Although others, most notably the late J. Griffin (Homer on Life and Death [1980]), have drawn attention to the role of the gods in Homer as witnesses to and an audience for the spectacle of human action, M. now offers us a systematic study. He aims for a ‘metaperformative’ account of divine spectatorship, through an investigation of the particular strategies that the Homeric poet has used to convey the impression that the gods are close observers of a live, staged event (p. 2). Their responses to what they observe are intended, therefore, as a model for the responses of the external audience, the poet's own listeners. M. draws our attention too to those scenes in which Zeus and the other gods deliberate on the course that events will take. Throughout these scenes, he argues, the poet sets Zeus up as an ‘internal narrator persona’ (p. 2); the extratextual audience, on hearing Zeus's provocative speeches and the lively reactions of the other gods, is encouraged to give thought to how this performance is to be continued. Thus, as M. will conclude, the poet offers us ‘a conception of epic’ that embraces ‘raw spectacle’ and invites audience participation; and yet, as we shall see, it transcends time. Thus the emotional impact of the devastation at Troy is magnified and complicated (pp. 2–3, 7–8, 8–19).
M. makes the point that divine viewing does not make a spectacle, but is associated with it, augmenting and shaping it (p. 14). As he shows, drawing for comparative material on M.D. Stansbury O'Donnell's study of Attic vase-painting (Vase Painting, Gender and Social Identity in Archaic Athens [2006]), we can read the involvement of the gods as both superfluous and yet crucial. The Olympians are always outside the ‘nucleus’ of action, as Homer presents it. They encircle the action, just as they are shown in vase-painting (pp. 16–17). What attracts and holds the gods’ interest are spectacles of a particular kind: they all occur in specifically military or funerary contexts (the formal duel, funeral rites) that have been ‘staged’, as M. puts it (p. 19) within the text.
M.'s approach to this project is narratological, to the extent that he is concerned with audiences both within the poem (the gods, amongst others) and outside it (the ‘live audience’ of descendants of the Achaeans assumed by the text, pp. 20–5) and with the ways in which the poet uses the gods, particularly Zeus, to ‘manage’ and to ‘advertise’ the process of creating this particular performance, which will connect his live audience to their past. The audience's perception of these ‘staging operations’ contributes to their engagement with the fate of Troy (p. 25).
In the chapters that follow this important introductory discussion, M. (in Chapter 1) draws our attention to the role Zeus plays in shaping the story: as he observes (p. 43), the poet's narration and Zeus's plan intersect conspicuously in the proem to the epic, at Il. 1.5. And, as the poet stages the duels that are so critical to the development of the plot, we have the sense that Zeus, the poet and the extratextual audience have all been engaged in watching the same action (p. 51). Although the reactions of the external audience may differ from those of the gods, they share ‘a particular way’ of relating to the action, perceiving the conflict at Troy as ‘an orchestrated spectacle’ managed by Zeus (pp. 63–4).
Chapter 2 focuses on viewership. Here M. notes the ‘tiered’ arrangement of viewers of the duel between Paris and Menelaus in Iliad 3: we see the Achaeans and the Trojans on the edges of the space that has been measured out by Hector and Odysseus; Helen, Priam and the Trojan elders are on the walls; and the Olympian gods constitute the third tier of spectators – looking down on the contestants and, as well, the other viewers. When the gods as a group view mortal activities, they do so in a generally convivial atmosphere, which M. refers to as the daïs (I question his use of a diaeresis here). M. argues, at some length, for a mise en abyme, whereby the extratextual audience is invited to take its cue from the gods’ reactions to mortal events (pp. 83–108).
Chapter 3 takes us from the spectacle of fighting men to the spectacle of funeral rites, with a focus on the duel of Iliad 7 and the subsequent decision to call a halt to the fighting to allow the burial of the dead. Here M. introduces A. Bergren's idea (in Weaving Truth [2008]) of ‘metatemporal permanence’ (which he will take up productively in Chapter 5): the action at Troy is conceived of as contests that are memorialised – recorded for posterity – and, as well, as living spectacle (pp. 138–9).
The battle books (between Iliad 8 and 22) provide the subject matter of Chapter 4. M. promotes (and, perhaps, overstates) the notion of a partisan audience, claiming that the poet's audience (the audience of descendants of the Achaeans) is expected to identify with the Achaeans, although they may not like them (pp. 148–54). He concedes, however, that the poet tests the limits to which this perspective can be maintained by any listener and that some listeners may not accept it. M. uses this chapter to trace the movement and the alignments of the gods through the days of battle. Thus the gods take up their respective positions according to their loyalties, as viewers of the spectacle of warfare (Il. 20.144–52). The effect of their doing so is to magnify the conflict at this significant stage, before the theomachia. The Achaeans and the Trojans fade from view – although their silent presence will add to the intensity of the action to come (p. 188). As M. observes at this point, ‘nearly every combatant has become a viewer’ (p. 176). The focus will soon shift to Achilles and Hector.
In Chapter 5 M. follows the gaze of the gods (in Il. 22 and 24) as they view the spectacle before them; and he draws attention to the poet's capacity to present the poem as a live event even as he creates the impression that these events are eternal, as they might be presented on Helen's tapestry. Through the poet's strategic use of Zeus as a stand-in for himself, his audiences (the gods; his first listeners; and audiences of today) are able to keep both the action of ‘now’ and the awareness of Troy's fall (‘in the near future and the distant past’, p. 206) within their view.
This is a thoughtful and persuasive account of divine spectatorship in the Iliad and, particularly, of the role of Zeus as the poet's ‘collaborator’. M. builds on a wide range of existing scholarship – on the role of the divine audience, on performance and involvement, and on the capacity of epic to transcend time – to develop his argument. The volume is supplemented by an appendix in which instances of divine viewing in the Iliad are listed, two indexes and a bibliography, from which I missed only L. Kozak's Experiencing Hektor (2017) and R. Scodel's ‘Homeric Fate, Homeric Poetics’, in C. Tsagalis and A. Markantonatos (edd.), The Winnowing Oar (2017). The text is clean: I noted only three typos: p. 94 (‘cease’); p. 112 (‘Others’); p. 173 (‘least’). I do not agree with all M.'s conclusions: there are moments when he pushes too far with his speculation (e.g. at p. 89, on audience-response to questions internal to the text; at p. 93, on the Phaeacians as ‘overly casual’; and at p. 203, on Troy's destruction in honour of Patroclus). But to counterbalance these small points of disagreement I have noted for future reference many fine observations throughout the text.
