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The Iliad as heroic poetry
book 9) and liberates his fancy. 3 Without the Muse there would be a quarrel
of the chiefs, a short episode in the tale of Troy, but no Iliad.
In the Odyssey we meet also a familiar nexus of singer, patron, and
audience; the doiSos is a professional but not (at least in Demodokos'
case) retained by a permanent patron; the occasion is the feast, the purpose
entertainment; his status is relatively humble and the patron does not
hesitate to interrupt. Professionalism in some degree is a necessary condition
for the acquisition and practice of the skill and knowledge that a singer
must possess. Most singers, real or represented in songs, are at least semiprofessional
(R. Finnegan, Oral Poetry (Cambridge 1977) 188-201); professionals
may be itinerant or, if settled, the retainers of noble patrons; a
genuine amateur, i.e. a patron of the first rank who can also sing, like
Akhilleus at 9.186, or King Alfred among the Danes, is rare and the
verisimilitude of such representations is called into question. In both cases
the circumstances are exceptional, and of course Akhilleus is not giving a
public performance. Semi-amateurs, like the thegn at Hrothgar's court or
the suta of the Mahdbhdrata, are more in evidence. Sometimes the patron
may be in effect a god. This is commonly the case in India (Smith, in Hatto,
Traditions 11 29-41), and turns performance into ritual with a corresponding
attitude towards the text. The association of heroic figures with cult - Aias
in Locris, Akhilleus at Elis (Paus. 6.23.3), Neoptolemos at Delphi (Pind. JV.
7.44-7), Menelaos at Sparta - shows how readily a link between song and
cult could arise. Nevertheless any connexion between doiSfj and religion
was incidental; songs in the manner of the Homeric Hymns may have been
sung at cult centres (cf. HyAp 165-73), Dut there is no evidence that they or
an epic Titanomachia or the like were performed as part 0/cult; in Greece that
was the business of the choral lyric. Typically, it was when the Homeric
poems did become associated with cult, at the Panathenaea, that we first
encounter anxiety about the integrity of the text.
Modern researchers stress the inadequacy of the written text to represent
an art that properly exists only in performance and participation. Fortunately
doi5f) is one of those traditions in which the audience did not physically
participate. The audience dominated the performance but was not an
active part of a ritual of which the performance was also a part. Its patrons
felt no obligation to hear the singer out, but the effect of the song while they
listened is described by the verb OeAyeiv and the noun KT|Ar|0u6s; everyone
sat entranced in a state of'silent exaltation' - as is reported of some African
audiences. We lose less in reading the printed text of the Iliad, if it is read in
the right mood, than might have been the case.
3 M. Finkelberg, AJP 111 (1990) 291-303.
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