Persecution

Homer Essay for 2026-06-13; No. 18.

Persecution

Laughter is one of the most beautiful things in the world. When people laugh, they have an indescribable boundary in their lives that they have stepped over, and in this inimical failure for them and them alone they have a conveyance to others that is aural and visually beautiful, through the smile. This is why I believe that most of the early archaic statues are smiling (“the archaic smile”). The approach to the ironic and the besotted of our lives is always buttressed by the regimentation of the infinite, a glancing nudge that we are unaware of if we never ask about smiling, or if we never approach the mass.

The mass in the games in Iliad 23.840 is one of these moments, as Epeios tries to pick up the mass and throw it, perhaps in imitation of our modern shotput:

ἑξείης δ’ ἵσταντο, σόλον δ’ ἕλε δῖος Ἐπειός,

840 ἧκε δὲ δινήσας· γέλασαν δ’ ἐπὶ πάντες Ἀχαιοί.

Iliad, 23.839-840

They took their places in order, and then Godlike Epeios

Took the mass and threw it: and all the Achaeans laughed at him.

The powerful instinct to sing and to offer up a new word is strung along with the other 12 uses of γελάω in the Iliad and the Odyssey, often with ἔπος itself in close context, such as Iliad 6.483-5, where Hector gives his child back to Andromache:

Ὣς εἰπὼν ἀλόχοιο φίλης ἐν χερσὶν ἔθηκε

παῖδ’ ἑόν· ἣ δ’ ἄρα μιν κηώδεϊ δέξατο κόλπῳ

δακρυόεν γελάσασα· πόσις δ’ ἐλέησε νοήσας,

485 χειρί τέ μιν κατέρεξεν ἔπος τ’ ἔφατ’ ἔκ τ’ ὀνόμαζε·

δαιμονίη μή μοί τι λίην ἀκαχίζεο θυμῷ·

οὐ γάρ τίς μ’ ὑπὲρ αἶσαν ἀνὴρ Ἄϊδι προϊάψει·

μοῖραν δ’ οὔ τινά φημι πεφυγμένον ἔμμεναι ἀνδρῶν,

οὐ κακὸν οὐδὲ μὲν ἐσθλόν, ἐπὴν τὰ πρῶτα γένηται.

490 ἀλλ’ εἰς οἶκον ἰοῦσα τὰ σ’ αὐτῆς ἔργα κόμιζε

ἱστόν τ’ ἠλακάτην τε, καὶ ἀμφιπόλοισι κέλευε

ἔργον ἐποίχεσθαι· πόλεμος δ’ ἄνδρεσσι μελήσει

πᾶσι, μάλιστα δ’ ἐμοί, τοὶ Ἰλίῳ ἐγγεγάασιν.

So saying, he put his child into her hands,

Iliad, 6.483-493

And she then received him into her fragrant bosom,

And cried while laughing: And knowing this, he had mercy for her in his heart

485 At which he stroked her with his hand and spoke this to her:

“My blessed wife, do not grieve in your spirit for me;

There is no man above my fate who will send me to Hades

And I will say to that there is no man that will escape being subject to fate,

Not even if he is bad, or if he is good, since already he has been born.

490 But go and tend to your tasks inside the house,

The loom, the distaff, and order those who are around you

To tend to work as well: But war will be cared for by men,

All of us, and most of all myself, out of all those who came to Troy.”

Again, the ἔπος, the Epic notion, follows closely after the diffusion of frailty from the moment of recognition of the boundaries of fate, and the knowledge of failure and the need to survive and to carry out what is made first known, ἐπὴν τὰ πρῶτα γένηται, since it becomes all encompassing; for Hector, it is all he can do to take pity on his wife to orient her to her deeds to be done, as he himself excuses himself to war, and for Ἐπειός, to treat the agonistic failure of his throwing of the mass as it compares to the competition and excuse himself from this perfect distance through the clarification of the games.

But where does this game begin for the singer? What is the singer’s ἔπος which must be named to provide a reinvigoration of fate after the expression of the infinite found in laughter? The rigors of this examination are personal and divine. The rejection of all others’ standards is divine philosophy. The restitution of laughter to the inward episcopy of the loving individual is heard in the powerful, muted, and smiling bent over figure of the individual trying hard not to laugh, doing their best to maintain that spirit of disintegration that they have found before letting their enunciation and broken vow of communal self-regarding out into the open, and at this very moment in tandem, their confession of the greatest ecstasy, in its peal an unrelenting furtherance.

This joy and the power of discovery of laughter is the reason why the we love to watch the water in streams as it passes by, or why we look at the shells in the ocean and play patterns with them; why we listen to the birds sing and write messages in the sky, and why the most lovely song of the great chimes of the house of my father are the supreme music that orients and recognizes. The great singer is the laughing singer, who even in the face of utter ineptitude and the catharsis of philosophical sovereign atomization needs to express something, anything, to begin to hear again the boundaries of the world and how it feels to run up against the greatest fruit of all, which is to taste the sweet invocation of that full and loving laughter in the paradise of memory, where the aghast, terminal picture of the present is drawn back again and again to full reproof and actualization as at Iliad 2.270; ἀχνύμενοί περ ἐπ’ αὐτῷ ἡδὺ γέλασσαν, “nevertheless sore at heart, they laughed sweetly at him.”