Sean seems to me incontestably right to say “her dream seems to have spurred her into a state of wanting to be ready for such a meeting if it comes.”
That out of the way, the pair of questions I asked were less flip, an attempt to encourage us to distinguish properly between characters and readers, a distinction which I think is too easily elided, though I don’t think there’s any harm in succumbing temporarily to the illusion (created with extraordinary success) that his characters are real. (That gets us back to plausibility I suppose, but let that go.) On that level: Nausicaa says what she says—and her father successfully interprets her meaning (ὁ δὲ πάντα νόει) even though she hadn’t made it explicit. I find this very interesting (the narrator’s telling us so, I mean)—but let that go too. Aren’t we readers are in a position analogous to his, inescapably imagining intentions and expectations etc behind what people actually say (just as we do in real life), and no less inescapably reaching for the poet’s meaning, behind or beyond that?
Sorry this post is not more coherent.