It is said that when Aristotle was asked, ‘What is a friend?’ (τί ἐστι φίλος;), he replied: ‘One soul dwelling in two bodies’ (μία ψυχὴ δύο σώμασιν ἐνοικοῦσα). So wrote Diogenes Laertius (5.1.20), who composed biographies of the ancient Greek philosophers in the third century ce. A similar definition is found in Cicero's essay On Friendship (81), when he says that a human being naturally ‘both loves himself and seeks out another whose mind [animus] he may so mingle with his own as almost to make one mind out of two’ (‘et se ipse diligit et alterum anquirit, cuius animum ita cum suo misceat ut efficiat paene unum ex duobus’). Cicero, with Roman practicality, inserted the qualifier ‘almost’ (paene), but even so the idea is startling if taken literally, as I believe that Aristotle, at least, intended. Similarly, the formula ‘another self’, which Aristotle applies to a friend at least half a dozen times in his treatises and is also echoed by Cicero (again modified by the unreal conjunction: ‘as though the friend is both another and the same’, ‘est enim is qui est tamquam alter idem’, 80), suggests that friends, although they are clearly distinct entities (hence ‘another’), are in some sense nevertheless one and the same (the meaning of idem).

In this chapter, I argue that Aristotle's account of friendship in fact anticipates, and in certain ways even goes further than, aspects of the theory of distributed cognition. As Yvonne Rogers, in ‘A brief introduction to distributed cognition’ (1997), explains: ‘A general assumption of the distributed cognition approach is that cognitive systems consisting of more than one individual have cognitive properties that differ from those individuals that participate in those systems.’ The notion of distributed cognition has been applied to tasks that are undertaken jointly by a group, for example piloting a ship, where no one person may have access to all the data needed to determine the proper course, and to the use of external props in making calculations, as when we do arithmetic sums or division on paper or on a blackboard that we could not do just in our heads (Rogers provides a crisp summary of such cases).

Introduction

There are two major obstacles to detecting humor in the Epic Cycle. The first is the fragmentary condition of the texts, supplemented by dry summaries that surely flatten out any flashes of wit. This we cannot remedy. The second is the abiding sense that these are inferior poems, or at best products of an oral tradition to which so individual an element as humor is foreign. The dates of various poems in the Cycle have been much discussed, and they are not uniformly regarded nowadays as necessarily post-Homeric. Moreover, scholars have observed that the difference in quality that we perceive between them and the Homeric epics may well reflect a later aesthetic such as Aristotle's, who preferred the Iliad and the Odyssey because their unitary plots resembled those of tragedy, which was for him the model genre. Still and all, I have not come across a discussion of the Cycle in which anyone has referred to the Monumental Poet of the Cypria, for example, or of the Aethiopis; even those who are inclined to accept ancient attributions of the Cypria to Stasinus or Hegesias or Cyprias, or of the Aethiopis to Arctinus, rarely if ever put these shadowy figures in the same class as the equally shadowy Homer when it comes to subtlety and originality.

In what follows, I am going to assume, for my argument's sake, that the Cypria and other poems in the Cycle were every bit as sophisticated as the Odyssey, and see whether, on such a reading, there are signs of humor in what survives – I had almost said ‘deliberate humor,’ but then, humor is by nature intentional; I am not referring to lapses of taste that we might find funny but are not the product of authorial wit. For humor, as we know, is entirely at home in epic, often in the form of innuendos that slyly undercut the heroic ethos – and these are perhaps the most difficult to spot. By way of preface, let me offer one such example in the Odyssey that I think has not been previously appreciated, and may suggest ways of interpreting some of the apparently outlandish bits in the Cyclic poems.

Preface

Charles L. Griswold

Talk about forgiveness has reached astonishing proportions in the contemporary world. Forgiveness is said to do it all: it is the cure for wrongs both personal and political, the road to eternal salvation, and the secret to mental and physical health. Related notions such as apology, pardon, excuse, mercy, pity, sympathy, empathy, and reconciliation have also gained wide currency. One can hardly open the newspaper without reading about an apology being offered by, or demanded from, some organization, state, or prominent individual. We want apology and remorse from convicted criminals so as to decide how harshly to punish them; we praise South Africa’s famous Truth and Reconciliation Commission as the path to forgiveness and civic unity; countless self-help and religious tracts urge us to forgive our enemies unilaterally and instruct us how to do so, promising that we shall thereby rid ourselves of toxic resentment. Forgiveness and related notions are now so thoroughly woven into the fabric of culture that it is hard to imagine a moral world without them.