Homer's Divine Audience

The gods of Homer's Iliad have troubled readers for millennia, with many features of their presentation seeming to defy satisfactory explanation. Homer's Divine Audience presents and explores a new 'metaperformative' approach to scenes of divine viewing, counsel, and intervention in the Iliad, referencing the oral nature of the poem's original composition and transmission to cast the Olympian gods in part as an internal audience, who follow the action from their privileged, divine perspective much like the poet's own listeners. Although critics have already often described the gods' activities in terms of attendance at a 'show' and have suggested analogies to theatre and sports, little has yet been done to investigate the particular strategies by which the poet conveys the impression of gods attending a live, staged event. This volume's analysis of those strategies points to a 'metaperformative' significance to the motif of divine viewing: the poet is using the gods, in part, to model and thereby manipulate the ongoing dynamics of performance and live reception. The gods, like the external audience, are capable of a variety of emotional responses to events at Troy; notably pleasure and pity, but also great aloofness. By performing the speeches of the provocative, infuriating, yet ultimately obliging Zeus, the poet at key moments both challenges his listeners to take a stake in the continuation of the performance, and presents a sophisticated critique of possible responses to his poem.

Tobias Myers is Assistant Professor of Classics at Connecticut College and holds degrees from the University of Colorado at Boulder and Columbia University. His research focuses primarily on Homer, with additional interests in Greco-Roman literature more broadly, magic and religion, and the history of ideas. Among other topics, he has written on addresses in Theocritus' bucolica, the 'literary cosmology' of Theocritus 2, and the spatio-temporal paradoxes of Iliadic battle scenes. His current projects include a study of Odyssean conceptions of self-knowledge and an attempt to situate Homeric conceptions of time within the larger history of the idea of eternity in the Western tradition.