This chapter will consider three aspects of Homeric narrative whose interaction produces characteristic and influential effects. The first, and most famous, is reliance on direct speech. Homer accomplishes his characterisations largely through speeches (including speeches in which characters attribute motives or traits to each other). By itself, Homer's reliance on direct speech does not mark a uniquely Greek narrative tradition, since Sanskrit epic, for example, also presents many speeches. Furthermore, the evidence suggests that in this respect the Homeric epics were outliers in early Greek epic tradition (Aristotle, Poetics 1460a5–11), and Apollonius uses direct speech far less than the Homeric epics do.

Reliance on character-speech is one typical quality of Homeric narrative. Others are not quite as familiar. First, ‘interest-focus’ – where the audience directs its attention – changes frequently. ‘Interestfocus’ is Chatman's term; structuralist narratology has not given careful attention to interest-focus, perhaps because it is so closely connected to characterisation, which classic narratology neglected. Also, structuralist narratologists were preoccupied with precision about the nature of focalisation in the strict sense, and with critiques of the concept. Shifts of interest-focus do not present such difficult theoretical problems, even though they are inherently harder to define with precision.

INTRODUCTION

One of the most ambitious attempts to define ancient Greek narrative, and one of the most influential to date, is Erich Auerbach's book Mimesis. In the famous opening chapter, written in Istanbul in 1942, Auerbach argues that Homeric narrative is all surface and illuminated detail, whereas the Hebrew Bible is elliptic, deep and demanding of its reader. To this day, Mimesis informs what modern readers see as characteristic of Homeric narrative, and of classical Greek literature more generally: for that reason alone, it seems important to revisit it in this volume. I would like to take the opportunity to consider how well Auerbach's work has stood the test of time; and to reflect on what it can tell us about the nature of this collection: what does it mean to define Greek narrative? I begin by looking at how Auerbach's vision of Homeric narrative emerges from what he himself called ‘the particular situation’ in which he conceived it. I then sketch out what I see as the circumstances in which, some sixty-five years after Auerbach, we find ourselves engaged in a similar set of questions.

HOMER AND THE BIBLE

On a superficial reading, the opening chapter of Auerbach's Mimesis presents itself as a fairly straightforward exploration of Homeric narrative technique. Auerbach looks at a specific passage in Odyssey 19: the disguised Odysseus has entered his palace and is having his feet bathed by his old maid-servant, Eurycleia. Eurycleia notices a scar which Odysseus acquired as a young man, while hunting with his grandfather Autolycus. The scar serves as a mark of recognition throughout the Odyssey, but here it threatens to give away Odysseus’ identity at an inopportune time: the hero reacts by clasping Eurycleia’s throat and swearing her to silence.

The present volume is the seventh in a series deriving from the biennial Edinburgh Leventis Conference in Greek. The conference and the visiting research professorship with which it is associated are generously funded by a grant from the A. G. Leventis Foundation. Since 1999 this grant has given the Edinburgh Classics department the enviable luxury of being able to invite, every two years, one of the world's leading Hellenists to spend a semester in Edinburgh. The main event and principal public face of the Leventis Professor's tenure is of course the conference, devised and organised by the Professor on a theme of his or her choice, but each Professor has also made a very substantial contribution to the intellectual life of the department, especially through public lectures and seminars for students and colleagues. The seventh A. G. Leventis Professor in Greek, Ruth Scodel (D. R. Shackleton Bailey Collegiate Professor of Greek and Latin, University of Michigan), was no exception: throughout her stay Ruth played a full part in the department's academic and social activities. For her part, she is honoured to have served as the Leventis Professor, and was impressed by the engagement of her students and endlessly charmed by the city of Edinburgh.

This chapter investigates the role of what I shall call the ‘principle of alternation’ (the idea that no human life is free of suffering, that the best one can expect is a mixture of good and bad fortune) in (some) ancient Greek narratives. This is not a narratological study in the traditional, formalist sense, but rather reflects my own interests in Greek social and ethical norms and especially in the sociality of emotion in ancient Greek societies. In its broadest terms, its affiliations are with recent approaches, especially those influenced by the cognitive sciences, that see the human species' storytelling propensities, and particularly the interest in the lives and minds of others that these engage and manifest, as a function of our cognitive and affective evolution. The interest in others' minds and experiences manifested in (cinematic, literary and other forms of) narrative is not separable from the interest in others' minds and experiences, and the capacities to have such interest, that we have developed as a result of our evolution as a social species. Emotional responses to imagined scenarios, for instance, are as important in life as in literature.

HISTORICAL NARRATIVE AND THE TASK OF THE READER

For as long as I have studied ancient historiography, one aspect in particular has been especially fascinating to me: the continual concern of many authors about their readers and the potential effect their narratives have on them. Or, to be more precise: what am I to do, how am I to write, in order to prevent the reader from becoming bored and – horribile dictu – from putting down the scroll and quitting communication with the author altogether.

Dealing with the reader in antiquity is, needless to say, always tricky, because our knowledge is far from sufficient to take an empirical approach towards these phenomena. One way out consists in the statements ancient historians make about this topic, since we can suppose with some confidence that they have been readers themselves too, at least from time to time. Some of them even try to take the perspective of their own readers, thus creating a kind of implied counterpart, as for instance Livy does in his tenth book:

For those working on ancient texts in a modern world which puts a high value (in different ways) on the ‘relevance’ and ‘impact’ of scholarly research, it is beguiling and seductive to discern ancient analogues or equivalents even for such seemingly modern forms as the novel, as well as for genres whose antiquity is more transparent, such as the epic poem. A very understandable critical excitement has also been in evidence with regard to a special category of the novel, the novel in letters or epistolary novel (Briefroman), since there are several collections of Greek letters surviving from antiquity which tell a story of some kind, and which have accordingly sometimes been analysed as analogues of the modern epistolary novel. But there are some dangers in assuming too readily that these ancient collections of letters are straightforwardly equivalent to modern epistolary novels, not the least of which is failing to examine properly what is distinctive, and distinctively Greek, about these ancient letters and the narratives they tell.

In this chapter, therefore, I examine some prominent examples of these ancient and modern epistolary narratives alongside one another to illustrate some of the differences as well as some of the similarities between them, in order to achieve a more systematic and thorough understanding of the connections (and disconnections) between ancient and modern examples of stories told in letters. I concentrate on what one might term epistolary narratives ‘proper’, that is, on narratives mostly or entirely told by means of a series of letters, rather than narratives containing embedded letters or narratives consisting of a letter relating a narrative.

INTRODUCTION: DEFINITION

Italo Calvino's novel If on a Winter's Night a Traveller of 1979 famously revolves around a reader in search of a book that he has started to read but that turns out to be incomplete. The book's opening sentences tell of a traveller arriving on a winter's night at the small station of a provincial town. In the final chapter the reader ends up in a library where one of the other readers warns him that finding the book will be very difficult since ‘once upon a time they all began like that, all novels. There was somebody who went along a lonely street and saw something that attracted his attention, something that seemed to conceal a mystery, or a premonition; then he asked for explanations and they told him a long story’; ‘the traveller always appeared only in the first pages and then was never mentioned again – he had fulfilled his function, the novel wasn't his story’.

In this chapter I shall take a closer look at this device of ‘the anonymous traveller’ in European literature. Calvino suggests that it is an old device (‘once upon a time they all began like that’), and my first question is ‘how old?’ Thus, I shall go back in time step by step and trace its origins. My quest will, not surprisingly in view of the topic of this volume, lead me to ancient Greece. The second question which I shall discuss is whether we can indeed draw up such a European history of a narrative device and speak of its Greek origins, or whether, perhaps, we should rather consider the anonymous traveller a narrative universal.

How do we define ancient Greek narrative? The theme of this volume, and the conference on which it is based, is more than a timely one. Thanks to the efforts of many scholars – Walter Burkert and Martin West above all – classicists now take very seriously the role of comparative study in helping to illuminate the culture of early archaic Greece, usually by listing apparently parallel phenomena in the many civilisations of the ancient Near East (hereafter ANE). Whilst the broadening of horizons in this way must be a welcome development, not all of the new vistas are equally fair, and some are so tempting as to have distracted us from the task at hand. As Robin Osborne observed some time ago, ‘[i]t is worth stopping to ask what is really at stake here … If I choose to disagree with with that claim [i.e. of a parallel], what is at stake? … What is really at stake is my ability to understand the Iliad.’ These stakes were then famously upped by Sarah Morris's claim that ‘in the final analysis, it may be a greater challenge to isolate and appreciate what is Greek in Homeric poetry than to enumerate its foreign sources’. The current chapter takes up that challenge, and suggests that ANE texts should not be treated as direct source material for the Iliad and Odyssey.

Thucydides claims that he saw at the start that the war would be ‘more worthy of account than any previous one…on the grounds that both sides came into the war at the height of their powers and in a full state of military readiness’ and that ‘the rest of the Greek world had already taken sides…or was now planning to do so’. In the same opening section but in what must have been a late insertion, he writes that it was ‘certainly the greatest ever upheaval among the Greeks, and one which affected a significant part of the barbarian world too – even, you could say, most of mankind’ (1.1.1–2). But beyond these remarks on its scale and effect, together with two incomplete and arguably misleading views on why Athens was defeated, the first of which I mentioned at the end of Chapter 5, the second of which I come to in Chapter 12, and his apparently considered view that it was one long war (5.26.2–4, but cf. 7.28.3 and Chapter 14), he ascribes no one meaning – dispositional, associational or consequential – to it, and draws no lesson.

His exile did give him time ‘to study matters more closely’, but he makes no mention of considering them more broadly (5.26.5); even if he had written ten books rather than eight, as Hunter Rawlings imagines him thinking of doing, the end of the tenth might well have been as inconclusive as the end of the fifth. His inclination always was to take readers back to what Hobbes called ‘the drifts and counsels of actors to their seat’, to shape his account by what the actors themselves thought they were doing, in so far as they thought about it at all, rather than by what he and the readers knew had happened later. He does in this respect write rather like a modern novelist or in the parts of the text that contain speeches, a dramatist without a commenting chorus. But as I said in Chapter 1, authors of fictions usually convey the sense of an ending, which he does not. Writing against a culture that had long been infused with the anticipation of meaningful outcomes – though a culture that Francis Dunn suggests was in this respect changing – he offers what Henry James, writing about someone else, described as a ‘frank provisional empiricism that is more telling than any premature philosophy’.

Thucydides’ set pieces on events in the fourth and fifth years of the war turn on the reaction of one or other of the two warring powers to their allies. A rebellion in the city of Mytilene on Lesbos was indicative of those states who sought to take advantage of the wider conflict to recover their autonomy; a debate in Athens about how to deal with this resistance reveals more clearly than anything else in Thucydides how the Athenians now saw themselves in relation to their dominion. A descent into internal war in Corcyra indicated how the wider war was inciting factions within the lesser Greek cities to gain advantage over each other. And Sparta's decision to destroy Plataea is in good part explained by its wish to please Thebes. Each reveals how fear, frustration and rage in the two large powers were offering opportunities to lesser states that brought suffering on these states themselves. Each also exposes the growing distance between what was said and done. Thucydides writes speech to show what men were thinking and how they wished to persuade others to think and act. He makes it clear that on Plataea and Mytilene, speech had as little impact on what was done as it did in most of the rest of his story. He makes it clear also that the war of words as well as actions in Corcyra, to be repeated, he says, in other internal wars, was one in which those speaking were not actually thinking at all.