Sound, Sense, and Rhythm: Listening to Greek and Latin Poetry

SOUND, SENSE, AND RHYTHM

MARTIN CLASSICAL LECTURES

The Martin Classical Lectures are delivered annually at Oberlin College through a foundation established by his many friends in honor of Charles Beebe Martin, for forty-five years a teacher of classical literature and classical art at Oberlin.

John Peradotto, Man in the Middle Voice: Name and Narration in the Odyssey

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethnics

Josiah Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule

Anne Carson, Economy of the Unlost (Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celon)

Helene P. Foley, Female Acts in Greek Tragedy

Mark W. Edwards, Sound, Sense, and Rhythm: Listening to Greek and Latin Poetry

SOUND, SENSE, AND RHYTHM

LISTENING TO GREEK AND LATIN POETRY

MARK W.EDWARDS

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright © 2002 by Princeton University Press

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Edwards, Mark W.

Sound, sense, and rhythm : listening to Greek and Latin poetry / Mark W. Edwards.

p.cm. — (Martin classical lectures. New series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN: 978-1-40082-483-0

1. Classical languages—Metrics and rhythmics. 2. Classical poetry—History and criticism. 3. Oral communication—Greece. 4. Oral communication—Rome. I. Title. II. Martin classical lectures (Unnumbered). New series.

PA185.E392001880'21—dc092001021989

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Janson Typeface

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CONTENTS

PREFACE

CHAPTER ONE Homer I: Poetry and Speech

The Older Discoveries: Fränkel and Parry

The New Theories: Functional Grammar and the Grammar of Speech

Homeric Style in Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur

Homeric Style in the Duels of Achilles

CHAPTER TWO Homer II: Scenes and Summaries

The Book Divisions

The Paragraph Divisions

Joining Episode to Episode

Continuity and Oral Poetics

CHAPTER THREE Music and Meaning in Three Songs of Aeschylus

The First Choral Song (Agamemnon 104–257)

The Second Choral Song (Agamemnon 367–488)

The Third Choral Song (Agamemnon 681–781)

The Rest of the Agamemnon, and of the Trilogy

CHAPTER FOUR Poetry in the Latin Language

Latin Word Order

Ambiguity in Latin Verse

Propertius 1.19

AFTERWORD

APPENDIX A Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur

APPENDIX B Continuity in Mrs. Dalloway

APPENDIX C The Performance of Homeric Episodes

APPENDIX D Classical Meters in Modern English Verse

REFERENCES

PREFACE

WHEN I received the invitation to give the Martin Classical Lectures, I felt that I did not want to devote the whole series to what has been my main research subject, the poetry of Homer. During my life as a university teacher I have also developed a number of other interests, usually arising from courses I have taught, and about two of them in particular I thought I had something to say that might be useful to my peers in the profession: the ways in which Aeschylus uses lyric meters in his choruses to convey a meaning and a mood, and the ways Roman poets (Propertius in particular) availed themselves of the special characteristics of the Latin language to produce certain effects. These topics, it seemed to me, could be linked with two others from Homeric studies that were much in my mind at the time: the order and positioning of words in the verse, and the interconnection of successive scenes (and hence the significance of the book divisions). All four were centered upon the way one should try to imagine oneself listening to ancient poetry, rather than reading it from the page; and all four had strongly affected my teaching of these and other authors in undergraduate classes, and might be of interest to others in such circumstances.

When I delivered the lectures in Oberlin in February 1998, I gave them in the chronological order of authors discussed. In preparing them for publication I at first thought of abandoning this simple sequence in favor of one that progressed from word order in Homer to word order in Latin poetry, then on to word rhythm (or meter) in Aeschylus, and finally to larger-scale issues of Homer’s ways of keeping his hearers’ attention while passing from one scene to another. However, readers of this version were not impressed by this arrangement of the material, and complained that the transitions between the chapters were weak—they were obviously thinking the book should be a unified whole, and wanted a better synthesis of the parts. I have therefore returned to the sequence of the lectures, which (besides having the advantage of familiarity) produces another, perhaps clearer, progression of topics. Now our examination moves from Homer’s art in arranging the sequence of his words to his skill in linking the succession of his scenes, and then on to how Aeschylus drives home his meaning by his use of meter (i.e., music and dance) and how Roman poets use the quite different features of the Latin language for their own poetic purposes. Since most Classics teachers are involved with all the authors I discuss, I hope they will read through the whole volume; but the chapters can be read independently if desired.

Though I hope that the following chapters make a scholarly contribution to their topics, I am in the first instance aiming at a readership of Classics professors at large who teach Greek and Latin literature to undergraduates—who spend much of their working lives teaching students to translate ancient poetry in class. There are still many of them in the United States, especially in the numerous liberal arts colleges of Ohio and Virginia. This kind of work is characteristic of our discipline, and essential for training the future teachers who will ensure its continuance; and—though possibly ranking below the cultural, political, and social lessons that should be drawn from the ancient Greek and Latin civilizations—the education of students in the immense possibilities of language is an important part of the value of the study of Classics. The most enjoyable part of my own past teaching experience has been reading and translating classical authors, both Greek and Latin, with undergraduates, and my research and scholarly reading have both contributed to this work and profited from it. If the content of this volume seems polymorphous and disconnected— And now for something completely different—it is partly because much of it arises from my past teaching assignments, the daily kaleidoscopic workload that we classicists enjoy.

I hope that my approach to the three authors (and the two languages, besides English) I focus on in this book will refresh readers’ insights into these and similar texts and give them renewed interest in showing their students how to translate—how best both to understand the intonations and implications of the original language and to see why it can be so difficult to reproduce it in the different norms of English idiom. Most university Classics teachers, in their careers from teaching assistant to full professor, seldom discuss their everyday classroom word-for-word-translation experience with their peers, and it is not often that a student produces an insight into the intent of the author’s wording that gives the teacher a new idea. New ideas and renewed excitement is what I hope to inspire in this volume.

For the same purpose, that of augmenting and perhaps reinvigorating the teaching of Greek and Latin authors in the original language, I have included a good many illustrations from English literature, in particular to show Tennyson’ s adoption of Homeric style and word order and the effective use of the rhythms of ancient lyric meters by some twentieth-century poets. I think such parallels provide a good means of familiarizing students with the classical models—and probably of improving their knowledge of English literature, too. Examples like these are further elaborated in the appendixes, which include material extending the main subjects that I think could be both interesting and useful to a teacher.

I also hope that to some extent the points I make here may be of interest to nonclassicists, and to that end I have translated Greek and Latin quotations, except in a few cases where an understanding of the original is essential for the argument. Such readers may well be more aware of the shortcomings in my knowledge of English literature than of any contribution I make to its appreciation, but many well-known authors, past and present, have had a familiarity with classical literature far surpassing that of some modern-day critics, and can be better valued if the qualities they observed (knowingly or not) in ancient writers are better known.

These chapters were first written in a style suitable for public lectures, and in refashioning them for publication I have added footnotes and made a number of other changes. Sometimes, however, I think something of my lecturing manner may have survived, and I hope this more personal touch will not be found offensive.

I am grateful to the Martin Classical Lectures Committee of Oberlin College, and to the members of the Oberlin Classics Department, for inviting me to give the Lectures in 1998 and for their generous hospitality during the week I visited their campus. In producing this volume, my old friend Tom Van Nortwick has given me very valuable support and criticism, and Jim Helm has helped me with Princeton University Press. Thorough, useful, and constructive comments on my text (at various stages) have been made by John Heath, Edward Spofford, Thomas Van Nortwick, and Oberlin’s anonymous reader, and I am very much in their debt. Professor Charles O. Hartman and the late Professor John F. Nims were very helpful in answering my queries about their work, and my colleagues Andrew Devine and Paul Kiparsky gave me generous assistance with relevant parts of their own research.

The content of chapter 1 owes much to the research of Professor Eg-bert J. Bakker; chapter 2 to the work of Professor Scott Richardson; chapter 3 to the long-ago lectures of the late Professor H.D.F. Kitto, my teacher when I was an undergraduate at Bristol University (though he would not have agreed with some of my basic principles); and chapter 4 to the insights of the late Craig A. Manning, who as an undergraduate at Brown University in my first years of teaching taught me more about Latin poetry than I ever taught him.

A modified version of the Aeschylus chapter was given as the Carl Deppe Memorial Lecture at the University of California at Santa Cruz on 22 April 1999. I am grateful to those who chose to honor me with this invitation.

The book’s epigraph is taken from a typewritten card I used to see in my early years of teaching at Brown on the door of my then-colleague C. Arthur Lynch. I never asked him its origin. It means: You want to learn? Then teach. Give, if you wish to receive.

SOUND, SENSE, AND RHYTHM

Chapter One

HOMER I: POETRY AND SPEECH

MOSTLY, we read the Homeric epics; despite the existence of modern recordings, few of us listen to them. In the last seventy years, scholars have devoted a great deal of time to studying the poems as oral compositions, but—as the term suggests—have very largely concentrated their investigations on the techniques by which poems of such metrical complexity and length could be composed and adjusted to the occasions of performance. Not much attention has been paid to the listeners, and what demands were imposed on them by the need to understand the recitations, what capacities they had to employ if they were in any way to appreciate the enormous depth of artistic skill that we readers identify in Homer.

Yet two great advances made about seventy years ago much improved our understanding of what the characteristics of oral poetry meant to the listener, as well as to the singer. Only quite recently, however, has this become clear. The two scholars responsible for the older discoveries, Hermann Fränkel and Milman Parry, though unaware of each other’s work, shared a common and largely original insight: that Homer’s verse should be analyzed into larger units than dactyls and spondees, and his sentences should be analyzed into larger units than words. And now, within the last fifteen or twenty years, there have been two other advances, in the field of linguistics, that have provided a much better theoretical understanding than we had before of why this is the case. They have revealed that the now-well-known compositional techniques of the oral poet not only provide the resources for the singer to present a song adapted to the occasion of performance: they are also developed so that the song will be as accessible as possible to the listening audience.

In what follows I first quickly explain the larger units upon which Hermann Fränkel in 1926 and Milman Parry in 1928 focused attention. Then I describe the two more recent and less-well-known theories I mentioned. Finally, I demonstrate the advantages of emphasizing this kind of approach to Homer by commenting in detail on one passage from the Iliad—not a well-known speech or a highly wrought emotional scene, but one of the descriptions of Achilles’ battles soon after his return to the fighting. Battle scenes are sometimes neglected, because there are so many of them, and because their brutality may discourage and perhaps disgust the modern reader; but just as Homer lavishes all his poetic powers on the speeches of his hero Achilles, so, if one pays proper attention, his account of Achilles’ battles, too, brings before our eyes the superb skills of this greatest of poets.

THE OLDER DISCOVERIES: FRÄNKEL AND PARRY

In 1926 Hermann Fränkel published a monumental article in a German periodical1 demonstrating that the Homeric hexameter should be viewed not simply as a succession of six metrical feet, heavy and light syllables arranged as dactyls (DUM DE DE) or spondees (DUM DUM), but as a series of four (or occasionally just three) word groups whose syllables certainly add up to a hexameter, but which should be regarded as entities separated by word-end and often by a pause in sense.² This means a typical hexameter might be DUM DE DE DUM (word break) DE DE DUM DE (word break) DE DUM DE DE (word break) DUM DE DE DUM DUM (verse-end)—or (with some dactyls replaced by spondees)

(Iliad 1.2). The four units in this example include interior word breaks as well, but the sense pauses (often the punctuation points) would fall between the units, not within them. Occasionally a verse occurs that illustrates this by presenting strong and obvious breaks between each of the units, as in

(Iliad 1.158:³ But you—you shameless thing—we followed you, to do you a favor). It is highly significant that all the units are of different metrical shapes—a vital matter for avoiding monotony—and, of course, further variety is added both because the units in other verses will be different in shape from those given in the example, and because each group of two light syllables may be replaced by a single heavy one.

Here is a further illustration, from a couplet that will concern us again later. In the second book of the Iliad, after Agamemnon finishes addressing the assembly, the Greek troops move off and fix themselves a meal, which as always includes a sacrifice. Then come the lines (Iliad 2.402–403):

The orthodox prose translation is, But Agamemnon, king of men, slew a fat bull of five years to the son of Cronos, supreme in might.⁴ If we follow the examples Fränkel gives (1968b: 112–113), we would divide the lines into word groups like this:

—and in such cases it is best not to force the issue but (as Kirk pointed out, 1985: 19) to take the half-verse as a virtually continuous whole. We might note (though this is surely acci-dental) that the two verses are similar in rhythm, each composed of the different metrical units DUM DE DE DUM DE DE DUM DE DE DUM DUM DUM (or DE DUM DE DE DUM) DE DE DUM DE.

In the past I have tried to give nonclassicists an idea of the effect of Homeric verse, when looked at in this way, by quoting Longfellow’s Hiawatha.⁵ If one runs two Hiawatha verses together, they add up to something roughly like a Greek hexameter in length, divided by three heavy word breaks and sense pauses into four parts, each usually DUM DE DUM DE:

(Here and elsewhere I use an acute accent to mark a stressed syllable, a grave to mark an unstressed one.6) The replacement of a heavy syllable by a light one does little to vary the movement—particularly as many readers might tend to maintain the metrical stress and hear (for instance), "Wíth thè

Only occasionally is there a noticeable reversal of stress, as above in . . . òf gréat rívèrs, or the running over of a word from one unit to the next, as in:

This meter soon becomes monotonous, because so many of Longfellow’s component metrical units and sense units have (or are liable to be forced into) the same rhythm, DUM DE DUM DE. This trochaic meter is very natural to English (a staple of English prosody, says J. F. Nims, referring to Poe’s eighteen-stanza The Raven as well as Hiawatha, Baker 1996: 193) and is very easy to compose: anyone, with little effort, knowing nothing about rhythm, can go rambling on forever in this free and easy meter. But the Homeric Greek hexameter is very different, because of its constant variation. Usually, like Longfellow’s verses when quoted in pairs, it has a pause in the middle; but the position can vary by a syllable either way, which changes the length of the two adjacent metrical units. More than this: again as with the doubled Longfellow verses, the Greek hexameter often has two further pauses, one in each half of the verse, but their position varies a good deal, and sometimes they are not present (or at least not noticeable) at all. Here are the first few verses of the passage I shall be discussing later (Iliad 20.455–59), divided by pauses into the kinds of unit identified by Fränkel:⁷

Translated into English in the same rhythm, substituting stressed and unstressed syllables for the heavy and light syllables of the Greek (and retaining as far as possible the same word order, if necessary in violation of the normal idiom), this becomes:⁸

might be taken as one unit or two); the third unarguably falls into three units, not four, with the usual word break in the middle bridged by the long patronymic;with his sword [the] powerful [one].

Note also that the stronger pauses in these five verses, as marked with English punctuation by the editor of the Greek text, fall at different positions: the first at verse-end; the next a little after the midpoint of the second verse (at the caesura or word break in the fourth foot) closely followed by another at verse-end; the next comes late in the fourth verse (at the bucolic diaeresis); the last at verse-end again. I think it is seldom realized that this continual change in the positions of the major and minor pauses in sense, which constantly alters the shape of the component units (and hence the rhythm), and the location of the breaks between clauses and sentences, contributes much more to the variety of the Homeric line than the admission of either dactyls or spondees in the first four feet (and the occasional spondee in the fifth). Homer’s listeners would not have experienced the monotony that might well afflict those exposed to Longfellow’s seldom-changing cadences.

Fränkel’s work was apparently not known to Milman Parry, studying a few years later in Paris, but Parry discovered the same divisions in the Homeric hexameter while developing his own enormously important contribution: the demonstration of the prevalence and dominance of the formulas, the traditional systems of expression in Homer, especially the combinations of proper names with epithets. This need not be recapitulated in detail here; most classicists accept that whether Achilles is described as brilliant, swift-footed, or Peleus’ son in one of Lattimore’s lines depends on the metrical circumstances of the particular Homeric verse, not on the physical or emotional circumstances of the hero.¹⁰ Here it need only be noted that the formulas or conventional expressions in Homer fall between the sense pauses just mentioned—after all, they naturally begin and end at sense breaks.

Through Parry’s eyes, our demonstration couplet at Iliad 402–403 would look like this:

This is following Parry’s technique, in his archetypal analysis of formulae in Iliad and Odyssey 1–25, of marking word groups that recur unchanged by a solid underline and using a dotted underline for phrases which are of the same type as others . . . limit[ing] the type to . . . those in which not only the metre and the parts of speech are the same, but in which also at least one important word or group of words is identical.¹¹ In the first line we note that its first half recurs with slight modifications (and again followed by a noun-epithet formula) at Iliad 7.314 and Odyssey 13.24, and that its second half is the standard name-epithet formula for Agamemnon when the second half of the verse is to be filled. The second verse recurs at Iliad is also a name-epithet formula in the dative, recurring four times in Iliad in this case and twice in the accusative. For both name-epithet formulas, the economy that was one of Parry’s most significant discoveries is observed—no alternative word group for this character in this metrical position and in this grammatical case is found.¹³

Longfellow of course discovered proper-name formulas, too, and he invented the same kind as the Greek tradition provided for Homer (remember, he spoke of stories . . . with their frequent repetitions). Thus the name Hiawatha fits neatly within one of Longfellow’s metrical units (i.e., between the sense pauses), and so do Minnehaha, Mudjekeewis, and others; some other names are padded to fit by adding an epithet, like "old Nokomis and lazy Kwasind, or expanded to cover two units, like Gitche Manito the Mighty and Chibiabos the musician." So Longfellow constructed passages like:

Thus it was that | Hiawatha | to the lodge of | old Nokomis | Brought the moonlight, | starlight, firelight, | brought the sunshine | of his people, |

Minnehaha, | Laughing Water, | handsomest of | all the women |

In the land of | the Dakotahs, | in the land of | handsome women. |

In the Greek, such