In medias res

I'm back to Homer again. A couple of weeks ago I bought myself (a sort of birthday present) a copy of Gregory Nagy's Homeric Questions. This is another of those books I've seen references to and looked at but never read. Nagy's arguments have such cumulative power that the best way to appreciate them is to read the entire book all the way through. There are many wonderful insights in this book. Nagy attempts to show what we know and what we can reasonably conjecture about the Homeric epics, their origins in oral tradition, their dispersal and eventual textualization.

Briefly, Nagy, with frequent reference to Milman Parry and Alfred Lord, discusses the way the Homeric epics probably began within a larger Greek tradition of oral poetry. Eventually what we would come to know as the Iliad and the Odyssey emerged as popular and successful parts, collections of stories or episodes, from the larger oral tradition of Trojan War poetry. I won't attempt to reproduce Nagy's argument. I would probably only distort it anyway. But as I was reading his account of the conventions of oral performance, I had one of those revelations or epiphanies that come along every once in a while. Something I thought I knew suddenly became much clearer to me.

Naturally an epic poem begins by thrusting the audience in medias res. Since the entire Trojan War tradition is so long and complicated, stretching backwards to a wedding between Thetis and Peleus and forwards to the many tales of heroes on their return journeys to Greece, such as the tales of Odysseus, the poet can only ever sing some part of the whole for any given occasion. How, then, to begin? Well, assuming that the audience already knows the shape of the greater story, and many of the details as well, he begins with some episode, a popular episode, somewhere in the middle of things, maybe even in the tenth year of the war, when Achilles was enraged by Agamemnon and withdrew his Myrmidons from the battle.

Of course, in medias res is also a marvelously artful way of telling a story that's part of a larger story, beginning with some important scene of action, filling in other details as you go along, which is exactly the way the Homeric poems proceed, and the way that Virgil chose to tell his story of Aeneas, even though it was no longer a genuine part of oral tradition, but a work of literature.

Now, none of this comes as news to anyone who has studied the classical epic. What is so amazing is the way Nagy explains how the conventions of oral poetry likely gave rise through the practices of oral composition and performance to the eventual shape and patterns of the Homeric poems.