2—
Performing Interpretation:
Early Allegorical Exegesis of Homer
Andrew Ford
Ethnographic accounts of living epic traditions show that "context" is a very complex thing that can extend to providing a social frame for the reception and evaluation of poetry as well for its performance. Andrew Ford's essay explores how far we may discern such traditions of performing epic interpretation behind the texts of Homer. Ford's focus is epic's very ancient connection with allegory, and he shows that even such an apparently textual affair as allegoresis can be fully understood only in the light of social and political contexts of interpretation. Ford turns to pre-Socratic evidence to argue that allegoresis becomes a part of the Homerist's arsenal a full century before the early sophists and two centuries before Aristotle's Poetics. Especially in the context of the archaic Greek city, the use of allegorical commentary allowed performers to constitute a select, elite audience, giving those with pretension to cultural leadership in the city a claim to authority based on having access to an exclusive meaning intended for an exclusive audience.
The study of living epic traditions valuably reminds readers of Homer that an oral poem is never presented to an audience "in itself" but always in the context of performative conventions, which can powerfully determine its significance.[1] Because the Homeric poems have for so long exerted their influence on Western criticism and poetry in the form of canonized texts—scrupulously reconstructed in Hellenistic academies and minutely examined in Greek and Roman classrooms—it may be difficult fully to appreciate that in their case, too, performative context was not something "extra" added to the "pure" text but was inextricable from epic as a social and cultural object. Among the ways in which context may shape a poem on a given occasion is by providing a structured forum for the evaluation and interpretation of epic as well for its performance. Some measure of what a text of Homer cannot give to modern readers is suggested by Dwight Reynolds's recent ethnographic account of Arabic epic poets in the Nile Delta:
In al-Bakatush one attends a performance of epic first of all to participate in and share a social experience and only secondarily to attend to the "text." In essence, the social action within the event is, in this indigenous "reading," the text. . . . The sarha [epic performance] is a stage for social interaction; though
epic singing may form the focus of an evening's activities, the accompanying discussions, evaluations, arguments, and storytelling constitute, in a very real sense, the heart of the event.[2]
Plato's Ion confirms the importance and antiquity of such commentary in Greek traditions of epic performance. Ion, a professional expert on Homer, has a double professional competence: not only can he give dramatic recitations from the poems, but he has also labored to acquire a stock of ennobling observations on their meanings or "thoughts" (pollai kai kalai dianoiai, Ion 530D). Indeed, he says, this has cost him more effort than mastering the poems themselves (530C). This aspect of Ion's practice is traditional and not decadent, for he claims to interpret Homer better than a host of contemporaries and "anyone who ever lived." Yet the Ion also neatly shows that in the fourth century B.C.E. exegesis and commentary were regarded as detachable from a notional text-in-itself: with some comic irony, Socrates politely but repeatedly declines the rhapsode's offers to perform (530D, 536D). All the philosopher wants from the rhapsode is that he reproduce pieces of Homer's text for Socratic analysis, and the dialogue ends with Ion's show of "embellishing" (kosmein ) or "praising" Homer (Ion 536D) indefinitely postponed.
The present study aims to recover more fully some of the interpretative practices and traditions that surrounded Homeric poetry when it was still circulating primarily in oral performances. Specifically, I will focus on a time when it appears that the exegesis of Homer underwent a radical change: histories of literature report that allegorical interpretation in the West can be traced back to Greek readings of Homer in the last quarter of the sixth century B.C.E.[3] A certain Theagenes from Rhegium in southern Italy is recorded as the first to have interpreted Homer in a way that, for example, would see beneath the battles between gods in the Iliad a coded description of the natural strife that prevails among the physical elements composing the world. In this he is supposed to have been defending the traditional gods against contemporary rationalizing critiques. I revisit this episode both because I believe that current accounts of this key moment in the construction of the Western epic tradition should be revised, and more generally to urge that purely rhetorical analyses of textual traditions remain inadequate to the extent that they do not consider criticism and interpretation as what Reynolds calls a "social act."
I shall first review the evidence for Theagenes, considering contemporary influences and possible precursors for his allegoresis (by which I mean allegory as an interpretative mode). In order to understand the scope and purport of his project, I shall reconsider the history of terms for allegory, focusing on a stunning example of allegorical exegesis from the fourth century B.C.E. This text will suggest that in its earliest phase epic allegory was understood on the model of a widespread and significant mode of speech in
archaic Greece, the riddling ainos. Clarifying the relationship between epic and ainos at this time will allow me to redescribe the aims of early epic allegoresis by considering it not abstractly as a problem of theology or signification, but functionally as a way of expanding the uses of epic and of discourses about epic in particular social contexts.
Theagenes and His Times: Sources of Allegoresis
Although the "extra-textual" discourses that situated Greek epic for its earliest audiences were not preserved when oral performance was converted into text, some of what rhapsodes, littérateurs, and schoolmasters said in explaining Homer made its way into early written treatises on Homer's life and poetry and eventually into ancient commentaries. These commentaries, being kept physically apart from the poems, were themselves lost, but a number of specific interpretative observations survived and fought their way back into the texts of the poems in the form of marginal comments and interlinear glosses preserved in medieval manuscripts. Hence it is that the late note of a scholiast is often our only link to ancient traditions of "embellishing" the Homeric poems with commentary.
The prime piece of evidence for Theagenes comes from one such scholiast on the Iliad. The passage to be commented upon is Iliad 20.67ff., in which the Olympians are set free by Zeus to descend to the Trojan Plain and fight each other for the fate of the city. When the poet begins to catalogue how Poseidon lined up against Apollo, the War God against Aphrodite, Hera against Athena, and so on—the scholiast remarks:
In general, [Homer's] account of the gods tends to be worthless and unsuitable, for the myths he tells about the gods are inappropriate. To such charges as this, some reply on the basis of Homer's way of speaking [lexis], holding that everything is said by way of allegory [allegoria] and refers to the nature of the elements, as in the passage where the gods square off against one another. For they say that the dry battles with the wet, the hot with the cold, and the light with the heavy. Moreover, water extinguishes fire while fire evaporates water, so that there is an opposition between all the elements composing the universe, which may suffer destruction in part but remains eternal as a whole. In setting out these battles Homer gives fire the name Apollo, Helius, or Hephaestus, he calls water Poseidon or Scamander, the moon Artemis, the air Hera, and so on. In a similar way he sometimes gives names of the gods to human faculties: intelligence is Athena, folly is Ares, desire Aphrodite, speech Hermes, according to what is characteristic of each. Now this kind of defense is very old and goes back to Theagenes of Rhegium, who first wrote about Homer.[4]
A good deal of caution is required in evaluating such information. This note has been traced to Porphyry, the Neoplatonist philosopher and commentator on Homer of the third century C.E. His account is thus some eight cen-
turies after the time of Theagenes, who is placed by another source in the last quarter of the sixth century B.C.E.[5] Porphyry depends on intermediary sources now unknown,[6] and it is these sources who may be responsible for the specific allegorical equivalencies listed; to Theagenes, Porphyry only ascribes the method of apologetic allegoresis of Homer as a whole. In addition, there are prima facie problems with this piece of history. Greek scholars had a penchant for "discovering" founding figures for any significant cultural practice, and one may doubt on its face any claim that allegoresis had a single founder or a definite starting point. After all, Homer and Hesiod offer allegories in their poems,[7] and Homer's characters even exhibit an aptitude for the allegoresis of divine and heroic names.[8]
If it is scarcely credible that Theagenes could have invented epic allegoresis single-handedly, it becomes difficult to specify what he did that was remarkable, especially if, as Denis Feeney suggests, he did nothing more than etymologize a few names of Homeric gods along the lines of equating "Hera" with "Air."[9] His fame may be due simply to the fact that he managed to leave an example of his interpretative practice in a written text, the one remembered as the first treatise on Homer. [10] Still, the text Theagenes expounded and wrote on was Homer's, and no one else was remembered to have done so earlier. Our sources then may be taken as indicating that in the later sixth century the traditions in which Greek epic were handed down and commented upon changed in the sense that at that time allegorical exegesis became prominent and was incorporated into the repertoires of recognized authorities on epic. The question is, Why?
Histories of criticism have understood Theagenes' allegoresis as a response to late sixth-century rationalist attacks on epic myth by the likes of the philosophers Xenophanes, Heraclitus, and perhaps Pythagoras.[11] Xenophanes in particular provides a suggestive context; this poet, performer, and savant spent a good part of his life in cities very near Theagenes' Rhegium and has left us remarkable poems that propound a new vision of divinity while criticizing the traditional representations of gods to be found in Homer and Hesiod. Declaring that "there is one god greatest among gods and men, / resembling mortals neither in bodily form nor in thought" (B23DK), he issued biting critiques of Greek anthropomorphism, saying that if animals could paint and sculpt, then horses would fashion gods that looked like horses and cows like cows (B15 DK). Devotees of Homer could hardly have enjoyed all this, and they may have felt rebuked when Xenophanes condemned those who sing about the battles of Titans, Centaurs, and Giants, the "fabrications of men of old in which there is nothing of value" (B1.21-23 DK).
Juxtaposed with the activities of this nearby contemporary, Theagenes' practice becomes comprehensible if we view him as a rhapsode or at least an expert on Homer. Evidence for Theagenes as a "Homerist" may be found in one other scholium that attributes to an unspecified "Theagenes" a vari-
ant form of an Iliadic half-line.[12] If this is Theagenes of Rhegium, he seems to have been capable of performing or reproducing epic lines himself, and so we may think of him as something of a rhapsode-cum-explicator who, like Plato's Ion, both performed epic texts or parts of them and offered observations on the poet's "fine thoughts." As such, he would have been strongly moved to reaffirm the poet's authority. On this view, allegory in its earliest phases would have functioned as it often has later, as a defensive measure for sustaining the authority of aging narrative traditions whose literal interpretation is becoming inadequate to new ways of thinking. By the end of the sixth century some recognizably stable form of the Iliad would have been getting on to 200 years old.
Xenophanes and Theagenes seem to make a neat historical fit as prosecution and defense, yet viewing the rise of Homeric allegoresis so abstractly no doubt oversimplifies the situation, for to explain the rise of epic allegoresis as a response to philosophical critiques of the poems says nothing about the basic and most intriguing questions of why allegoresis should have been hit upon as the way to meet criticism of Homer, and why such an outlandish method should have been deemed credible. Even if we can assume that Theagenes' motives were defensive, allegoresis does so by what is surely a very bold hypothesis that the poems are about something quite other than what they declare themselves to be on their face. One can hardly suppose that allegoresis was the only or inevitable option available to the challenged Homerist; the ancients developed, after all, many other, less radical ways of defending Homer against critical attacks, as can be seen from the résumé of such defenses in chapter 25 of Aristotle's Poetics.[13]
Moreover, our scanty evidence can as well be taken as indicating that allegoresis was originally a positive strategy, exegetical rather than defensive, and that it had already been developed among the early Greek philosophers, who "appropriated for their own use some at least of the mythical traditions which they could not help venerating."[14] A precursor for Theagenes has been claimed in Pherecydes around the middle of the sixth century: he is reported to have read Homer allegorically, and his own prose cosmogony includes a few passages that may readily be read as allegorical.[15] Others have pointed to the Pythagoreans flourishing in southern Italy at the time: at least at a later period, Pythagoreans certainly practiced allegorical exegesis of Homer, and with a moralizing slant very similar to the one in Porphyry's note.[16] There is in addition a strong resemblance between some allegorical equivalencies and the use of folk etymology among early Pythagoreans to derive cosmic truths from the sounds of certain words: the Pythagorean belief that the truth of incarnation can be glimpsed in the closeness between the words for "body" (soma ) and "tomb" (sema )[17] seems not far from the notion in Porphyry that "Hera" (Heran ) in the Iliadic theomachy conceals the element "Air" (aera ) [18] But magical etymology was by no means confined to Pythagoreans in archaic
Greece, and on such grounds it has been claimed that Theagenes also had precursors in early Orphic circles.[19] Indeed, as noted above, one can go yet further and find the sources of Theagenes' practice in the epic poets themselves, since Homer often plays upon the names of gods and heroes such as Zeus or Odysseus and, unwittingly or not, provides a paradigm for the popular Hera etiology as Air in a suggestively phrased line from his theomachy: "A deep mist of air Hera / spread before [the Trojans] to check their flight."[20]
In view of the above, it seems prudent to put aside the quest for a single source of allegoresis and to stipulate that Theagenes' approach must have had wider roots and ramifications, not all of which can we hope to trace in full. The significance of the tradition about Theagenes is that it points to a time in which heroic narratives (we should probably not yet speak of "literary" texts) were subjected to a new kind of exegesis not traditional in that form, though one that was perhaps already developed in certain philosophical or religious circles. We can posit that there was in the later sixth century, particularly in southern Italy, an environment in which mystical texts and language itself were being plumbed for hidden depths of meaning; it was here that the Homeric poems, now being regarded from a number of new angles, were first subjected to a kind of exegesis that had thitherto been used with esoteric poetry. Before we can understand the motives that led epic expounders to adopt or adapt such a method, we must clarify what it was exactly that they claimed to be doing. We can do so by turning to consider the vocabulary in which early allegoresis was conducted.
Lexical Evidence: "Allegory" and Ainos
Writing around 100 C.E., Plutarch says that the term allegoria is not very old and that what is called allegoria in his day had formerly been called huponoia.[21] Plutarch is borne out by our evidence. We do not find the noun allegoria securely attested until the first century B.C.E., though it is possible that it and related words go back to the Hellenistic period.[22] As for huponoia, "a thought or intention that lies below the surface," it is attested in a special sense of "under-meaning" in two significant texts of the fourth century B.C.E. describing exegetical practices of the fifth. In the first, Plato uses it to refer to allegoresis of the type attributed to Theagenes: Socrates rejects from his city stories about "the binding of Hera by her son, the casting out of Hephaestus from Olympus when he went to defend his mother from his father [cf. Iliad 1.591-3, 15.23-24], and all the battles among gods Homer has composed [e.g., Iliad 20.67ff.], regardless of whether they are composed with or without allegorical meanings [en huponoiais, aneu hupnoion]" because the young can't tell the difference (Republic 378D). The term is also significantly used in Xenophon's Symposium when Socrates and some sophisticates are discussing the value of Homeric poetry in education. The well-bred Nicera-
tus has been compelled by his father to learn the Iliad and the Odyssey by heart so as to become a gentleman (3.5). But the company agree that being able to recite Homer by heart is no worthy accomplishment in itself; rhapsodes, after all, can do as much, and this company is unanimous in viewing them as the most stupid of men because they "do not know the huponoiai." Niceratus therefore is to be congratulated because he has "paid a good deal of money to Stesimbrotus and Anaximander and many others so as to miss out on nothing of their valuable learning" (3.6).[23]
These texts establish that in the fifth century huponoia was in use in intellectual circles for the distinctive and subtle interpretations of poetry offered by certain Homerists and sophists, though not by rhapsodes. If a rhapsode expounded on the "fine thoughts" of Homer (kalai dianoiai ) an education in poetry could still be called incomplete without an acquaintance with the "under-meanings" (huponoiai ) available from a different class of experts. The etymology of huponoia suggests a rather intellectualist and even text-based conception of poetic meaning: hupo- puts the meaning in a depth and thus implies a surface, and the root -noia is the most important fifth-century word for "thought" as intellection and calculation rather than mere perception or recognition.[24]Huponoia is thus a good name for implicit philosophical or ethical theses that may be derived from a poem in the course of a sophistic discussion. Allegories belong to the class of huponoiai because huponoiai were by definition subtle and unapparent meanings. The term demarcated economic and social distinctions more precisely than rhetorical ones: in pointing out the noble thoughts the poet intended (dianoiai ), rhapsodes could win crowns and prizes from poetic guilds or state festivals; sophists, on the other hand, could sell to select students at considerable prices the unexpected huponoiai known only to a few.
In the fifth century, then, allegorical readings of epic could be offered as an intellectual commodity under the term huponoia. But we can reconstruct a yet earlier phase of this history by considering a piece of evidence that has not so far been adduced in this connection. This is our earliest preserved specimen of extended allegorical interpretation, the Derveni papyrus, discovered in 1962 and still not yet fully published.[25] This papyrus itself is dated archaeologically to the fourth century B.C.E., but its text may be earlier by as much as a century and in any case clearly derives from the ambit of pre-Socratic thought. The text is a commentary on an Orphic cosmogonic poem, a half-rationalizing, half-mystical exegesis that repeatedly resorts to allegoresis. Although many of these passages are only partially preserved, it is nevertheless clear that the proper term for allegorical writing in this author is ainittesthai, "to speak in hints" or "to speak enigmatically," and his word for "allegorically" is ainigmatodes, "in the mode of an ainos or ainigma."[26]
In the clearest passage—a textbook example of defensive allegoresis—our commentator puzzles over an Orphic phrase he misconstrues to mean
"Zeus ate the god's genitals."[27] He is quick to say that "since through the whole poem [Orpheus] is speaking allegorically [ainizetai] about things in the world, it is necessary to consider each word [or verse] individually."[28] This assumption allows him to allegorize "genitals" as the sun, since the sun is the source of generation; Zeus's alleged meal turns out to mean that the governing power of the universe also controls generation. This interpretation uses as its operative verb for "allegorize" ainittesthai, a word that occurs twice more in the same sense. In a more scrappy fragment the target phrase from Orpheus is the anthropomorphic expression "he [i.e., Zeus] took in his hands," and our commentator says the poet "uttered this as an allegory [enizeto ] "[29] Precisely what these hands signified must now be a matter of conjecture,[30] but the author is clearly proposing a hidden, nonliteral meaning, one to be distinguished from the construction put on that phrase by "those who do not understand" mentioned a few lines before.[31] Finally, he uses an adverbial form, ainigmatodes, perhaps to say that certain goddesses are described "allegorically"[32] and, in a very broken piece from the early and possibly introductory portion of the work, speaks of "allegorical" (ainigmatodss ) poetry.[33] Neither huponoia nor any of its cognates is used in the twenty-four columns so far available.
The Derveni papyrus thus shows that, outside the philosophical-rhetorical tradition of the later fifth century, which sought the huponoia of poets, ainittesthai and its cognates supplied the standard set of terms in which to discuss what was eventually called allegoria. Since this is our only direct pre-Socratic evidence for the early practice of allegoresis, we must hold that the operant term for expressing oneself allegorically was ainittesthai before it became huponoiein and then allegorein.[34] A passage from the late archaic poet Theognis places this vocabulary back in the time of Theagenes: Theognis concludes a fairly extensive allegory of the "ship of state" by saying: "Let these things be riddling utterances [einikhtho] hidden by me for the noble. / One can be aware even of future misfortune if one is skilled."[35]
The fact that the technical term for allegory changes is of more than philological interest. Recovering the language in which allegories were discussed before they were called huponoiai or allegoriai allows us to locate early allegoresis in relation to other contemporary forms of interpretative and expressive activity. The root of both ainittesthai and ainigmatodes can be traced to the word ainos, which named an important mode of riddling discourse in the archaic and early classical period. The ainos was a polymorphous but quite distinctive and important mode of speech, and one that interacted in significant ways with nearly all the major forms of Greek literature. It is my contention that the use of ainittesthai in the Derveni author, and presumably in his predecessors going back to the time of Theagenes and Theognis, indicates that early allegoresis involved a shifting of generic boundaries so that epic could be viewed as a specimen of the ainos. Thus, whatever the debts of
early epic allegorists to mystical traditions or to the epics themselves, their procedure announced itself as assimilating epic to this familiar form of ambiguous speech. We are thus obliged to look more closely at the archaic ainos.
Although the ainos assumed too many forms to be thought of as a genre, it is often used of animal fables such as we find in Archilochus[36] or Aesop. The prototypic example may be Hesiod's tale (called "an ainos kings will understand" at Works and Days 202) of a hawk that holds a nightingale (aedon ) in its clutches; this seems to refer in some way to the power the king has over the singer (aoidos ) Other early examples of ainoi refer more generally to any "fable or other story with an implied message in it for the hearer,"[37] such as the story Odysseus tells Eumaeus in the Odyssey: in need of covering for the night, the beggar-Odysseus tells the swineherd a story about a ruse the "real" Odysseus had once used to secure a cloak on a cold night watch. Eumaeus is quick to perceive the point of the story and, commending the ainos, offers his guest a cloak.[38] Whether it takes the form of an animal fable or a pointed story, the ainos should be regarded as a mode of speaking rather than identified with any particular kind or form of narrative.[39] Gregory Nagy defines ainos as an "authoritative speech: an affirmation, a marked speech act made by and for a marked social group,"[40] highlighting the fact that the selective audience may serve to rein in the polysemy of ainos: an ainos is decoded by those the speaker considers "wise" or "good," and so "akin" to himself (the sophoi or philoi commonly addressed in ainetic poetry). This select audience is thought to be capable of this decoding not through linguistic expertise but through an innate gift presumed to mark the truly noble, the agathoi. Thus, though an ainos may be analyzed thematically as an allusive tale or structurally as a coded message, in its Greek context it was defined as a message that had a special meaning for a special audience; it was a socially rather than rhetorically constructed riddle.
Another dimension of the ainos is brought out in Thomas Cole's fascinating Origins of Rhetoric, which suggests that the hinting ainos was an especially appropriate use of language in a context of social inequality. Cole notes that tradition recorded the slave Aesop as the inventor of the ainos, and points to a passage in Aristotle's Rhetoric in which ainos is associated with what Aristotle calls the "slavish" habit of talking around a point when addressing a superior.[41] On this view what is essentially ainetic about the fable of the hawk and the nightingale in Hesiod is that the subordinate singer tells an ainos "the kings will understand"; so too the cloak story of Odysseus qualifies as an ainos because a suppliant castaway must be circumspect in making demands on his host. The marked, oblique speech act known as ainos, then, may take the form of allegory when the situation calls for the most discreet self-presentation on the part of the speaker. Such occasions are reflected in the verse ainoi that were commonly sung within aristocratic coteries such as those addressed by Archilochus, Alcaeus, or Theognis. In such ainoi the encoding
allowed discretion in times of political uncertainty all the while reinforcing the solidarity of close-knit aristocratic groups.[42] But ainoi of course would also have been useful in wider contexts too, as in stories of Stesichorus's using animal fables to dissuade his fellow citizens from giving the strongman Phalaris a bodyguard: in predicting a tyranny one doesn't dare be too offensive to a powerful man.[43]
The significance of all this for epic allegorists depends on an important point, stressed by Nagy, that Greek epic is not ainos: though epic may incorporate ainoi, such as Odysseus's tale of the cloak, and though it may give us a portrait of a master of ainoi in "Odysseus poluainos," it does not refer to itself as ainos, nor does it ever declare it has a hidden meaning for the cognoscenti. Pindar will often characterize his odes to Olympic victors as ainoi, but not Homer.[44] In this case, it seems that for an allegorizing critic to say that the epic poet ainittetai this or that was to assimilate narrative epic to another form of discourse with its own special rules and ethos. In view of our lexical evidence, then, the rise of epic allegoresis may be reinterpreted as the assimilation of the Homeric poems to the ainos. It was not so much that the sixth-century allegorists concocted a bizarre new method of reading epic as that they transferred epic to a special and well-established form of speech act, one in which discreet self-expression requiring expert decoding was the norm. With this closer view of what allegoresis amounted to in the archaic period, we can turn to suggesting why the ainos might have appealed to Homerists as a model for their favored poetry.
The Uses of Hidden Meanings
In assimilating epic to ainos allegorists would have done more than appeal to a readily intelligible model of encoded speech or verse. The ainos defined not simply a special kind of message but also a special relation of speaker to audience and so brought in its a train a series of social implications that made possible a new use for epic poetry in the city. For a professional Homerist like Theagenes, the most important function of ainoi may have been that it was the customary way for poets, councilors, and wise men generally to address their most powerful and lavish patrons in the West. The tyrants and dynasts of Sicily whom Pindar served a generation later are repeatedly praised as "wise," "skilled" (sophos ) or "discerning" (sunetos ) and part of this ideal image of the tyrant involves being skilled in interpreting ainoi.[45] In this respect the situation at the Sicilian courts where Xenophanes performed in the late sixth century or where Pindar sent songs in the fifth had changed very little by the time Plato was trying to advise the unpredictable tyrant Dionysius. Plato's Seventh Letter says that he and his friends thought it best to communicate their doctrines about ruling justly "not by expressing them straight out—which was not safe—but through riddles [ainittomenoi] " (332D).
Like the poet before the king in Hesiod, or the beggar before his host in the Odyssey, the Homerist addresses the sixth-century tyrant or aristocratic coterie as a master of oblique discourse. To adopt this mode of address was thus both to respect one's proper station and also to adopt the ideology of the great ruler that depicted him as at once powerful and perceptive (sunetos ) To sustain a position of authority in this politically tumultuous period required not only force of arms but the ability to read signs aright so that one could, in the classic allegory of the time, steer the "ship of state" through the tempestuous waters of politics.[46] That the discernment needed to rule extended to the decipherment of obscure symbols may be illustrated in Herodotus (4.131-2). He tells us that when the Scythians were being attacked by Darius, they sent him messengers bearing a bird, a mouse, a frog, and five arrows. The messengers challenge the Persians—"if they are wise [sophos]— " to "recognize" what the gifts mean. Darius optimistically interprets the objects as symbolizing complete submission, "likening" (eikazon )[47] the mouse and frog to earth and water—traditional tokens of fealty—and the birds and arrows to the Scythian cavalry and arms, all of which he thinks are being handed over to him. But one of his advisers proposes a different reading: unless the Persians can fly like a bird, burrow like a mouse, or dive like a frog, they will not escape Scythian archers. The upshot, designed to warm the heart of any professional wise man, is of course that Darius read this allegory wrong, and he is soon planning a hasty retreat. The distance between Darius faced with such symbols and a Greek potentate who may hear about the air, water, and fire underlying the text of Homer may be not so great as appears at first glance. The Greek king or prince striving to catch the political import of every shifting wind is well advised to cultivate courtiers—his xenoi or philoi as everyone would politely put it—of equal discernment.
The first epic allegorists of the West, then, found their place in this culture of competitive interpretative expertise. A model for their role was afforded by the tyrant's circle of advisers-companions or, more distantly, by the Eastern king's viziers. Yet the allegorists seem not to have interpreted epic in terms of current events. Different book-bearing sophoi exploited these veins, such as the oracle-monger Onomacritus, whose readings of ancient prophetic texts he edited (and interpolated) led him in and out and back in favor with the ruling Peisistratids at Athens (cf. Herodotus 7.6). If we can judge from the kinds of allegory Plato rejects, with Theagenes or soon after, allegorists rather focused on epic scenes of theomachy and struggle between gods (as they long continued to).[48]
That allegorists should have been drawn to passages such as theomachies may be explained along standard lines as stemming from a desire to assuage outraged piety; but it is also worth noting that theomachy could serve as a mythic paradigm for destructive infighting among the nobility, as in Xenophanes, who rejects not only mythic accounts of fighting Titans, Centaurs,
and Giants but also songs of civil strife, stasis (B1.23DK).[49] Hence to discourse about theomachy may be to speak about the management of strife, the cosmic principle and social force that Hesiod's Works and Days had taught could be both beneficial and harmful. Allegorized along these lines, Homer presents a world in which both hierarchy (Zeus commanding the Olympians, the Olympians far greater than mortals) and conflict are naturalized. The tyrant who reads Homer this way may find an image of his own power, identifying himself with Zeus who sits atop a pyramid of battling that ranges from his own divine lords down to pathetic mortals. Hence if allegorists proferred timeless verities of cosmology and general ethics, their readings in context were yet themselves ainoi pointing to, without naming, the pervasiveness of social tension and the need for a stable hierarchy among aristocrats.
Allegoresis had another function apart from the particular coded message conveyed. In making Homer ainetic allegorizing critics gave a new and special use to the poetry. The very strategy of repositioning these stories as coded messages allowed allegorists to constitute a select audience who could distinguish themselves by their subtle understanding. This was all the more valuable in the sixth century, when rhapsodes were crossing the entire length of the Aegean giving public performances of Homeric epic, and some states were incorporating such performances into their city festivals, such as the Panathenaia at Athens. References to Homer, which begin to crop up at this time, take special note of the breadth of his appeal:[50] when Simonides says that "Homer and Stesichorus sang to the people," he implies a wide and perhaps undiscriminating diffusion of the poetry by using for "people" an epic term (laos ) for the army or citizen body as a whole as distinct from its generals.[51] Homer's critics concede something to the widespread respect in which he is held, as when Xenophanes says that "all men have learned from Homer" (B10 DK) or when Heraclitus calls Homer "wiser than all other Greeks" before going on to deflate that reputation (B56 DK). Heraclitus's rejection of the poets' doctrines is mingled with contempt for the witless de mos who use them as teachers (B104 DK), and he would ban poets from public contests (B42 DK).[52]
In the context of many archaic cities, then, allegorical readings of epic enabled certain experts to proffer and certain audiences to obtain an elite purchase on a kind of poetry that was increasingly becoming the possession of all Greece. Allegoresis of epic did for audiences with pretensions to cultural leadership in the city what the récherché interpretations of Orphic poetry or Pythagorean sayings did for those desiring to form exclusive communities at the city's margins: these groups too cherished and collected "texts" in which they found subtle meanings intended for the elect. Such were Pythagorean watchwords or symbola and the Orphic poems, one of which begins: "I will sing for the discerning."[53] Whether at court or in a conventicle, allegoresis confers a nimbus on a body of poetry that is to be penetrated
only by the wise or initiated. Applied to Homer, it forms inside the larger community within hail of a passing rhapsode's voice a smaller group of those who rightly understand.[54]
This use of allegoresis to create distinctive audiences became more extensive in the fifth century, when, as is indicated in the passage from Xenophon, some Homerists professed to offer invaluable huponoiai that were not available from the scorned rhapsodes. Then, as in the sixth century, traveling experts in traditional song could well have an interest in presenting themselves as possessing a hidden knowledge of poetry, one that was not so public as the declamation of a rhapsode, that was not controlled by guilds on Chios or Samos or broadcast by the Athenian state. In this vein we may understand the sophists' portraying Homer as one who "covered up" and "veiled" his wisdom so that only they are able to disclose it, even if they did not allegorize the texts at great length.[55] Suspicions about the method are voiced by Plato, as we saw, who found allegories dangerously ambiguous and regarded as trivial the games played by "those who are so clever about Homer" (Cratylus 407c). After him the way was clear for Aristotle to treat poetry as a problem of form and structure rather than one of theology or hermeneutics, and the tradition of formalist and rhetorical analysis of literature flourished at Alexandria, where "interpreting Homer from Homer" meant reading him in his own terms and not those of another system. Of course there were always competing views and backsliding, as in the allegoresis favored by Crates of Mallos and to some extent among the Stoics.[56] Epic's affinity with allegory both as an expressive and as an interpretative mode endured through the eighteenth century and formed a basic frame for conceiving the genre for such poets as Vergil, Spenser, Tasso, and Milton.[57] Since then, allegory has gone in and out of favor but has never been absent from the range of techniques deployed in Western literary, and especially epic, interpretation.
If we consider Theagenes' practice in the history of epic performance in its full sense, including the performance of commentary, he appears to stand not for the origin of allegoresis but for a change in the traditions of epic interpretation: however old allegoresis may be as an interpretative strategy, it came to cultural prominence only when it intersected with the wider Greek history of epic reception. Though epic had long called for and been accompanied by many kinds of exegesis, when allegoresis became available to the Homerist's arsenal—a full generation before the early sophists and nearly two centuries before Aristotle's Poetics —expertise in poetry could not only boast a command of the texts and of a tradition of lore about them and their author but also distinguish itself by offering wholly unexpected accounts of what these old and familiar poems really said. It seems that it was in only in the later sixth century that certain Greek readers and their audiences found that epic could begin to say something of value only when it began to say something other.
Throughout this long history, that protean thing called allegory always has involved social practices and institutions that define literature and criticism as well. I reaffirm this point in concluding, since to discuss allegory historically is problematic from certain points of view today, especially theories that would identify allegory with the workings of language itself. If one defines allegoria etymologically as "saying one thing and meaning something other,"[58] allegory may appear not simply as one mode of speech among others but as the figure of speech that most directly exemplifies the fundamental arbitrariness of language, its lack of any firm bond between signifier and signified. Allegory may then be said to attend any and every type of speech: all texts may be called allegorical,[59] and all interpretations insofar as they state the meaning of a text in other terms than those of the text.[60] These lines of analysis suggest that to give an account of allegory in historical and social terms is only to offer yet another allegory of allegory while evading its ubiquitous and uncontrollable character. After all, a recovery of true but concealed early meanings has been one of the favorite promises of allegoresis.
One might argue in turn that conceiving allegory solely as a trope rather than as the act of an interpreter is itself an interpretative strategy, which can be situated historically within the late and postromantic revival of allegory as a symbolic mode.[61] But the issue is whether it is adequate to define allegory solely as an affair of diction or reference. In my view, reducing allegory to operations on a linguistic plane cannot account for the extremely varied uses allegoresis has had, uses ranging from defensive recuperation of threatened traditions to their radical reevaluation. To attempt to historicize allegory need not be to quest after its chimerical origins but may allow us to see it as a practice whose semantic dislocations always take place within a culturally and historically specific context. I side then with ethnographers like Reynolds:
In seeking reactions to and interpretations of the epic, I found again and again that I was listening to evaluations not of an individual performance or event, but of larger social patterns and of the epic as a symbolic catalyst. To a great extent, evaluations of the epic were only extensions of the speaker's position vis-à-vis the social forces he or she saw the epic as representing.[62]
Viewed in this way, the ancient allegorist Theagenes suggests that we may understand epic allegoresis not only as a philosophical, theological, or hermeneutic position, but as a social performance within the cultural construction of "literature" in its time.
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