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THE ILIAD
 BLOOMSBURY PAPERBACKS

The Aeneid R. Williams Narrators and Focalizers: the presentation

Alexander the Great: king, commander and of the story in the Iliad I. de Jong
statesman N. Hammond Neoplatonism R. Wallis
The Art of Living: the Stoics on the nature Ovid Recalled L. Wilkinson
and function of philosophy J. Sellars The Piraeus R. Garland
The Art of the Aeneid W. Anderson Plato C. Rowe
The Art of the Odyssey H. Clarke Plutarch D. Russell
Athenian Democracy in the Age of The Poet Lucan M. Morford
Demosthenes M. Hansen The Political Background of Aeschylean
The Catullan Revolution K. Quinn Tragedy A. Podlecki
Cicero: a portrait E. Rawson The Politics of Olympus: form and meaning
Criticism in Antiquity D. Russell in the major Homeric Hymns J. Strauss
The Design of Virgil’s Bucolics J. Van Clay
Sickle Pope’s Iliad F. Rosslyn
Euripides and Dionysus: an interpretation The Presocratics E. Hussey
of the Bacchae R. Winnington-Ingram Propertius M. Hubbard
The Greek Epic Cycle M. Davies The Roman Novel P. Walsh
The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and Roman Poetry and Propaganda in the Age
European pastoral poetry T. Rosenmeyer of Augustus A. Powell (ed)
Herodotus J. Gould Roman Satire M. Coffey
Historians of Greece and Rome S. Usher Rome: its people, life and customs U. Paoli
History of Cynicism: from Diogenes to the Rome’s Debt to Greece A. Wardman
sixth century AD D. Dudley The Satires of Horace N. Rudd
History of Sparta G. Forrest The Satires of Persius C. Dessen
Horace and his Lyric Poetry L. Wilkinson The Stoics F. Sandbach
The Iliad M. Mueller The Story of the Iliad E. Owen
The Imagery of Euripides S. Barlow Suetonius A. Wallace-Hadrill
Latin Poets and Roman Life J. Griffin Tacitus R. Martin
Law of Athens: vol. 1 The Family and Themes in Roman Satire N. Rudd
Property A. Harrison Three Archaic Poets: Archilochus, Alcaeus,
Law of Athens: vol. 2 Procedure A. Harrison Sappho A. Burnett
Livy: his historical aims and methods To Homer through Pope H. Mason
P. Walsh Virgil’s Epic Technique R. Heinze
Magic, Reason and Experience G. Lloyd Wild Justice J. Mossman
Milton and the Transformation of Ancient Xenophon J. Anderson
Epic C. Martindale
 THE ILIAD
SECOND EDITION

Martin Mueller

LON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W YOR K • SY DN EY

 Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway

London New York
WC1B 3DP NY 10018
UK USA

www.bloomsbury.com

First published by Allen & Unwin in 1984

Second edition published in 2009 by Bristol Classical Press an imprint of
Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd.

© Martin Mueller 1984, 2009

Martin Mueller has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988, to be identified as Author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or
any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from
the publishers.

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining

from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury
or the author.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: PB: 978-1-8539-9715-0

ePUB: 978-1-4725-2117-0
ePDF: 978-1-4725-2118-7

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A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Typeset by Ray Davies

 Contents

Preface to the Second Edition vii

1. Introduction 1
History and the Iliad 1
The poet(s) of Homer 5
Homo homericus and the question of oral poetry 9
The Iliad and Odyssey 16
The Homeric hexameter 20
Interpreting Homeric repetitions 21

2. The Plot of the Iliad 35

Achilles, Hektor and the Fall of Troy 35
Achilles in Book 1 37
Hektor during the absence of Achilles 41
The Embassy 48
The Patrokleia 52
Hektor after the death of Patroklos 62
The death of Hektor and the structure of the Iliad 65

3. Fighting in the Iliad 76

The ethos of Homeric fighting 76
The individual encounter 78
Necrologues and gloating speeches 86
Narrative patterns beyond the individual encounter 91
The progress of battle 96

4. The Similes 102

The narrative function of the similes 102
The content of similes 105
The function of detail: the lion similes 108
Contrast and significance in the Iliadic image 112
The Homeric simile and the epic tradition 113

v
 Contents

5. The Gods 116

Human and divine motivation 116
The Homeric gods and their society 123

6. Homeric Repetitions 135

The distribution of repetitions across the poems 137
Different patterns of repetition in the Iliad and Odyssey 138
Classifying repetitions by type: who speaks? 140
Rare repetitions, clustering and interdependence 153

7. The Composition of the Iliad 173

The development of the epic poem 173
The stages of the Iliad: a rough sketch 177

8. The Life of the Iliad 187

First reflections of the Iliad: the Odyssey, tragedy and Plato 188
Homer and Vergil 190
The matter of Troy, Chapman and Shakespeare 191
Milton and Pope 194
The Iliad in a world of prose 197

Bibliography 199
Index 204

vi
 Preface to the Second Edition

This book was first published in 1984, but its roots go back to the sixties, and its central
ideas appeared in my essay on ‘Knowledge and Delusion in the Iliad’ (1970). It is in
many ways a German book and deeply shaped by my engagement with Wilamowitz’s
Ilias und Homer and Schadewaldt’s Iliasstudien, but above all with Karl Reinhardt’s
searching inquiries into the nature of the ‘Iliadic’. Reinhardt’s posthumous and
fragmentary book about the Iliad has the title The Iliad and its Poet. More recently
Mark Edwards has written a very sensible and sensitive book with the title The Poet
of the Iliad. These are programmatic titles that ask the interpreter to see the work in
relationship to a single maker about whose life we know nothing but whose voice and
‘take’ on the world can be heard in the work. My book is an attempt to make modern
readers hear that voice more clearly.
In a recent essay on ‘Rhapsodes, Bards, and Bricoleurs: Homerizing Literary Theory’,
Egbert Bakker has divided Homeric scholars into those who look for a ‘transcendental’ or
an ‘immanent’ Homer. According to this useful distinction my book falls squarely in the
‘transcendental’ camp. But there are two different ways in which one might challenge too
sharp a division between a ‘divine creator outside the scope of any historical research’ and
‘the poems themselves [and] the mechanisms that not only were instrumental in their
development but that also sustained their transmission and survival’ (Bakker 2007, 1).
The first challenge comes from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 111 in which the speaker says:

my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.

Auden took the title for his collection of essays The Dyer’s Hand from this phrase.
The dyer’s hand questions the dualism of immanent and transcendent. The poet will
always get his hands dirty, and his poems will reek of the stuff from which they are
made. You may call this an incarnational theory of poetry, but every ‘embodiment’
has its unique aspect.
The second challenge is probabilistic. In a conventional system of any size there is
for all practical purposes no limit to the different ways of combining conventional
elements for new effects. Bach and Handel or Haydn and Mozart worked within
strongly defined harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic conventions. If we say that within
two quite different period styles each of these composers speaks with an unmistakable
voice, we are not moving from the ‘mechanisms } instrumental in their development’
to a ‘divine creator’. The unmistakable voice of Bach speaks in, with, and through
those mechanisms, and the listener’s pleasure consists in hearing that voice and being
able to distinguish it from others. Nor is this desire a modern hankering after
individuality as Milman Parry thought. Something very like it appears in a famous and
charming passage from the Apollo Hymn:

vii
 Preface to the Second Edition
Hail and farewell to you, maidens, remember me kindly hereafter
When anybody of men upon earth, say a wayfaring stranger
Come to this island, should ask your opinion and pose you this question,
‘Who, do you think, is the man that is sweetest of singers, O maidens,
Of those that visit you here? And in which do you take the most pleasure?’
Answer him then well together, unanimously in my favour:
‘He is a blind man whose home is on Chios, that rugged and rockbound
Island, and all of his poems are excellent, now and hereafter.’

Pope’s ‘grace beyond the reach of art’ need not take us into a world of transcendence;
it may be a matter of searching the probabilities that are immanent in the conventions.
As the mad Ophelia says: ‘You may wear your rue with a difference’ (Hamlet
4.5.182).
A search for immanent difference is the major cause of change in this edition. In
the nineties, Ahuvia Kahane and I became interested in computationally assisted
analysis of Homeric repetitions. With the help of two gifted programmers, Craig Berry
and Bill Parod, we built the Chicago Homer, a database that in a crude but consistent
way recorded all instances of word sequences that occurred more than once. The very
mechanical definition of a repetition in that database is not the same as the definition
of a Homeric formula. On the other hand, it created a robust quantitative framework
for analysing the distribution of various types of repetitive phenomena across Early
Greek epic. Questions of the type ‘how many of this occur here rather than there?’ can
now be answered in minutes rather than hours. Moreover, the Chicago Homer lets you
quickly execute searches that are very difficult to do with other lexical tools, such as
‘show me all repetitions that occur in Iliad 16 and 22 but nowhere else’.

The framing chapters of this book have been substantially rewritten in the light of the
quantitative inquiries supported by the data in the Chicago Homer. While I have made
minor changes in the central chapters on plot, fighting, similes, and the gods, I have
rewritten the introduction and the chapter on the composition of the Iliad. I have added
a new and quite long chapter on Homeric repetitions, which starts from the premise
that frequency is a very important property of style. In ordinary conversation we are
acutely sensitive to things other people say often, rarely, or never. Turning this natural
and informal sensitivity into systematic attention is a good procedure, especially with
the Homeric poems, where repetition is the central stylistic phenomenon readers have
to come to terms with.
The chapter on repetitions is somewhat more technical than the rest of the book,
and some readers may feel like Odysseus, caught between the Scylla of Greek and the
Charybdis of statistics. But the other chapters of the book do not depend on a
command of its detail. The opening chapter now includes a section on ‘Reading
Homeric repetitions’, which is less quantitative in its orientation.
We will never know for sure just how the Iliad and Odyssey came into being. But
the classification of different types of repetition provides substantial corroborative
evidence for some version of the hypothesis that the poems result from the consequen-
tial encounter of two language technologies. We are living through a very different

viii
 Preface to the Second Edition
stage of such an encounter today and are familiar with the uncertainties and possibili-
ties of hybrid technologies. But then every child is a hybrid.
In the preface to the first edition I thanked Brook Manville, Claude Rawson,
Herbert Tucker, and John Wright for their advice, and I repeat those thanks here. I
thank Marianne Hopman for the excellent advice on how to approach the task of
revision a quarter century later. But where this version improves on the first edition,
the largest thanks are due to four individuals who helped me gain some footing in the
business of digitally assisted text analysis, which for better or for worse will come to
play an increasingly important role in scholarly work with texts. Gregory Crane’s
Morpheus or morphological parser of ancient Greek was a critical tool in the process
of extracting Homeric repetitions. Mark Olsen may not even remember that almost 15
years ago he wrote some perl scripts for me that made it seem possible to tackle
repetitions in a systematic fashion. Bill Parod helped me explore the potential of
relational database technology for certain kinds of philological queries. And Craig
Berry wrote the program that extracted the repetitions for the Chicago Homer on
which my analyses depend. I am deeply grateful for their support on these particular,
and many general, matters.

ix
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 1

Introduction

History and the Iliad

In Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old Mystery, Joachim Latacz embeds the
Iliad in a rich context of archaeological and other evidence taken from Greek and Near
Eastern sources. In this regard he follows such milestones of Homeric scholarship as
Whitman’s Homer and the Heroic Tradition, Page’s History and the Homeric Iliad,
Kirk’s The Songs of Homer, and Webster’s From Mycenae to Homer. Compared with
those books, the historical dimension of my study is marginal and in no way competes
with any of their accounts. On the other hand, historically oriented scholars have often
been complacent about examining the types of relationship one can plausibly assume
between a fictional text and various levels of historical reality. My chief aim in the
following pages, beyond sketching a minimal historical framework, is to set the stage for
an extended analysis of the text by clarifying the network of temporal relations in which
it exists. What is the relationship of the Iliad to the ‘historical’ events it purports to
describe, to the contemporary world in which it originated, and to the ‘heroic society’ of
which it is an image? And what is the relationship between the Iliad as a ‘heroic poem’ to
the subsequent city culture in which it became a canonical text?
Herodotus, writing in the latter half of the fifth century BCE, expressed the
conventional wisdom of his day when he dated Homer, the author of both the Iliad
and the Odyssey, about 400 years before his own time. Most modern think that a later
date is more likely: ‘the Iliad at least, seems from the evidence of art and literature to
have been in circulation by about 630’ (West 1999, 364).
Modern archaeologists have reconstructed the history of settlements on the site of Troy
beyond 3000 BCE. Homer’s Troy to them is ‘Troy VIIa’. This settlement came to a violent
end around 1200 BCE and was in all probability destroyed by war, although a fire cannot
be ruled out. Was it destroyed in the ‘Trojan War’, i.e. a collective expedition by mainland
Greeks? The ancients had no doubt on this score. Even so sceptical a writer as Thucydides
used the Iliad as a source for his review of early Greek history on the assumption that by
discounting the elaborations of poetic fancy he could recover the historical truth about a
pan-Hellenic expedition. Modern scholars are divided on the subject. Some think that
the very existence of the Iliad is proof that such an expedition must have taken place,
although it surely did not last ten years or have Helen as its cause. Others point to
instances in which we have independent evidence about the event a heroic poem
purports to celebrate and can only marvel at the gap between history and fiction. No
heroic poem without ruins, Albin Lesky (1966, 12) has written. From our knowledge
of other heroic poetry we may conclude that the mere ruins in the Troad were a
sufficient factual irritant to produce in time the pearl of the Iliad. We may well believe
that the ruins of Troy were the ‘cause’ of the Iliad, but we must not expect the Iliad to
tell us much about the cause of those ruins.

1
 The Iliad
Whether or not there was a ‘Trojan War’, the Iliad rests on a tradition of verse-
making that goes back centuries beyond Homer and probably reaches into Mycenaean
times. Homer’s Greeks do not call themselves Hellenes as the Greeks of the classical
period (and probably of Homer’s day) did, and the political map of the Iliad reflects
an old pattern of settlements that was radically altered with the population movements
towards the end of the second millennium conveniently known as the Dorian invasion.
The Iliad refers to some objects such as Nestor’s cup or the boar’s helmet that can be
matched with Mycenaean artefacts discovered by modern archaeologists. In the case
of the phasganon arguroêlon, the ‘silver-studded sword’, not only is there a corre-
sponding artefact, but also the Homeric phrase can be matched with words that appear
on the Mycenaean clay tablets inscribed in the Linear B script that represents an early
form of Greek. Homer’s poetic language also includes archaic words that predate the
dialect divisions that took place centuries before his time. But Homer knew less about
Mycenaean Greece than is taught today in a good undergraduate course. To illustrate
his epics with Mycenaean pictures is a profound anachronism, even where the
Homeric object has a Mycenaean origin, for it provides the verbal image with a
pictorial equivalent that in most cases neither Homer nor his audience had ever seen.
The past remembered in the Iliad and the Mycenae excavated by the twentieth-century
archaeologist are two very different things.
Whatever the precise date of the Iliad, the story of the pan-Hellenic expedition
against Troy has much more to do with Greece around 700 BCE than with the late
Mycenaean age. The world of the Greek city states was characterised both by a
propensity for internecine rivalry and by a strong sense of cultural identity and
superiority. Greeks of whatever ethnic origin divided the world into those who ‘talk
Greek’ (hellênizein) and all the others who make unintelligible noises and are there-
fore fitly called ‘bar-bar-ians’. While Greece never achieved political unity, it
developed common religious festivals and competitions that united, for the duration
of the event, even cities that were at war. The institutions that maintained the sense of
pan-Hellenic identity date back to the eighth century – above all, the Olympic Games,
whose beginnings the Greeks dated back to 776 BCE by our calendar. The most
powerful of these pan-Hellenic institutions is of course the Iliad. One may well ask
whether the Greeks, who from the eighth century on established colonies in much of
the eastern and some of the western Mediterranean, would have resisted the centrifu-
gal tendencies of such geographical dispersal had it not been for the common past, the
common religion and the common set of values that the Iliad ‘created’, if only by
putting traditional materials in canonical form.
The story of the expedition of ‘all the Achaeans’ against Troy is not a poem ‘about’
Mycenaean Greece, but it is, in a different sense of ‘about’, a poem about the
pan-Hellenic consciousness of the polis world in its earliest stage. In what sense is the
Iliad about a ‘heroic society’ existing in a particular place at a particular time? Many
scholars believe that, despite certain distortions due to poetic licence, the Iliad is a reliable
description of a heroic society. A.W.H. Adkins in particular has provided elaborate
analyses of the value system of Homeric heroic society, but his hypotheses have not gone
unchallenged by philosophers or historians (Long 1970, Snodgrass 1974).
It is unquestionably true that the characters of the Iliad for the most part observe a
warrior code that can be found in many real societies. Courage, physical strength,
loyalty to friends and kinsmen, revenge, and hospitality to strangers are important

2
 1. Introduction
elements of this code. It is an aristocratic code, and there is no reason to doubt that
some version of it governed the lives of the landowners who were the normative part
of Homer’s audience. But it is one thing to say that the upper strata of Homer’s
audience lived according to a warrior code and another to claim that they formed the
heroic society of which the Iliad is a description. Greek has given us the useful word
pornography (writing about whores). One might coin the analogue hero-graphy and
capture an essential aspect of heroic poetry: it is never a description but always a fiction
of desire, born out of a fascination with, yearning for, and revulsion at, physical violence.
The modern reader, by which I mean the reader since the eighteenth century, has
typically approached the Iliad from a perspective of nostalgic inferiority. The charac-
ters and actions of the Iliad breathe a fullness and simple strength that he lacks, and
he mourns the loss of the glamorous world that produced such glamorous poetry. But
there never was a world of heroic glamour to correspond to its poetic image. ‘Heroic’
is an adjective in the past tense. To the poet of the Iliad the present is inferior to an
image of the past endowed with greater fullness. Men like Hektor or Aias, let alone
Achilles, no longer exist. Three times he tells us that it would take two modern men
to hoist the stones his heroes lift with ease (5.303, 12.447, 20.286.) And even the
characters in the poem share in this regression towards a fuller past: in the first book
Nestor in the presence of Agamemnon and Achilles reminisces about a time when he
fought with men the like of which he will not see again (1.262). G.S. Kirk (1962,
135-8) has argued persuasively that the impoverished material conditions following
the collapse of Mycenaean culture were a particularly rich breeding ground for the
heroic tradition of which Homer is the culmination. But ultimately the heroic vision
is the product of the more radical and metaphysical poverty that is the subject of
meditation in Wallace Stevens’s Esthétique du mal:

Natives of poverty, children of malheur,

The gaiety of language is our seigneur.

Homer, his contemporaries and his modern readers inhabit the first line, Achilles and
Hektor the second. A failure to observe that crucial distinction will ruin our under-
standing of the sense in which the Iliad is a poem ‘about’ heroic society.
Occasionally in the Iliad we catch a glimpse of a less heroic everyday world. The
most striking passages of this kind are the shield of Achilles (18.478) and Nestor’s
narrative of his role in the war with the Epeians (11.671). The latter is a story of greed
and revenge and deals with a dispute of two villages over horses and cattle. It is a
three-day affair, and perhaps more than any other part of the Iliad it gives a sense of
what warfare in the eighth century may have been like. The former is an encyclopaedic
tableau of the real world, telling us about marriage, justice, war, harvesting and
celebration. It is an ordinary and ‘realistic’ world, made radiant, but not elevated, by
the skill of Hephaistos. In the Odyssey such glimpses are more common; in particular,
Odysseus’ false accounts of his adventures describe an unheroic, almost mean-spirited
world. It would be quite wrong to see in such passages the traces of a more ‘modern’
world. Rather, they reveal the everyday world that underlies both the Iliad and the
Odyssey, and they tell us a great deal about the imaginative energy that wrested from this
simple and poor world the austere and splendid vision of force that inspires the Iliad.
We know much less about the world in and for which Homer wrote than about the

3
 The Iliad
world that made of his poems a kind of Scripture. Homer was ‘the poet’ par excellence
in the world of the Greek city states, and the Iliad and Odyssey were what Eric
Havelock has called a ‘tribal encyclopaedia’, through story and example conveying
information about the entire range of human affairs. Is it surprising that classical
Athens looked for guidance to poems celebrating a heroic society? The question loses
its point as soon as we recognise the heroic world as a vision in the past rather than an
image of a once existing world. Moreover, the vision is deeply rooted in a city culture.
What differentiates the Iliad from other heroic poems is the significance of Troy as
setting and theme. It is true that Priam’s palace is all we ever see inside Troy. But one
need only look at the banqueting-hall in Beowulf to recognise that Troy is much more
than an extended royal palace. The walls of Troy enclose and define a city.
Historians of Greek moral thought like Adkins have made much of the distinction
between the competitive values of the warrior and the cooperative values of the
citizen. The distinction is real but it should not be bridged by a theory of evolution.
The warrior code retained its relevance and appeal not only in the militaristic climate
of Sparta, but also in the ‘softer’ Athens, which took no less pride in its citizen army than
in its cultural accomplishments. And the fact that the warrior code dominates the Iliad
to the seeming exclusion of everything else reflects less a historical stage of develop-
ment than the poem’s unremitting concentration on the marginal situation of war.
The warrior code is less foreign to the citizen reader than some evolutionary
theories suggest. A similar point can be made about the aristocratic bent of the Iliad.
Is there not a fundamental opposition between the democratic spirit of Athens and the
exclusive spirit of the warrior caste in the Iliad? The exclusiveness is beyond question.
The Iliad is rather like a club and bestows on its members privileges that persist in the
face of grave moral shortcomings. Take Paris, a womaniser and fighter of dubious
velour. Hektor is not afraid to scold him in public, but in the end even Paris
remains a member in good standing and does not forfeit the privileges such
standing confers. What those privileges are is made emphatically clear in the
Thersites scene of the second book. Thersites is not a member – in fact, he is the
only non-member in the Iliad – and he is the aristocrat’s image of a perfect
plebeian: an ugly loudmouth and coward. He stands up in the assembly and rails
at Agamemnon. What he says is very similar to what Achilles had said, but it does
not matter, for someone like him has no right to speak in the first place. His
presumption must be brutally checked, and Odysseus does not hesitate to do so,
first in words and then in deed (2.265-70):

So he spoke and dashed the sceptre against his back and

shoulders, and he doubled over, and a round tear dropped from him,
and a bloody welt stood up between his shoulders under
the golden sceptre’s stroke, and he sat down again, frightened,
in pain, and looking helplessly about wiped off the tear-drops.
Sorry though the men were they laughed over him happily }

Once the distinction between members and non-members is made, however, the Iliad
pays no further attention to it. In this it is very unlike, say, Don Quixote or Shakespear-
ian plays, in which a high-low distinction is a recurring structural element. Those who
gain admission to the narrator’s world form a society of peers with little internal

4
 1. Introduction
differentiation along hierarchic lines. There is a natural hierarchy of youth and age,
and there are kings and priests to whom special respect is due by virtue of their office.
There is also the pecking order maintained by the warriors’ continuing rivalry among
themselves. Nonetheless, it is fundamentally a society of equals with a remarkable
ease and simplicity of manners. This state of affairs is mirrored on Olympus, where
the gods, while mindful of the power and pre-eminence of Zeus, do not hesitate to
answer back or quarrel with him.
Homer’s Athenian audience was very receptive to an ethos that was exclusive and
competitive but anti-hierarchic. Quite apart from the fact that the privilege of citizen-
ship was beyond the reach of slaves and resident aliens, Athenian society was hardly
egalitarian. With the great exception of Socrates, most famous Athenians came from
‘good’ families whose commitment to politics, inseparable from warfare, found a ready
mirror in the image of the heroic world. In Athens, just as in Homer’s day, the values of
the upper class established the moral norms and canons of taste, even though Homer’s
audience was never restricted to that class. Those values and a commitment to competitive
excellence governed the conception of the typical. If we think of the normative citizen
reader as a young man of the class that produced Kimon, Miltiades, Perikles, and
Alkibiades, the gap between the city and the heroic world narrows considerably.

The poet(s) of Homer

The word ‘Homer’ refers with great precision to the 15,693 lines of the Iliad and the
12,110 lines of the Odyssey. These poems must have been made by some human(s),
but we know nothing about who s/he or they were. Nor do we know with any degree
of precision just how they were made or how long it took to make the versions that we
read today. Such facts as we know point to a paradox: the Iliad and Odyssey are deeply
rooted in oral traditions of verse-making, but they have spent most of their lives as
highly canonical texts in cultures dependent on writing. Without writing they would
long have been lost. We do not know whether writing merely preserved them or
whether it played a role in shaping them as well. It remains a tempting speculation that
‘Homer’ is the result of a highly consequential encounter of two language technolo-
gies during the transition from an ‘oral’ to a ‘literate’ culture – a transition in which,
as in other major cultural shifts, the ‘old’ is never completely replaced but lives on in
different ways and shapes the ways of the ‘new’.
To begin with known facts, since the middle of the second century BCE the texts of
the Iliad and Odyssey have been transmitted with remarkable fidelity. The editor of
the recent and authoritative Teubner text, Martin West, has identified some 160
interpolated passages that add up to just over 200 lines or 1.25% of the text. By
contrast, the quarto and folio editions of King Lear differ in more than 10% of their
lines. Textual variance within a particular Homeric line is rarely of interest. Is there a
single substantive disagreement about the interpretation of a Homeric scene that turns
on choosing this rather than that reading?1 We know from papyrus fragments that prior
to the second century BCE the Homeric texts fluctuated considerably in the number of
lines. By contrast later multi-line papyrus fragments overwhelmingly show the same
1
Compare this with the large literature on the duals in Iliad 9, perhaps the most celebrated textual crux
in Greek literature. The textual tradition unanimously uses a dual verb form to refer to the three men who
try to assuage Achilles’ anger. There has not been and probably will never be a fully persuasive solution.

5
 The Iliad
number of lines in the same order. The texts of the Iliad and Odyssey have been
extraordinarily stable for two millennia. We also know that from the early third
century on successive generations of increasingly professional scholars spent much
labour on those texts. The most famous of them was Aristarchus. Their work is known
to us at third or fourth hand through the scholia or marginal notes that have survived
in some manuscripts, notably Venetus A, the most important manuscript source for
the Iliad. It is not entirely clear what impact their work had on the stabilisation of the
Homeric vulgate, but stabilised it was.
Was that stabilisation an act of consolidation or creation? Do we have Homer’s
Iliad or that of Aristarchus? Plato is an important witness. When he cites a single
Homeric line, it nearly always differs a little from what we read today – perhaps
because he was quoting from memory. On the other hand, when he quotes multi-line
passages they do not differ from the vulgate in the order of lines. Take this evidence
with generous dashes of hope, and you conclude that the poets and philosophers of
fifth- and fourth-century Greece read more or less the same Homer that we do.
As we move back from the classical to the archaic period of Greek history it
becomes increasingly difficult to square the ideal of a faithfully preserved Iliad with
the practical difficulties surrounding the accurate transmission across generations of
a document of 16,000 lines in a world that had only recently re-acquainted itself with
writing.
The Mycenaean Greeks used writing for administrative and commercial purposes
(Linear B). After the collapse of their civilisation around 1200 BCE, writing disap-
peared from Greece for four centuries. Towards the end of the ninth century BCE, the
Greeks adapted an alphabet from the Phoenicians. The date is suggested by the
resemblance of the Greek alphabet to Phoenician scripts current during that period.
We know very little about the spread or degree of literacy in Greece until roughly 600
BCE when inscriptions become more frequent. Only a handful of documents can with
any confidence be dated before 700 BCE. The most famous of these, a cup found in
1953 in Ischia, is a plain piece of pottery with a three-line inscription, partly iambic
and partly hexametric. The inscription is fragmentary; a plausible reading attributes
aphrodisiac powers to the modest cup and therefore ranks it above the ‘cup of Nestor’
(Nestoros potêrion), about which Book 11 of the Iliad has much to say. It is a striking
feature of the inscription that its orthography and punctuation imply a system of
prosodic notation for hexametric verse. The few other inscriptions from around 700
BCE also are in hexameters.
The evidence, slender as it is, is sufficient to establish the fact that writing was
known during the period 725-650 BCE that most scholars would agree on as a critical
period for the genesis of the Homeric poems. There is, however, no positive evidence
to suggest that the Greeks of that period had the document management technologies
for coping with texts as long as the Iliad. I use modern computer terminology
advisedly to draw attention to the ‘scale’ problems of a very new technology. The
early fixing and transmission of the Homeric texts will forever remain a mystery.
Moving back in time deepens some problems but produces greater clarity about
others. Internal evidence and analogies with other cultures suggest that the most striking
features of Homeric verse-making are rooted in the practices of an oral culture. Indeed, in
its general outlines this is as known a fact about the Homeric poems as the fact of their
extraordinarily stable written transmission since the second century BCE.

6
 1. Introduction
But this certainty only produces more uncertainties about the ways in which to
relate the known and the unknown. Hypotheses about negotiating these relations have
always been shaped less by evidence – of which there is very little – than by individual
or generational dispositions. Hypotheses divide along answers to three somewhat
overlapping questions.
The first question is whether in looking at human achievements, especially of a
highly significant kind, you incline towards a ‘strong author’ or a ‘weak author’ view.
The second question is whether you think of the Iliad and Odyssey as poems that
largely stay within the parameters of their genre or whether you think of them as
transformational works that relate to their generic backgrounds in roughly the ways in
which the Matthew Passion or the Marriage of Figaro relate respectively to the
musical genres of passion and opera buffa. You can see the traces of opera buffa in
every scene of The Marriage of Figaro, but you cannot predict the opera from the
genre.
The third question is whether in the creation of the Homeric poems you give to
writing a role that goes beyond the mechanical preservation of documents that were
generated in and for a different medium. Just about every theory about the composi-
tion and authorship of the Homeric poems since the days of F.A. Wolf can be defined
very satisfactorily in terms of where it positions itself vis-à-vis these three questions.
The nineteenth-century division of German Homeric scholars into ‘unitarians’ and
‘analysts’ or, as they were known jocularly, Einheitshirten and Liederjäger (unity
shepherds vs. song hunters) was very much a division between strong and weak views
of authorship. F.A. Wolf in his Prolegomena set the agenda for this quarrel when he
turned a casual remark by Cicero into a theory of a ‘Pisistratean recension’ according
to which Homer consisted of separate and anonymous poems floating in a generic
space of epic narrative until the tyrant Pisistratus in the middle of the sixth century
ordered them to be stitched together. A very peculiar and distinctly German version
of a ‘strong author’ theory appears in the many books and articles in which the author
seeks to rescue a Homeric Gulliver from his Lilliputian copyists, redactors, imitators
etc. Wilamowitz’s Ilias und Homer is the most famous of these works and still worth
reading despite or because of its wilful brilliance.
A powerful ‘weak author’ component is the reverse side of Milman Parry’s interest
in the systematic character of Early Greek epic diction. A very different kind of ‘weak
author’ or ‘strong tradition’ theory appears in the Multitext Homer project by Gregory
Nagy and his students. The focus here is not on the ipsissima verba of a putative single
author but on a living tradition in which you see textual variance as the many eddies
and cross-currents of a a river flowing through time. This view is strongly shaped by
theories about mouvance in medieval French epic, and the eventual stabilisation of the
text is something of a fall into fixity.
Milman Parry’s son Adam took a markedly ‘strong author’ position in a famous
essay with the programmatic title ‘Have we Homer’s Iliad?’ to which the answer is
‘yes’. In a very declarative manner Martin West opens his Latin preface to 1998
Teubner edition of the Iliad with the sentence:

Ilias materiam continet iamdiu per ora cantorum diffusam, formam autem contextumque
qualem nos novimus tum primum attinuit, cum conscripta est; quod ut fieret, unius
munus fuit maximi poetae.

7
 The Iliad
(The Iliad contains materials that had circulated among oral poets for a long time, but it
received the form and context in which we know it when it was first written down, which
was the work of a single and very great poet.)

West’s strong author is a writer. Albert Lord and his student Richard Janko also posit
a strong author, but they see him as dictating his poem. How much of a difference is
there between having a secretary and knowing how to type? There may be less
difference between Janko, Lord, and West than there is between any of them and G.S.
Kirk’s theory of the ‘monumental composer’ who changed the rules of the epic game
but did not use writing directly or indirectly and whose poems were transmitted orally
but in fixed form for almost two centuries.
The arguments about Homer and writing typically take the form of culture follow-
ing commerce. The Greek alphabet resulted from contacts between Greek and
Phoenician traders, but poets were quick to explore a new medium. Barry Powell
reverses this causal chain and argues that it was the creation of the Iliad that spurred
the introduction of writing into Greece. Here writing appears almost as the cause of a
strong author position.
In the strong author theories surveyed here the emphasis is on the change of scale
and on the role that writing did or did not play. A greater emphasis on qualitative
change is found in Karl Reinhardt’s famous essay of 1937 on the judgement of Paris.
Reinhardt sees a tradition of straightforward stories with simple morals, whether the
ruse of Penelope or the judgment of Paris, and he locates the genius of the poets of the
Iliad and Odyssey in their ability to transform those stories into ‘epic situations’ of a
scope and ethos that leave the source narratives far behind. Reinhardt and Kirk lived
in very different worlds of classical scholarship, but there are interesting overlaps
between Kirk’s ‘monumental composer’ and Reinhardt’s shaper of epic situations.
Compared with these big questions, it is a lesser and more practical question
whether or not you assign the Iliad and Odyssey to the ‘same author’, however you
understand ‘author’. Internal evidence offers much support for and little resistance to
reading the Odyssey as an intentional and complementary sequel to the Iliad. It is a
little easier to see such an ambition as the work of a different author, and if one is concerned
with articulating the very deep thematic and narrative differences between the two epics
it is a convenient fiction to think of their authors as different as well. But no difference
between the Iliad and Odyssey in terms of language, technique or perspective is so deep
that it could not be contained within the work of a single author. There are also deep
phrasal affinities between the Odyssey and some parts of the Iliad, notably the last book.
These go well beyond commonality of a shared epic idiom. They have puzzled scholars
since the mid-nineteenth century and remain a puzzle (see p. 185 for a fuller discussion).
What about the ‘real’ Homer, the person who certainly composed the Iliad and
perhaps the Odyssey as well? If you are a ‘weak author’ person, the question makes
little sense. Homer is just a name to personalise a tradition, and perhaps we would be
better off not using the name (Nagy 1992, 28). But the ‘strong author’ scholars are just
as sceptical on biographical matters. They no longer believe, as Wilamowitz or
Schadewaldt did, that you can extract from the ancient sources about Homer’s life a
story that bears any semblance to what actually happened (Graziosi 2002, 14). The
sources tell you much about the needs of people in some particular then and there, and
from that perspective their informational value is far from trivial. But they tell you

8
 1. Introduction
nothing about ‘Homer’. Martin West, the strongest of ‘strong author’ proponents, has
an essay on ‘The Invention of Homer’ in which he argues that there was indeed a
maximus poeta, that he was responsible for the Iliad in very much the form in which
we read it today, but that we know nothing about him except that his name was not
‘Homer’, which was instead a back formation from the name of a professional guild
of rhapsodes called the Homeridae (West 1999).

Homo homericus and the question of oral poetry

For the Greeks, Homer was simply The Poet and as such a timeless authority. While
the Homeric poems have maintained a highly canonical status through 2,500 years of
Western culture, later ages have tended to put an existential divide between them-
selves and ‘Homer’. You see some of this in a Plutarchan anecdote about the last
meeting of Brutus and Portia. I quote from North’s famous Elizabethan translation
(Plutarch 1579, p. 1065):

There Porcia being ready to depart from her husband Brutus and to returne to ROME
did what she could to dissemble the griefe and sorow she felt at her hart: But a certaine
paynted table bewrayed her in the ende, although vntill that time she alwayes shewed a
constant and pacient mind. The deuise of the table was taken out of the Greeke stories,
howe Andromachè accompanied her husband Hector when he went out of the citie of
TROY to goe to the warres, and how Hector deliuered her his litle sonne, and how her
eyes were neuer of him. Porcia seeing this picture, and likening her selfe to be in the
same case, she fell a weeping: and comming thither oftentymes in a day to see it, she
wept still. Acilius one of Brutus friendes perceiuing that, rehearsed the verses An-
dromachè speaketh to this purpose in Homer:

Thou Hector art my father, and my mother, and my brother,

And husband eke, and in all: I mind not any other.

Then Brutus smyling, aunswered againe: but yet (sayd he) I can not for my part say
vnto Porcia as Hector aunswered Andromachè in the same place of the Poet:

Tush, meddle thou vvith vveying devvly owt

Thy mayds their task, and pricking on a clowt.

This is a classic instance of a belated perspective with its characteristic mix of

inferiority, condescension, and regret. Some 1600 years later we encounter Alexander
Pope reflecting on the scene in which Nausikaa does her laundry on the beach:

It has been further objected, that the Poet gives an unworthy employment to Nausicaa,
the daughter of a King; but such Critics form their idea of ancient, from modern
greatness: It wou’d be now a meanness to describe a person of Quality thus employ’d,
because custom has made it the work of persons of low condition: It would be now
thought dishonourable for a Lady of high station to attend the flocks; yet we find in the
most ancient history extant, that the daughters of Laban and Jethro, persons of power and
distinction, were so employ’d, without any dishonour to their quality. In short, these
passages are to be look’d upon as exact pictures of the old World, and consequently as
valuable remains of Antiquity. (Note on Odyssey, 6.31; 6.35 in Pope’s translation)

9
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 The Iliad
Between Plutarch and Pope, there is the sixteenth-century poet Ronsard who in the
preface to his Franciade professes to emulate Homer’s ‘naïve facilité’ rather than
Vergil’s ‘curieuse diligence.’ ‘Naïf’ here is closer to its etymological source nativus
than to our ‘naive’, but the opposition is structurally related to Schiller’s later
opposition of ‘naive’ and ‘sentimental’ poetry.
That opposition turned out to be a powerful and deeply consequential ideological
construct. We might turn for a moment to Gibbon, who in his discussion of the ancient
Germans remarks that ‘the use of letters is the principal circumstance that distin-
guishes a civilised people from a herd of savages incapable of knowledge or
reflection.’ There is an

immense distance between the man of learning and the illiterate peasant. The former, by
reading and reflection, multiplies his own experience, and lives in distant ages and
remote countries; whilst the latter, rooted to a single spot, and confined to a few years of
existence, surpasses but very little his fellow-labourer, the ox, in the exercise of his
mental faculties. (Decline and Fall, 1.91)

In tone and substance this passage from 1776 stands at the other end of a position that
is eloquently caught by the title of Herder’s famous anthology of 1778, Stimmen der
Völker im Lied or ‘voices of the peoples in song’. What matters most is caught, not in
speech, but in song, not by a learned individual, but by many voices of many peoples.
One could do worse than see the history of Homeric criticism as an endless quarrel
(sometimes friendly, often not) between readers whose habits of the heart or mind
resonate more with Gibbon or with Herder. Evidence is very unlikely to settle the
matter.
In his Essay on Criticism Pope envisages Virgil imitating Homer and attributes to
him the discovery that ‘Nature and Homer } were the same.’ ‘Nature’ here refers to
universal standards, but it is easily modulates into Rousseau’s ‘Back to Nature’, and
some overtones of civilisation as ‘dis-ease’ are clearly audible in Pope’s nostalgic
evocation of Nausikaa and her laundry. And ‘Homer’ is the most iconic version of the
poet as the child of nature. While the opposition of nature and art is an old idea, it is
intensified in the late eighteenth century and adds a new twist to the Myth of the Two
Poets, which in England found its best expression in the oppositions of Shakespeare
and Milton or Homer and Vergil. The myth is a poetic version of the Fall and contrasts
the self-effacing naive with the self-projecting sentimental poet. Homer had four great
advantages over Shakespeare as the prototype of the self-effacing poet:

1. Nothing was known about his person, and it was not even clear whether his name
was a real name. Thus he was more radically anonymous than Shakespeare, whose
biography was never so mysterious as it was popular to assume.
2. Tradition pictured him blind, thus depriving him of a further powerful aspect of
identity.
3. While Shakespeare in the opinion of Ben Jonson had small Latin and less Greek,
Homer, according to the best knowledge of eighteenth-century historians, could
not write at all.
4. He was original and spontaneous in the sense that nothing was known about his
predecessors.

10
 1. Introduction
Anonymous, blind, unlettered – what better image could there be of an original genius
existing prior to the division of self and community, subject and object, thought and
feeling, thing and meaning, concrete and abstract, or whatever other oppositions have
been used to illustrate this particular ideological construct?

Homo homericus
A very important strand of twentieth-century Homeric scholarship is rooted in nine-
teenth-century evolutionary theory, whether Hegelian or Darwinian, and sees
Homer’s world as a stage in the cultural evolution of mankind. The debts of that
scholarship to the concept of a ‘naive’ Homer are obvious. Hermann Fränkel’s Ways
and Forms of Early Greek Thought or Bruno Snell’s Discovery of the Mind are books
that carry their story lines in their title. E.R. Dodds’ argument about Homeric shame
culture or A.W.H. Adkins’ theories of the competitive structure of Homeric society
are other distinctive scholarly contributions of this type, where ‘not yet’ or ‘no longer’
are important words. Equally significant is a tendency to draw a very sharp line not
merely between us and Homer but between Homer and the Greek world for which the
Iliad and Odyssey were the most canonical works.
The reductio ad absurdum of this approach is probably The Origin of Conscious-
ness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes, who took the narrative
conventions of divine intervention in the Homeric epics very literally and argued that
the Greeks of Homer’s day were wired differently and that the Socratic daimonion was
the residue of an earlier age in which each human had a ‘bicameral’ mind in which
one chamber could be addressed directly by the gods.

Homo homericus and oral poetry

Julian Jaynes’ homo homericus never existed, but he demonstrates the temptations of
pushing a hypothesis beyond any reasonable limits. Something similar can be said of
what is sometimes called ‘hard’ Parryism, a very rigid insistence on the ‘oral’ nature
of Homeric poetry. While few scholars any longer hold to its more doctrinaire forms,
it is still helpful to review the basic assumptions of a method of inquiry that in its
details is much too technical for the purposes of this inquiry.
It was known in the eighteenth century that the Iliad and Odyssey originated in a
world that was unfamiliar with writing. In his Prolegomena of 1795, a milestone in
the history of modern textual scholarship, F.A. Wolf made this conventional wisdom
a point of departure for systematic reflections on the status of poetry in such a world
and on the problems affecting its transmission. Wolf’s Prolegomena set the agenda
for a century or more of Homeric scholarship. Scholars furiously disagreed about
whether the Iliad was the work of one or of many hands and whether a single hand
should be posited at the beginning or end of the process of composition. But these
disagreements did not affect a growing consensus that the poems employed a
Kunstsprache or ‘artistic dialect’ (not unlike ‘country’ or ‘blues’ in popular music),
and that the individual poet’s art was steeped in his tradition to the point of disappear-
ing in it.
It was the achievement of Milman Parry in the 1920s to rearrange the pieces of that
consensus so as to give it the shape of a very strong theory. Parry was a peculiar

11
 The Iliad
mixture of Herder and Henry Ford. He was more attracted to exploring how a
collective and ethnically grounded creativity speaks through a particular maker than
to tracing the ways in which such a maker plays with or reshapes a tradition. Thus in
the final sentence of his MA thesis the Iliad and Odyssey are described as works in
which ‘the genius of the artist has blended with that of his race so inextricably that the
two are hard to distinguish: they can only be realised in the perfection of the result’.
In the same work the progressive individuality of the post-Homeric hymns strikes him
as the cause of their poetic Fall: ‘The later poems are graceful, charming, but they have
not the greatness of the earlier hymn, which, losing nothing in grace or charm, has
added to them a grave reverence and a spirit of universality } The later hymns have
allowed a definite impress of personality to creep in’ (Parry 1971, 431, 430).
But Parry was also an American in the age of the assembly line and fascinated by
the efficiency of systematic processes that eliminated redundancy. His new idea was
not that Homeric poetry was oral or heavily conventional. Rather it was the hypothesis
that the language of Early Greek epic is a system of metrical production that maxi-
mises both extension and economy: there was a solution or ‘formula’ for every
contingency (the principle of extension), but there was only one solution for every
contingency (the principle of economy). You might say that in Parry’s vision of epic
poetry langue and parole coincide.
Parry’s writings do not always speak with quite the same voice. But at its most
distinctive, that voice sits at the intersection of a deeply romantic and a deeply
mechanical anti-individualism. The resultant hypotheses were immensely productive
in terms of the insights they generated about stylistic and structural patterns in Early
Greek epic. They were also troublingly totalising and at deep odds both with the
poetry and the people described by it. Why would you want to describe a fundamen-
tally ludic activity as a system with so little ‘play’ in it?
More significantly, how do you reconcile an aggressively self-denying theory of
poetic production with the intensely self-seeking cast of characters that populate the
world of Early Greek epic? The essence of parental advice in the Iliad is summed up
in the line aien aristeuein kai hupeirechon emmenai allôn ‘always excel and be ahead
of the others’ (6.208, 11.784). In the context of the Iliad the line refers to battle. But
aristeuein literally means ‘excel at whatever you do’, and Hesiod’s praise of ‘good
discord’ in the opening of Works and Days may be seen as a gloss on the maxim and
an explanation of how it works in the world of farmers, potters, builders, beggars, and
– last but not least – poets:

This is that Discord that stirs up even the helpless to hard work,
Seeing a man gets eager to work on beholding a neighbour
Who is exceedingly wealthy and makes haste ploughland and sowing,
Putting his household in order: so neighbour competing with neighbour
Runs after riches and therefore this Discord benefits mankind.
Every potter begrudges another, and artists do likewise;
Every beggarman envies a beggar, and poets are rivals.

A strongly competitive element is also present in a famous passage from the Hymn to
Apollo (169-73):

12
 1. Introduction
Hail and farewell to you, maidens, remember me kindly hereafter
When anybody of men upon earth, say a wayfaring stranger
Come to this island, should ask your opinion and pose you this question,
‘Who, do you think, is the man that is sweetest of singers, O maidens,
Of those that visit you here? And in which do you take the most pleasure?’
Answer him then well together, unanimously in my favour:
‘He is a blind man whose home is on Chios, that rugged and rockbound
Island, and all of his poems are excellent, now and hereafter.’

The Greek text of the last line reads tou metopisthen aristeuousin aoidai and uses the
same verb that expresses the relentless quest for excellence and individual distinction
that animates Homer’s characters. This very explicit aspect of Early Greek culture is
oddly erased by the most austere version of Parry’s oral poetics.
It is important to remember that Parry made his decisive contributions to Homeric
scholarship before he knew anything about the South Slavic guslars with which his
name is often associated. They are the work of a linguist with a strong systematising
urge, and they are entirely based on close scrutiny of the Homeric texts. They are also
largely a theory of the microstructure of Homeric poetry – a point emphasised by
Adam Parry when he edited his father’s papers under the title The Making of Homeric
Verse. On the other hand, Parry’s theory was based on a division between oral and
written literature, and it remains a paradigm of a theory that locates Homer on the other
side of a very deep divide.
Important technical aspects of Parry’s work were challenged by Hoekstra in
Homeric Modifications of Formulaic Prototypes (1965) and by Hainsworth in The
Flexibility of the Homeric Formula (1968). The titles of these quite technical mono-
graphs give a good indication of their aim to soften the rigid excesses of Parry’s
theory. In a recent monograph on Formular Economy in Homer (2007) Rainer
Friedrich grounds a Homeric poetics on the ‘breaches’ of formular economy. The
insights are good, but the terminology is awkward and points to the lingering survival
of the greatest initial shortcoming of Parry’s hypothesis, its failure to conceive of the
conventions of oral poetry as a rule-governed but open-ended system whose normal
output would always include unpredictable, playful, and redundant phenomena.
Parry’s work was continued and extended by Albert Lord, who in 1960 published
his The Singer of Tales, an anatomy of oral poetry that is based on Homeric and
Serbo-Croatian heroic poetry but claims validity for all oral poetry. The Parry-Lord
theory, for all its wealth of empirical observation, cannot deny its derivation from the
Myth of the Two Poets. It posits oral poetry as far more than poetry produced,
performed and transmitted without the aid of writing. It is the expression of a distinct
mentalité radically opposed at all levels to the world of literacy. The dogmas of the
theory may be stated as follows:

1. The oral poet has no ‘style’ of his own – the very word betrays its origin in a literary
culture. He composes with the aid of a stock of formulas inherited from the
tradition.
2. The oral poem is formulaic at every level of organisation. Stock phrases are
combined into sentences; stock themes into larger narrative units, etc.
3. The oral poet improvises, and there is no distinction between the acts of composi-

13
 The Iliad
tion and performance. The concepts of a fixed text and of individual authorship,
fundamental to a literate culture, make no sense in an oral context in which singer,
tale and audience are merged in a communal tradition.
4. An oral tradition cannot survive the advent of literacy.

From these principles one can deduce two additional methodological rules:

5. The ‘reader’ of oral poetry must unlearn the habits of literacy if he wants fully to
enter into the spirit of oral poetry.
6. If you prove that a poem is oral at one level of organisation, you must read it as an
oral poem at all levels of organisation.

The rigid application of these principles to the Homeric poems has always confronted
critics with the dilemma of having to acknowledge the unquestionably oral nature of
Homeric verse at the cost of rejecting many perceived qualities of the Iliad and
Odyssey as figments of a literary imagination. Ruth Finnegan therefore did Homeric
scholarship a great service by proving that the theory of oral poetry as different from
literate poetry at every level of organisation is a myth that does not fit the facts. She
surveyed a wide range of oral literature differing in genre, social function and
geographical origin and demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that it is impos-
sible to identify a set of traits common to all oral literature.
In some cultures, oral poems are a collective possession, but others have a distinct
notion of individual authorship. Performance and composition often coincide, as they
do in Serbo-Croatian poetry, but there is ample evidence for oral poems that are
premeditated and recited on separate occasions, whether by the author or by someone
else. There is considerable variety with regard to verbatim transmission. Above all,
Finnegan showed that the relationship of oral to literate traditions is extremely flexible
and that many oral traditions have co-existed with literacy and made use of it. The
conclusion of her research is that the internal variety of oral traditions and the great
flexibility of their relationship to literacy greatly weaken arguments from analogy. To
say of a work that it is oral is to make a statement about its dominant mode of
production and or transmission. Such a statement of itself says nothing about the
organisation, complexity and spirit of a text so produced or transmitted. The proof that
a poem is like a certain kind of oral poetry in some ways does not justify the inference
that it will be like that poetry in other ways. ‘Oral literature’ is a vague concept with
low explanatory power.
Since the eighties, the most productive approaches to style and language in the
Homeric poems have moved away from the oral/literate divide and have instead
focused on them as a special kind of speech. The guiding question has moved from
‘How does this feature differ from literate poetry?’ to ‘How can we relate this feature
to what we know about ordinary properties of spoken language?’ The great advantage
of such an approach is that it grounds the analysis of Homeric phenomena in what
people know about how people talk. We can sidestep the conundrum of how people
who are no longer ‘oral’ can understand a poetry that is not yet ‘literate’ and draw
instead on common sense understandings of speech and performance as well as on
the formal study of these phenomena in speech act theory, cognitive psychology,
and such subdisciplines of linguistics as pragmatics and discourse analysis. Richard

14
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Title: Le livre des lotus entr'ouverts

Author: Maurice Magre

Release date: July 10, 2024 [eBook #74003]

Language: French

Original publication: Paris: E. Fasquelle, 1926

Credits: Laurent Vogel (This book was produced from images made
available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LE LIVRE DES

LOTUS ENTR'OUVERTS ***
 MAURICE MAGRE

LE LIVRE
DES

LOTUS
ENTR’OUVERTS

PARIS
Eugène FASQUELLE, Éditeur
11, RUE DE GRENELLE (7e)

1926
EUGÈNE FASQUELLE, Éditeur, 11, Rue de Grenelle, PARIS (7e)

DU MÊME AUTEUR

POÉSIES

La Chanson des Hommes 1 vol.

Le Poème de la Jeunesse 1 vol.
Les Lèvres et le Secret 1 vol.
Les Belles de Nuit 1 vol.
La Montée aux Enfers 1 vol.
La Porte du Mystère 1 vol.
 IL A ÉTÉ TIRÉ DE CET OUVRAGE
60 exemplaires numérotés sur papier de Madagascar.

Tous droits réservés

Copyright 1926, by EUGÈNE FASQUELLE
 EN FACE DU BOUDDHA DE BOIS…

En face du Bouddha de bois que m’a rapporté de Chine un

voyageur et qui fut sculpté par le bonze d’une pagode, dans la
montagne de Cao Bang, je me suis assis les jambes croisées, durant
bien des soirs, sur le tapis où sont des arabesques et des fleurs
coloriées, sur le tapis où veillent mes rêves comme autant de petites
lampes sereines.
Et comme j’avais longtemps demandé aux esprits intermédiaires
qui peuplent les royaumes invisibles de m’accorder la clairvoyance de
mes existences antérieures, je vis s’écouler des images et
s’entr’ouvrir des prunelles familières, des formes surgirent de
l’ombre des jours révolus.
Mais à cause de l’imperfection de mon âme, ces formes étaient
indistinctes, ces prunelles demeuraient voilées, je ne contemplai que
des fragments épars des beautés et des douleurs qui n’étaient plus.
Car il n’est donné qu’à ceux qui sont purs, de s’échapper hors de la
prison du temps.
Et je connus qu’à travers les âges sans nombre la justice de la loi
avait toujours fait de moi un homme médiocre. Jamais, comme les
hommes plus favorisés ou plus orgueilleux qui se souviennent de
leurs vies passées, il ne m’avait été donné d’être un personnage
remarquable par les talents et illustre dans sa nation.
Rien qu’un pauvre ramasseur d’herbes, au pied d’une falaise
crayeuse, qui fait sans cesse le même geste de tirer avec un râteau !
Une sorte de bateleur qui s’en va sur les routes derrière un âne et
fait des tours dans les villages ! Un homme qui tanne des peaux,
marié à une créature délicate qu’il torture par sa vulgarité !
Et toujours de l’autre côté du monde ! dans l’orient lumineux où
bruissent les forêts où étincellent les sables, où les pagodes tendent
au ciel leur dôme circulaire en mosaïques azuréennes ! Et à cause de
cela je suis solitaire dans le pays où résonnent les cloches, où le blé
croît au lieu du riz.
Enfin, j’ai vu ma dernière incarnation, celle où un rayon de
l’esprit descendit sur moi, celle où il me fut donné d’être un poète
que toucha la beauté des formes, qui aima les choses avec son
cœur, qui entrevit les vérités cachées sous les apparences. Ainsi
dans une grotte souterraine, l’eau incolore de la pluie, après avoir
filtré des milliers d’années, se condense en des stalactites de cristal.
En des stalactites de pensées d’amour s’est muée la pluie de mes
quotidiennes pensées, durant la vie d’un poète de l’Inde qui vécut à
Delhi et à Bénarès. Il a aimé les visages charmants et les formes
parfaites et l’amour de la beauté l’a conduit à l’amour de la
connaissance comme une jeune fille amoureuse conduit un étranger
à son fiancé.
Et c’est pourquoi en souvenir de ce prédécesseur fraternel dans
le voyage innombrable, j’ai écrit le livre des Lotus Entr’ouverts, le
livre dont j’ai déchiffré les caractères au fond du miroir, le miroir qui
est au-dessus du Bouddha de bois que m’a rapporté de Chine un
voyageur.
Car il est enseigné par les Sages anciens qu’on peut enclore une
magie dans certains bois savamment vernis et que cette magie avec
la réflexion du miroir et la volonté du visionnaire recrée le verbe
perdu qui fut prononcé du fond de l’âme et le grave dans la buée
crépusculaire du miroir, le grave pour les yeux qui voient.
Et je dis, ayant terminé la transcription de l’ouvrage ancien :
Puissé-je être digne de celui que j’ai été, moi qui suis indigne de
celui que je serai. Puisse mon esprit s’élancer plus haut, puisse mon
esprit s’élancer plus vite vers la connaissance et vers l’amour,
puissent mes actions être en harmonie avec mes pensées, puisse ma
voix faible résonner très loin et transmettre aux hommes par le
mystère de l’écriture la goutte de beauté que j’ai pleurée.
 LE SERPENT NOIR QUI DONNE LA
CHANCE

L’aurore se lève. Remercie Dieu qui t’a fait découvrir dans la cour
dorée, le serpent noir qui donne la chance à la maison.
Il faudra lui apporter du lait dans un vase de terre plat et mettre
à côté des feuillages secs pour qu’il y repose.
Aucun visage de mauvais augure ne se présentera aujourd’hui à
la porte, aucune pensée triste ne se tiendra debout sur le seuil de
l’âme.
Une journée entière de bonheur, sans querelle parmi les
servantes, sans souvenir amer qui trouble la pureté de ton regard !
O serpent noir, je mettrai chaque jour du lait dans le vase plat et
je préparerai les feuillages secs, serpent noir qui me rend visite si
rarement !
 PETITE LUMIÈRE

Une intérieure suavité spirituelle met sur les traits de son visage
une expression délicate qui fait penser au vol d’une hirondelle, au
bord d’un étang, par un crépuscule de printemps.
Elle ne sait pas jouer de la cythare, ni composer des strophes,
mais tout en elle est poésie naturelle et harmonie invisible.
Elle délivre le papillon des mains des enfants et aide la bête à
bon-dieu à retrouver son chemin. Tout ce qui est petitesse et fragilité
l’attendrit.
Elle n’accomplit aucun grand acte de bonté et elle rêve plus
qu’elle n’agit. On prétend même qu’elle est paresseuse.
On ne peut définir la nuance exacte de sa robe d’un bleu
intermédiaire entre celui du ciel et celui de l’eau. Qui peut dire aussi
si elle est gaie ou si elle est triste ?
Elle n’aime pas les fêtes, les longs voyages, les réunions
solennelles, l’apparence extérieure de la richesse. Elle craint la
pauvreté et elle fait volontiers le tour du jardin.
On l’a surnommée Petite Lumière. Mais pour moi elle à un nom
secret au fond de mon cœur et je ne le prononce jamais. Je l’aime à
cause de l’intérieure suavité spirituelle qui se reflète sur son visage.
 L’EMPEREUR DE CHINE ET
L’EMPEREUR DU JAPON

L’empereur de Chine et l’empereur du Japon se sont rencontrés

par une belle soirée, sur la mer calme. Deux navires pavoisés se
sont avancés solennellement de chaque côté de l’horizon et des
milliers de jonques avec leurs lanternes de couleurs se sont tenues
immobiles sur les flots comme autant de grandes étoiles et les
étoiles innombrables se sont tenues immobiles dans le ciel, comme
autant de jonques minuscules.
L’empereur de Chine et l’empereur du Japon se sont assis l’un en
face de l’autre sous un parasol de soie à manche d’or et, à côté
d’eux, il y avait un nain chinois avec un bonnet carré et un nain
japonais avec une mitre de plumes de paon qui leur présentaient du
thé dans un bloc de cristal creusé. Les deux empereurs en buvaient
quelques gorgées et ils se regardaient en silence. Leurs robes
étaient ruisselantes de pierreries et ils étaient pareils à des dieux
timides qui n’osent pas engager la conversation.
Les courtisans, sur le pont des navires faisaient un cercle
respectueux de broderies et d’armures. Il y avait là des mandarins
de neuf rangs différents, depuis le Tai Fou qui porte la pierre rouge
jusqu’au Tai Tchao qui porte un globule d’or. Il y avait là le Siogoun
entouré des Seigneurs de la Terre et certains fonctionnaires religieux
courbés en deux par la discipline des rites et dégageant la
vénération comme une lampe dégage la lumière. Et sur les rivages
de la Chine et du Japon les peuples étaient massés et regardaient la
mer calme.
Les deux empereurs allaient s’entretenir de l’invasion prochaine
des Tartares, de la puissance des épidémies qui s’abattent
mystérieusement sur certaines provinces. Ils allaient chercher
ensemble les moyens de faire circuler rapidement le riz à travers les
terres et les mers pour remédier aux famines, ils allaient étudier les
causes de ces fabuleux typhons qui, à certaines époques, soulèvent
les mers. Ils allaient entrer en communication avec les Génies,
écouter la voix des Ancêtres. De leur réunion allait jaillir l’éclair qui
fait descendre les Dieux.
L’empereur de Chine, le plus résolu, parla le premier et la
conversation fut assez animée. Ils étaient tous deux grands
amateurs de laques et ils s’étonnaient qu’une certaine nuance de
violet ne puisse plus être obtenue. « Les polisseurs de Canton
n’apportent plus autant de soins qu’avant à leurs travaux. Le colcotar
est trop calciné. On ne trouve plus le cinabre absolument pur. Et,
pour le rose, c’est bien plus terrible ! On a abandonné la culture de
la fleur de carthame. Le secret des anciens maîtres est perdu. En
vérité, le monde est en décadence. » Les deux empereurs sont très
malheureux et, lorsque l’entrevue est terminée, ils pleurent presque,
courbés derrière leur éventail, tandis que les deux navires
s’éloignent solennellement sur la mer calme.
 LA CHARITÉ DE PADMANI

J’ai trouvé la robe déchirée d’un pauvre sur la barrière de mon

jardin. Le pauvre lui-même appuyé sur son bâton s’éloignait sur le
chemin avec une singulière légèreté, revêtu d’un manteau à
broderies et à franges qui ressemblait à mon plus beau manteau.
« J’ai fait manger le pauvre et je l’ai fait boire, me dit Padmani
avec un visage serein. Je l’ai conduit dans la piscine et il a fumé ton
houka. Et comme son manteau était déchiré je lui ai donné un
manteau à broderies et à franges, car il convient d’être charitable. »
« Tout ce que tu fais est bien fait », ai-je répondu.
« Quand je lui ai eu donné cela, reprit Padmani, j’ai vu que le
pauvre était aussi pauvre qu’avant. Il me faisait tant de peine que
j’ai voulu qu’il emportât une richesse inusitée, la richesse d’un beau
souvenir et je me suis donnée à lui. » Ainsi parla Padmani, avec
simplicité et elle allait, s’occupant de petites choses, dans la maison.
Alors j’ai médité sur la charité et sur la connaissance du bien et
du mal qu’il n’est pas donné aux femmes d’avoir. « Quel âge pouvait
avoir ce pauvre ? » ai-je demandé tristement. Padmani a éclaté de
rire : « Comment pourrai-je me souvenir de cela ? Je n’ai vu que ses
yeux qui pleuraient. » J’ai médité encore sur la charité.
 LE DIEU DE L’INTELLIGENCE
BIENVEILLANTE

O dieu de l’intelligence bienveillante qu’on représente avec le

grand front dénudé d’un homme mûr, le regard ingénu d’un enfant
et le pli de la bouche d’un vieillard, toi qui tiens une boule de cristal
et un lotus refermé, toi qui es immobile, toi qui vois, toi qui sais.
O dieu de l’intelligence bienveillante, mets sur mon visage le
sourire qui comprend, fais faire à ma main le geste qui excuse,
donne à toutes mes attitudes ce délié que l’indulgence quotidienne
apporte au corps.
Écarte de moi la colère qui aveugle et nous enveloppe d’une
buée rougeâtre, ne permets pas au désir effréné de me posséder,
car il force l’homme à marcher à quatre pattes à la manière des
bêtes.
Donne-moi la mesure avec laquelle on pèse ses actions comme
des cailloux noirs, la mesure avec laquelle on pèse ses pensées
comme des grains de blé lumineux.
Donne-moi le jugement par lequel la vérité est discernée de
l’erreur et la clairvoyance qui fait savoir qu’un homme est bon même
sous une apparence vulgaire ou mauvaise.
Fais-moi me dresser entre le bien et le mal comme on se dresse
entre deux frères ennemis. Montre-moi la part du mensonge que
cache la douceur du masque blanc et la part d’humaine nécessité
qu’il y a sous la grimace du masque noir.
Ne me fais pas rire à cause du caractère plaisant de la douleur,
ne me fais pleurer qu’à cause de l’émotion spirituelle que procure la
beauté et permets-moi de comprendre la mort, cette entrée dans le
pays des hommes immatériels, des paysages subtils, des vibrations
délicates.
Donne à mon esprit la soif inextinguible de savoir, à mon cœur la
faculté illimitée de chérir les formes diverses de la création, permets-
moi de gravir avec l’agilité du coureur les degrés de la connaissance
qui conduisent à la porte de l’amour, ô dieu de l’intelligence
bienveillante !
 LA MÈRE DE PADMANI

Elle m’avait dit sur sa mère des choses tellement délicieuses que
je résolus de l’accompagner quand elle voulut lui rendre visite dans
un village perdu au pied des montagnes Aravalli.
Nos chevaux moururent dans les sables du désert de Thar et
nous faillîmes nous noyer en traversant une rivière qui avait
débordé. Mais tous ces dangers étaient sans importance puisqu’il
s’agissait d’aller voir une merveilleuse créature pleine de sagesse et
de beauté.
« Ce serait orgueilleux de ma part, de prétendre que je lui
ressemble, disait Padmani, tant elle a de majesté naturelle et de
noblesse supérieure. » Ses yeux brillaient et elle redevenait une
toute petite fille à mesure que nous approchions.
Devant une misérable case était accroupie une vieille femme à
demi sauvage. Elle ne se leva pas pour embrasser sa fille et elle se
contenta de remuer à droite et à gauche sa mâchoire, en signe
d’une confuse satisfaction. Et mon âme était pleine de honte pour la
charmante Padmani dont les larmes coulaient comme des perles sur
ses joues couleur de lune.
Et, lorsque nous reprîmes le chemin du retour, je la tenais
tendrement par les épaules, m’efforçant de ne plus penser à cette
visite malheureuse. Mais elle riait, une musique enchantée était dans
sa voix et elle répétait : « Comment l’as-tu trouvée ? N’est-ce pas
que je ne t’avais pas menti ? Il m’est doux d’aimer une telle mère ! »
Alors je fus plein de honte pour moi-même. O merveille de la pureté
des cœurs !
 LE TIROIR SECRET

Dans le coffret d’ivoire incrusté d’or où sont ses bijoux et les

souvenirs de notre amour nous avons découvert un tiroir secret où il
y avait un parchemin jauni et d’aspect triste, avec des caractères en
langue Zend.
« C’est peut-être une malédiction ou l’indication d’un trésor
caché. Il faudra aller, me dit-elle, chez le moullah qui sait toutes
choses, pour savoir ce que ces caractères veulent dire. » Mais, moi,
je secouai la tête car je savais bien ce que contenait le parchemin.
Il contenait l’histoire de nos amours, celle de tous les amours des
hommes. Il disait que dans le beau coffret d’ivoire il y a toujours un
coin ignoré avec une histoire secrète et que dans l’âme de la bien-
aimée il y a toujours une amertume incompréhensible que le
moullah ni personne ne peut expliquer.
 LA SAGESSE DIVINE

Il y a peut-être un jardin délicat au sommet d’une montagne

sauvage avec un kiosque de porcelaine et de bois laqué d’où l’on
aperçoit de très loin les dômes des villes où s’agitent les hommes.
Oh ! vivre là, avec la parfaite certitude qu’aucun visiteur ne se
présentera à la minuscule porte du kiosque, que je n’entendrai ni
formule de politesse, ni affectueux témoignage.
Là, je marcherai à petits pas, j’examinerai le dessin d’une feuille,
les veines d’un caillou, la clarté d’une goutte d’eau, les nuances d’un
souvenir.
Là enfin, ni la famille, ni l’amitié, ni l’amour ne m’envelopperont
de leur nuage gris, bleu ou rose et je ne serai pas comme un
glaneur qui cherche un grain de plaisir dans un champ d’ennui.
Je m’assiérai sous un mûrier qu’on ne cultivera pas pour le vers à
soie, je cueillerai une rose qui ne sera pas destinée à un bouquet, je
suivrai une allée où le sable ne gardera pas la trace d’une sandale
féminine.
Et là, comme une essence parfumée qui tombe dans une urne
d’or, la sagesse filtrera du ciel silencieux, apportée par le vent sans
parole et remplira lentement l’urne spirituelle de mon âme.
Je serai entouré de parents attentifs parce qu’ils se tairont,
d’amis fidèles parce qu’ils seront immobiles, de maîtresses tendres
parce qu’elles répandront des parfums suaves sans le vouloir. O
famille des arbres, amitié des pierres, amours des fleurs !
Et si je vois un soir la silhouette noire de quelque conseiller ou le
voile incarnat d’une femme aux beaux yeux s’acheminer de mon
côté je couperai une branche de saule et j’en lancerai les feuilles
vers le croissant de lune pour qu’ils comprennent qu’en moi a
pénétré le sentiment de la vanité du monde et qu’ils s’en retournent.
Et à l’heure où les étoiles sont épuisées et où la rosée fera dans
ma chevelure une couronne brillante après une nuit de méditation,
peut-être connaîtrai-je dans l’évanouissement de l’extase avec la
naissance de l’aurore, le parfait amour de toute chose qui met
l’homme au rang des dieux.
 LES PLUMES DU PAON

Une très belle femme se tenait sur un balcon. On voyait sous la

mousseline la chair laiteuse de ses épaules, elle était couverte de
bijoux comme une idole et elle cachait à demi son visage derrière un
éventail en plumes de paon éblouissantes.
Et moi, je la regardais longuement, oubliant Padmani qui
marchait à côté de moi, car la beauté d’une femme est plus grande
sur un balcon à cause du mystère de la chambre qui est derrière. Et
j’aurais bien voulu être remarqué d’elle et je me redressai et me
retournai de son côté.
Padmani ne dit rien, mais avec une ridicule affectation, elle resta
taciturne et un peu plus tard, je pensai qu’elle était affligée de mon
long regard et je lui dis : « Es-tu triste parce que tu es jalouse de la
belle femme du balcon ? Dis-moi tes pensées pour que je te
console. »
— Je suis triste, a-t-elle répondu, à cause des éblouissantes
plumes de l’éventail. Le paon qui les a portées ne dessinera plus au
soleil une roue multicolore. Comme on est cruel avec les oiseaux ! Ne
savais-tu pas que le paon est l’oiseau que j’aime le mieux ? »
 LE JEUNE HOMME DE LA NUIT

Il a fait craquer doucement les feuilles mortes dans le jardin. Le

chien n’a pas aboyé quand il est passé. La lune n’a pas reflété son
ombre sur le sable de l’allée. Mais j’ai bien su qu’il était là.
Je me suis arrêté de jouer de la cithare. J’ai posé l’instrument sur
le coussin. Je me suis tenu immobile, je n’ai pas regardé du côté de
la fenêtre. Mais je savais bien qu’il me regardait par les volets
entr’ouverts.
Comment était l’ovale de son visage ? De quelle couleur étaient
ses yeux ? Quelle forme avait son turban ? A la fin j’ai tourné un peu
la tête de son côté. Il y avait une légère buée sur le carreau.
Je n’ai pas entendu de craquement sur les feuilles mortes du
jardin et le chien n’a pas aboyé. J’ai repris ma cithare et je me suis
remis lentement à jouer car j’ai bien compris qu’il était parti.
 LA POÉTESSE DE CHINE ET LES
PAVOTS BLANCS

Je suis amoureux de la poétesse Tchou Chou Tchenn qui vivait en

Chine il y a plusieurs siècles. A un homme vulgaire son père l’avait
mariée pour la punir d’être allée, la nuit, porter un bouquet de
pavots blancs sur une montagne déserte.
De cette habitude depuis son enfance, on n’avait jamais pu la
guérir. Comme si une mystérieuse voix l’appelait, il fallait qu’elle
allât, certaines nuits, faire cet hommage nocturne à un invisible
Génie.
L’homme vulgaire la battit et elle jura de ne plus recommencer.
Mais quand le temps était venu, elle se glissait furtivement à l’heure
où tout le monde dormait, par un sentier qui ne menait nulle part et
se perdait au milieu des pierres.
On la trouva morte, un matin, au sommet de la montagne
déserte. Son corps était couvert de gouttes de rosée et brillait
comme si elle était habillée d’une tunique de diamants. Les Génies
de cette solitude avaient-ils enlevé son âme ? A côté d’elle on ne
retrouva pas les pavots blancs.
 II

Je suis amoureux de la poétesse Tchou Chou Tchenn qui vivait en

Chine il y a plusieurs siècles. L’homme vulgaire qu’elle avait épousé
était corroyeur de son état et avait une boutique dans une rue de
Raé-Ning.
Au milieu des peaux entassées, cette délicate se tenait, avec ses
yeux couleur de jade vert et ses mains couleur de jade blanc. Et des
cuirs tannés montait pour elle un plus suave parfum que celui des lis
ou des roses.
Elle lisait ses vers à son mari quand il était réuni dans la boutique
avec ses apprentis et d’autres hommes vulgaires, ses amis. Nul ne
comprenait, mais tous restaient immobiles, pleins de béatitude,
sentant le souffle invisible de la beauté planer sur la maison.
Et une fois un mandarin en voyage écouta par la fente de la
porte et s’émerveilla grandement. Et il prépara une troupe de
cavaliers et d’hommes armés avec un palanquin d’or et de cristal
pour enlever la délicate et la subtile à la boutique du corroyeur.
Elle aurait bien voulu s’en aller loin de la compagnie des hommes
vulgaires pour habiter dans un palais au milieu des matières rares,
pour jouir de la musique des luths, de la conversation des lettrés, de
la possession des manuscrits chargés de pensées, mais quelque
chose la retenait là.
C’était la voix qui n’a pas de son, le chemin qui ne mène nulle
part, la mystérieuse tâche nocturne à laquelle elle s’était vouée,
c’était la présence de la montagne déserte au sommet de laquelle
elle devait certaines nuits, porter un bouquet de pavots blancs.

III
 Je suis amoureux de la poétesse Tchou Chou Tchenn qui vivait en
Chine il y a plusieurs siècles. Bien rarement elle parlait et elle ne se
plaisait qu’à voir de la balustrade de sa maison décroître le vol des
cigognes dans de ciel.
Elle ne rencontra qu’une fois, au milieu d’autres mandarins
puissants, son père qui l’avait vouée à la misère en la mariant pour
la punir et la faire rétrograder parmi les êtres, à un corroyeur
vulgaire.
Elle se prosterna comme il est prescrit, sur le chemin devant son
père et elle prit la main de la malédiction et elle la baisa. Et lui, qui
était un homme mauvais, s’étonna de voir dans les yeux de sa fille
une si belle flamme couleur de jade vert et de l’étoile Ki.
Et il ne savait pas que l’âme est faite d’un métal plus inaltérable
que l’or vierge et que celle qui s’est regardée intérieurement ne fait
que se purifier au contact de la vulgarité.
Et dans son orgueil il dit à sa fille : « Donne-moi ce pavot blanc
que tu as à la ceinture. » Elle le lui tendit respectueusement, mais
elle s’arrangea pour en faire tomber les pétales et qu’il n’en restât
plus que la tige.
« Elle n’a pas changé, dit le père aux autres mandarins. Et le
corroyeur ne doit pas recevoir d’elle plus que son père n’a reçu. Elle
donne tout aux Génies. »

IV

Je suis amoureux de la poétesse Tchou Chou Tchenn qui vivait en

Chine il y a plusieurs siècles. Quand elle mourut, tous les corroyeurs
de Raé-Ning furent en deuil et son mari, l’homme vulgaire, qui était
gros devint pareil à un saule en hiver.
Il pleurait sans cesse, songeant qu’il ne l’avait pas assez aimée et
il se repentait de ne pas avoir uniquement, avec ses peaux, fait des
robes de fourrure pour la couvrir.
Il disait : « Quand elle parlait, j’étais transporté dans un pays
merveilleux, mais nous étions loin l’un de l’autre. Comment peut-on
aimer à ce point ce qu’on a perdu sans l’avoir compris. »
Et moi, peut-être, dans une vie antérieure, j’ai été cet homme
vulgaire et c’est pourquoi j’aime la poétesse Tchou Chou Tchenn et
je la pleure encore après des siècles. Je la cherche sur la balustrade
de ma maison quand je vois des cigognes s’éloigner et si un pas
résonne sur le chemin, je m’imagine que c’est elle qui s’en va
silencieusement porter ses pavots blancs sur la montagne déserte.
 LE LOTUS ET LES DÉVAS

Comme je poussais la porte du jardin, elle était au milieu d’une

plate-bande de roses et, les yeux levés au ciel, elle avait un doigt sur
les lèvres et semblait faire : « Chut ! » à quelqu’un. Mais il n’y avait
personne.
Alors j’ai gardé le silence. Mais elle m’a dit : « C’est pour mieux
t’entendre me dire des paroles d’amour que j’ai fait signe à un
groupe de dévas vêtus de blanc de rester silencieux au-dessus du
jardin. »
« O Padmani, comme j’aimerais voir ces dévas. Ne peux-tu leur
dire de s’approcher et de me montrer le bel ovale de leurs traits et
leurs robes, tissées sans doute de nuages. »
Elle a secoué la tête et a répondu : « Ils viennent justement de
s’éloigner car ils ont respiré l’arôme de certain lotus d’une espèce
rare qui vient d’éclore à mille lieues d’ici sur une montagne de Chine
et ils sont ivres pour plusieurs jours. »
 L’ASSEMBLÉE DES MUSICIENS
SILENCIEUX

Ayant gravi un interminable escalier je me suis trouvé soudain

dans une assemblée de musiciens en robes noires. Il y avait des
laques sur les murs, le plafond était d’or mat, tout était éteint, tout
était voilé dans la salle où étaient réunis ces musiciens de génie.
Les visages de ces musiciens étaient illuminés par l’extase et ils
touchaient leurs instruments avec des mains légères, comme en un
rêve. Mais j’avais beau prêter l’oreille, je ne percevais aucune
musique d’orchestre, rien qu’un grand silence mystérieux.
Et ce silence était si angoissant, si chargé d’invisibles images et
de pensées inexprimées que je commençai à trembler. Mais celui qui
me conduisait me toucha du doigt entre les deux yeux et me dit :
« Dans cette salle sans reflets, ce n’est pas avec les oreilles qu’on
entend mais avec le cœur. »
Et je commençai à comprendre la musique des musiciens en
robes noires. C’était l’harmonie cachée de la terre, le langage sans
mots, la résonnance sans vibrations, la beauté qui se perçoit par les
sens intérieurs de l’âme et c’est à partir de ce jour que j’ai possédé
la connaissance de la vie vraie.