1. Campbell, J., The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York, 1949).Google Scholar

2. Lord, A. B., The Singer of Tales (Harvard, 1960), 242Google Scholar, cites this event in contemporary Serbo-Croatian oral narratives.

3. Snell, B., The Discovery of the Mind, translated by Rosenmeyer, T. G. (Harvard, 1953), 1–22Google Scholar, argues that neither the frame of the living man nor his personality are conceived as a whole in Homer, but as an aggregate of parts. Snell has been countered by Lesky, A. ‘Göttliche und menschliche Motivierung im homerischen Epos’, Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften (Phil.-hist. klasse), 1961, 4–52Google Scholar, and by Lloyd-Jones, H., The Justice of Zeus (Sather Classical Lectures 41, Berkeley, California, 1971), 157–158.Google Scholar

4. Dodds, E. R., The Greeks and the Irrational (Sather Classical Lectures 25, Berkeley, California, 1959), 28–63Google Scholar, introduced classical scholars to the terms ‘Shame Culture’ and ‘Guilt Culture’, which had already been enjoying a considerable vogue among anthropologists in the 1940s and 1950s. Essentially, the ‘Shame Culture’ stresses that one is measured by what lies outside him: if one commits a wrong but it remains undetected, he does not worry; if he does get caught, then he is unhappy. In a ‘Guilt Culture’, there is an internalised sense that what one does is likely to bring him trouble, whether or not anyone else has seen the act occur. Dodds does not address himself exactly to the proposition I have just set out (which is, however, just the way in which an anthropologist discusses the polarity), but examines, during the Archaic Age, the growth of fear about pollution, and of an oppressive sense of divine retribution which is supposed to hang over us all. ‘Shame Culture’ refers to personal failure to equal or surpass the achievements of others; ‘Guilt Culture’, as Dodds sees it, concerns the transgression of interdicted limits. For a critical reaction to this, cf. Lloyd-Jones (above, note 2), 24–26. By raising the question here, I want only to point out that in the externally oriented society of Homer’s Greek heroes it is appropriate for the king, Agamemnon, to enjoy greater measure of respect and for this timê to be reflected in his right not to have his holdings diminished when one of lesser rank than he keeps his possessions intact.

5. I would differ from Whitman, C., Homer and the Heroic Tradition (Harvard, 1958), 183CrossRefGoogle Scholar, who argues that Achilles feels more responsibility for his men and thus is the person who calls the assembly, while Agamemnon is, by his lack of initiative, shown to be less sympathetic. My own view is that Achilles is spoiling for a fight and seizes the present opportunity to press matters, while Agamemnon behaves reasonably within the established societal order and only eventually is pushed to concentrate his annoyance on Achilles.

6. Murray, G., The Rise of the Greek Epic (Oxford, 1924),³12–15, 317–321Google Scholar, emphasizes that these victims were not really killed, but only symbolically sacrificed. They were led out of the city and ritually stoned. The practice was remembered from the distant past, and it was continued, as the Greek commentators reveal, after the fifth century B.C.

7. Zenodotus thought that the dual could be used interchangeably with the plural. Aristarchus suggested that Phoenix has already gone on ahead (cf. 9.168), that the heralds are ancillary to the moment and need not count, and that the pair which Homer has in mind here are Odysseus and Ajax. D. L., Page, History and the Homeric Iliad (Sather Classical Lectures 31 — Berkeley, 1959), 297–298 ff.Google Scholar, says that the speech of Phoenix is a later interpolation: there were two versions of the embassy — one with Odysseus and Ajax, another with Phoenix. For a similar opinion, see Kirk, G. S., The Songs of Homer (Cambridge, 1962), 218Google Scholar. Whitman (above, note 5), 344, n. 25, believes that Homer is here conflating different versions (Page and Kirk feel that Book 9 is from two different composers). Segal, C. P., ‘The Embassy and the Duals of Iliad 9.182–98’, GRBS 9 (1968), 101–115Google Scholar, explores the parallels which join the embassy in Book 9 with the visit to Achilles’ tent by the two heralds in Book 1, when they have come to take away Briseis. He suggests that the dual is intended to place the heralds at the centre of the stage, to recall their previous visit in Book 1, and to motivate for the audience Achilles’ refusal in Book 9. Such a renewal of motivation would have been necessary since so many long books had run their course between Agamemnon’s taking of Briseis and his attempt to persuade Achilles to come back. Segal studies the tension between Achilles’ happiness at seeing Ajax and Odysseus (his ‘dear friends’) and his awareness of the past wrong he has suffered in Book 1 when the two heralds came to his tent (hikaneton, 9.197, the dual, fits the formality of the two heralds who are the pair mentioned in 9.182, who remind Achilles of the earlier, similar visit). Segal is most persuasive and has added to our appreciation of the dynamics of Achilles’ interaction with his friends. My own thought here lies somewhat closer to Whitman and is especially influenced by what Lord (above, note 2) has to teach regarding the habits and practice of non-literate bards: such a singer retains certain nucleic ‘kernels’ around which he elaborates his song — the ‘kernels’ are transmitted unchanged from generation to generation. At the most significant points in his singing when he is dealing most directly with an important set of circumstances lying at the heart of his story, the composer will insist that the song be sung in the traditional way, even if disparities develop. Segal, for one, is reluctant to accept that Homer would allow so glaring a disparity in grammatical sense as the contradiction of the dual by a plural (or vice-versa) to enter his story.

8. Cf. Lord (above, note 2), 13–29, on the way in which the young singer learns to build upon accepted turns in a story, improvising above and against them as a pianist may do against the set figures provided by the rhythm section and by the bass in contemporary popular music. Since each singer in the long development of a given tradition has received the same turns from an earlier bard, many features of his composition will have been incorporated from a point so far distant in the past that they will come no longer easily to be understood by the audience. One example of a city which the commentators on Homer had lost track of even at an early period is given by Page (above, note 7), 169, n. 62.

9. The last century paid a great deal of attention to the fascination early man entertained for the phenomena of seasonal change and the varying relationship between the Sun and Moon. One theory, to which Murray alludes (above, note 6), is that of the ‘year-daimon’ — eniausios-daimôn — which seeks to relate the recurring narrative of a young hero who leaves his society and then returns to the departure of the earth’s fertility in the fall and its arrival back when the spring comes. All of this is a bit dated in classical studies, enjoying its hey-day among the English ‘ritualists’ such as Cornford, Harrison, and Murray himself, who made it a point, back toward the beginning of this century, assiduously to seek out, in the literature of Greece, all possible areas of contact between primitive social practices and the shape of the stories preserved in writing. (On the ‘ritualists’, see now Ackerman, R., ‘Some Letters of the Cambridge Ritualists’, GRBS 12 (1971), 113–136.Google Scholar) It seems to me that we should not be so ready to scoff at the very considerable research of this group of scholars, though many critics at this time tend to do so: in trying to appreciate epic, we must constantly be sensitive to the great antiquity of the patterns it has carried down to us.

10. Campbell (above, note 1) maintains that the concern with separation and the re-establishment of unity mirrors the psychological maturation of each human being. Living, by itself, requires man to seek what will please him more, and this search for greater satisfaction necessitates his separation from — or at least introduces tension into — those relationships which have come to make up the status quo. It is inevitable that the passage of time will cause us to revalue what has existed in different ways. This very act distances us from what we knew as solid and secure. Hence, the pattern of separation and search or journey stems not so much from early man’s observance of the seasons, as it arises naturally from the inevitable disruption of our sense of others as we live on.

11. Whitman (above, note 5), 217.

12. Ebeling, H., Lexicon Homericum (Leipzig, 1880), vol. 1, p. 26.Google Scholar

13. On the selective repetition of verses and situations, the consensus seems to be taking shape that we need not think of every instance from the standpoint only of formula, of metrical efficiency. The article by Segal (above, note 7) gives a good example of how it makes sense to explain Homeric repetitions as deriving from artistic impulse, rather than strictly mechanistically as owed to the demands of structure. For this qualified view, cf. C. Bowra’s, M. remarks on ‘Style’ in A. J. B. Wace’s and F. H. Stubbings’ A Companion to Homer (London, 1962), 34–36Google Scholar; Else’s, G. F. ‘Homer and the Homeric Problem’, University of Cincinnati Classical Studies I (Princeton, 1967), 348 ff.Google Scholar; and M. W. Edwards, ‘Some Features of Homeric Craftsmanship’, TAP A 97 (1966), 177. The repetition of verses from 9 to 16 in the Iliad recalls the ‘geometric’ structure Whitman has argued for (note 5, 87–101, 249–284): Book 9 stands from the beginning of the whole epic the same number of books as Book 16 stands from the end.