Both the Iliad and the Odyssey begin with imperatives relevant to the act of vocal articulation: ennepe and aeide, “tell” and

Truth and Related Concepts (including projection) in Homer

Thesis: Despite numerous apparitions of the singer among the verses of Homer, and numerous references to the Muse and invocations for her aid in producing the art form, the implicit (explicit in Iliad book 2) anxiety is the closest allusion there is to the performer’s “fouling up”—there is not direct mention of it, that is, forgetting lines or breaking meter. I believe the many lines that don’t quite “work” metrically or lexically evidence the sort of foul-up I refer to, though scholars traditionally look for scribal error or analyst explanation or linguistic reasons. Indeed, within the events themselves, the singer is stopped cold when his content upsets Odysseus in book 8 of the Odyssey and he is forced to beg for his life in book 22, so he is real enough of a personality though always competent when plying his art. The fear of foul-up, and in this study I will focus on forgetting, something an aoidos might surely dread, lurks just beneath the surface, however, projected elsewhere, particularly onto the battlefield and other arenas of conflict besides performance qua performance.[1] This realization struck me in the process of exploring various vocabularies for “truth” — a concept expressed often via negatives. When I questioned this predominance associated with such an important concept and studied appearances of the root opposites of these negatives, words like hamartanō and lanthanō, I realized the transference mentality in that words for “truth” so often are demanded in a process akin to performing epic: the conversations that dominate so much of Homer’s material. The earliest expressions for truth issuing from the perspective of the singer/performer, encode this concept as something neither fouled up (nēmertes) nor forgotten (alēthes) — and indeed these two expressions appear the most frequently to refer to what became a more abstracted concept later in the literary history of Greece: truth.

Both the Iliad and the Odyssey begin with imperatives relevant to the act of vocal articulation: aeide and ennepe, “sing” and “tell,” respectively, as if the Muse and not the poet were about to perform (the immortal proemium to the Catalog of Ships in Iliad 2 portrays the reciprocity more realistically). The subject of each imperative is the goddess of memory, the Muse. Memory is invoked because the verses of Homer were recited through an act of memory, of myriad formulae, a discreet literary language, being permutated and recombined to express all the ideas and scenarios and emotions and events that comprise these classics. Writing as a way to create and perpetuate literary forms was not yet on the scene. To “do it right,” for the singer, was, inter alia, to correctly remember events and connectives, without forgetfulness, a – lēthēi.[2]

In that so many of the seeds of that phenomenon we know as fifth-century Athens can be found among the 33,000 lines of Homer, I decided to mine for something even more amazing, truth itself. I figured that if everything else is there besides modern technology, why not truth? I began to explore the formations and etymologies of words for “truth” in Homer. The database source was the two English translations at perseus.com, and later the mainstays, Dunbar and Prendergast’s concordances of Homer, all of which I mined for all words for “truth,” “true,” “truly,” and the like. Once I derived a list of verses, I subtracted from them all examples that include particles like dē and ē (“truly,” “indeed,” and the like), which occur frequently enough, opting to concentrate on nouns, substantival formations, and adverbs. Predictably, more periphrases for “truth” and related notions occurred in the “intellectual” Odyssey than that archetypal war story, the Iliad. But the score was close: something like 48 to 42 in my sampling. The reason? Words for “truth” most often refer to the production of credible accounts of events — so many of the basic structure “Tell this to me (or I will tell this to you or he told it) truly/accurately/without prevarication.” Most of these occur in the context of the dialogues so important to both epics. “Truth,” that is, occurs in contexts that often echo the first line of each poem. Homer, in myriad disguises, is confronting his muse in disguise throughout both epics. Here we find the repetition that recapitulates parallelism, the basis of poetry and music, as well as metamorphosis, ever-changing forms of the same thing, something the gods do so well and particularly Nereus/Proteus, that variation on Tiresias, the font of truth; I cannot help but wonder at the significance of Hesiod’s attribution alēthea kai apseudea of Nereus (Theogony 233; unlike Hesiod’s muses who both lie and tell the truth), comparing the emphatic adjectival application of nēmertēs in the Odyssey to him alone among animate beings (as alēthēs in the Iliad [12.433] describes an animate being only once, a destitute woman measuring out grain that she sells to support her children). Further in the brief description of Nereus, the “old man” is described as nēmertēs and then as one who “does not forget the laws of righteousness” (Evelyn White’s translation), that is, again, ou lēthetai collocated within three lines of alēthea, showing a clear awareness of the relatedness, if not provenance, of alēthes, unless it is only a phonetic association, which is operative in generating poetry always – not just Homeric verse. Compare also the names of two of the Nereids, his sea-nymph daughters, at Iliad 18.46: Nēmertēs and Apseudēs. Along with the nine Muses, the Nereids are specified as mourning Achilles at Iliad ___ and Odyssey 24.60, which could transfer the epithets to the Muses, if this is needed. Certainly it is implied of the Muse throughout Homer. Further below, in the context of the first line of the Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo.

The ultimate abstraction, truth, issues forth from Homer’s requirement to sing his epic verses without forgetting — or blundering (more literally, perhaps, missing a beat, since hamartanō has to do with throwing spears but missing the target; compare the string of Odysseus’s bow that “sings like a swallow” at his touch in book 21.410–11 and the subsequent repetition of ouk ēmbroton as he wins the archery contest 21.421, 425). At this point it would be appropriate to cite all the terms for “truth” I have collected in this context. They include the various forms of [negative] alēthes, nēmertes, atrekes, apseudes, and the “positive” [viz., non-negative] trio, all of unknown etymology, eteon, etētumon, etumon. With all the invocation of Muses in Homer, should we not expect a hymn to the Muse? The closest thing I could find is the Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo (god of poetry, follower of the Muses at Hymn to Hermes 450, teacher of the Muses at Odyssey 8.488), in which the poet himself appears at the end, which differs from the formulaic other Homeric Hymn endings — the poet opts to stay with the god instead of transferring focus (metabēsomai) to another. The adjective “true” is here etētumon of the dubious etymology, but uniquely it describes kleos, not some permutation of the spoken word; actually, yes a form of speech (a sort of encomium, like Achilles’ klea andrōn in book 9 of the Iliad) but different from the dialogue (mainly, speech) forms to which other appearances of “true” refer. It is sung by the most dramatic and self-conscious apparition of Homer in all of his opus — Cinaethus of Cos will sing the glory of the Delians wherever he goes, if they in turn but remember him as the “sweetest of singers,” and listeners will believe him, because the kleos he will sing will be “true.” He is not like Hesiod’s Muses, singers of truth and falsehood, here. Who are these Delian maidens, though? Close to the Muses in many ways (at 160–61 the language could easily describe Muses). They are also mimics, like Helen imitating the wives of the Greeks in the Trojan Horse episode, only they know all the languages that people speak. The hymn also begins differently, enigmatically from the others: mnēsomai, ou lēthomai Apollonos hekatoio… “I will remember and not forget Apollo…” The kleos is etētumon perhaps because the poet “remembers truly” (and expects reciprocity) — the concept has evolved and ou lēthomai may at this point be synonymous with the form alēthiōs (“truly”) that appeared later. The end of the Delian hymn emphasizes reciprocal memory and even the “unforgetting” is echoed in ou lēxo hekēbolon Apollōna … (line 177), which sounds so much like ou lēthomai Apollōnos hekatoio and strikes readers/listeners as almostly defiantly, rebelliously different from the more usual Hymn endings.

“Truth” in Homer, then, is frequently a negative concept, most often, especially in the Odyssey, either “without forgetfulness” (alēthes etc. 16 x in Od., 4 in Il.) or “without erring” (nēmertes etc. 14 times in Od., 4 times in Il.). Atrekeōs, “accurately,” also occurs in like contexts 6 times in the Odyssey and 5 times in the Iliad, but this seemingly negative or privative construction has no known etymology. It occurs mostly with katalexō and sometimes with both that verb and forms of eipeîn. It frequently precedes questions or otherwise begins speeches. Forgetfulness/error is as lethal (pardon the allusion) to the Homeric poet as it is to the epic warrior. The ultimate meaning of hamartanō related to throwing spears before it became more abstract (per LSJ) — already in Homer the abstract hamartoepes appears twice, in the Iliad, depicting the opposites Odysseus (ouch’ aphamartoepēs, in Antenor’s famous description , Iliad 3.215) and Ajax (hamartoepēs at Iliad 13.824, among other comical epithets like bougaie). Both these compounds are hapaxes in Homer. Forgetfulness is the opposite of memory, the nemesis of the Muse (cf. the litotes in Homeric Hymn 7: ou pēi esti / seîo ge lēthomenon glukerēn kosmēsai aoidēn, it is in no way possible for the one who forgets you to formulate a sweet song], another anomalous Homeric Hymn ending, as if the hymn were to a muse (and not Dionysos)![3]

The notion of Lethe as the opposite of life, in that we drink of forgetfulness when we die, is said to have come after Homer. Other rivers separated us from the realm of Hades sooner than Lethe. Drinking sacrificial blood restores memory to the shades in Homer, of their identities in life, however. So the germ of the concept is inferable, if not the exact vocabulary. sun + lēthē = death, so a + lēthē must imply “life” as well as “truth” as well as “with memory”; Tiresias, even though he alone among the shades in Hades retains his consciousness, says to Odysseus before beginning his prophesy (11.96): Haimatos ophra piō kai toi nēmertea eipō : drinking of blood, the opposite of lēthē, one can speak the truth, to alēthes. Plato, who first refers to drinking of the River of Ameleta after crossing the plain of Lethe[4] (Repub. 6.21a) also equates truth with life at Sophist 263d.4 lexically with the idiomatic ontōs kai alēthōs, where to mē onta hōs onta appears in the line above, translatable as “the untrue as true” or “the nonexistent as alive”; cf. Aristophanes, Plutos 289, Chorus: . . . eiper legeis ontōs ou taut’ a lēthē.) Where the two terms were first actually associated, I do not know (probably in Parmenides, for whom the monist element is to on (“the being”), a concept he introduces as alētheia, “the truth.” But the idiom emerges in full flower in the Plato and Aristophanes cites and the terms ontōs and other forms of eînai and forms of alēthēs are frequently collocated in Plato. In other words, I suggest that drinking of the River Lethe as an image of death/forgetfulness existed sooner than is evident in the extant literature, in counterpoint to the drinking of sacrificial blood to regain consciousness and memory/identity (cf. the melissai in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes who drink honey to tell the truth; deprived of it, they lie [561-63]), and that “truth” as dynamic life, which entails memory, evolved from that setting. The Homeric muse, opposed to Hesiod’s muse, is concerned with telling what is true,[5] as the anomalous beginning of the Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo makes clear: mnēsomai, ou lathomai Apollonos hekatoio (cf. Telemachos’s painful honesty to Odysseus disguised as beggar at the beginning of book 17: … ē gar emoi phil’ alēthea muthēsasthai). Alkinoos praises Odysseus at 367ff. for telling his story to his people like a competent singer; the formulae aoidos epistamenos katelexas (368) and eipe kai atrekeōs katalexon (370) are paralleled within one line of each other. The singer/poet, in other words, is the one who relates events “truly,” atrekeōs, as opposed to others who tell falsehoods (pseudea t’artunontas, 366).

The other major set of expressions relevant to “truth” in Homer involves the triad eteon, etumon, and etētumon, which all also lack an etymology, but the homonymity is functional in Homer at the formulaic level. None of these seems to involve a negation or privation, as do atrekes, alēthes, and nēmertes. Another intriguing idiom without an etymology occurs twice, in close proximity, in the Odyssey, oud’onar, all’hupar, “not a dream, but real.” At issue throughout seems to be the problem of an incomplete semantic field. Research will continue, at both the primary- and secondary-source levels. How can we really understand Homer if we cannot trace the root of so many of his concepts of “truth”?*

------------------------------------

*I have since studied occurrences of vocabulary [verb forms] cognate with lēthē (the noun seems to be a hapax in Homer and Hesiod) in Homer and find that in both the Iliad and the Odyssey the terms are far more often negated than appearing in non-negated contexts. I'm not sure whether or not this is relevant to the present research but will continue exploring the possibility and what it may imply.

Works Consulted

Crane, Gregory, ed. Perseus On-Line Lexicon. <http:/www.perseus.tufts.edu>

Curd, Patricia, The Legacy of Parmenides: Eleatic Monism and Later Presocratic Thought. Princeton, 1998.

Dunbar, Henry. Concordance to the Odyssey and Hymns of Homer. Oxford, 1880.

Liddell, Henry, Robert Scott, and Henry Jones. A Greek-English Lexicon. 9^th ed. Oxford, 1990.

Prendergast, Guy L. Concordance to the Iliad of Homer. London, 1875.

Stanford, W. B., ed., The Odyssey of Homer, 2 vols., 2d ed. London and New York, 1971.

[1] Reciprocally, warriors refer to the performing arts pejoratively, in contrast to the noble skills of the Homeric hero: e.g., Aias’s ironic ou men es choron keleutai, alla machesthai and Priam’s lament that his heroic sons are dead while the “performers” among his offspring survive them (24.257ff.). Note also Odysseus’s ironic anticipation of the bloodshed to follow the archery contest, a “banquet” whose formulaic trappings are molpēi and phormingi (song and the phorminx, an early stringed instrument akin to the lyre). Also relevant may be Polydamas’s “priamel” at Iliad 13.726ff. that collocates martial skills with musical adeptness and the like, mainly to emphasize that Hector is far more a warrior than a strategist (intelligence [noon esthlon] transcends both the battlefield and performance arena for Polydamas)..

[2] Who in Homer expresses this fear of forgetfulness most accurately? A performer? No, but rather the warrior Hector, twice, the figure who falls hardest, in that he risks all and loses it all to Achilles. Twice in the Iliad Hector voices this fear in terms of meneos alkēs te ou lathōmai: once to his wife Andromache in book 6, as she offers him wine, and the second time, accusing Achilles of the performer’s other greatest fear: ēmbrotes, he shouts back at Achilles [in a powerful position, speech beginning, line beginning] for thinking he can make him forget his strength and might (in cruel irony to 22.193, hōs Hektōr ou lēthe podōkea Pēleiōna and nearer, Athena’s lathe at 22.277). There is nearly immediate reference to skillful speech (281); then, a few lines later (290), indeed, Hector does not err in striking the great shield of Achilles; but yet a few lines later he realizes the end is near. In this case the singer projects his anxiety into the most fearful and climactic confrontation in Homer. There is no more direct expression of the performer’s anxieties; the Muse is with him – most notably in book 2 of the Iliad, but Deiphobos is not with Hector in book 22 (“fear of the gods” – does not this name seem well positioned in the context of this point?).

A similar collocation of concepts, but positive this time, occurs in the context of the bow context in Odyssey 21. The bow “sings” when Odysseus strings it (411) and he “does not miss” (ouk ēmbrote/on) aiming the arrow to fly in a straight line through the ax-handles (421, 425).

One key takeaway from these results, then, is that in the scenarios of Hector’s tragic downfall and Odysseus’s success in stringing the bow and shooting the arrow successfully—that is, climactic points in books 22 and 21, respectively, the near-endings of each epic--verbs that I have focused on occur: ou lēthe and ēmbrotes in the Iliad and ouk ēmbrote/-on in the Odyssey, along with the “sing” metaphor. At such moments in Homer, these verbs are at the forefront of his mind.

[3] Note that the previous line uses the near-hapax (in the context of versing) entunon (which usually appears in the pragmatic contexts of setting up a banquet or other more prosaic actions), which we find elsewhere similarly employed with reference to the “counterfeit muses,” the Sirens, who in the course of the song they entunon (12.183) promise truth in another form, knowledge of everything, which “truth” came to mean, but it involves visual memory, as the anaphora of idmen makes clear)– rather than falsehood, an acceptable parameter to Hesiod’s muses at least, if not Odysseus in disguise after he reaches Ithaca from Phaeacia. Also collocated in the Siren passage is ou lathen at 12.182.

[4] Does the phrase “[your story] does not hold water” originate from this passage? If so, why do the waters of Lethe behave in this fashion? Does blood then, in contrast, inhabit vessels compliantly? Or what waters from what rivers characteristically and significantly [willingly] inhabit the bounds of containers?

[5] Despite Odysseus’s Cretan lies, described in terms similar to the characterization of Hesiod’s Muses (19.203)