This volume contains fourteen papers from the thirteenth ‘Orality and Literacy’ conference, which took place in March 2019 at the University of Texas at Austin, with an introduction by the organiser Beck (no explanation is provided for the selection). The volume contains a helpful index locorum and a somewhat less helpful index of subjects (I am unsure of the usefulness of listing ‘repetition’, with no subtypes, in the index to a volume on repetition; some entries, at the other extreme, refer to a whole paper). Individual bibliographies follow each contribution, which makes for easier assessment and comparison of sources, and is helpful for readers accessing individual chapters electronically.
The book presents a cohesive selection of papers and will be of interest in its entirety to scholars of orality in archaic Greek literature, but also to readers who wish to explore cognitive approaches to ancient texts more broadly. ‘Orality and Literacy’ is a specialised conference series, however; so almost none of the papers will be very helpful to undergraduate readers, at least in the UK, with the possible exception of P.A. O'Connell's paper on Sappho and W. Duffy's excellent oralist study of professional wrestling moves. Less oralist-minded readers will enjoy T.J. Nelson's and R. Scodel's contributions exploring the boundaries of ‘literary’ engagement with texts. The quality of all papers is good to outstanding; the notes on individual contributions below should be taken with this in mind. Key topics resonate throughout – for example, the discussion of the role of the ‘original’ instance in repetition, introduced by J. Arft and reprised by F. Létoublon, X. Gheerbrant, R.F. Person and Duffy; more explicit signposting across chapters would have been helpful.
Arft discusses the δ’ ἄνδρεσσι μελήσει, ‘X will be a care for men’ formula, which has often been interpreted as an example of ‘mindful repetition’ (p. 8), alluding to its first use by Hector in Il. 6.492. Arft suggests that it is better understood as ‘traditional recurrence’ of a formula whose value (in terms of J.M. Foley's traditional referentiality) is to signal a discrepancy between speaker and audience in both social power and understanding of a situation. The nuances of Telemachus’ uses of this phrase in Od. 1.358 and 21.352 could have been discussed in more detail, as Telemachus seems to me to manipulate the traditional referentiality of the formula: in all other instances the speaker does not understand the reality of a situation, but in Telemachus’ case it is the suitors who are being tricked into believing they have control of the situation over him; Telemachus may be understood as choosing this phrase precisely because it creates an expectation that its speaker will be proven wrong.
A. Forte applies a cognitive-linguistic perspective to actions that are described as happening three or four times in Homer. Triple repetition conveys indefinite iteration, while quadruple repetition represents the terminating climax of a series. This ‘cognitive technique’ exists independently of verbal markers and is grounded in embodied experience, as evidenced by the fact that the pattern only applies to animate agents. This paper is an excellent formalisation of something that readers of Homer may pick up on instinctively. The analysis of repeated lamentation in the final books of the Iliad as an unverbalised triple/quadruple pattern has interesting literary implications.
Létoublon's paper on the story of Odysseus’ scar in Od. 19 returns to familiar discussions of the hunt as an initiation ritual; its interest for this volume lies in Létoublon's analysis of how repeated lines signal that the story of the scar is part of an oral tradition originating from Odysseus’ own tale. The ‘original’ telling of the story by Odysseus to his parents occurs second in the text compared to Eurycleia's first use of key repeated phrases, which resonates with Arft's discussion of the role of ‘original instances’ in repetition.
C.M. Donnelly uses patterns of repetition to interpret symbols on Cypro-Minoan clay balls, which are inscribed in an undeciphered script. The symbols are likely to have encoded priestly functions or tasks, as evidenced by how they combine with longer sequences that have been interpreted as names. Donnelly discusses how writing can have functions that go beyond traditional ideas of literacy, as repeated sequences can be understood even by illiterate users.
Nelson discusses examples of Homeric hapax legomena that are repeated in later literature, aiming to disrupt the scholarly argument that interest in Homeric hapax legomena is characteristic of a hyperliterate Hellenistic culture. While this is undoubtedly a useful point, the analysis of individual examples sometimes raises more questions than it answers: for example, why is knowledge of Homeric glosses connected to traditional, non-sophistic modes of learning in Old Comedy, while Euripides’ use of the same glosses is mocked as sophistically hyper-learned? It might also be worth extending the study to the Homeric Hymns: echoes of the Hymn to Aphrodite in Sappho, for instance, would fit Nelson's argument.
Speaking of Sappho, O'Connell's paper is another clear, theoretically grounded study of a phenomenon that readers of this poet may subconsciously be aware of. O'Connell discusses repeated structures making up Sappho's idiolect, from the reuse of words in the same metrical position to the selection of specific syntactic patterns. Adopting the concept of mentalising/theory of mind from previous studies, O'Connell explores how these traits play alongside the personal content of the poems to give audiences the impression of a speaking author; the analysis is extended to the new Kypris Poem and set in the context of sympotic performance.
Gheerbrant offers a detailed study of Hesiod's use of repetition not just as a structuring device, but also as a meaning-constructing feature that highlights parallels and differences between episodes: ‘disanalogical repetition’ is used to introduce apparent contradictions that can be resolved by understanding the deeper implications of nodal points in the narrative. The focus is on ring composition in the Cyclopes and Hundred-Handers episodes (Th. 501–6 and 617–28), and how these frame the problematic narrative of the Children of Iapetus. The discussion of ring composition in each passage rests on an extensive review of previous theory, but the coexistence of several possible structural analyses (transparently presented by Gheerbrant for Th. 521–34) makes this reader worry about the risk of projecting too much of our interest in pattern recognition onto the text.
Scodel offers an accessible paper on reperformance in the early fourth century bce (although some conclusions are presented as going beyond this chronological scope). A text became literature when it could be reperformed, a dynamic later complemented by reading as a form of fruition and writing as a form of preservation. Different kinds of reperformance are discussed, with a special eye towards the ‘canonicity effect’, which leads audiences to evaluate a performance separately from the pre-existing text.
R. Verano discusses repetition of another character's utterances in Plato, a device that heightens verisimilitude and persuasiveness. Concepts from Conversation Analysis and English-language spoken corpora are used to elucidate the function of different kinds of repetition in creating cohesion and a sense of cooperation between speakers. This chapter contains some excellent commentary on particle usage, although it is unclear why J.D. Denniston is the primary reference rather than the more recent treatment by A. Bonifazi, A. Drummen and M. de Kreij (Particles in Ancient Greek Discourse [2016]).
N.W. Slater offers a close reading of Eumolpus’ Troiae Halosis in the Satyrica, building on existing discussions of parallels with Senecan tragedies to suggest that the illusion of oral performance may be at least as salient, if not more. The increasing rate of repetition, especially at line-end, is better explained as a signal that the poem is getting more and more orally improvised (and, perhaps, that Eumolpus is getting tired, which would mark him as a substandard oral performer) rather than as a drawn-out joke about repetition in contemporary tragedians.
H. Golab studies epigraphic hymns to Asklepios to reconstruct a strand of oral tradition in which the god has daughters as well as the sons who are named in the Iliad. The texts name the two Homeric sons, three or four daughters, Epione as their mother and then Hygieia with an additional epithet; this pattern also appears in Herodas’ Mimiamb 4, Athenian reliefs and Aelius Aristides’ prose hymn. The daughters have speaking names, which Golab suggests were used as a mnemonic to structure a prayer for all different aspects of health; this strikes me as unnecessary, as the naming itself may have been sufficient to obtain this effect.
R.F. Person, Jr., discusses examples of harmonisation between closely related passages in the Pentateuch and Gospels. This kind of variation is perfectly accepted in a tradition that operates like an oral one: examples in which several sources are merged into a single addition particularly suggest that the influence of scribal memory is unintentional, and make the use of written models unlikely. Harmonisations are better understood as synonymous readings in the scribes’ minds and would not have been identifiable to anyone reading a single version of a text without comparing several written sources. The discussion of what constitutes a word in this chapter could have relied on more recent Construction Grammar bibliography.
The last two chapters are two very different examples of Homeric scholars approaching contemporary material. Duffy's paper proposes that wrestling moves can be used as a model for the semantic evolution of formulae: they have similar narrative and structural functions to epic formulae, as matches are built from a limited set of context-restricted manoeuvres with specific narrative values. (A discussion of competitive/collaborative performance would be a productive avenue for further comparative research.) The paper shows how a specific move, the DDT, went through semantic bleaching as its association with a single performer and narrative environment weakened. A bleached formula is more prone to variation, a result that contradicts existing studies of formulaic evolution (chiefly C. Bozzone's 2014 UCLA dissertation), where higher productivity is associated with the earlier, ‘healthier’ life a formula. E. Minchin goes in the opposite direction, applying the concept of ‘storyrealm’ in oral performance studies to the use of repetition in Alice Oswald's Memorial. Repetition offers both a cognitive advantage in performance and marks poetic speech as ‘special speech’, à la Bakker.
