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The Iliad as heroic poetry
stichic narrative lays, between lays and epics, or even perhaps between
traditional and non-traditional poems. Demodokos on the same occasion
would sing of the sack of Troy and of a distinctly unheroic episode in the
daily life of Olumpos. One can be heroic in the narrative boasts of E. and
S. Africa, in all sorts of lyrical poems, in stichic verse epics thousands of lines
long, and in prose stories too. The heroic ethos shades off into romance and
folktale, stichic verses may be arranged into couplets and stanzas, or the
verse may be so long that it breaks into two and the verse-end is overridden.
In these circumstances comparison highlights the place on the continua
occupied by a particular poem and by emphasizing how it differs from
others deepens our understanding of it.
The Homeric poems rest on a tradition of singing
(i) in a stichic but a quantitative metrical form,
(ii) about the supposed events of a 'Heroic Age'
and embody
(iii) a certain concept of heroism.
The questions put to the comparativist are: Where do the Homeric poems
and the Iliad in particular stand in relation to the possibilities? In what
respects do they stand out? What has their author done that others did not?
It is sometimes useful to compare the Iliad with the rest of the Greek
tradition (called here ocoi6f|); the two should not be uncritically identified.
(i) The verse and the singer
What counts as verse varies so greatly that comparison can only be made
at a very general level. There is a count of syllables or morae and a
verse-end; on that are imposed alternations of quantities or accents, patterns
of assonance, alliteration, and stanzas. It is commonly said that the
Greek hexameter is a difficult metre compared with the Serbo-Croat decasyliable
(deseterac) or the seven-morae Kirghiz verse; it would be safer to
say with respect to the trained singer that it posed different problems. The
Greek singer had to master a special language that deviates sharply from
any vernacular and a special poetic grammar, and the Old English scop
faced a comparable task. The complexity of the special languages is indicative
of the difficulty of the poetical form which would have confronted the
singer if he had not acquired the means of overcoming it.
The technical point of these special speech forms was to enable the
singer to give his thoughts expression in the appropriate verse-form with
appropriate facility. The verse therefore shapes the form of the singer's
thought. The length of the hexameter, twelve to seventeen syllables,
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