The Homeric Simile in Comparative Perspectives

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS The Homeric Simile in Comparative Perspectives: Oral Traditions from Saudi Arabia to Indonesia. By Jonathan L. Ready. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2018. Pp. xiii, 315. Jonathan Ready is the author of a well-received book on the Iliadic simile as a site of competition among Homer’s characters (Character, Narrator and Simile in the Iliad [Cambridge 2011]). He now gives us a companion volume on the Homeric simile as a way for the poet to display his competence. An Introduction sets out his aims and explains how he proposes to approach them: he asks what modern traditions of oral poetry can tell us about Homeric similes (4), and more specifically about how similes helped the poets of the Iliad and the Odyssey (for Ready they are two) “succeed in performance.” Ready pursues these questions in two parts, the first dedicated to a selection of modern oral poetry from Bosnia, Kyrgyzstan, Sumatra, and the Najd, a region in central Saudi Arabia (35–168); the second to the Homeric epics (169–260). The first half of the book is longer than the second: for Ready, the encounter with comparative materials is just as important as is that with Homer. Chapter One addresses basic questions of comparability, focusing on the length, duration , arrangement, and positioning of similes. Chapter Two develops the crucial concept of a “spectrum of distribution,” which Ready uses to recast longstanding debates about tradition and innovation in Homeric scholarship. The idea is to shift the emphasis from diachronic to synchronic considerations: whereas “tradition” suggests continuity across time, “distribution,” as Ready understands it, occurs in cultural space. Thus, we may call a word, phrase, motif, or larger unit in oral poetry “idiolectal,” if it is found exclusively in the work of one poet; “dialectal,” if it is shared across a region; and “pan-traditional,” if it is shared across a poetic tradition as a whole (72). Together, these different registers constitute a spectrum across which the performer ranges in a bid to display his competence and to ensure his song is well received. Ready insists that all points on the spectrum of distribution are relevant to the success of a performance, not just idiolectal material (what other Homerists might call “innovations”)—though the emphasis may vary from one tradition to another, one performer to another (95–96), one performance context to the next (89), and even within one performance (92). What matters, ultimately, is that the performer strikes the right balance between idiolectal and shared material, and that he knows how to move between them. Chapter Three uses similes in modern oral poetry to test the claims made in Chapter Two. Similes are detached from the plot and therefore lend themselves to the display of poetic competence. This is not, however, a matter simply of “standing out” from the rest of the tradition: like other aspects of oral poetry, similes require a well-judged mixture of the idiolectal and the shared. Ready illustrates the point with a detailed analysis of simile tenors and vehicles in his four modern traditions, looking at shared vehicles that are combined with a shared tenor (158–160), shared vehicles with an uncustomary tenor (160–162), and finally idiolectal vehicles (163–165). Chapter Four considers the spectrum of distribution in Greek epic, starting from a helpful review of previous work on Homeric poetics (170–184). Chapters Five and Six then investigate shared and idiolectal similes in Homer, along similar lines as Chapter Three. A conclusion summarizes the PHOENIX, VOL. 72 (2018) 3–4. 361 362 PHOENIX main findings of the argument before embarking on a brief discussion of the so-called “wild papyri” of Homer, which seems less germane to the rest of the argument (263–265). Two brief indices and a detailed bibliography round off the work. There is much to learn from Ready’s discussion. The modern traditions he studies in Part I, which will be unfamiliar to most classicists, throw a fascinating light on Homer as oral poetry. Of particular interest are the testimonials of modern audience members and performers. Thus, Üzeyir Pünhani, a performer of Turkish hikâye, worries about people calling him “a liar” (88; cf

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