Deploying the linguistic sub-field of pragmatics, narratological theory and speech-act theory, B. aims to contribute a systematic examination of how speech-events are cited, reproduced or referred to in Homeric epic. She has scrutinised every instance of this phenomenon from the grandest, the apologoi of Odysseus, down to lowly directives. B. classifies two sets of speakers: the ‘main narrators’ of the Iliad and Odyssey and their characters, arguing that the contribution of the latter has been underestimated by her predecessors.
Two further innovations. B. unifies Homeric modes of reproducing speech into a single ‘speech presentation spectrum’, enabling her to treat both poems together as one data set. She can thus restore neglected kinds of speech presentation, such as ‘speech mention’ (speech as pure act without citation of content) to an equal analytical footing as the others. To account for this unified spectrum of speech presentation, B. borrows from literary theory the idea of an ‘implied author’, the tutelary mind that maintains the continuity and balance of the spectrum between the two poems.
‘Direct quotation’ is the subject of Chapter 1. Though accounting for the greatest sum of lines, it does not furnish the most numerous kind of speech presentation. Furthermore, its use varies depending on who is doing the quoting. Thus, the main narrators use ‘τις-speeches’ to report what a representative of a group will have said, whereas characters use τις-speeches for hypothetical quotations (‘some day … a man will say …’). This distinction yields many useful observations but confounds the discussion in one major way. B. uses the name Homer only once: as a heading in the index locorum. Her preference for ‘Homeric epic’ or ‘the main narrator(s)’ is understandable, but throughout the book B. regularly predicates thought and action – agency, almost – of Homer's people: for example, ‘Nausicaa, like Hector, uses hypothetical direct quotation to depict her own emotions’ (p. 55). B. might say the ‘implied author’ put Nausicaa up to this, but it is impossible to tell, since she has corralled her discussion of this abstract entity into her introduction and conclusion – leaving the important problem of responsibility in oral performance unexamined. B. occasionally approaches, then recedes from, productive ideas of narrative responsibility as a process of embedding – which would have admitted the study of modulation in voice and persona.
Such ideas seem germane to Chapter 2, where B. claims to have discovered ‘free indirect speech’ (FIS) in Homer. A hallmark of the modern novel, FIS is the rhetorical modality by which an author gives voice to a character's thought or speech without quotation: ‘Smith sulked and glowered. God damn it, he'd show them. You bet he would’. Does Homer do this? FIS, says B., is used to provide vividness when the main narrators or characters present indirect speech. Lattimore (B.'s preference): ‘So speaking brilliant Achilleus gave orders to his companions / to set a great cauldron across the fire, so that with all speed / they could wash away the clotted blood from Patroklos . / They set up … a bath-water cauldron’ (Il. 18.343–466). B.'s double underscore marks FIS: ‘The purpose clause might be either the main narrator's comment on why Achilles gives the order or part of what Achilles says to his companions in order to explain the order more fully to them and persuade them to do it’ (p. 65). While it is true that many such passages raise the kinds of ambiguity she finds here, B. does not explain how this kind of subordination might work in indirect speech without lapsing automatically into FIS. In the above passage, for example, it is notable that the companions reach for the right kind of cauldron, meaning that they received the message as Achilles delivered it. If we have gained FIS in Homer, it has surely lost some of its rhetorical force.
Cleopatra's speech to Meleager (Il. 6.590–5) contains a passage in indirect speech followed by an unusual outburst of reported speech without a verb of speaking: ‘[She] rehearsed in their numbers before him / all the sorrows that come to men when their city is taken: / they kill men, and the fire leaves the city in ashes, / and strangers lead the children away and the deep-girdled women ’ (Il. 591–4 [Lattimore]; my single underscore, B.'s double; quoted p. 70). B.: ‘In 593–594 … we are given unmediated access to Cleopatra's words. They are governed by no verb of speaking, they take the form of an independent sentence rather than a subordinate clause, and they use the present tense of Cleopatra's own speaking time instead of the past narrative time of the verbs of speaking in 591. That is to say, 593–594 are presented with free indirect speech’ (p. 72). But FIS is not the term normally used for ‘unmediated access’ to a character's words. Has the transcription captured a voice shift, the singer's ventriloquy?
Chapter 3 is a discussion of indirect speech (IS). Wanting again is a scheme that comprises the role of the aoidos: ‘[C]haracters should be seen as the normative users of indirect speech and the main narrators should be studied in relation to them’ (p. 79). B. observes that IS appears more commonly in character-speech than in narrator-speech and that most of it comes in the form of directives (‘X ordered Y to …’). Indeed, B. reckons that directives account for 60% of instances of IS throughout both poems (p. 216 n. 10). These are important figures but bespeak dilution. IS that represents a more extensive, discursive original might bear separate analysis.
Chapter 4 examines ‘speech mention’, wherein an act of speech is named (‘prayer’, ‘oath’), though its content is not quoted: this is speech as pure act. B. is very thorough and perceptive here.
Chapters 5–6 consider speech presentation in the Od. and Il., respectively. There is a good discussion of the songs of Demodocus, but when the Phaeacian singer uses traditional formulas to refer to Agamemnon and Apollo (Od. 8.75–82), B. argues (p. 143) that the ‘mixture’ of vocabulary is there for vividness amid the usual limitations of IS (which stylises reported speech). Tradition, thanks to which Homer, embedding speech in speech, can deftly attribute the use of formulas to Demodocus as a fellow tradition-bearer, seems to go missing again. With its many comparisons between the two poems, Chapter 6 should be read by all advanced students of Homeric language.
The quality of B.'s empirical research methods is not always ratified by her interpretations, as in her reading of Il. 6.459–61, where she discusses a key τις quotation. Lattimore: ‘And some day seeing you shedding tears a man (τις) will say of you: / “This is the wife of Hector, who was ever the bravest fighter / of the Trojans, breakers of horses, in the days when they fought about Ilion”’. B.: ‘Hector uses his τις quotations to convey his own emotions’ because of his ‘inward orientation’, which causes him to ‘[view] Andromache's enslavement primarily in relation to himself and not with any real sympathy for her plight’ (pp. 166–7). But this τις is precisely the indefinite ‘someone’ of rumour and reputation within a society whose chief mode of communication is face-to-face. Hector is not portrayed as self-absorbed ‘to the detriment of those around him’ (ibid.), but rather as aware that his kleos will forever impinge on that of Andromache, Astyanax and Troy itself.
B.'s greater project becomes clear in the conclusion: ‘[T]he existence of a basically modern-looking speech presentation spectrum in Homeric poetry draws the Il. and Od. more closely into the theoretical fold of modern fiction … it suggests that the speakers in the poems can be profitably understood using current linguistic theories that have been developed for understanding the talk of living, non-fictional people’ (pp. 194–5). I doubt it. Homer's poems are artefacts of traditional verbal art, comprising embedded layers of ritualised speech uprooted long since from its own habitat, but always remote by convention from living talk.
