Summary
Both archaeological ‘documentation’ and Homeric scholarship were satirized in Samuel Butler’s Authoress of the Odyssey, the work of a writer who devoted his life to subverting the revered institutions and mocking the sacred cows of late Victorian Britain. Butler suggests his own recipe for enlivening modernization—surely a mischievous young female author is preferable to an aged bard?—but quickly turns to making ‘presence’ ridiculous in his photographs of “Cyclopean” walls, and a “Cave of Polyphemus” that looks like any other cave.
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Notes
- 1.
Thanks to the members of the Heidelberg seminar, above all Sally Humphreys and Rudolf Wagner, and to audiences at UC Riverside and Yale, for feedback. Many thanks also go to Mariette de Vos Raaijmakers and to Delphine Burlot for helpful clarifications concerning the still murky history surrounding La Musa Polimnia. I am further grateful to Kathryn McKee of St. John’s College, Cambridge, who generously assisted me in obtaining photographic materials from the Butler archives and the permission to utilize these.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
The conceit took. Cf. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling 1804: 40, comparing the earth to a philological problem: “in geology we still await the genius who will analyse the earth and show its composition as Wolf analysed Homer.”
- 5.
Butler 1922: 252. Henceforth, references to this edition of Butler’s Authoress will be given by page number only in the body of the text. The phrase “Wolfian heresy” (ibid.: 2) is borrowed from Mure 1851.
- 6.
Butler 1893 (here 1923: 276–77), itself dependent on an outlandish narrative about how the authoress’ plans for the Odyssey evolved from a sketch into a full-blown epic.
- 7.
Wilamowitz-Moellendorff 1884: 228–229: “The ‘redactor’ [of the Odyssey] used three epics for his compilation, which were themselves already the product of contamination. The most recent of these, which for its part presupposes the other two, was produced not long before the redaction, and likewise on the mainland,… [while] the remaining two poems are formally of a higher caliber, are older (even if there is no reason to date them to earlier than the eighth century), and were produced in Ionia.” The remark is typical of much nineteenth-century mantic philology.
- 8.
“How can I expect Homeric scholars to tolerate theories so subversive of all that most of them have been insisting on for so many years?… If I am right they have invested their reputation for sagacity in a worthless stock” (3). As Butler recognizes (ibid.), his subversion pertains as much to the Iliad as to the Odyssey.
- 9.
An unsurprising exception is Farrington 1929, a vigorous and straightforward defense of Butler’s claims by another ‘subversive’; another is Butler’s continuator L. G. Pocock (1955, 1957, 1965). For correctives, see Shaffer 1988, 167–203, who sets the right tone, and who also pays close heed to Butler’s use of visual imagery, photographic and other; similarly, Shaffer 2004: “The very title of his book…was calculated to offend the entire establishment nurtured on Gladstone’s notion that a classical education, a grounding in the political and military tactics of Homer’s Iliad and the navigational prowess of the Odyssey, was the best preparation for young men whose task was to rule the empire.” Also Whitmarsh 2002; Beard 2007. Butler’s “subversiveness” in a way merely consisted in literalizing the bias about Homer (known also in antiquity, [Longinus] Subl. 9.11–15) to which Richard Bentley gave lapidary form in 1713: “the Ilias he made for the Men, and the Odysseïs for the other Sex.” Cf. Mure 1854: I. 225; Kingsley 1880: 114–115; Butler 1893: 286.
- 10.
Note, too, how the embedded inconsistencies (layerings) of the oral tradition hypothesis have been replaced by a (rather strained!) explanation based on the technology of writing.
- 11.
See Claire L. Lyons et al. 2005; Downing 2006: 87–89. Dörpfeld is sometimes said to have supplied Schliemann with the idea of photographing his excavations, but C. Runnels points to “the extensive use of photography by Schliemann in 1874 to document his Trojan finds [and] the numerous photographs he had taken at Mycenae in 1876, all before he met Dörpfeld. Schliemann regularly used engravings in his publications because he was dissatisfied with the quality of the photographs he could obtain” (Runnels 1997: 128). See Schliemann 1874b and the accompanying volume of illustrations, 1874a; also Schliemann 1878. On images in archaeological reports see also Fotiadis and Wang and Thouard, this volume.
- 12.
See Butler 1888a: 123–25 for one delicious example. The earlier work, Butler 1881, is bizarrely dotted with musical accompaniments, in the form of scores, apparently drawn from Handel’s organ concertos (Shaffer 1988: 79), designed to describe what Butler claims he heard at various points on his journeys, e.g., “By and by, the galloping, cantering movement became a trotting one, thus:—”, upon which a page of musical notation follows (Butler 1881: 84).
- 13.
See E. S. Shaffer 1988 for a superb account (whence the phrase “ignorant eye”).
- 14.
Ibid. 99.
- 15.
Cf. Butler 1893: 276, where we read that the kernel of the Odyssey and its inspiration were a jeu d’esprit and the desire “to make fun of the Epic Cycle [which for Butler includes the Iliad (ibid., 303)], much as the mock-heroic Battle of the Frogs and Mice made fun of it centuries later.” Further, Butler 261: “I believe Nausicaa is quietly laughing at her hero [sc., Odysseus], “a bald elderly gentleman, whose little remaining hair is red, [and who is] being eaten out of house and home during his absence,” (270) and sees through him; cf. ibid. 269: “how obviously the writer is quietly laughing at [Alcinous] in her sleeve.” Further, ibid: 280.
- 16.
See his remarks on p. 217 n. “†”.
- 17.
- 18.
For this identification, see de Vos 1985: 71–72. The painter was formerly thought to be G. Guerra (a well known forger), but was more probably either the Roman painter and copyist Camillo Paderni or another pupil of Francesco Fernandi (see Burlot 2010). On Guerra and Paderni, see further, D’Alconzo 2007: 205 at n. 21. Guerra’s forgeries were exposed by the court of Naples, and one of his products was hung in the museum as an object lesson in thwarted duplicity (see Pelzl 1972: 310 n. 70).
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The work is now hung, not secreted away, and it is accompanied by a gallery label that identifies it as a “post-classical” encaustic work—a recent concession.
- 20.
On these hazards generally, see Campbell 2010.
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- 22.
See the contemporary Italian documents assembled in Procacci 1984; Curzio dei Marchesi Venuti 1791: 233; also the correspondence between Barthélemy and Caylus from 1755 quoted and discussed in Burlot 2006. In the next century, see Lenormant 1877. Lenormant revived the controversy of the previous century (though it never went away), and exacerbated it, and he paved the way for the most recent findings today. He reproduced a high-quality photograph of La Musa for the first time as a scientific tool for study (pl. 7); he expressed an unresolved “skepticism” (42), but finally plumped for the ancient date; he recognized that the Muse was in fact a “simple citharodist” of the sort found in Pompeian wall paintings (43–44); and he suspected oils but then plumped for encaustic. In response came Heydemann 1879: 110–111: “sicher modern, nicht antik” (with a host of arguments). Heydemann also suspected the work to be painted in oils, not in encaustic, as do de Vos and Burlot today (per litt.). Cf. Sartain 1885: 8 who mentions, only to dismiss, the skepticism thrown on La Musa. He notes that some of the skeptics placed the work “in the epoch of the great artists of the Renaissance.” Similarly, Cros and Henry 1884: 19–21. I am grateful to Delphine Burlot for these references.
- 23.
This is a verbatim echo from Butler 1888: 165: “There is no figure here which suggests Tabachetti, but still there are some very good ones. The best have no taint of barocco.”
- 24.
Thus, for instance, Shaffer 1988: 166 reproduces the image and innocently assigns it the date: “1st century AD”.
- 25.
Or any other number of like references in the poem to Neritum: Butler adduces several (see pp. 167–75).
- 26.
Cf. K. O. Müller’s suggestion that the cave where Hermes hid the cattle of Apollo, described in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, Hesiod, Ovid, and Pausanias, could be confirmed in its details in Pylos “vor Augen” today (Müller 1833). Müller’s claim was based on the explorations reported in Blouet et al. 1831 (with illustrative plates), but also went well beyond their claims of having merely located the grotto of Nestor.
- 27.
Longinus, On the Sublime 9.13–14; trans. Donald A. Russell.
- 28.
Butler 1893, 276.
- 29.
See n. 32 below.
- 30.
Kingsley 1873, 112.
- 31.
- 32.
Venuti 1791, esp. 238–67 (here, 240).
- 33.
See n. 20 above on Lenormant 1877: 44. La Musa’s exposed breast and skin “ne conviennent pas aux chastes filles de Mnémosyne. C’est, au contraire, le costume que les peintures antiques donnent à ces musiciennes que l’on faisait venir pour égayer les banquets et que les ornemanistes des maisons d’Herculaneum et de Pompéi ont souvent reproduites comme figures décoratives. Il faut surtout comparer à notre tableau de Cortone deux peintures, l’une d’Herculaneum, l’autre de Pompéi, représentant des Citharistes debout.”
- 34.
Butler 1888b: 168.
- 35.
- 36.
As Shaffer notes (ibid.: 135), “the ‘attribution’ and even identification are finally irrelevant,” but so too in the Nausicaa episode: “She may have been either plain or beautiful without its affecting the argument.” Butler’s ultimate target is his own audience, in both cases (and in all cases).
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Porter, J.I. (2013). Homer, Skepticism, and the History of Philology. In: Humphreys, S., Wagner, R. (eds) Modernity's Classics. Transcultural Research – Heidelberg Studies on Asia and Europe in a Global Context. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33071-1_12
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