23 April 2024: We are investigating problems with ecommerce on Cambridge Core. We apologise for any inconvenience and hope to have full functionality restored shortly.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
In this article I shall argue for an interpretation of Odyssey 19.393–466 as a flash-back taking place in the mind of Eurykleia at the moment she recognises Odysseus' scar. That Eurykleia somehow forms the connection between main story and digression has been suggested before, but so far other interpretations have been defended with more fervour.
Most famous of these interpretations is the one given by E. Auerbach in the first chapter of his Mimesis. He had chosen 19.393–466 to illustrate his thesis that in Homer everything is ‘fully externalized’ and that there is no background, only a ‘uniformly illuminated’ foreground. According to Auerbach the digression on the scar stands in complete isolation to its context. It is meant to ‘relax the tension’, to make the hearer/reader ‘forget what had just taken place during the footwashing’, and although it might have been presented as a recollection of Odysseus (by inserting the story ‘two verses earlier, at the first mention of the word scar’), this ‘subjectivisticperspectivistic procedure, creating a foreground and background’ was not chosen, being ‘entirely foreign to the Homeric style’.
Some twenty years later this interpretation was challenged by A. Köhnken, who, however, stuck to the idea that the digression is not told from the restricted perspective of one of the characters but from the perspective of the omniscient narrator; he claims that foreground and background are marked as such through a difference in narrative style: ‘berichtende Erzählung’ for the digression itself and ‘szenische Darstellung’ for the context. I disagree with both points.
1 Sauter, H., Die Beschreibungen Homers und ihre dichterische Funktion (diss. Tübingen, 1953), pp. 42ffGoogle Scholar. and Müller, F., Darstellung und poetische Funktion der Gegenstände in der Odyssee (diss. Marburg, 1968), pp. 33–4Google Scholar. Müller refers to Sauter for arguments. Sauter, however, only explains why it is Eurykleia (and not Antikleia or Laertes) who recognises the scar.
2 Engl. translation Princeton, 1953, 3–23.
3 Antike und Abendland 22 (1976), 101–14Google Scholar. He convincingly shows that the digression serves an important function within the whole recognition-scene (pp. 102–8), is placed effectively after the recognition, but before its effect (108), and does not stand in isolation from its context (109–12).
4 For Eurykleia's position of high honour in Laertes' household see 1.432: ἴσα δέ μιν κεδνῇ ⋯λόχῳ τίεν (Laertes) ⋯ν μεγάροισιν. She had taken care of Odysseus and nurtured him right after his birth (19.354–5) and considered him ‘her own child’ (19.363,474: τέκνον, 492 τέκνον ⋯μόν). Confirmed by Odysseus: 19.482–3.
5 The importance of these verses is overlooked by Whitman, C., Homer and the Heroic Tradition (Harvard, 1958), 119CrossRefGoogle Scholar: ‘Homer simply dramatizes her (sc. Eurykleia's) mental image, complete with speeches and even the boar-hunt, which incidentally she could not have witnessed’ (my italics) and Köhnken, op. cit., p. 113, n. 48: ‘Odysseus und Eurykleia haben jeder nur einen Teil des in Exkurs Berichteten direkt miterlebt, der Erzähler braucht für seine Zwecke die Erinnerung beider zusammengenommen’.
6 I am preparing a monograph where cases like these are analysed in terms of modern semiotical narratology. I have already made an extended study of a group of cases in Fokalisation und die Homerischen Gleichnisse, to appear in Mnemosyne 1985.
