NESTOR POETIC MEMORY IN GREEK EPIC KEITH DICKSON GARLAND PUBLISHING, INC. NEW YORK AND LONDON r995 Copyright C 199 5 by Keith Dickson All rights reserved library of CongreuC atalogin1-in-PublicatDioant a Dickson, Keith. Nestor : poetic memory in Greek epic / by Keith Dic:luon. p. cm. - (Alben Bates Lord studies in oral tradition ; vol. 16) (Garland reference library of the humanities ; vol. 1923) Includes bibliographical referencesa nd index. ISBN 0-8153-2071-6 (alk. paper) 1. Homer-Characters-Nestor. 2. Epic poetry, Greek-History and criticism. 3. Nestor (Greek mythology) in literature. 4. Trojan War in literature. S. Aged men in literature. 6. Memory in literature. 7. Homer. Odyssey. 8. Homer. Iliad. I. Tade. Il. Series. m. Series: Garland reference library of the humanities ; vol. 1923. PA4037.D46 1995 883' .01--dc20 95-12542 CIP Printed on acid-&ee,2 50-year-life paper Manufactured in the United States of America Fay & Sam Contents Acknowledgments ix 1. Naming Nestor: The Muse at Pylos 1. Introduction 3 2. A Typology of Elders 10 3. Name and Character 20 4. Naming Nestor 25 2. Nestor as AOIDOS: Narrative Authority 1. Introduction 47 2. The Narrator as Prophet 50 3. The Muse at Pylos 64 4. A Fusion of Visions 85 3. Nestor as Intercessor: Figures of Mediation 1. Introduction 101 2. Ethos 104 3. Situation 111 4. Response 125 5. Ironic Mediation 144 4. Nestor as Host: Nostos and Hospitable Death 1. Introduction 157 2. Patroklos at the Threshold 160 3. Telemakhos at Pylos 181 4. Nestor among the Sirens 195 5. Conclusion 213 Bibliography 227 Passages Discussed 247 General Index 249 Vii Acknowledgments Very preliminary work on this book was begun under the auspices of a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar in the Humanities Grant in 1989. It was helped along toward completion by a Purdue Research Foundation Summer Faculty Research Grant in the following year, as well as by a research leave from the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Purdue Univenity during the Fall 1991 semester. I am grateful for this; like the best kind of support, it was timely and unobtrusive, andn o strings were attached. If there are few individuals to whom I am directly indebted, the burden of debt to each is that much greater,w hile the burden of responsibility of coune remainsm ine alone. These few chiefly include John Miles Poley, for guidance in the early and fragile stages of this work, and for welcome support at the end; and John Peradotto, for a model of clarity, rlgor, and intellectual vitality over the last two decades. Thanks are also due to Ann Astell, John Kirby, Anthony Tamburri, and Deborah Starewich, and to a number of anonymous editon, each in their own way, for useful comments and advice at crucial points en route. Chapter 2 represents a revised and expanded version of my essay, "Kalkhas and Nestor: Two Narrative Strategies in Iliad 1," which appeared in Artthusa 25.2 (1992). I am grateful for permission to republish this material. Parts of Chapter 1 and 3 appeared earlier in less developed form in Oral Tradition8 .1 (1993), as "Nestor Among the Sirens," and in Oral Tradition5 .1 (1990), as "A Typology of Mediation in Homer." ix NESTOR 1 Naming Nestor: The Muse at Pylos 1. INTRODUCTION What better way to begin a work on storytelling than with a simple piece of narrative? Tantalizingly brief, a fragment stripped of most embellishment, sketching little more than a few iconic gestures-a name, a place, a posture struck, a swift and apparently final reaction-yet at the same time also a tale suggestively rich with allusion? Like many fragments, this one is found nested in another tale that is itself embedded in a tale that is a fragment of an even larger story. They say that the men who sailed to fight at Troy under Nestor's command hailed from the fabled towns of Pylos and lovely Arene, from Thryon and strong-built Aipy, Kyparisseeis and Amphigeneia, from Pteleos and Helos (II. 2.594-600): §1 ' .. Kai. t.wp1.ov, lvea TE:M ouaaL aVTOµE:VOI0. ciµvp1.v TOV 0p~1.KaT Taucravc io1.6i;s, olxa>-.(T)9E:Vl6 vTa TTap'E vpuTOVo lxa>-..1.fios· O'TE"":' UTyOa ' p E': UX, OµE:VOVSI.K' T)O, "E:µE€1.:, ,v T, TE:a"p v au' Tal' . Moucra1c. iE:(601.E:KVo, upm 61.0Sa ly1.6xo1.o· al SEx: o>-..waciµevatT TT)pove iaav, avTa.p cioiS~v 9E:O'TTE:CJclTi4)>Vi >-..0VTKOa i. E:KA€Aa9ov Kl.9ap1.crT\J.V . . . and Dorion, where the Muses met Thamyris the Thraciana nd stopped him from singing as he came from Oikhalie and Oikhalian Eu.rytos; for he swore, boast:ingh e would win, even if the very Muses ~ against him, the cfaughterso f z.eus who holds the aigis. But m their anger they impaired him, and took away wondrous song,a nd made him utterly forget his harping. The shortest stories are sometimes the best: they engage and empower us as readers, make us work, conscript us into the 3 4 N•"''"I Nntor task of actively g~rating nvaning along with ttw narration of a tale. To this extent, they wrve ~rtl.pt t"Vffl btttter than longer tales do to thematiu tJw r«it auumpt,ON dull guide the process by which meaning ii gerwratN in Nrr•tivn, thus exposing the complicity that Hiatt ~twHn 1torytellt'r and audience.1 for it ia ellipsis far more than m1btt1Ushnwnt th.lt reveals the truly productive depth of n.urahm; in what is left unsaid or else merely suggested, the implicit boundArin within which stories orient themselves COIM alowJy into v~w--or into earshot, in the case of talet that are heard rather th&n read (as now) from a page silently. Beneath or behind or beyond or around or within every tale-no metaphor quite captures this relation properly-is the far broader context within which the tale is situated, and upon which it depends for its meaning. To be sure, this is a context whose contours are largely shaped by the prejudices and expectations of the community dult makes up its audience. Such expectations constitute a ~ptive horizon that is in some respects fixed, in others quite pliable and open to refiguration. Aspects of its fixity concern us more at this point. For the more homogeneous the audience is in the presuppositions with which it receives a tale, the lees the tale actually needs to say outright, the more it can simply take for granted as already given since already well understood. But these assumptions in tum are themMlves to a large extent influenced by prior tales received on other occasions by the same audience; it is chiefly in terms of what it has heard or read before that the audience apprehends and understands this story. It is with reference to this fact that we speak of the "intertextuality" of narratives. Eagleton's remarks (1983: 138) on the subject of literate texts of course apply equally-perhaps even more closely-to works that are orally composed and transmitted:2 AU literary texts are woven out of other literary texta, not in the conventional sense that they bear wthe :tr:ac:els eofh "inrfaluesncee" but in the more radical sense that every or ~t is a reworking of other writin~ which p e or surround the origina) wori. There is no such thing as literary "originality", no such thing as the "first" literary work: all literature is "intertextual". A specific piece of writing thus_ has no clearly defined boundaries: it spiUs over constar:atly into the works clustered around it, Sffl._eratinga hundred different perspectives which dwindle to vanishing point.