NOTES

Introduction

1. For the discussion of the similes by the rhetorical tradition, see M. H. McCall, Ancient Rhetorical Theories of Simile and Comparison (Cambridge, 1969). For antiquity’s views on Homer’s similes, we have Adolf Clausing’s Kritik und Exegese der homerischen Gleichnisse im Altertum (Parchim, 1913). These matters will be taken up in more detail below in the discussion of Apollonius. I do not mean to say that the ancient critics sought no further justification for the similes than mere ornamentation. Many scholia attribute broadly defined functions for various similes, such as auxesis, emphasis, etc., but these functions are themselves perceived as ornamental in respect to the narrative. Modern scholarship has likewise often proposed various “ornamental uses” for the simile: (1) the presentation of the generic alongside the individual: Kurt Riezler, “Das homerische Gleichnis und der Anfang der Philosophie,” Antike 12 (1936), 253-71; W. Schadewaldt, “Die homerische Gleichniswelt und die kretisch-mykenische Kunst,” in Von Homers Welt und Werk (Leipzig, 1944), 130-54; P. Vivante, “On the Representation of Reality in Homer,” Arion 5 (1966), 149-90. (2) Creation of atmosphere: H. Fraenkel, Die homerischen Gleichnisse (Göttingen, 1921). (3) Imagistic continuity: Carroll Moulton, Similes in the Homeric Poems, Hypomnema 49 (Göttingen, 1977); Martin Mueller, The Iliad (London, 1984), 108-124. (4) Characterization and foreshadowing: T. Krischer, Formale Konventionen der homerischen Epik (Munich, 1971); S. E. Basset, Poetry of Homer, Sather Classical Lectures 15 (Berkeley, 1938), 164-72; M. Coffey, “The Function of the Homeric Simile,” AJPh 78 (1957), 113-32. (5) Incorporation of the past into the present: F. Müller, “Das homerische Gleichnis,” NJAB 4 (1941), 175-83. (6) Allusion to antecedent literary traditions: Philip Damon Modes of Analogy in Ancient and Medieval Verse, University of California Publications in Classical Philology 15, No. 6 (Berkeley, 1965).

2. For Hellenistic criticism on Homer, see R. Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship From the Beginnings to the End of the Hellenistic Age (Oxford, 1968); Howard Clarke, Homer’s Readers (Newark, 1981).

3. Convenient summaries of the criticism of this period can be found in M. P. Nilsson, Homer and Mycenae (London, 1933; repr. 1968); J. A. Davison, “The Homeric Question,” in A Companion to Homer, ed. A. Wace and F. Stubbings (London, 1962). Most helpful for the analyst position is Peter von der Mühll, Kritische Hypomnema zur Ilias (Basel, 1952). For examples of unitarian criticism of the similes, see J. T. Sheppard, “Traces of the Rhapsode,” JHS 42 (1922), 220-37; A. Shewan, “Suspected Flaws in Homeric Similes,” CP 6 (1911), 271-81; and, of course, Fraenkel, Die homerischen Gleichnisse. See note 7 below for analyst works on the simile.

4. Milman Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse, ed. Adam Parry (Oxford, 1971). A. B. Lord develops the notion of a “semi-autonomous” pattern or “theme” in Singer of Tales (Cambridge, 1960), 69-98. This notion will be rethought in a semiotic context below.

5. W. Hansen, The Conference Sequence, University of California Publications in Classical Philology 8 (Berkeley, 1972); G. S. Kirk, Songs of Homer (Cambridge, 1962); D. Page, The Homeric Odyssey (Oxford, 1955).

6. B. Fenik, Typical Battle Scenes in the Iliad, Hermes Einzelschriften 21 (Wiesbaden, 1968). Neo-analytic critics presume the unity of the poems, but usually take the position that Homer was a literate poet who substantially transformed traditional oral sources. See, for example, W. Kullmann, “Zur Methode der Neoanalyse in der Homerforschung,” Wiener Studien NF 15 (1981), 5-42; and “Oral Poetry Theory and Neoanalysis,” GRBS 25.4 (Winter, 1984), 307-23.

7. W. C. Scott, The Oral Nature of the Homeric Simile, Mnemosyne Supplementband 28 (Leiden, 1964). D. J. N. Lee, The Similes of the Iliad and the Odyssey Compared, Australian Hum. Res. Council Monograph 10 (Melbourne, 1964). G. P. Shipp, Studies in the Language of Homer (Cambridge, 1953; 2nd ed., 1972).

8. Michael Nagler, Spontaneity and Tradition (Berkeley, 1974), 28. Hereafter cited as Spontaneity.

9. For a discussion of relativist and universalist theories of language, see George Steiner, After Babel (Oxford, 1975), 49-109.

10. For Humboldt’s term and Chomsky’s articulation of the “rationalist” or “nativist” position in language acquisition, see Chomsky, “Review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior,” reprinted in The Structure of Language, ed. J. Fodor and J. Katz (Englewood Cliffs, 1963), 384-89. The comparison of the Indian theory of meaning to generative transformational grammar is inevitable and suggested by Nagler himself (Spontaneity, 19).

11. Spontaneity, 198. James Redfield, Nature and Culture in the Iliad (Chicago, 1975), 219. Cedric Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Tradition (Cambridge, 1965), 219. F. Jameson notes that readings which make appeals to the “universal truth” of poetry provide organizations of the text which “find their proper use in the staging of the fundamental problems of a narrative text” and “in the evaluation of the narrative solution, or sequence of solutions, invoked for this purpose” (The Political Unconscious [Ithaca, 1981], 256). This can be so even with militantly ahistorical analyses such as that of T. McCary, Childlike Achilles (New York, 1982), who sees the “thematic core” of the poem as a “formative stage in the development of every male child” (95).

12. Whitman, Homer, 240. The full sentence is, “The universal limitation of death which causes human beings to restrain their passions, and Achilles’ disregard of that limitation, is what allows him to carry his passions so far and become more like a god than a man.”

13. This little overview of semiotics is based on lectures by Wlad Godzich at the University of Minnesota. See his review of U. Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington, 1976), in Journal of the History of Music (Winter, 1979), 117ff. The following discussion of the theory of codes is based almost entirely on Eco’s book, hereafter cited as “Eco.” Further elaboration of Eco’s theory can be found in The Role of the Reader (Bloomington, 1979) and Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Bloomington, 1984).

14. The terms “seme” and “sememe” were introduced by A. J. Greimas, Sémantique Structurale (Paris, 1966), with a slightly different meaning than Eco’s. See Eco, 93-94.

15. Noam Chomsky, Aspects of a Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, 1965), 157ff.

16. C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers (Cambridge, 1931-58), I, 339.

17. It will not be possible to give much space to the numerous varieties of reading theory, and what follows here is a strategic selection aimed at foregrounding issues pertinent to the approach to be outlined below. Culler’s chapter on reading theory in On Deconstruction (Ithaca, 1983), is most useful for identifying the key problems. So-called “reader-response criticism,” examples of which are collected in Reader-Response Criticism, ed. Jane Tompkins (Baltimore, 1980), tends to focus on how various readers, or groups of readers (women, students, social classes) transcend or skew the function of the addressee, however that function is objectified.

18. Norman Holland, Five Readers Reading (New Haven, 1977).

19. Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts (Berkeley, 1972).

20. Fish has abandoned the notion of the informed reader in his more recent work. In Is There a Text in This Class? (Cambridge, 1981), Fish notes the importance of “reading strategies” which are the product of shared assumptions of an “interpretive community.” These interpretive strategies “are the shape of reading” and hence “give texts their shape, making them rather than, as is usually assumed, arising from them” (13). That Fish’s notion of interpretive communities is still a valorization of the addressee is evident from the fact that the reading strategies are themselves not subject to analysis. Since they exist “prior to the act of reading and therefore determine the shape of what is read rather than the other way around” (14, my emphasis), there is no dialectic between text and reader. See Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis, 1983), 85-89.

21. Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca, 1975), 112. The Frye quote is from Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1971), 17. Culler has moved away from this position, but the idea of a “literary competence” analogous to linguistic competence has persisted in various forms. See, for example, E. Spolsky and E. Shauber, “Stalking a Generative Poetics,” NLH 12, No. 3 (Spring, 1981), 397-413; and S. H. Olsen, “The ‘Meaning’ of a Literary Work,” NLH 14, No. 1 (Autumn, 1982), 13-31, with discussion by C. Belsey, 176.

22. N. Chomsky, “Formal Discussion,” reprinted in Chomsky, Selected Readings, ed. J. Allen and P. van Buren (London, 1971), 130-1.

23. George Steiner, After Babel (Oxford, 1975), 107.

24. U. Eco, The Role of the Reader (Bloomington, 1979), 11. I have underscored the words textually established to emphasize that the interpretant is not the interpreter.

25. M. Riffaterre, The Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington, 1978), 1-6. See also his earlier article, “Paragram and Significance,” Semiotexte I, No. 2 (Fall, 1974), 72-87.

26. The term “hypogram,” or Riffaterre’s earlier term “paragram,” derives from Saussure’s theory of the anagram. Saussure had toyed with the idea that the verses of ancient poetry represented by phonic imitation the names having importance in each passage. In this theory the verse would be phonic proliferations (anagrams or paragrams) of the names of gods or heroes. Saussure was never sufficiently satisfied with his idea to publish it; indeed, as Riffaterre notes, such a notion does not take into account the ordinary experience of reading a poem. For Riffaterre, Saussure’s genius was “to understand that the text’s center is outside of the text, not behind it, hidden away, as seekers after the writer’s real intent are fond of thinking; its true nature lies in the text’s consistent formal reference to and repetition of what it is about, despite continuous variations in the telling of the story built around that ‘it’” (“Paragram and Significance,” 12). This “it” which a poem is about was for Saussure a phonic sequence, but for Riffaterre this “it” consists of the “lexical transformations of a semantic given” (“Paragram and Significance,” 73). For discussion of the relevant passages from Saussure’s notebooks, see P. Wunderli, Ferdinand de Saussure und die Anagramme (Tubingen, 1972).

27. Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. T. H. Thompson (Cambridge, 1955), 768. This example was given by Professor William Beauchamp of Southern Methodist University in a lecture at the University of Minnesota. He has kindly given me permission to reproduce his analysis.

28. For the term see Semiotics of Poetry, 25-26 et passim; see also the discussion of seme and sememe above, p. 10.

29. “Theme” is defined by Riffaterre as a “culture-marked hypogram” (39); that is, a repeatedly poeticized hypogram. The word “theme” has itself been repeatedly “poeticized” and hence has a descriptive system entailing essentialist notions of disembodied ideas (Lord, Nagler, etc.). For this reason the term “subcode” will be developed below for repeatedly poeticized hypograms in the context of narrative, a term which will emphasize their operational status.

30. For the notion of descriptive system, which will be exemplified below, pp. 25ff., see Semiotics of Poetry, 39ff.

31. Speaking specifically of a pedagogical situation, Bourdieu and Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (London, 1977), argue that this is the one irreducible and inevitable characteristic of communication. More generally, see M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York, 1979).

32. Eco uses the term “textual strategy” for the notion of the sender in textual studies; and this is what will be meant by the term “poet” or “author” in the discussion below. A communicational model emphasizes the dialectical relationship between reader, writer and text; meaning is produced in this dialectic. It does not reside in any one of these terms.

33. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, 1981), offers numerous examples of this sort of methodological progression. See also Terry Eagleton’s call for a recasting of literary studies as “cultural studies” in Literary Theory (Minneapolis, 1983).

34. Hence the rise of the “aesthetic crisis” in Homeric studies, the suspicion that critics are deceiving themselves by attributing meaning to various aspects of Homer’s expression actually determined by metrical constraints. Parry’s theory has attracted a number of attacks with varying degrees of ira et studium for being the “Darwin of Homer” (H. T. Wade-Gerry). A “soft” Parry school has tried to modify the oral theory to make more room for the aesthetic use of formulaic diction. For a summary of the literature, see J. Holoka, “Homer’s Originality: A Survey,” CW 12 (1973), 257-93.

35. Berkeley Peabody, Winged Word (Albany, 1976), 176-94, argues that text production in Homer and Hesiod proceeds from “phonic cores” which preserve traditional “information cores.” This unusual hypothesis should be compared to Saussure’s theory of the anagram (note 26 above). G. Nagy, Best of the Achaeans (Baltimore, 1979), who also produces many interesting results, nevertheless bases his analysis on a very stable tradition of meaning stretching back to its Indo-european “roots.” Peabody and Nagy are both more explicitly “intertextual” than Nagler, but all three see meaning as produced by substance (sphota, information cores, roots) rather than by difference.

Homer

1. Walter Leaf, ed., The Iliad, 2nd ed. (New York, 1902), ad loc.

2. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, Die Ilias und Homer (Berlin, 1920), 125.

3. Herman Fraenkel, Die homerischen Gleichnisse, 74-75.

4. For these notions of the functions of Homer’s similes, see the works cited in note 1 of the Introduction.

5. Walter Arend, Die typischen Szenen bei Homer (Berlin, 1933), 64-78.

6. For the “conversion of a descriptive system” see Semiotics of Poetry, 63-75.

7. The adverb ἀγεληδόν (160), “in a herd-like fashion,” suggests a pell-mell motion in contrast to the rigorously ordered procedures of the heroes and the hierarchy implied by their ritual propriety. Cf. A 448: ἑξείης ἔστησαν ἐΰδμητον περὶ βωμόν, “They stood in order around the altar.”

8. If we changed the accent to the antepenult, we would have the only Homeric example of an adjective found in later Greek (ἀραῖος from ἀρά), which means in bono “prayed to” (cf. Zεῦς ἀραῖος) and in malo “cursed,” a particularly pregnant association.

9. A 469, B 432, I 92, I 222, Λ 780, Ω 628, α 150, γ 473, θ 72, θ 485, μ 308, o 303, o 143, o 501, ξ 454, π 55, ρ 99, ψ 57, ω 489.

10. See Arend’s discussion of this passage as well as the suitors’ varied feasting habits, Die typischen Szenen, 67-68. See also his discussion of the lexical inversions of meal language in the Cyclops episode of the Odyssey, 75.

11. Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind, tr. T. G. Rosenmeyer (New York, 1960), 9.

12. It is not specifically called a meal; the children are hidden in a “hollow place” in the earth, but the notion of reingestion is clear enough. Cf. Kronos’ explicit consuming of his children in the next phase of the succession myth, Theogony, 458-59.

13. Neither Chantraine, Dictionaire etymologique de la langue gréque (Paris, 1968), nor Frisk, Grieshisches etymologisches Wörterbuch (Heidelberg, 1973), see any etymological connection between στένω and στείνω, although Autentrieth does in A Homeric Dictionary, tr. R. P. Keep (Norman, 1958). But Theogony, 159-60, suggests at least a folk etymology.

14. Vladimir Propp, The Morphology of the Folktale, tr. L. Scott, 2nd ed. (Austin, 1968).

15. That is, they are not universal. While there is no doubt about the heuristic value of a formalist analysis such as that of Propp, the generalization of such a “morphology” to all narratives everywhere, or even all fairy tales everywhere, falls back on essentialism. See T. Todorov, Introduction to Poetics, tr. R. Howard (Minneapolis, 1981), 48.

16. Cf. the opening words of Odysseus to Achilles in the embassy scene (I 225): δαιτὸς μὲν ἐΐσης οὐκ ἐπιδευεῖς, “you have no lack of a fair portion.”

17. Cedric Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Tradition (New York, 1958), 206.

18. See Charles P. Segal, The Theme of the Mutilation of the Corpses in the Iliad (Leiden, 1971).

19. Achilles has been variously condemned or praised for holding out so long. See, for example, A. L. Motto “Ise Dais: The Honor of Achilles,” Arethusa 2.2 (Fall, 1969), 109-25; Peter W. Rose, “How Conservative is the Iliad?” Pacific Coast Philology 13 (1978), 86-93. The value of his actions relative to the other Greeks, however, is clearly negative; and it is this intra-textual perspective with which we are concerned at present. But see below, pp. 71ff.

20. See J. I. Armstrong, “The Arming Motif in the Iliad,” AJPh 79 (1958), 337-54.

21. The first critic to suggest that the plot of the major action of the Iliad is the Διὸς βουλή was, I believe, Schadewaldt, liasstudien, 3rd ed. (Darmstadt, 1966), 110. The extension of Riffaterre’s term matrix to mean the plot of a narrative is only approximate. The “will of Zeus” is hardly the single unifying element of the Iliad, but it does seem to be the most important such plot feature.

22. Helmut Erbse, Scholia, III, 275: πῶς γὰρ ἄνανδρος ὁ εἰργαμένος τοσαῦτα; “How can such an unmanly thing be compared to someone who has just accomplished what Agamemnon has?” This indicates the traditional concern, largely as a result of the rhetorical tradition, that the ethos of simile and narrative should be related. See Clausing, Kritik, 77-82.

23. This does not mean that the rest of the simile is fortuitous. As the scholiast points out, there is a lexical expansion of the painfulness (Erbse, III, 275): πὰντα δὲ ὀδυνηρὰ ἔλαβε τὰ ὀνόματα, τὸ ὀξυ (269), τὸ δριμύ (270), τὸ πικρόν (271), ἐπιτείνων τὰς ὀδύνας. “All the names describe the painfulness: the sharpness, the piercing, the bitterness, expanding the notion of wounds.” For “expansion” (ἐπιτείνων), see Semiotics of Poetry, 47-63.

24. Note that the woodsman is overdetermined in the simile by the frequent comparison of a fallen hero to a fallen tree (e.g. Δ 482, E 590, N 389, Π 482).

25. On the peculiarity of the fighting in this scene, especially Hector’s fighting of the “right side,” see von der Mühll, 197-98.

26. The teichomachia seems to be almost an afterthought to deal with the wall built back in Book 7, as the initial 33 lines of Book 12 suggest. It consists mainly of a seesaw battle in which Hector and Aias do not confront each other. The end of the episode (when Hector smashes the wall), with its ἶσα μάχη resolved by Zeus’ intervention and accompanied by a balance simile (M 432-37), recalls the other moments in 𝚯 66 and Λ 84 when Zeus “tips” the scales in the Trojans’ favor (cf. esp. the golden scales of 𝚯 69). The essay of Norman Austin, “The Function of Digressions in the Iliad,” GRBS 7 (1966), 295-312, should remind us that “digression” is not viewed in the same way by Homer as by his post-Aristotelian critics.

27. Note the ὄφρα...τόφρα diction of O 318-22.

28. Winged Word, 231-33.

29. Formale Konventionen der homerischen Epik, 62.

30. Cf. Π 770-1, where these words are repeated at that “equal battle.”

31. See Leafs comment, The Iliad, ad loc. For the “gnomic” character of the passage, see Ernst Ahrens, Gnomen in griechischer Dichtung (Halle, 1937), 33.

32. Hans Trumpy, Kriegerische Fachausdrüke im griechischen Epos (Basel, 1950), 140.

33. Eris is twice described in the Iliad as, ἄμοτον μεμαυῖα, “raging insatiably” (Δ 440, E 518). The epithet θυμοβόρος, “gnawing on the thymos,” is applied only to Eris (six times). Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans, 130-32, discusses further the δαίς/ἔρις nexus.

34. Eco, The Role of the Reader (Bloomington, 1979), 15.

35. Cedric Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Tradition, 249-84. Cf. Karl Reinhardt, Die Ilias und ihr Dichter (Göttingen, 1961), 210:

Kann die Einheit nicht auch eine Art von Ganzen sein, dass man ein bewegtes Ganzes nennen möchte? In dem verschiedenen Ringe, gleich exzentrischen Kreisen auseinander hervorgehend, einander überschneidend einander zuwachsend sich einer über den anderen legen. So dass zu einem zugrunde liegenden Entwurf oder Grundstock Neues nacheinander hinzukam, das teils aus ihm selber sich entwickelte, teils von aussen durch die Umstände hinzugetragen wurde, um mit dem Hauptstamm, mehr oder weniger, zu verwachsen.

To call this “Ganze” an “Einheit” is a rather harsh extension of the meaning of that word. Notopoulos adopts the term “inorganic unity” to describe Homeric narrative (“Parataxis and Homer,” TAPA 80 [1949], 9-10). Both of these oxymorons show how value laden the notion of “unity” is when applied to literary works.

36. Winged Word, 176-215. Peabody does not, of course, omit discussion of other levels of linguistic organization, but his assumption that narrative is a late development which enters the tradition as explication of non-narrative material does not seem the most likely possibility.

37. Such a notion is exemplified in social criticism which defines the “problematic” of any theoretical approach as the questions that govern its mode of social inquiry, but also the questions not asked, and the relationship between them. See Louis Althusser, For Marx, 66-67. For a specifically literary example of such criticism, see Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis, 1983).

38. See, for example, A. Parry, “The Language of Achilles,” TAPA 87 (1956), 1-7; J. A. Russo, “How and What Does Homer Communicate? The Medium and the Message of Homeric Verse,” CJ 71.4 (1976), 289-99; L. Versenyi, Man’s Measure (Buffalo, 1974), 32-42.

39. See von der Mühll, 189-90.

40. G. Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans, 15ff. Thus, a common form of insult is to question a man’s genealogy (e.g., Π 33-35).

41. Cf. the other occurrence of ἀπηλεγέως in the same phrase in Odyssey 1, 373, where Telemachus addresses himself bluntly to the suitors. See also other uses of ἀλέγω with the negative in such phrases as θεῶν ὄπιν οὐκ ἀλέγοντες, “disregarding the watchful eyes of the gods” (Π 388).

42. Adam Parry, “The Language of Achilles,” TAPA 87 (1956), 1-7, makes a similar claim about Achilles’ inability to articulate his “meaning,” but obscures the point by attributing the difficulty to the constraints of oral poetry. The difficulty of saying something new for the first time is not peculiar to oral poetry, since all communication relies on conventions. See the discussion of ratio difficilis below in the Dante chapter. Related discussions of the peculiarity of Achilles’ speech include D. Claus, “Aidos in the Language of Achilles,” TAPA 105 (1975), 13-28; S. Scully, “The Language of Achilles: The ‘OxOtiaaç Formula.” TAPA 114 (1984), 11-27; S. Nimis, The Language of Achilles: Construction vs. Representation,” CW. 79.4 (March-April, 1986), 217-25.

43. Note the parallel between Priam’s “wallowing” in dung and Achilles’ “tossing from side to side” in Ω 5.

44. Cf. Y 222-24 where Achilles is compared to a father weeping for a son, another identification between Achilles and Priam.

45. Note also Achilles’ groaning in Σ 315-6, expanded into a simile of a lion groaning.

46. See Iliad 14, 125, where ἀκούω with the accusative means “understand” (cf. LSJ s.v. II.3). For μύθος meaning “unspoken thought or purpose,” see LSJ s.v. 5.

47. As in B 433-34; γ 473-74; cf. I 92-94; I 222-25; Λ 778-80; 𝚯 485-86; o 304-4, o 501-2, π 55-56; ρ 99-100; ω 489-90.

48. Peter W. Rose, “How Conservative is the Iliad?” PCP 13 (1978), 86-93, outlines the ideological apparatus of Agamemnon’s authority and sketches briefly the Iliad’s implicit critique of various symbolic forms of that authority (scepters, divine birth formulae, etc.). Professor Rose has kindly shown me drafts of work in progress which develop these ideas more fully.

49. Of the many discussions of gift-exchange in a traditional society, I have found most useful that of P. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, 1977), 177-97. Bourdieu uses the term “misrecognition” (méconnaisance) to describe the process by which power relations are perceived not for what they objectively are, but in a way which renders them legitimate in the eyes of the beholder. See also W. Donlan, “The Politics of Generosity in Homer,” Helios 10.2 (1982), 1-15; Bjørn Quiller, “The Dynamics of Homeric Society,” Symbolae Osloenses 56 (1981), 109-55.

50. Nagler notes that the phrase ἔνθα καὶ ἔνθα (B 90) often suggests fruitless activity (Spontaneity, 170 n.), a point well supported by this bee simile. Note other occurrences in similes of Book 2: 397, 462, 476, and most significantly, 779.

51. These two Hesiodic stories, as West notes, are variations of each other. I will therefore use details of the Titanomachy as evidence for the traditional representation of the Typhonomachy. See West’s notes on these stories, Theogony, (Oxford, 1966), 336-38, 379-83.

52. The other “groaning” of the earth is in Theogony 159, for which see above, p. 31.

53. In the Typhonomachy, M. L. West reconstructs one manuscript’s reading for κονάβησε in Theogony 840 to σμαρ]αγησε. See West, “More Notes on the Text of Hesiod,” CQ 12 (1962), 180.

54. West notes that in Homer Okeanos seems to have taken over the role of primeval father from Ouranos (Theogony, 23). Cf. Ξ 201: ’Ωκεανόν τε, θεῶν γένεσιν.

55. T. B. L. Webster, From Mycenae to Homer (New York, 1964), 64-90. West, Theogony, 19: “This succession myth has parallels in oriental mythology which are so striking that a connection is uncontestable.”

56. See West’s commentary on Theo. 706 and 846.

57. Cf. Erga 505-11; Theo. 706, 846, and West’s notes there.

58. The phrase παντοίων ἀνέμων is repeated in a passage of the Erga (618-22) which recalls the evil winds of the Theogony. Cf. also P 56 and ε 293.

59. See Nagler’s discussion of this key passage, Spontaneity, 156-57.

60. B. Fenik. Typical Battle Scenes of the Iliad, 20; W. C. Scott, The Oral Nature of the Homeric Simile, 87. T. Krischer, Formale Konventionen der homerischen Epik, 49-52 and 61-66.

61. E.g., B 455-56, Δ 422-27, Λ 155-57, Λ 305-9, N 795-800, Π 765-70, O 380-83, P 737-39, Y 490-92.

62. The term proairesis is used by Aristotle to indicate a logic of action as it applies to a represented character (“inclination” or “code of behavior” AP 1454a) in terms of class, sex, etc., but this places too much importance on the referent. In a semiotic context, we say that a logic of action is determined by genre rules for “verisimilitude” or, in a more radically innovative case, are constructed in a text; in any case it is based on a discourse. See Roland Barthes’ discussion of proairetic codes in S/Z, tr. R. Miller (New York, 1974).

63. I regret to say that this analogy is not my own invention, but that of Wlad Godzich. In the original ABC Monday Night Football broadcast, Frank Gifford gave the play-by-play (proairesis), Don Meredith regularly discussed the instant replays, explaining what “really” happened, and Howard Cosell performed a third narrative function to be discussed below.

64. See Leaf and von der Mühll on this passage for enumerations of its many difficulties.

65. The relationship of Zeus and the gods to “fate” has long been debated. See B. C. Dietrich, Death, Fate and the Gods (London, 1965), 179-93, for a survey. Reinhardt suggests that the prevarication of Zeus in II 432ff. and Y 168ff. reflects the portrayal of Zeus in the Aithiopis, the work he argues is the source for the Patrokleia and the slaying of Hector (Die Ilias und ihr Dichter, 382-90). If this is indeed a case of intertextual “noise,” it is still a question of determining what motivated the intrusion of a contradictory portrayal. Note that although the deaths of Sarpedon and Hector are said to be “established long ago,” they were actually established by Zeus himself in O 65-67.

66. Especially useful is Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge, 1977).

67. For this important problem, see Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, 1977).

Apollonius

1. See Juri Lotman and B. A. Uspensky, “On the Semiotic Mechanism of Culture,” NLH 9, No. 2 (Winter, 1978), 211-33, for these points about the relationship of culture and non-culture.

2. Whitman writes (Homer, 161): “Few things are more subtle in the Iliad than the way this ‘good-for-nothing,’ the social and physical antitype of Achilles, reiterates the resentment of the hero (sc. Achilles): the theme of the second Book is Delusion, and the truth can appear only in the mouth of a Thersites.” Whitman sees the opposition of Achilles and the rest of the Greeks as the opposition of absolute value and relative value. We should say, however, that two truths are juxtaposed here: that of culture (Odysseus) and that of anti-culture (Thersites), and Achilles is aligned with the latter.

3. Histories 3, 38. The interpretation of the Pindaric fragment has been disputed, but Herodotus’ meaning is clear enough. Cf. J. L. Meyers, “Herodotus and Anthropology,” in Classics and Anthropology, ed. R. R. Marett (New York, 1966), 157.

4. J. R. Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge, 1967), 52-73. Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, 1963), and H. Fraenkel, Early Greek Poetry and Philosophy (Oxford, 1967), ch. 7, make related observations.

5. Besides The Domestication of the Savage Mind, see J. Goody and Ian Watt, “The Consequences of Literacy” in Literacy in Traditional Societies, ed. J. Goody (Cambridge, 1968), 27-68; and Eric Havelock, The Literate Revolution and Its Cultural Consequences (Princeton, 1982); and his Preface to Plato. Havelock’s notion that the use of writing “released psychic energy” is, however, rather vague. In the end it is best to speak of a conjuncture of causes. Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labor, (New York, 1978), for example, argues that the abstraction of use-value into exchange-value, which gives rise to the money-form, was the key factor in the rise of abstract thinking; while Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 233, notes that the concentration of diverse populations is a significant factor.

6. Marsh McCall, Jr., Ancient Rhetorical Theories of Comparison and Simile, 52.

7. This passage is of considerable interest for the relationship between metaphor and simile. See J. Derrida, “White Mythology” in The Margins of Philosophy, tr. A. Bass (Chicago, 1982), 207-71. For a semiotic critique of idealist theories of metaphor, see U. Eco, The Role of the Reader, ch. 2; and Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, ch. 3.

8. Rhetoric 3, 10, 1411a 7 also makes this point.

9. Adolf Clausing, Kritik und Exegese der homerischen Gleichnisse im Altertum (Parchim, 1913), 66-67.

10. Both Clausing, Kritik, 28-59, and J. F. Carspecken, “Apollonius Rhodius and the Homeric Epic,” YCIS 13 (1952), 58-99, make these points and give ample illustrations.

11. Carspecken, “Apollonius” (above note), 67.

12. T. M. Andersson, Early Epic Scenery (Ithaca, 1976), 37, calls Homer’s scenic technique “symbolical, not descriptive,” which is to say that Homer’s scenes do not cohere “mimetically.” See Nagler’s discussion of ι 9, 491 in Spontaneity, 35-36.

13. Fraenkel makes this point repeatedly, Noten zu den Argonautika des Apollonios (Munich, 1968): 32 n. 15; 173 n. 54; 430 n. 180.

14. Note that explicit examples of “analogizing” in Homer, such as Polydamas’ interpretation of the omen in M 200-9 or Phoenix’s “paradigm” of Meleager in the embassy scene, are most unsymmetrical. See Fraenkel’s discussion of the former in Die homerischen Gleichnisse, 3-4; and von der Mühll, Hypomnema, 176, for the latter.

15. The seminal text is Snell, The Discovery of the Mind (New York, 1960). See also E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley, 1951), ch. 1; and Fraenkel, Early Greek Poetry and Philosophy.

16. C. R. Beye, Epic and Romance in the Argonautica of Apollonius (Carbondale, 1982), 79:

“Apollonius is not writing as a spokesman for a community. To the contrary, this is a private narrative about private people.... Apollonius does not ask us to admire Jason or consider him a specimen of the community’s values. He asks us to believe in Jason, and in that Apollonius is successful.”

Similar judgments are given by Carspecken, 88-89, and W. D. Anderson, “Notes on the Simile in Homer and His Successors,” CJ 53 (1957), 83-84. I thus cannot agree with Brooks Otis, Virgil (Oxford, 1964), 40, when he lumps together Homer and Apollonius as representative of the “objective” style in comparison to the “subjective” style of Vergil.

17. Fraenkel, Noten, 162-63; “Apollonius Rhodius as Narrator in Argonautica 2. 1-140,” TAPA 83 (1952), 144-55. See also his discussion of Argo. 3, 775-89 in Noten ad loc.

18. Clausing, Kritik, 28-59.

19. For a survey of the content of Apollonius’ similes, see M. Schellert, De Apollonii Rhodii comparationibus (Halle, 1885); or E. G. Wilkins, “A Classification of the Similes of the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes,” CW 14.21 (April 11, 1921), 162-66.

20. See the discussion of B 144-9 (above, p. 82), and of Λ 558-62 (above, p. 52).

21. See Max Pohlenz, Die Stoa (Göttingen, 1964), 81ff.

22. J. M. Rist, Stoic Philosophy (Cambridge, 1962), 198-200. The early Stoa was heavily influenced by the Cynics, who wished to liberate men by eradicating all cultural institutions (see Rist, 54-80, and Lesky, History of Greek Literature, 669-70).

23. Besides the works cited above in note 15, see A. W. H. Adkins, Merit and Responsibility (Oxford, 1960); J. Russo and B. Simon, “Homeric Psychology and the Oral Epic Tradition,” JHI 29 (1968), 483-98. Others, such as Norman Austin, Archery at the Dark of the Moon (Berkeley, 1975), 81-129, have criticized this view as a form of primitivism. Austin argues that the similes, in particular, are one of Homer’s means of representing psychological events (115-17). This view, taken by Fraenkel, Riezler, and others (see note 1 of the Introduction) is, however, based on the assumption that comparison functions pretty much the same way in all texts in all times. So Austin can assert, for example, that Homer’s similes attempt to “make visible the human order by finding correspondences between it and the order of nature” (176), iterating here the orthodox view of simile since Aristotle. The least that can be said is that there is a difference in degree between Homer and Apollonius with regard to the amount of agency that each attributes to individuals. One index of this is the relatively superfluous divine machinery in the Argonautica (see Lesky, History of Greek Literature, 734). For a most radical assertion of the historical nature of human consciousness, see Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston, 1976).

24. See E. Phinney, “Hellenistic Painting and the Style of Apollonius,” CJ 62 (1967), 145-49.

25. For the role of the similes in constructing character, see J. Clark, “The Medea Similes of Apollonius’ Argonautica,” CJ 68 (1973), 310-15.

26. The Novel Before the Novel (Chicago, 1977), 15. See also C. M. Bowra, Pindar (Oxford, 1964), 137-42.

27. See, for example, Carspecken, 110-25; G. Lawall, “Apollonius’ Argonautica: Jason as Anti-hero,” YCIS 19 (1966), 119-69; M. Hadas, “The Tradition of the Feeble Jason,” CP 31 (1939), 166-68; C. R. Beye, Epic and Romance in the Argonautica of Apollonius (Carbondale, 1982), 77-99; T. M. Klein, “Apollonius’ Jason, Hero and Scoundrel,” QUCC 42 (1983), 115-26.

28. See Erwin Rohde, Der griechische Roman und seine Vorlaüfer, 2nd ed. (Leipzig, 1900), 22-23; W. W. Tarn, Hellenistic Civilization, 3rd ed., tr. G. T. Griffith (London, 1952), 278; Albert Cook, The Classic Line (Bloomington, 1966), 187-88. Heiserman, The Novel Before the Novel, 11-29.

Vergil

1. The former, the more traditional reading, can be seen in critics like V. Pöschl, The Art of Vergil, tr. Gerda Seligson (Ann Arbor, 1962); Brooks Otis, Virgil (Oxford, 1964). The latter can be seen in critics like W. R. Johnson, Darkness Visible (Berkeley, 1976); Mario di Cesare, The Altar and the City (New York, 1974); and in the essays by Adam Parry, R. A. Brooks and W. Clausen in Virgil, ed. Steele Commager (Englewood Cliffs, 1966). One of many attempts to mediate the two positions is H. C. Gotoff, “The Transformations of Mezentius,” TAPA 114 (1984), 191-218.

2. The idea that a constitution comprising a mixture of aristocracy, kingship and democracy might have certain advantages is at least as old as Plato’s Mnexenus (238c-d) and is a peripatetic commonplace. Polybius, who is mentioned by name in Republic I, xxi, 34, gives essentially the same scheme as Cicero in Book Six of his Histories. For more on the background of the basic idea, see Kurt von Fritz, The Theory of the Mixed Constitution in Antiquity (New York, 1954), 60-95; and F. W. Walbank, Polybius (Berkeley, 1972), ch. 5.

3. It is, in fact, the balance among the three simple forms which is important, not the simple mixing, a point emphasized more by Cicero than by Polybius. Cicero notes that other states had “mixed” constitutions, but that like the early Roman monarchy, they did not have a balanced mixture (Rep. II, xxiii, 42): “ita mixta fuerint et in hac (sc. Roma) civitate et in Lacedaemoniorum et in Karthaginiensium, ut temperata nullo fuerint modo.”

4. In his discussion of the origin of the city (Rep. II, 369b-c), Plato states that each man was unable to provide everything for himself. This weakness led to the institution of a metadosis, a “reciprocal exchange,” among men. Government is the institutionalization of this exchange, and justice is simply a “proper” metadosis (Rep. IV, 433a-b). Polybius (6, 2, 5) also cites man’s weakness as the main cause for the rise of political institutions. Cicero, like the Stoics, emphasizes a more positive principle, an innate political instinct (Rep. I, xxv, 39): “eius autem prima causa coeundi est non tam imbecillitas quam naturalis quaedam hominum quasi congregatio.” The two are not mutually exclusive, but each produces a different emphasis on the relationship of nature and culture. For this tradition and its roots, see T. Cole, Democritus and the Sources of Greek Anthropology, American Philological Monographs 25 (1967).

5. See Cicero’s discussion of the ratio of Rome’s site, possessing the advantages of both inland and coastal locations, but none of the disadvantages (Rep. II, v, 10). See also the fragments of Republic III, xxii, 22-25, for the “natural” basis of justice and government.

6. The Greek term is μεταβολή. I have simplified somewhat the relationship among the primary forms; Polybius and Cicero also discuss the changes (conversiones, μεταβολαί) among the pairs (e.g. from tyranny to democracy), and this is the main concern of Plato. Nevertheless, in all three authors there is the basic contrast between a cycle of revolutionary change among the simple forms, on the one hand, and a stable structure of exchange according to a ratio on the other. Cicero is most clear on this point; Polybius less so. See C. O. Brink and F. W. Walbank, “The Construction of the Sixth Book of Polybius,” CQ 4 (1954), 97-122.

7. Typical of this approach is W. S. Anderson, The Art of the Aeneid (Englewood Cliffs, 1969). The similes are treated along these lines by R. A. Hornsby, Patterns of Action in the Aeneid (Iowa City, 1970).

8. Coorior is used twice elsewhere in Vergil: once for a storm’s rising (Geo. 3, 478) and once for the wind’s rising (Aen. 10, 405). Orior is used typically of the sun’s rising (Aen. 3, 277, etc.) or of a race of men “rising” from its ancestors (Aen. 1, 626, etc.).

9. Otis, Virgil (Oxford, 1964), 155.

10. Cf. especially Geo. 2, 61-62:

scilicet omnibus est labor impendendus, et omnes
cogendae in sulcum ac multa mercede domandae.

See also Geo. 2, 35-36, 47-52. I thus cannot agree with Otis’ evaluation of the second Georgic as showing man’s happy cooperation with nature (Virgil,163-64).

11. Otis, Virgil, 181-90.

12. See again Juri Lotman and B. Uspensky, “On the Semiotic Mechanism of Culture,” NLH 9, No. 2 (Winter, 1978), 211-33, for this opposition.

13. Cf. Georgics 3, 244-46:

amor omnibus idem

tempore non alio catulorum oblita leana

saevior erravit campis.

Amor is described as a natural impulse which must be overcome throughout the section of the Georgics (3, 209-83) from which this is taken.

14. Cf. Servius on Aen. 4, 69:

furor enim est amor, in quo nihil est stabile: unde et Cupido puer inductier, quam instabilis et infans, qui non potest fari: unde post paulo (76) incipit effari etc.

Cf. also line 85 where Dido’s amor is called nefandum, “unspeakable.”

15. Cf. the utopia of Eclogue 4 (22-25):

nec magnos metuent armenta leones;

ipsa tibi blandos fundent cunabula flores

occidet et serpens, et fallax herba veneni

occidet.

Snakes and poisonous weeds, it seems, unlike the lions, are unassimilable.

16. The Homeric and Apollonian background for the Dido episode confirms this view. The Diana simile is much closer to Od. 6, 102-8 than to Argo. 3, 876-85; and, in fact, the last half of Aeneid 1 seems to draw most of its inspiration from Odysseus’ Scherian episode (Knauer, Aeneis und Homer [Göttingen, 1964], 152-73). Aeneid 4, on the other hand, is closer to Od. 5, 1-262 (Knauer, 209-14), and Argo. 3 (Felix Ruetten, De Vergilii studiis Apollonianis [Münster, 1912], 66-76). Dido thus shifts from a Nausicaa interpretant to a Medea/Calypso interpretant; and the former is a much more attractive model than the barbaric Medea or Calypso the “Hider.”

17. For the Homeric and Hesiodic background of the earth’s groaning, see above, pp. 31-32, 76-79.

18. Cf. Republic III, xxii, 33; Polybius 6, 2, 5; Aristotle, Politics I, 1254a-b.

19. Cf. 𝚯 69 and see above, pp. 43ff.

20. Note that in the ensuing battle Turnus is compared to a cervus pursued by an Umbrian canis venator (749-55). The comparison of Aeneas to a dog is the only animal simile in the Aeneid which does not have some negative connotation; but then a trained hunting dog has been made part of culture.

21. See M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, tr. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, 1981), 34-35.

22. For a fuller discussion of this analogy, see Marc Shell, The Economy of Literature (Baltimore, 1978), who cites a substantial bibliography on the subject. A full-scale philosophical attempt to identify the relationship between the rise of abstract thought and abstract value (i.e., money) can be found in Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labor (New York, 1978).

Dante

1. C. Singleton, ed., The Divine Comedy (Princeton, 1970), ad loc.

2. C. Singleton, “In exitu Israel de Aegypto” in Twentieth Century Views on Dante, ed. J. Freccero (Englewood Cliffs, 1965), 103-21.

3. E. Auerbach, “figura,” in Scenes form the Drama of European Literature, tr. R. Manheim (Minneapolis, 1984), 11-76. Dante, Convivio II, 1. Of the many works on biblical typology, I have found A. C. Charity, Events and their Afterlife (Cambridge, 1966), to be the most useful.

4. Epistle X, 7, cited by Charity, Events, 201. My translation.

5. Summa theologica I, i, 10. For a discussion see Charity, Events, 173-8, who argues that res ipsae be translated as “historical events.”

6. Auerbach, “figura,” 58-59. Manheim’s translation has been modified according to the German version in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur romanischen Philologie (Bern, 1967), 80-81.

7. The New Testament canon of 27 books was firmly established in the Latin West in three African synods of the fourth century through the influence of Augustine. But a large number of apocryphal works (e.g., the Gospel of Nicodemus), whose status was controversial, still circulated in Dante’s time.

8. See the annotation ad loc. in La Divina Commedia, ed. G. A. Scartazzini (Bologna, 1881).

9. J. Freccero, “Medusa: The Letter and the Spirit,” Yearbook of Italian Studies (1972), 2.

10. Eco, 153-55, 250-56, and the whole section on the “semiotic purport of the aesthetic text,” 261-76.

11. See Aristotle, Rhetoric 3, 2, 1405a12, cited above, p. 136.

12. C. S. Peirce coined the term “abduction” in Collected Papers, II, 623-25. See Eco, 131-42, and his paper “The Theory of Signs and the Role of the Reader,” Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association 14, No. 1 (Spring, 1981), 43-45, and the discussion by Wlad Godzich which follows, 53-55.

13. This should be compared to Riffaterre’s notion of “indirection”; see Semiotics of Poetry, 1-6.

14. See C. T. Davis, Dante and the Idea of Rome (Oxford, 1957).

15. Typological exegesis always “leans” on exchange in the sense that an analogy of some sort must be the basis for establishing an antithesis between figura and fulfillment. Hence Auerbach, “figura,” 29: “The relation between the two events is revealed by an accord or similarity.... Often vague similarities in the structure of events or in their attendant circumstances suffice to make the figura recognizable.” We would restate this as “suffice to make the ratio difficilis acceptable.”

16. The veltro has been interpreted both politically (e.g., Singleton, ad loc.) and religiously (e.g., Sapegno, ad loc.). We should remember, however, that political and religious allegories are not two different “levels” of meaning, but two terms of a dialectic which constitutes both the political and the religious realms into models.

17. The “silence” of the divine presence is a major theme of the Confessions. See, for example, 9, 10; 10, 2; and J. Freccero, “The Laurel and the Fig Tree,” Diacritics 2 (1972), 35-36.

18. Compare the pelle macolata of the lonza with the Virgin who was conceived immaculata. St. Lucy, whose martyrdom was a victory over haughtiness, balances off the leone (Scartazzini, ad loc.), and Beatrice, whose eyes shine like the stars (II, 55), balances off the lupa, whose visage so terrifies the pilgrim (I, 53).

19. Sapegno, ad loc.

Milton

1. See Eco, 125-29 for the inherently transitory character of the “Global Semantic Universe,” and 139-42, for the dialectic of codes and messages.

2. Note that Eden unfolds in Book Four of Paradise Lost before the eyes of Satan, to whom it is no longer available. Cf. the similes comparing Satan and the devils to various “anti-pastoral” types: a city dweller visiting the country (9, 446-54), merchants (2, 636-42), pioneers (1, 675-78), and sailors (4, 159-65).

3. See Arnold Stein, Answerable Style (Minneapolis, 1953), 73; J. R. Knott, “Symbolic Landscapes in Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies 2 (1970), 37-58; J. B. Broadbent, Some Graver Subject (London, 1960), 185; A. B. Giamatti, The Earthly Paradise in Renaissance Epic (Princeton, 1970), 295-351; John Steadman, Epic and Tragic Structure in Paradise Lost (Chicago, 1976), 20-28.

4. The portrayal of an amoenus locus as a sensuous trap is exemplified in the Odyssey (Scheria and the islands of Circe and Calypso), imitated by Vergil (Carthage in Aen. 4), Ariosto (Alcina’s island in Orlando Furioso 6), and many others. See Giamatti, The Earthly Paradise (previous note).

5. Milton’s narrator has other faces as well. See Ann Ferry, Milton’s Epic Voice (Cambridge, 1963); and Christopher Grose, Milton’s Epic Process (New Haven, 1973), discussed below.

6. Samuel Johnson, “Milton,” in Lives of the English Poets, repr. with numerous other older critics of Milton in Milton Criticism: Selections from Four Centuries, ed. J. Thorpe (New York, 1966), 81-82.

7. T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (New York, 1957), 162, 173. The earlier stages of the Milton “controversy” have been made available in Milton: The Critical Heritage, ed. J. Shawcross, 2 vols. (New York, 1970-72). The post-Eliot debate can be gleaned from R. M. Adams, Ikon: John Milton and the Modern Critics (Ithaca, 1955), among others.

8. Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin (New York, 1967), 2 n. For a similar view which focuses on the similes, see Douglas Knight, “The Dramatic Center of Paradise Lost,” South Atlantic Quarterly 63 (1964), 44-59.

9. John Steadman, Milton and the Renaissance Hero (Oxford, 1967); Milton’s Epic Characters (Chapel Hill, 1959); Epic and Tragic Structures in Paradise Lost (Chicago, 1976); T. J. B. Spencer, “Paradise Lost: the Anti-Epic,” in Approaches to Paradise Lost, ed. C. A. Patrides (London, 1968), 81-98; M. di Cesare, “Paradise Lost and the Epic Tradition,” Milton Studies 1 (1969), 31-50; S. P. Revard, “Milton’s Critique of Heroic Warfare in Paradise Lost V and VI,” SEL 7 (1967), 119-39; M. B. McNamee, Honor and the Epic Hero (New York, 1960). With special reference to the similes, see C. M. Bowra, From Vergil to Milton (Oxford, 1949), esp. 228; Kingsley Widmer, “The Iconography of Renunciation: The Miltonic Simile,” in Milton’s Epic Poetry, ed. C. A. Patrides (London, 1967), 121-31; D. P. Harding, Studies in the Classical Background of Paradise Lost (Urbana, 1962).

10. Christopher Grose, Milton’s Epic Process (New Haven, 1973), 151.

11. Grose, 154. A related view of the similes is taken by G. Hartman, “Milton’s Counterplot,” ELH 25 (1958), 1-12.

12. The phrase is a pastiche of Paradise Lost 7, 178 and 9, 24.

13. T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood (New York, 1930), 87. F. R. Leavis, Revaluation (London, 1936), 60, compares the composition of Paradise Lost to bricklaying. I do not cite these critics because I agree with their judgment that Milton is “bad” for poets to read, but because their response to the poetry of Paradise Lost recognizes an essential characteristic of the narrative organization. A more favorable estimation of this aspect of Milton’s poetry can be found in C. S. Lewis, Preface to Paradise Lost (Lnodon, 1942), 43-45.

14. See Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis, 1983); and the introduction by Wlad Godzich, xxvii-xxx. Paradise Lost can thus be seen to accomplish within the epic tradition the “novelization” of stylizations that Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, argues is characteristic of the novel.