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The Iliad as heroic poetry
The vignettes of doi8f) in the Odyssey, there is no reason to doubt, describe
circumstances in the background of the monumental epic. Where there is
an individual patron, whether Danish kings, Kirghiz khans, West African
chiefs, or Gaulish princelings, there is panegyric (Bowra, HP 412-17),
though not to the exclusion of wider interests. The funeral feast, like that of
Amphidamas to which Hesiod alludes (Erga 654-7), ls another opportunity
for praise poetry. Yet as the Odyssey describes it doi8r) praised no patron
directly. The situation in which a patron (Odysseus) called for a song about
his own exploits was not a contemporary situation. Praise was possible only
indirectly, e.g. through the representation of ancestors, cf. the Neleids of
Miletos and Nestor's heroic tales at //. 7.132-56, 11.670-762. But the
Neleids had to be content with an ancestor of secondary importance in the
tradition taken as a whole, and the great heroes, Akhilleus and Odysseus,
left no descendants in the Ionian world. Who then was the patron of the
Iliad?
In the social system, for example, of the Germanic world patron (economic
support) and audience (moral support) were separated. In Greece,
at the time of the eighth century renaissance, they were not. The audience
was the patron, and because some singers at least were not rooted in one
spot (cf. HyAp 175) their potential audience was the whole community. The
bT scholia made a good point when they said that the poet of the Iliad was
cpiAiAAriv (e.g. at 10.13), the poet of the "EAAr|V6S. The stories of a people,
whether in a hundred lays or concentrated in a monumental epic, are the
tale of the tribe. They are of immediate use for the inspiration of impetuous
youth, and more generally they articulate the myths, beliefs, values, and
hopes of the tribe that created them. 4 Wilamowitz thought that the tale of
Troy reflected the struggle to colonize Aeolis; the Ionians perhaps saw in it
a justification for their presence in western Asia. But the eclipse of the world
in which Akhilleus and Odysseus had lived meant that the heroes could
appeal to all Greeks. And they received their greatest literary promotion at
the very time that a consciousness of Hellenic identity was beginning to
establish itself.
(ii) The tradition
The secular subject matter of Phemios' and Demodokos' songs was highly
predictable. It would be taken from a few cycles of stories. This restriction
is not a primitive picture. Beside the tale of Thebes the Iliad itself alludes
to stories about Calydon, Pylos, Centaurs, Herakles, and Bellerophon; the
4 For this reason the communist administration in Kirghizia, it is said, endeavoured to
suppress the Manas-cycle.
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