Beyond Fate
Week 6 of Essays on Homeric Performance.
Beyond Fate
Over time, words in the epic diction that lose their functional metrical value are replaced ad hoc with ones that do, and these new ones slowly totally replace the ones of the old. The ones of the old came from older peoples and reflect older dialects and traditions of expressing things in the Epic world. Here myths are borne and killed, like the heroes the words sing of. This process of continual reflection and recomposition of myth is the evolutionary aspect of Homer which provides it such power. This power and the location of it makes our destination even more vital.
Homer and poets are valuable because they help illuminate the design of the world. The destination of Epic poetry is mysterious due to the political cataclysm that seems to befall most people that defect against the power of Homer’s and Hesiod’s physics. It seems that those who do their best to go beyond this measure, the form of the singers, always run up against an almost Holy wall that deprives their hubris of construction outside of these bounds. These words I hope are taken as literally as possible, both as a reflection of their necessity for the passing individual in an epoch, and their greater relevance to the first point above about evolution.
Both of these are good to discuss, both as performers of the poetry in our modern times, and as seeds for the perspective of better judgment unto the poetry which this essay series claims to be in pursuit of, through radical reimplementation of the critical faculty of scholarship to break the pattern of resignation we console ourselves to in place of finding the words to converse with the tradition, on equal footing, and with a dream of our own; through attempting to perform the songs.
Fate is only exceeded one time in Homer:
καὶ τότε δή ῥ᾽ ὑπὲρ αἶσαν Ἀχαιοὶ φέρτεροι ἦσαν.
Iliad, 16.780
“And it was then indeed, at that moment, when the Achaeans were better and carried themselves beyond their fated allotment.”
The epic diction of the word is sincere. The text of ὑπὲρ αἶσ- never appears after the Iliad, and resurfaces only in Pindar twice, in the discussion of an Eagle and in a single word of a fragment which we only have the (potential) second half of the word, in ὑπ]εραίσιον (Fr. 173). The achievement of the Greeks to go forth and sack the city would indeed be contrary to the Gods, and in Book 17 the singer cites Zeus preceding Apollo’s disguised speech to Aeneas:
Ἀργεῖοι δέ κε κῦδος ἕλον καὶ ὑπὲρ Διὸς αἶσαν
Iliad, 17.321
The Argives would have won glory beyond Zeus’ Fate for them…
A line which occurs in Apollo’s speech, isolated from its context, stresses the point more:
Αἰνεία πῶς ἂν καὶ ὑπὲρ θεὸν εἰρύσσαισθε
Iliad, 17.327
“How could you guard [high Ilion], against the will of God?”
Both, and Pindar’s form from hundreds of years later which is evoked in the context of the Amazons, seem to stress a problem which we are ill-fit to approach without looking deep into the machinery which propels epic forward and complimentarily experiments with reason. The collapsibility of words into one another seems to be the principle vector through which we become ingenious, and by which we beget some sense of madness and novelty to the poem, even just a single word at a time, in an almost double-helix themed reformation and reproduction. This inspiration is well understood as the origin of divine inspiration of great lines, and in a rote way, this tracking through memory and dislocation of creation is probably often what gave new stories to the Iliad, whether they be little new adjectives or long new similes, or even whole poems and their belonging within a culture (perhaps Aeneas’ importance in this sentence didn’t go unnoticed by the Romans). Dialects and physical changes to the world, a population, and terms used would have begotten the process noted at the start of this essay.
The individual divulges these new terms, and the test of them comes at a point where the necessity of them must overcome the old form which still argues for itself. We hear a quaint heroic story here with Etas and Alphas in the dialects which compose the Iliad in 16.780. The words αἶσαν and ἦσαν occupy different halves of the line, when one disposes of the opening string of four connecting, particular words, καὶ τότε δή ῥ᾽. In between the two are the words Ἀχαιοὶ φέρτεροι, perhaps a literal concurrence with the observance of populace in formation of the poetry (the ‘Achaeans’ as a term is chased down as a root for the authorship of the Epic, or at least its dialectical history). The imaginative role of φέρτεροι is the bold one. To become better and to hold that quality is much the same as when a musician holds a form in his head, thinking and working through it before it makes its way onto the stage, or into the manuscript.
For us as readers today, it is this miniscule march forward of new ideas and discovery that slowly changes the Homeric landscape, bit by bit reinforcing new ideas and putting better ones into place. They are better borne, and taken to new heights, one line of tens of thousands (likely hundreds of thousands for singers in the Geometric period or earlier) at a time.
What are we to do against these physics? The generation of new forms and the individual’s role in discovering them can seem very daunting. Where is our place in this? It is not just to find joy that is important, but also to do something that adheres best with the rational beauty of the universe, and to espouse why this is: exactly why something is harmonious and in concordance with ideal form. We must ourselves find what provides soul-affirming grounding for authoritatively explaining how the singer modified over time, why he remembered, why he still remembers. The adherence and the evolution of the song must have had something to do with the rules of the world which Homer seems to acknowledge better than anyone else, and paradoxically, tempting and pursuing violation of fate seems to be one clear reservation against this exploring individual.
It is only in the murky rostra of the twists and turns of the very mouth of the performing poet that these ideas are literally held, perhaps like that of the happiness that comes from someone as they hear a good story when they are young. It may even be evidenced from this practical phenomenon more than anything else, per Plato. It is within this negotiation that we are no longer forbidden to imagine.
The word above the fragment containing ὑπ]εραίσιον in Pindar is ‘quiver.’ Each line only has one surviving word, at most. The Homeric singer is obsessed and occupied only with the discovery of new arrows, and the need to do so and the desire to no longer miss the mark brings one to a new chorus of instantiation that no other hermeticism or ascetic deprivation can come close to mollifying. One begins to learn about the lived Hero in a way that could never be done before picking up the strung lyre. This is perhaps just the acquisition of curiosity for performance. Metaphorically, one begins to make music.
I am often sad when I recite the fates trailing behind Achilles, and Phoinix’s Λιταί. There is something about the way that they recall and ask for their due, how they know the measure of one’s life, that seems like an entreaty given to not interfere with what should be, and maybe the ability to deeply feel that respect and cumulative tragedy is what makes the interruption of the harsh hubris of Dolon, the bad storytelling of Book 10, so clearly non-Homeric, or at least ‘funny’ in a way that the rest of the Iliad is not. It is perhaps these old, trailing women that make a perfect pair with Ἄτη because they are not afraid to be there for us, just like the revelation that concern for the design of God is always awaiting one after the business preceding music-making is put to rest.
We go beyond fate when we ask for such a great thing, and we defeat not just old dialects and suspicions, the little things that can be collected in everything from the small new letters in Homeric poetry to the comings and goings of empires, but also the very instability which the questioning Person may find in their daily life. Through this we are then given the real reason for the power of Epic, which is because of its ability to most clearly enunciate that permanence of the Gods, and the stories that really make them understandable to us. Whenever a God comes to speak to a Hero in the poem, they do so with a ‘voice that will never tire.’ So we, if we are to at least find ourselves comfortable within the world which Homer has construed for us as our philosopher and reigning consigner of fates, must attempt to render one another in similar infinities as we trial our lives. The singing of these songs is one excellent first step, and I believe the fastest way to arrive at our destination.