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Temporalities, Texts, Ideologies
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Temporalities, Texts, Ideologies
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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA
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Bobby Xinyue and Contributors have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work.
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for,
any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given
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regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased
to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes.
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Contents
v
vi Contents
Bibliography 233
Index of Passages 259
General Index 267
Contributors
Rebecca Batty teaches at St Mary’s Catholic High School, Lancashire, UK. Her
research interests focus on Latin literature, ecocriticism and depictions of the
natural environment in the late Republic and early Roman Empire. She completed
her doctoral thesis, titled ‘Rivers and the Redefinition of Time in Ovid’s Poetry’
in 2021 at the University of Nottingham. Most recently, she reviewed Irby’s Water
in Antiquity (2021) in The Classical Review 72 (2022).
Tom Geue teaches Latin at the Australian National University. His 2019 book,
Author Unknown, proposed some new ways of working with anonymous
authorship. His current project, Major Corrections: The Materialist Philology of
Sebastiano Timpanaro, lies between intellectual history and classical scholarship.
It seeks to show technical philology and militant Marxism working together
towards a future of full human flourishing.
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viii Contributors
This volume began its life as a conference held in Venice in September 2019.
Some of the chapters here are based on papers presented at the conference,
others are commissioned at a later stage. I would like to offer heartfelt thanks to
Ovanes Arkopyan, Siobhan Chomse, Elena Dahlberg, Helen Dixon, Stephen
Harrison, Andrew Laird, Tiziana Lippiello, Marco Sgarbi, and Caroline Stark for
their contribution and stimulating discussion at the conference; and David
Fearn and James Ker for offering excellent chapters on topics which give this
volume much-needed balance and variety.
Among the many people who helped me with putting together this volume, I
would like to thank firstly Ingrid De Smet. As my mentor during my British
Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, Ingrid played a critical role in the organization
of the conference and kept a close eye on the intellectual quality of the volume.
Without her input, this volume would not have been possible. Secondly, I would
like to thank Lily Mac Mahon and Zoe Osman at Bloomsbury for supporting me
every step of the way. Their enthusiasm for this volume certainly made my life
much easier. Of course, I must also thank the press’s readers for their constructive
criticism and incisive comments, which undoubtedly improved the quality of
the work presented here. Furthermore, I would like to thank Louise Chapman
and Michael Hendry for compiling the indices (a horrendous task which I shall
never attempt by myself again); and Sacha Scott for copyediting and proofreading.
Tom Coward deserves a special mention for his outstanding hospitality in
Venice.
Last but not least, I would like to thank the British Academy and Ca’Foscari
University of Venice for the organization of the conference; the University of
Leicester for offering me a home when things were looking a bit bleak; and King’s
College London for bringing this project to a satisfactory conclusion.
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Introduction
Bobby Xinyue
The encircling ocean awaits us. Let us seek the blessed fields, the fields and rich
isles where every year the earth unploughed returns grain, and the vine unpruned
continually flowers . . . Not to this land did Argo’s oarsman drive the pine, nor
did the unchaste Colchian set her foot; not to this land did Sidonian sailors turn
their yardarms, nor Ulysses’ toiling crew. Jupiter set those shores apart for the
righteous race when he debased the Golden Age with bronze, then hardened
that age with iron, from which a blessed escape is offered to the righteous with
me as their seer.
Horace, Epodes 16.41–661
1
2 Temporalities, Texts, Ideologies
world yet conceived directly in opposition to it.3 Life on the Blessed Isles
represents a different kind of temporality – the long march of history is
interrupted by a mythic age which is both past and future – but not a total
suspension of time (quotannis, 43). But where there is timekeeping, there is also
inequality and exploitation: nature produces for mankind on time, while humans
don’t have to pick up a single shift (inarata, 43). The utopian bliss of the poet’s
escapist fantasy (fuga, 66) is a patchwork of different literary, philosophical and
religious concepts of time. There are echoes of the utopian imagery in Homer,
Hesiod, Pindar, Plato and near-contemporary Roman texts (such as Virgil’s
Eclogue 4), as well as traces of Eastern thought on epochal cycles and notions of
redemption.4 Horace’s vision, moreover, holds a mirror up to the poet’s present.
As impiety marked the end of man’s Golden Age (57–8; cf. Hes. Op. 134–7,
236–7),5 so, too, has it brought a stop to Rome’s Republican era; but good times
await those who are pious (66). Time is moralized, polarized and even politicized.
Nor is time a linear process that proceeds unidirectionally, uninterruptedly and
neutrally along the past–present–future axis.
This volume shows that the exploration of time as a locus of philosophical
and political thought has been an important activity in Greek and Latin literature;
and this in turn served to shape the conceptualization of macro and historical
time in the literary imagination of the early modern period. Approaching this
topic through four distinct themes (presence, spatialized time, temporal patterns
and finality), the essays in this volume highlight the ways in which time is
construed as relational, contestable and politically inflected across a number of
texts and intellectual cultures. As the contributors to this volume represent a
wide range of research specialisms, covering a variety of authors, genres and
periods, engaging with different critical theories and interpretive models, each
chapter speaks to specific debates and offers fresh perspectives on the literary
figuration of time in a particular subfield of ancient or early modern studies. At
the same time, this book offers a reading of time in literature not as a backdrop
to or component of storytelling, but as a lively site of contemplations on ontology,
relationhood and ideology, enabling the reader to locate a text’s philosophical
and political activities in its temporal fabric.
This collective approach is underpinned by a point of conceptual common
ground. The investigation carried out here seeks to understand how time and
temporal relationships are imagined and negotiated in specific cultural and
historical contexts. That is to say, we set out to investigate temporality rather than
metaphysical time per se. The distinctive characteristic of temporality identified
by modern scholarship – namely, its twofold concern with relationality (i.e. how
Introduction 3
different periods and aspects of time relate) and with the imaginary (i.e. the
subjective perception and experience of time)6 – offers an ideal analytical
framework to elicit the concept that the positioning, shaping and delineation of
time in literary discourses are no mere artistic arrangement but a process of
intellectual negotiation and a potentially political one at that.
The volume’s core strength and key contribution to scholarship and critical
debate lies in its consistent offering of alternatives to or modifications of
narratological modelling of time.7 The contributors set out to achieve this
through considered implementation of modern philosophical theories (such as
phenomenology and historical ontology) and urgent dialogue with current
political issues (such as the ecological crisis and labour market exploitation). By
engaging directly with ongoing conversations in contemporary science,
philosophy and politics, several of the volume’s chapters demonstrate the
relevance and ready applicability of the product of these conversations as
innovative interpretive tools for literary figurations of temporality. At the same
time, this volume takes forward the crucial insights of classical scholarship on
topics such as aetiological discourses,8 timekeeping in antiquity,9 the production
of temporality in Greek and Roman epic,10 and the development and manipulation
of calendars in ancient Rome,11 and illustrates how these insights can propel
fresh understandings of temporality in a broad range of literary texts and
historical situations. In a number of cases, the contributors also draw on the
techniques and technologies of cinema and photography to render apparent the
ways in which the study of temporality thrives on interdisciplinary openness.
The volume’s explicit engagement with contemporary intellectual developments
and political issues dovetails with its consistent exploration of the wider impact
of classical scholarship on critical approaches to time in literature. It is through
this combination that the volume both maps out new ways for studying
temporality in ancient and early modern texts and expands the conceptual
frameworks of modern critical theory.
Entering a crowded field, this volume differentiates itself from some recent
contributions to the question of time in literature in a number of ways.12 First,
the majority of the texts studied here lean towards the non-narrative (or at least
not straightforwardly narrative), in particular philosophical dialogues and
treatises, didactic and lyric poetry, epistles, epigrams and versified calendars.
While conventional narrative genres such as epic occupy the attention of
a number of chapters, and foundational texts such as the Odyssey, Metamorphoses
and Paradise Lost remain the subject of enquiry, the volume’s intentional
coverage of non-epic and non-historiographical texts serves to demonstrate
4 Temporalities, Texts, Ideologies
its principal claim that time functions not merely as a mechanism in the ordering
of narrative but as a critical space for texts to interrogate the order of things.13
Indeed, as a number of subsequent chapters show, the examination of how
time operates or manifests itself in literary genres that are not driven by a plot or
the sequentiality of events can jolt the reader into fresh considerations of
questions of temporality and relationhood, such as: does the temporal fabric of
a text inform us of how time is perceived and understood? What does a text have
to say about having a relationship with time and with forces and phenomena
that are always already there? How does a text articulate the significance of
recognizing this relationship? These and other cognate questions propel the
volume’s attempt to steer the discussion of literary time away from the province
of narrative.
Second, this volume identifies the value of ancient and early modern texts for
critical discussions on temporality in the future – both within and beyond the
confines of academic research. The texts examined here have much to offer to
current scholarship on the non-linearity of time, the production and experience of
time and the existentially incomplete nature of texts (and their interpretations) –
topics which occupy a notable space in modern philosophy. A number of essays in
the volume also respond directly to recent approaches to the study of time in
the humanities and social sciences, exploring how they may help to shed new
light on or find new uses for ancient texts in contemporary contexts. Specifically,
the contributors engage with critical trends that have productively expanded on
Bakhtin’s concept of the ‘chronotope’ and offered new ways of conceptualizing
time informed by sociocultural and environmental criticism.14 The key proposition
of anthropological studies on time – namely, time is an ongoing process of
‘construction’ being made and remade at multiple individual, social and cultural
levels – underpins the analysis of the ideology of time in this volume, enabling the
interpretations of specific texts to speak to broader social and political issues in
antiquity, early modernity and beyond.15 At the same time, the emergence of a
more spatialized and (in recent years) ecologically oriented conception of time,
with special emphases on the historical layering of landscape and the interactions
between human and natural activities over time,16 is here taken further by several
chapters. These essays in particular urge readers to consider how ancient and early
modern texts have already raised – and will continue to raise – important questions
about the place of mankind in the world and broader ideas of progress, inevitability
and decline.
Third, the essays in this volume situate the literary figuration of temporality
at the crossroads of narratology, historicism and theories of genre, treating it as
Introduction 5
emerges in the second half. Indeed, when Apollo at the end of the poem mentions
the ‘other men’ who might become the masters of the Cretans, the god appears to
think in human-historical time as he acknowledges the shifting of power among
men. As Walter argues, while there is something characteristically archaic about
the way that the poem constructs human time as subordinate to and responding
to divine time, the notable variations and interactions of different temporalities
in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo point to the conception of distinct temporal
frameworks for gods and humans, which represents an important step in the
development of ancient religious and metaphysical thought.
Susannah Ashton’s essay (Chapter 5) tackles an important issue in a sorely
under-appreciated text: the figure of Chronos/Kronos in Pherecydes’
Heptamychos, a sixth-century bce cosmo-theogonical treatise that has often
been read through a retrospective lens informed by later Platonic ideas about
time. By considering the text’s presentation of Chronos in relation to sixth-
century ideas about time and eternity, Ashton sheds new light on Pherecydes’
understanding of the nature of divinity and the cosmos. In particular, she
suggests that Chronos’ creation in five cosmic nooks, later used as sites for
metempsychosis, not only reflects Pherecydes’ pioneering conceptualization of
Chronos’ role in the temporal organization of the cosmos, but even anticipates
his eventual transformation into Kronos. The significance of the Heptamychos, as
Ashton argues, thus lies in its daring reimagining of the nature of divinity,
through which Pherecydes puts forward an innovative conception of a cosmos
in which time and eternity were not distinct but unified.
The question of what object-oriented ontology and ecocriticism can do for
our appreciation of Greek lyric and its relevance for today is the subject of David
Fearn’s essay (Chapter 6). Pindar’s Olympian 10 presents, in part at least, a
meditation on temporal processes of transformation of space into place, within
and beyond the parameters of human cultural cognition. By attending to Pindar’s
lyric language, sound and imagery with fresh ontological concerns, Fearn shows
that a ‘traditional’ philological close reading of Olympian 10 – or indeed of any
lyric poem – can become integral to a broader ecocritical project reassessing
human-world relations in ethical as well as aesthetic terms that intersect directly
with pressing issues of environmental philosophy. In posing the question of how
we even understand what Olympia is as a space or place, Pindar’s poem, as Fearn
points out, involves the reader in a process of reconfiguring the security of their
own subjectivity in relation to nature.
Part Three, ‘Temporal Patterns and the Politics of Latin Literature’, considers
the figuring of chronological patterns and progressions in Latin literature, and
8 Temporalities, Texts, Ideologies
enquires into the ideological thrust behind each author’s handling of these
temporal configurations. The overall claim of this section is that the varied
textual presentation of the motion, order and quantity of time goes to the core of
where a text positions itself in relation to authority, whether that is literary
orthodoxy or political hegemony. Just as David Fearn’s study of Pindaric
landscape extends Duncan Kennedy’s exploration of the uses of ontological
studies for ancient texts, the ecocritical angle of Fearn’s chapter finds further
expression in Rebecca Batty’s reading of the interaction of time and the
environment in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Chapter 7). Combining fresh dialogues
with recent ecological theories and in-depth engagement with Bakhtin’s
‘chronotope’, Batty argues that the extreme flooding and drying behaviour of the
rivers in the Metamorphoses can indicate moments of timelessness in the
narrative, which are key to Ovid’s fluid epic temporality. The focus of her essay is
the spatiality of river behaviour, both in the sense of spatial excess in flooding
and in the retrogressive journey of the rivers retreating from the apocalyptic
heat caused by Phaethon’s fall (Met. 1.279–347 and 2.241–59). In particular,
Batty notes that the depiction of the movements of specific rivers – the Nile,
Rhine and Tiber – can be seen to encapsulate not only Ovid’s playful manipulation
of narrative time, but also the poet’s negotiation of literary tradition and political
time. Batty’s essay thus sheds new light on the extent to which the natural
environments in the Metamorphoses serve as a stomping ground for the poet’s
critique of time and power in the Augustan period.
Questions of temporality have usually stood in the background of scholarship
on Roman biography. Martin Stöckinger (Chapter 8) suggests that a re-
examination of temporal patterns in the works of Suetonius, Nepos and Tacitus
enables us to better appreciate Roman biography as a genre deeply concerned
with human agency, political introspection and the values of history. Stöckinger
elicits the ‘messy’ chronology and shifting focalization of Suetonius’ Life of
Tiberius (72–74) through a narratologically informed examination; but the
conclusion he reaches highlights that the patterning of time in biography serves
to explore the tension between contingency and determinism. Likewise,
Stöckinger’s reading of Nepos and of Tacitus’ Agricola underlines the extent to
which Roman biography is thoroughly preoccupied with not just the career of
the written individual, but broader questions of Roman identity and Rome’s
political trajectory and future.
Can the length of a text be in some way connected to the transition of political
power in the Roman world? Tom Geue (Chapter 9) shows us that the brevity or
lengthiness of Latin literature at the turn of the Domitianic and Nervan-Trajanic
Introduction 9
periods is a reflex of social hierarchy. Branching from James Ker’s work on the
politics of ‘time pressure’ as figured in the imperial-era clepsydra (water-clock)
and its different valences across Pliny and Martial,21 Geue brings out further the
connection between time, class and textual length. Pliny’s repudiation of brevity
in speech-making (Epistles 1.20) shows that shorts and longs in this era are
heavily politicized aesthetic signals: brevity is closely tied to the insufferable
subjection and self-curbing of the Domitianic blackout, whereas an explosion in
length is hitched to the new dawn. Against this backdrop, Geue explores how
Martial tries to ape this move from brevity to length in Book 10, but ends up
shrinking under the weight of comparison with the man himself in the famous
epigram dedicated to Pliny (Ep. 10.20). Pliny then returns the temporal squeeze
on epigram when he sends Martial off with a letter on his death (Epistles 3.21),
in which he trims this very epigram by half. At stake here, as Geue neatly
illustrates, is nothing short of a power tussle over who and what political class
has the right of access to time.
Moving from Graeco-Roman antiquity to the early modern period, Part Four,
‘The End of Time’, focuses on the different kinds of endpoints in time, and
examines how literary negotiations of these endpoints are interwoven with
contemplations of morality, progress and spirituality. Catharine Edwards
(Chapter 10) examines the ways in which time, in Seneca’s Epistulae morales, is
conceived of as an expendable resource and is corporealized and moralized. In
his opening letter, Seneca reminds the reader that se cotidie mori (‘he dies each
day’, Letter 1.2), a paradoxical message which Seneca elaborates in subsequent
letters in relation both to the importance of the individual day and to the
perpetual presence of death. Later on, Letter 12 opens with a poignant
acknowledgement of the effects of time on the individual human body. For
Seneca, as Edwards shows, the single day is the unit of time on which a
philosophical approach to life should focus, while epistolary writing, rooted in
the individual day, offers the ideal medium through which to put this approach
into practice. Edwards suggests that it is through this pointed assertion of the
paramount importance of the day that the Epistulae morales challenge the
shadow cast by imperial displeasure over their author’s immediate future.
The importance of Ovid’s Fasti and the role it played in shaping early modern
poetic responses to the evolution of the calendar are the subject of Bobby
Xinyue’s essay (Chapter 11). Using the Feast of the Annunciation (25 March) as
a case study, Xinyue shows how Italian humanist poets (Ludovico Lazzarelli,
Battista Mantovano and Ambrogio ‘Novidio’ Fracco) explored this day’s
significance as the inception of Christianity, and variously presented it as the
10 Temporalities, Texts, Ideologies
further connections. For instance, one could consider the wide appeal and
different applications of ecocritical approaches to time in literature by reading
the contributions of Fearn, Batty and Hardie together; the politics involved in
the manipulation of or innovative play with time are treated in the essays of
Ashton, Stöckinger, Geue, Edwards and Xinyue; original observations on the
metaphors used to conceptualize time are offered by Kahane, Ker, Fearn, Batty,
Edwards and Hardie; new efforts to trace how ideas emerge over time can be
found in the works of Kennedy, Walter and Ashton. These and other possible
ways of reading this volume not only attest to the richness of the topic, but also
serve as the starting point of identifying future directions of research.
Notes
1 Text is taken from Klingner’s edition, Q. Horati Flacci Opera (Leipzig: Teubner,
1959). Translation is my own.
2 For an overview of the Golden Age in the Graeco-Roman tradition, see Gatz (1967).
3 Essential scholarship on Epode 16 include: Hierche (1974: 99–108), Kraggerud (1984:
129–68), Nisbet (1984), Fitzgerald (1988), Mankin (1995: 10–12, 244–72), Oliensis
(1998: 77–98), Watson (2003: 2–3, 20–30, 479–533), Harrison (2007: 130–4) and
Stocks (2016: 153–74).
4 See esp. Hom. Od. 4.563–8, 7.112–32, 9.116–41; Hes. Op. 109–26, 225–37; Pind. Ol.
2.61–75; Pl. Ti. 24e–25a; Criti. 114d–115c, 120e–121a; Verg. Ecl. 4.18–45. It is
thought that some combination of Sibylline prophecies and Eastern religious
traditions, which appear to have informed Virgil’s fourth Eclogue (Nisbet 1978), may
also be at work in this epode. Furthermore, the unmistakable similarity between
Horace’s description of the Blessed Isles and Plutarch’s Life of Sertorius 8.2–3 points
to a common source, most likely Sallust’s Historiae. Also relevant perhaps is Diod.
Sic. 5.19 and 6.1.4 (the latter records Euhemerus’ account of an imaginary journey to
the utopian island of Panchaea). See Watson (2003: 480–3, 512–30) with further
references.
5 Note esp. the Hesiodic expression ὕβριν . . . ἀτάσθαλον (‘wicked outrage’, Op. 134),
with discussion by West (1978: 185) and Clay (2003: 87–8). On the association
between the invention of seafaring and impiety, see West (1978) on Hes. Op. 236–7;
Kraggerud (1984: 152), Mankin (1995: 267–8) and Watson (2003: 525–6).
6 Ogle (2019: 314–15).
7 See esp. Genette (1980). While it would be unfair to describe Genettian narratology
as mere taxonomy, its fundamental concern – and dominant influence in today’s
literary criticism – is the formal dynamics of narrative temporality. For Genette,
narrative linearity gives way to diversity when there is variation in the order,
12 Temporalities, Texts, Ideologies
15
16
1
Dialectic at a Standstill
Homer, Image and the Nature of Temporality*
Ahuvia Kahane
Trinity College Dublin
Introduction
In this essay, I want to consider time and temporality in Homer’s verse, at the
notional beginning of narrative in the literary traditions of the West. Pace
common conceptions of the linear (or largely linear, day-by-day, notwithstanding
flashbacks, etc.) progression of events in Homer’s verse (ἦμος δ᾽ ἠριγένεια φάνη
ῥοδοδάκτυλος Ἠώς, etc.), and drawing above all on an analysis of visual
attributes, I argue that Homer’s time is inherently inseparable from the complex,
multitemporal structure of cognition and action and their relation to the
phenomenal world.
In practical terms, I focus on just one word, δολιχόσκιος, ‘long-shadowed’, as
it is usually translated, which in Homer is often used to describe spears. At first
glance, this epithet may seem unremarkable. Indeed, it has attracted only passing
critical attention in the past. But let us not forget that throughout history, shadow,
and indeed light, have always been used to tell time.1 That, as we shall see, is what
δολιχόσκιος, does, in Homer and beyond.
I begin with brief preparatory general comments in Section 1, on linear
chronology and on more complex forms of temporality. In Section 2, I introduce
the sequence of events in Iliad 5.15–19, a short battle scene between Phegeus
and Diomedes, which I will discuss in detail. At first glance, time seems to
progress step by step in a linear manner in this scene which encapsulates Homer’s
narratives of victory and death. Nevertheless, considering the scene’s most
distinct verbal element, the common epithet–noun phrase δολιχόσκιον ἔγχος,
suggests, unavoidably, I argue, a different form of temporality. I show that this
expression is made up of separate visual components that can only be united if
17
18 Temporalities, Texts, Ideologies
In antiquity as, indeed, in history and life, we often think of time as an abstract,
uniform continuum, plotted and quantified on a linear (Cartesian) axis: t1, t2, t3 . . . tn,
along which events (776 bce – the first Olympic games; 730 – the First Messenian
War; 621 – Draco; 594 – Solon; 515 – Hippias; 490 – Marathon; etc.) are set.
Indeed, already Aristotle (Physics 219a22–6) suggests that we perceive time as
change, or rather as ‘movement’ (κίνησις, thus expressed in direct, sensory terms2)
with regard to the ‘before’ and the ‘after’. He famously defines time as ‘the number of
change’ (ἀριθμός κινήσεως, Physics 220a24–6), a quantified, sequential process.3
There are many practical uses for well-ordered, linear time.4 It allows us to
normalize and regulate literary, juridical, scholarly, ideological and political
narratives of history, culture, value and the self. As Bonnie Honig, for example,
suggests:5
Belief in a linear time sequence is invariably attended by belief that that sequence
is either regressive (a Fall narrative) or progressive . . . the time sequence itself is
seen to be structured by causal forces that establish meaningful, orderly
connections between what comes before and what comes after (Decline or Rise),
such that one thing leads to another.
ἐν χρόνῳ γὰρ πᾶσα κίνησις καὶ τέλους τινός, οἷον ἡ οἰκοδομική, καὶ τελεία ὅταν
ποιήσῃ οὗ ἐφίεται· ἢ ἐν ἅπαντι δὴ τῷ χρόνῳ ἢ τούτῳ. ἐν δὲ τοῖς μέρεσι τοῦ
χρόνου πᾶσαι ἀτελεῖς, καὶ ἕτεραι τῷ εἴδει τῆς ὅλης καὶ ἀλλήλων.
Every motion or process of change exists in time, and is a means to an end, for
instance the process of building a house; and it is perfect when it has effected its
end. Hence a motion [κίνησις, i.e., the process of change] is perfect either when
viewed over the whole time of its duration, or at the moment when its end has
been achieved. The several motions occupying portions of the time of the whole
are imperfect, and different in kind from the whole and from each other.
And yet, students of temporality have, for a very long time, offered substantive
challenges to linear conceptions of time and of time in narrative, arguing instead,
in different ways, for ‘plural temporalities and tempos’.11 Forty years ago, in his
widely influential Time and Narrative, Paul Ricoeur, for example, invoking
Martin Heidegger’s seminal Being and Time, set out a basic phenomenological
perspective:12
As is well known, Heidegger reserves the term temporality (Zeitlichkeit) for . . .
the dialectic of coming to be, having been, and making present. In this dialectic,
time is entirely desubstantialized. The words ‘future,’ ‘past,’ and ‘present’ disappear,
and time itself figures as the exploded unity of the three temporal ekstases.
Such time is, by and large, more complex, more unruly, less easy to deploy in the
name of regulatory ends, and in this sense, perhaps more ethically responsible.13
In this essay, focussing on just one example from Homer’s Iliad, I want to suggest
that, pace linear readings, ‘plural temporalities and tempos’ are, in fact, at the very
20 Temporalities, Texts, Ideologies
heart of Homer’s language and thought. Ultimately, such plurality can help
us understand the values and the ethics of Homer’s world and worlds further
afield.
But for the fact that the narrative is made of words, this scene unfolds rather
vividly, somewhat like a cinematic (indeed, kinematic – from kinêsis, thus ‘of the
movement of time’) sequence.15 It also seems, at first, to attest to a linear
temporality in which time, parsed by grammatical clauses and by verbs marking
spatial movement, can be described as the ‘number of change’. In the opening
clause (T1) Phegeus ‘first’ (πρότερος) throws (προΐει) his ‘long-shadowed spear’
(δολιχόσκιον ἔγχος); in the next clause (T2) the spearhead, (ἀκωκή | ἔγχεος) flies
(ἤλυθ᾽) past its target; the spear misses (οὐδ᾽ ἔβαλ᾽, T3); Diomedes attacks
(ὄρνυτο) ‘second’ (ὕστερος) with his ‘bronze’ (χαλκῷ) spear (T4); the ‘missile’
(βέλος) does not fly from his hand (ἔκφυγε) in vain and hits home (T5); it strikes
(ἔβαλε) Phegeus between in the nipples (T6); Phegeus is cast (ὦσε) to the ground
(and dies, T7).16 It’s a ‘typical’ battle scene.17 The sequence seems to establish a
natural, isomorphic overlap between the ordered (πρότερος . . . ὕστερος . . .)
movement of time (T1 . . . Tn), numbered lines of verse (15, 16, 17, 18, 19 – only
in the written text, of course18), and plot action that is propelled by the force of
martial virtue, that leads up to the endpoint (an Aristotelian τέλος) of victory/
Dialectic at a Standstill 21
death, and that implicitly embodies Homeric ideology and its ethical/political
values: excellence (aretê), fame (kleos) and the so-called heroic-code by which
heroes live and die.19 All this is vividly presented in flurry of verbs of movement
and verbalized visual descriptions of weapons, of shadows and flashes of
bronze.20
Nevertheless, I want to suggest, this linear reading and, fundamentally,
the visual imagery that sustains it collapse under scrutiny and point, profitably,
to a different perception of time. Let us focus on the epithet δολιχόσκιος,
‘traditionally translated as long-shadowed’ (Beck, LfgrE).21 The epithet is notable
for its distinct, highly formulaic usage.22 In our passage in particular, the epithet
stands out in the very first line of this exchange, not least in relation to other
nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs and conjunctions in the passage, which are
among the most general (semantically) and most common (in terms of
frequency) in Homer and in epic. Regardless, it is understandable that the visual
description of a spear should attract some of our attention. After all, the spear is
an instrument of death. And death, the engine of ‘pity and fear’, is at the heart of
battle scenes, heroic life and the Iliad. It is exactly what we want to see in our
mind’s eye.23
At first glance, δολιχόσκιος may nevertheless seem like something of a
disappointment. The sense ‘long-shadowed’ is widely accepted but already the
scholia (Σ D Il. 6.44), for example, were dissatisfied with this meaning, and have
also suggested, albeit unconvincingly, ‘that can be cast to a long distance’, or
‘having grown in the shade and therefore long’.24 Rouse was more direct. He
thought that ‘long-shadowed’ was, ‘not appropriate to a spear, which suggests a
“flash” rather than a “shadow.” ’25 Kirk sourly dismisses the matter: ‘there is no real
objection to this epithet’s most obvious meaning, “with long shadow,” to which
no reasonable alternative has been proposed’.26
Within Rouse’s reservations and Kirk’s unenthusiastic verdict, let me
nevertheless suggest, lies an acute problem which has to do, not simply with style
or semantics, but with the nature of vision and language, cognition, time and
the world.
At the beginning of our scene in Iliad 5.15–19, Phegeus casts his δολιχόσκιον
ἔγχος. Flying through air, the spear’s ‘long shadow’ must be trailing on
the ground. Strictly speaking, spear and shadow are in two different places
(Figure 1.1).
The fact of the matter is that the physical human eye cannot literally focus on
two different objects in material space at a single point in time or look at two
images at once. We can only depict such complex objects in a picture, or in the
22 Temporalities, Texts, Ideologies
As we shall see in the next section, such relations between cognition and
the world are inseparable from the nature of time and from the essence of
Homeric temporality. Herein, I will suggest, lies the most important function of
the epithet.
‘Long-shadowed spears’ may be images of cognition, but they are not simply
invisible thoughts or transcendental objects in our minds. The moment of flight
separates the image of a spear and the image of its long shadow trailing on the
ground, but there are many other moments in the trajectory of a spear that are
part of ‘what it is to be a spear’. Such moments occur, for example, in the past of
a spear’s flight, before it is cast, when it may be stuck upright, deep in the ground,
with its shiny point in the air (Od. 10.151–4), leaning against a wall outside
of the house (Od. 17.29), indoors in a spear-stand (Od. 1.127–8), or on the
ground – with or without a visible shadow which may or may not be accounted
for.32 There are also moments in the future of a spear’s flight, when it reaches the
end of its trajectory, either missing its mark (as in Od. 5.15–17), or, most notably,
when it has hit its designated target. At such moments, in the real world, spear
and shadow unite at a single point in space and can be observed as a single visual
object (Figure 1.2).
Now, descriptions of spears at rest and of spears that miss their mark can be
interesting. Nevertheless, as we have already noted, one of the focal points of
combat scenes and of heroic life in general is death. Spears that hit home are, in
this sense, exactly what we want to see: that point in space and that moment
in time when one epic hero meets his fate and another gains immortal fame.
24 Temporalities, Texts, Ideologies
In Book 5 of the Iliad, for example, Ajax’ ‘long-shadowed spear’ strikes Amphios
in the belly and kills him (616–18):
Similarly, in Iliad 13, Idomeneus kills Oinomaus. Idomeneus then tries to remove
the spear from his victim’s body (Il. 13.509–11):
These are seminal moments that capture the essential condition and values of
violent conflict and heroic life. Crucially for us, these are also moments when the
all-important function of the spear as an instrument of death and the visual
image of the spear and its shadow unite, with absolute prominence in our mind.
Already in the previous section we have established that the expression
δολιχόσκιον ἔγχος exists, not as a simple reflection of visual reality or of what we
see with our sensory eye, but as a multiplex image of cognition.
Now, in cognition, just as a multiplicity of images can coalesce, so instants in
time multiply and coalesce, simply because without recollection and anticipation,
without memory of the past, without knowledge of the present and without
thinking, in fear or in hope, about what might happen in the future, without the
unity of all these temporal ekstases (as Heidegger would call them), no action would
have any meaning (we’d be living in a never-ending state of oblivion in the present).
This applies to the big ideas just as it applies to minute details of the narrative.
In the scene from Iliad 13 (above), for example, there is no actual description
of that point in time when Ajax cast his spear, nor of the spear flying through the
air. We are, in lines 506–8, given a point-by-point description of the wounding
and death of Oinomaus, though, again, Ajax’ spear is not itself mentioned at this
crucial moment. It is, of course, neither possible nor necessary to give an account
of all details. Every text contains ‘gaps’.33 We know that Ajax cast the spear, that
it flew through the air, that it was the spear that burst through Oinomaus’
breastplate. We surely see all this in our mind’s eye. These verses, like other visual
descriptions in Homer and many other descriptions and images, would have no
meaning at all if we were not capable of viewing the whole sequence somehow,
if images and events in time, past, present and future, were not fluid and entangled
attributes of our memory, knowledge, reason, imagination and cognition.
My second point, then, is that when we read words such as Φηγεύς ῥα
πρότερος προΐει δολιχόσκιον ἔγχος in Iliad 5.15 and other verses that contain
this epithet–noun formula, we are, in truth, reading a visual description that
expresses, not a static point in linear time, not an instant, but the image of a
compound, dynamic temporal event (Figure 1.3).34
We should note, of course, that Muybridge’s image is, in fact, a fragmented
‘hiding’ of reality, a heuristic which artificially unpacks the entangled plurality
which δολιχόσκιον ἔγχος keeps correctly whole.35
Because the words ‘long-shadowed spear’ are an image of cognition, because
they describe entangled moments, and because the words themselves are
formulaic and thus highly memorable and distinct,36 our reading of δολιχόσκιον
ἔγχος is inherently multitemporal.
26 Temporalities, Texts, Ideologies
Within the instant of this formula a whole duration (durée)37 exists, moments
before the battle, real but sometimes unaccounted-for in the literal text, when
the spear might have been lying on the ground or leaning against the side of a
hero’s hut; the formula incorporates those entangled multi-image, multiple
moments of the spear being cast, moments of the spear in flight (a trajectory,
not single points in space), moments when a spear misses its target, as in
Odyssey 5.15–17, those moments, sometimes told (e.g. Il. 11.572, etc.) but at
other times untold when, as ‘spent munitions’, the spear lies unnoticed in
some corner of the battlefield, moments when its shiny point lodges itself deep
in the body of a hero, when shaft and shadow are united as a single, terrible
visible image, and, as we have seen, moments when the spear is wrenched out of
the hero’s corpse.38
The time of all these moments, let me suggest, cannot be defined as ‘the number
of change’. It cannot be measured with a stopwatch.39 We could, of course, say that
so-and-so cast the spear at 10:45:00 AM; that the spear was at point X in the air at
exactly 10:44:59; that it struck Y in the belly at exactly 10:45:03; that Y died at
10:55:21; that the spear was pulled out at 10:59:17; and so on. But such numbered
representations of Homeric time do not exist in Homer’s world. They are un-
Homeric and patently meaningless.40 They destroy, not the illusion of Homeric
narrative representation, but the reality of Homer’s narrative and Homer’s time.
Phegeus’ death, like, mutatis mutandis, those of Achilles and many other heroes,
is a moment that unites a hero’s past, present and future, it is a heroic life, indeed, a
whole narrative bios, a ‘biography’. A deflected flying spear is always a narrative
that binds the past and the future of song. Time in such narratives does not
progress step by step or in straight lines or strictly by causes that precede effects,
nor does such time constitute a single muthos. ‘Long-shadowed spears’ sometimes
find their target, but at other times they miss their mark. The outcome of many
Dialectic at a Standstill 27
battle scenes is typical, and is in one sense ‘known’. But such knowledge is a
function of our cognition, and, by the complex and multiple nature of cognition
(as well as the complex nature of oral mouvance41), it is never fully aligned
with language ‘in itself ’ or with any formulaic expression, no matter how rigidly
patterned in formal terms. Yet, precisely this misalignment allows language,
indeed Homer’s formulaic language, to reflect and expose the fluid nature of
cognition and its relation to the world and to the precarity of events, both in
general and in many detailed variations. Thus, for example, expression δολιχόσκιον
ἔγχος sometimes marks a successful hit and the death of the spear’s intended
victim. In 5.15–19, however, the exact same expression ironically marks a
diametric opposite outcome: the spear has missed its mark and failed to kill
Diomedes. A moment later, the one who has cast the spear, Phegeus himself, meets
his death. My point, then, is that the formula, δολιχόσκιον ἔγχος, can, and must be
read phenomenologically, as a verbal image of cognition and of the ‘plurality of
temporalities and tempos’ in the world.
Or rather, let us rephrase this conclusion in the words of one of the influential
critics of both temporality and of the image of late modernity, Walter Benjamin,
and his famous definition of the image. As he says:42
It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its
light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together
in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words: image is dialectics
at a standstill. [My emphasis.]
That bright ‘flash’ and ‘shadow’ of the bronze spearhead of Homer’s ‘long-
shadowed spear’ and the futures and the pasts which it reveals to us are, I suggest
precisely, ‘dialectics at a standstill’, a true image that casts its light on Homer’s
temporality and, in this sense, since it is an image of life and death, of a trajectory
of being, also on the precarity of life in the Homeric world.
Two penultimate points must be made, if only in brief. To do them justice one
would have to write a very long book.
First, let me stress that the phenomenology of time I have tried to describe,
though inescapably attested in the formula δολιχόσκιον ἔγχος (and thus a
distinct example), is in no way unique. Once we know what to look for, we will
find it prominently attested everywhere in Homer’s diction and thought.
28 Temporalities, Texts, Ideologies
Consider, for instance, the formula πόδας ὠκὺς Ἀχιλλεύς, which denotes, of
course, Achilles’ future victory (significantly, with divine assistance and thus,
even here, not a static attribute) over Hector in the mortal footrace in Iliad Book
22. Yet this epithet is frequently used in Book 1 of the poem (48, 84, 148, etc.), in
Book 9, where Achilles is stationary and sulking in his hut (197, 307, 606, etc.),
and it marks important moments in Achilles’ meeting with Priam in Book 24
(559, 649, 751), clearly pointing, as a matter of basic poetic sensibility, not merely
to the hero’s bodily swiftness, but to the tragedy of his killing of Hector, to his
quick, destructive and self-destructive anger, his restless temper, his fated swift
death in a future beyond the end of the Iliad and so on.43 Similarly, the formula
πολύμητις Ὀδυσσεύς, (Il. 1.311, 23.755; Od. 2.173, 24.406) signals, not only the
many devices of Odysseus, both his resourceful and his vicious politics in the
Iliad, not only his past suffering, his clever if selfish survival, his inability to save
his men, his release from suffering in the Odyssey, his future triumph over the
suitors in Odyssey Book 22, the manner in which, after that triumph, he is
outwitted by Penelope in Book 23, his cruel excess in the encounter with his
father in Book 24 of the poem and ultimately, his fated death, ex halos (11.143),
in the future of the Odyssey, in the Telegony (and in Sophocles’ lost Odysseus
Akanthoplex), which all his ‘many devices’ could not avert and so on. Apollo, by
the same token, is ‘far-shooting’ whether he holds the bow in his hand or not.
Penelope’s suitors are ‘noble’ whether they misbehave in Odysseus’ palace or not.
Ships are ‘swift’ even when they are beached.44 They are ‘hollow’ both before and
after they have disgorged their deadly human cargo on the shores of Troy, when
they are filled and emptied and filled again with spoils and so on. Such filling and
emptying are precisely a dialectic at a standstill, a single, verbal image of time. In
one way or another, every word in Homer’s verse resonates with multiple
temporalities of this type. Cognition and language are exponents of reality,
and reality is multiple (at least as we, following many pivotal contemporary
philosophical and scientific accounts see it). Cognition and language are not
simply a matter of psychology or perception but, much more fundamentally, a
matter of truth and existence and of a relation of the ontic and the epistemic.
Paolo Vivante and many other students of Homer have long argued that
epithets signal the whole identity of a hero.45 What I am suggesting is that
formulaic diction, by its very nature, expresses far more than that. Homer’s
diction is not a matter of poetics or of style, but is, fundamentally, a verbal
embodiment of the phenomenology of Homer’s existential time.
Time, we should nevertheless stress, as, indeed, Bonnie Honig, Stephen
Tanaka and many other critics point out, is not simply a matter of ontics or
Dialectic at a Standstill 29
5. Conclusion
My concluding comment is the briefest of all, but is of widest import and directly
responds to the historical scope of this book. I want to suggest that tracing
Homer’s multiple temporality provides us with a point of reference by which to
explore a much wider swathe of literary works in antiquity, in traditions of the
West and beyond.
Such traditions, we have to stress, like time itself, are categorically ‘not one
object, idea, moment or trajectory’, but rather, genealogies of temporality –
multiple, non-linear, non-deterministic and historical. They, too, are inherently
epiphenomenal, stochastic and non-deterministic.
There is never one Homer and always more than one Homer.50 Yet, Homer –
this hardly needs saying – was a pillar of ancient literature, thought and pedagogy.
It is safe to say that many ancient writers, politicians, historians and critics,
including Aristotle, will have been schooled in Homer’s verse and thus – since
nothing exists out of time – schooled in a tradition (a stochastic tradition, let us
stress) of the temporality of epic.
Indeed, we might stress, not only those voices within the tradition, but also
those that have been silenced by the inheritors of antiquity and their exclusive
practice, by later eras in the history of an education in the classics and the ‘great
tradition’, can be usefully measured not in relation to Homer as a trope of time
but in their non-relation to Homeric tradition and its temporality.51 In such
cases, let us stress, Homer, ceases to be a privileged originary trope which he
should never have been and perhaps never was. Instead, Homer and his
temporality recede, quietly and comfortably, truthfully, into the open traditions
of diffracted, democratic spaces and of our many different ways of telling time.
Notes
* I am grateful to Matthew Ward for helpful suggestions. Any faults with the argument
nevertheless remain my own.
1 The bibliographies on vision and visual aspects and, separately, on time in Homer,
are large and often comment on the relation between daylight, night-time, darkness
and the passage of time. See Kahane (2022b), Zanker (2019), Beck (2017), Garcia
(2013), Purves (2010a, 2010b), Grethlein (2014), Grethlein and Krebs (2012),
Foxhall, Gehrke and Luraghi (2010), Lucci (2011), Christopoulos, Krantzakis and
Levaniouk (2010), Calame (2009), Bergren (2008, esp. chs 2–4), Kim (2008), de Jong
and Nünlist (2007), Dunn (2007), Bassi (2005), Holford-Strevens (2005), Bakker
Dialectic at a Standstill 31
(2002a), Theunissen (2002), and Csapo and Miller (1998). Earlier work, see Degani
(1961) and Fränkel (1931). More generally, Holford-Strevens (2005), Wilcox (1987)
and Meister and Schernus (2011). Existing work, however, rarely attempts to explore
the fundamental links between vision and the ontology (and phenomenology) of
time, which is the focus of this essay.
2 Time is otherwise ‘the element of invisibility itself ’ (Derrida 1992: 6).
3 See recent discussions, e.g. in Sentesy (2018) and Stein (2015). More generally, for
Aristotle on time, see Roark (2011), Bowin (2009) and Coope (2005).
4 Fundamental arguments within the philosophy of science in Galison (2003).
5 Honig (2009: 15).
6 Tanaka (2016: 161), usefully cited in Holmes (2020: 63).
7 In Aristotle, there are many examples of naturalized, linear, teleological time within
the hierarchy of domestic, economic and political orders. E.g. in the Politics, with
regard to the regulation (ἐπιμέλεια) of procreation and its social and political
consequences. Measures must be taken, Aristotle says (1335a6–7, trans. H. Rackham.)
‘to ensure that the children produced may have bodily frames suited to the wish of the
lawgiver’ (my emphasis) (. . .ὅπως τὰ σώματα τῶν γεννωμένων ὑπάρχῃ πρὸς τὴν τοῦ
νομοθέτου βούλησιν). Remarking on the appropriate ages of male and female
maturity by the standard of ‘all animal species’, Aristotle advises (1335a28–37) that it
is ‘fitting (ἁρμόττει) for the women to be married at about the age of eighteen and
the men at thirty seven . . . Moreover the succession of the children to the estates
(ἡ διαδοχὴ τῶν τέκνων), if their birth duly occurs soon after the parents marry, will
take place when they are beginning their prime, and when the parents’ period of
vigour has now come to a close, towards the age of seventy’ (my emphasis).
8 Trans. H. Rackham.
9 Esp. Ludovico Castelvetro (1505–71). The Poetics itself (in contrast, for example,
to On Poets) was almost certainly not read in antiquity. See Tarán and Gutas
(2012: 3–76); cf. Zucker (2016: 362 n. 19) on Themistius and the Poetics; Falcon
(2016); also Janko (2011). The question of whether linear conceptions of time
did, or did not otherwise characterize antiquity requires separate, extended
consideration.
10 Distinctly in narratological studies, of course: de Jong and Nünlist (2007: 505).
11 The phrase is borrowed from Honig (2009: 15), who links such plurality to politics.
12 Ricoeur (1984–8: 61). NB, immediately following:
‘Death’ figures prominently in the discussion below and Heidegger and Ricoeur are a
basic point of departure for the conception of time that underpins the present essay. I
32 Temporalities, Texts, Ideologies
T1 (clause 1): Phegeus throws his spear ‘first’ – Φηγεύς ῥα πρότερος προΐει
δολιχόσκιον ἔγχος
T2 (clause 2): The spearhead flies past Diomedes – Τυδεΐδεω δ᾽ ὑπὲρ ὦμον
ἀριστερὸν ἤλυθ᾽ ἀκωκὴ // ἔγχεος.
T (clause 3): The spear misses – οὐδ᾽ ἔβαλ᾽ αὐτόν.
3
T4 (clause 4): Diomedes attacks ‘second’ with the bronze (=‘spearhead’) ὃ δ᾽ ὕστερος
ὄρνυτο χαλκῷ.
T (clause 5): Diomedes’ missile does not miss – τοῦ δ᾽ οὐχ ἅλιον βέλος ἔκφυγε
5
χειρός,
T (clause 6): Phegeus is struck in his chest between the nipples – ἀλλ᾽ ἔβαλε στῆθος
6
μεταμάζιον,
T7 (clause 7): Phegeus tumbles from the chariot to the dust – ὦσε δ᾽ ἀφ᾽ ἵππων.
17 Fenik (1968) and Arend (1933) on ‘typical/type scenes’; more recently Grethlein
(2007) and Louden (2002); but discussions of formal type scenes incorporate
Parryan notions of oral style. Like the idea of formulaic composition (see Kahane
2018b), the patterning of scene elements require fundamental methodological
refiguration, which I will present in future work.
Dialectic at a Standstill 33
18 Linear temporality is not unrelated to the emergence of alphabetic writing and linear
scripts.
19 That ‘code’ has long been challenged – perhaps to be taken also as a hint that we
should likewise question the idea of linear temporal movement in Homer.
20 See e.g. Grethlein and Huitink (2017) and a large bibliography on enargeia.
21 Sub voc. 328.
22 Beck, LfgrE, M (Metrik), 26x neut. acc. sing only, 25x δολιχόσκιον ἔγχος, 24x verse
terminal, u u – u u | – x //. Otherwise, (c) – u u | – x //, χάλκεον/μείλινον ἔγχος; (v)
– u u | – x //, ὄβριμον ἔγχος.
23 See e.g. Griffin (1980) on the pathos of death, especially of heroes who appear only
briefly.
24 See also Beck LfgrE, sub voc.
25 Rouse (1890: 183).
26 Kirk (1985: 316) on 3.346–7. Cf. more recently, Bowie (2019: 346): ‘Why the shadow
should be highlighted is not clear: the epithet may simply be a poetic way of saying
“long” ’.
27 We see in parallax. Likewise, as the world moves, we see many images, from many
different angles; etc. I make no assumptions here beyond the basic facts. See e.g. The
Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Perception (Hilbert 1984).
28 See below, n. 31.
29 Cf. Purves (2010a: 34–5) who, discussing eusynoptic views of the poem as a whole, notes
that: ‘Homeric scholarship has also emphasised, however, that the Iliad is difficult to
visualise as a single, coherent entity. Not only do we run into problems connected with
sequence and simultaneity when attempting to “see” the plot as if it were a picture, but
we are also given very few examples of clear-sighted human vision within the poem.’
30 A demonstratio ante oculos in the tick-tock world of linear time visible to our eyes.
31 The terms are Heideggerian, of course, and refer to the ontology of his
phenomenology and his use of the term aletheia; see Heidegger (1962: 133, 220);
Dahlstrom (2013: 11–13) for overview and references.
32 Od. 10.151–4 is particularly interesting for its visual description though Book 10, a
nighttime adventure, contains no instances of the epithet ‘long-shadowed’:
ἀμφὶ δ᾽ ἑταῖροι
εὗδον, ὑπὸ κρασὶν δ᾽ ἔχον ἀσπίδας· ἔγχεα δέ σφιν
ὄρθ᾽ ἐπὶ σαυρωτῆρος ἐλήλατο, τῆλε δὲ χαλκὸς
λάμφ᾽ ὥς τε στεροπὴ πατρὸς Διός·
Cf. also e.g. the image of ‘Achilles and Ajax Playing a Board Game’ with their spears
at rest (Exekias, amphora, 540–530 bce , Musei Vaticani, Rome). Aristotle says (Poet.
1461a3): ‘this was then their custom, as it still is among Illyrians’; thus, a ‘real-world’
depiction.
33 Cf. Ingarden (1973).
34 Eadweard Muybridge, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.
wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Muybridge_horse_gallop.jpg (accessed 13 June 2023).
35 The reference, again, is to Heidegger’s phenomenology. See n. 31, above.
36 As words, as signifiers, not as signifieds or meanings.
37 For duration as I use it in this essay, see, e.g., Bergson (1913).
38 See Bielfeldt (2014: 33 n. 31).
39 See e.g. F. G. Lorca’s famous, ‘Lament for Ignacio Saches Mejias’ (1935). The poem
narrates a long, dramatic sequence of events in the corrida and the death of the
matador, opening with and repeating the refrain ‘At five in the afternoon. // It was
exactly five in the afternoon’.
40 See Kahane (2022b).
41 For mouvance, see Zumthor (1990).
42 Benjamin (1999: 463, N3, 1). Benjamin does not speak of Homer in this passage.
43 See esp. Lynn-George (1988: 170–1) on Il. 18.94–100 on Achilles’ demand autika for
his death: ‘The intensity of the wish would abolish the intervals of time’s sequence –
even the short succession which will culminate in Achilles’ own swift and early death
after Hektor – in a death which would be present instantly’ and on ‘the timing of
death, that which always comes either too early or too late, even – as in the case of
the hero Achilles – both too early and too late’.’
44 For ‘hollow’ ships, see Ward (2019).
45 On the epithet, see core bibliography in Reece (2010: 259).
46 Pace, e.g. views by Hegel, Lukács, Auerbach, Bakhtin, etc., regarding the authority
and fixity of epic.
47 See Kahane (2021).
48 See Kahane (2018b), Kahane (2019) and Kahane (2018a).
49 See Foley (1991).
50 See e.g. Most (2005), Porter (2004), Porter (2021).
51 For the arguments, see e.g. The Postclassicisms Collective (2020) and esp. section on
‘Untimeliness’.
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