Androktasia
Week 8 of my Homeric Performance Essays. Enjoy!
Androktasia
The recurring fault of the hero in Homeric epic seems to be their mortality, and the spiraling of consequences that comes from this is heard in the back-and-forth patterns of the slaying of men, or Androktasiai. The dynamic for understanding and portraying these slaughter sequences is a central part of the stewardship of text that comes for the reader, and the deep emotional connection that one feels when approached by the better half of reality within the recreation of the mythical. We all take part in this realization when we perform Homer.
Some of the more touching pieces of the epic are the ways in which our first rate heroes talk to one another, or the way the gods talk amongst themselves, or the way the two groups mix; but nearly never do we hear anything but the great communal cries rising into the air at the start of a battle sequence from individual second rate warriors among the killings of men that come across, for me, as the most emotional parts of the story to perform.
It is not just that the character dies, but they die with a wife in waiting; it is not just that they tried to do their best, but they failed with such short exposition. They often die accidentally due to the swerving of the first rate hero from the spear, even. They will not be reunited with their wealth or lovers at home, and instead are left here, in the singer’s words, with appellation at times of father or mother only, and the pithy remark of what they lost in exchange for joining the war as a subtle reflection on behalf of the poet about the nonsense that must be going on in men’s minds. They should never have imagined that they could be part-God and have something too interesting to their name when they inevitably fail to dodge said spear, for instance, or otherwise get themselves killed in front of a warrior en route to the catharsis of aristeia.
Why is this their small, tailing dynamic? Androktasia identities are hard for the performing poet because of the realities of the singer. The singer cannot be professional and a warrior at the same time: singers in the Iliad who are warriors never perform in public, as we have discussed in an earlier essay. When the killing of men rises to the occasion, then, a certain humility must be held in mind by the performer. What exactly is the experience or understanding that they have, to be able to speak on behalf of the dead? And what laudatory words can they give the dead heroes of these battle sequences, knowing that through their very mention they are isolated to lower traditions and lower status than their more godlike peers, who play much more signature formal and morphological roles? The medium, the remembrance, and the chains of verse which take away the life of them and make them into the mere blood running spolia of the foundations of the hexameter make these moments of men tragic for their inability to be understood by the poet, and yet the need for us to communicate with some sincerity their sacrifice to those who must engage in such a high calling, whether they know it or not, or worst of all, whether they know how to learn how to know it or not, all of this leads us to the reality that these listeners must reach fate: whether it is that of dying ignorantly and poorly as some do in the poems, or not so. And this can be overreaching for the performer, who is confined to rendition of the myth, and will not fight.
Nevertheless, the poet does help with battle. One aspect of the Iliad that I find very striking is the Homeric simile unto collectivity, and what it means for progress. Perhaps it is the progressivism of the singer’s impatient realization of the need to innovate past the world which seems unsettlingly uninvited, that of the warrior and the topos of the present, that made them unconsciously receive the gift of innovation which, hundreds of years later, I believe created Alexander’s success.
It was Alexander and his father who executed best the Phalanxes, and this lived recitation of the collectivity of the Iliad, the way the men ‘bristle outwardly’ and ward off the first rate heroes through their spears and closely held shields, this seems to me a most remarkable improvement on the tragedy of what would happen otherwise, which is, say, domination by Hector no matter who he is facing, or capitulation under Aias no matter how hard one tries to escape the verse destiny of the minor fighter. From the gnostic, post-hoc situation as the singer must think of it as, it is in fact impossible to change this; if one were to make it so that:
νύσσοντες ξίφεσίν τε καὶ ἔγχεσιν ἀμφιγύοισιν
Iliad, 13.147; 15.278; 16.637; 17.731
Brandishing their spears and two-edged swords
And this brandishing actually killed the main character, then one would have no great story, and there would be a lot to remember (or likely simply make up) about the hero who, within an Androktasia, is simply one of the brandishers, and should never be more than that. But their humiliation grows greater as one realizes that within the brandishing, across that special double sided sword and shield accentuated line of companion compulsion, νύσσοντες, ‘poking and prodding,’ lies the real patterned and pedantic test of history which their companions altogether may have lived to have heard of if they had somehow survived to witness their global great innovation of acting together which, as one notices in Homer, is a central aspect of his philosophy.
Homer, despite dealing with the realities of ἄριστος on the battlefield, also loves the double-sided, ἀμφίγυος. One chief double-sided quality of the fighting hero is the knowledge that two men usually beat one man. While one has a chariot-keeper and a husband has a wife, from there one grows armies of those that we rely on for our lives; and lost in these encomia of communality is the ability for the man singular to make as big of a difference as he does in the epic. The Phalanx, once it was figured out, made Homeric warfare and the dashing around the battle line, the shouting, and the din of the horses all nearly parochial myths, with only their moral character outlasting the physical part of what it meant to ‘brandish.’ For the scientist of war, brandishing became something that only the loser would doubt. The myth of the collective line easily did away with the story of the single fighter, then, and the population capable of outfitting men who could work together realized that they could very easily conquer the world.
There is no direct lineage between Homer’s battle tactics and the supremacy of the Macedonians across the ‘world’ of the time, but on a philosophical basis, there can be no clearer origination of the point, I believe, than in the recitation of the Androktasia and the questioning of its necessity.
Homer sings of collectivity over and over again, and perhaps the performer’s inability to understand how this innovation is coming about is what makes Androktasia so peculiar. As I sing them, I am overcome with emotion, not because there are people and their stories on display, but because the very act of reciting after the fact these deaths and their fighting failures I feel will one day bring about the next innovation which is necessary to beat what beat the Phalanx, and then after that yet more, proving over and over again that the return home, the νόστος, is a permanent departure from the νύσσοντες warriors, both words of which originate at the same place, but one of which will get the treat of returning to the joy of home, and the other which will decline into some abstract recalibration of the mores of a time into advantage of the stronger, as Eris and her legacy are made true in their obsolescence of whatever myths and situations of battle come before (for a good article on the origins of νόστος, see Bonifazi 2009; ‘surviving lethal dangers’). The poet is powerful, because the poet can pick which one gets to return.
Therefore when one sings of these Androktasiai, one actually sings of one’s own world, and the more emotional we are when we give light to those who left behind everything for war, but must fall again in their very remembrance to the definitional past that they embody now, we can be consoled not with their sweet memory but with the knowledge that this recreation and realization of destiny is in heard its highest unity in the verse of the poet who sings for the truly highest gentle endangering ignorance, which is song and lament of pity for what one does not yet understand, neither in the sacrifice of the warrior nor in the sacrifice of their own lives in the crafting of whatever tool will come next in war, or, the singer made blind and instrumental.
I personally think of Homer and the machinery of progress as most active within epic verse, and not completely without telos and possible reception of beautiful inspiration toward something that might one day be better.