6
E
UR
A
MERICA
still hotly debate the authorship of the
Iliad
and
Odyssey
. Yet an
episode in the
Odyssey
can help illustrate the function of poet in
the dissemination of fame. Due to the long absence of Odysseus, a
horde of suitors flood to his house, hoping to win Penelope’s heart
and brazenly squandering Odysseus’s property in endless banquets.
During their carousals these suitors often force a minstrel named
Phemius to entertain them with his lyre and singing (Homer, 1996:
82). In Book XXII, after virtually all the suitors are slaughtered by
Odysseus and his son, this minstrel, whose name roughly means
“bestower of fame” in Greek (Hexter, 1993: 340), implores
Odysseus to spare him because he devotes himself to singing for
gods and mortals (Homer, 1996: 450). This episode, together with
the implication of the name
Phemius
, suggests that the conception
of poet as disseminator of fame has already taken shape in the
Odyssey
. On the other hand, the situation is different in the case of
didactic poetry (Curtius, 1967: 515). Hesiod mentions his own
name in the
Theogony
(2004:
11) and sketches out his family
background in the
Works and Days
(2004: 66, 81). In the opening
lines of the
Works and Days
, Hesiod, though not specifically
referring to literary fame, claims that Muses bring “fame and
glory” (2004: 65).
3
In Roman literary landscape, in
Tusculan Disputations
Cicero
explicitly maintains that the quest for honor figures prominently in
human artistic endeavors: “Public esteem is the nurse of the arts,
and all men are fired to application by fame” (1945: 7). Virgil
mentions himself at the end of the
Georgics
(2005:
78), but in the
Aeneid
he is silent on its authorship (Curtius, 1967: 515). In the
case of the
Thebaid
, though Statius does not explicitly mention his
own name, he refers to the hard travails in the course of writing it
and, more importantly, his longing for posthumous fame through
3
Gilbert Murray, however, has pointed out that the passages in the
Theogony
and
Works and Days
where Hesiod mentions his own name and his background
respectively are probably spurious (1907: 6).
