Concluding Coda

At this point we might return to a significant conundrum within ancient Greek semantics, one already alluded to above. Muthos, the word that gives us ‘‘myth,’’ denotes in Homeric epic an authoritative utterance. It usually marks a long and detailed speech most often performed before a critical audience, expecting assent, and in the sub-genre mode of a command, an insult, or a detailed act of memory-recitation. This might sound like a good synonym for ‘‘epic’’ itself, which, as we have seen, in scope and ambition is homologous with ‘‘myth’’ in the societies where it flourishes. Oddly enough, the word that gives us ‘‘epic’’ is in fact contrasted, within our oldest Greek poetry, with muthos. It can be described, within the synchronic system of Homeric diction, as unmarked. Epos usually refers to short utterances; non-public ‘‘sayings’’; brief ordinary remarks; or intimate communication as between husband and wife or hero and companion. Later, the plural epea, as we have seen, comes to mean ‘‘hexameter verses’’ or ‘‘epic’’ whereas within Homer this plural (but not the singular) can be a synonym for muthos. How does this transformation occur? Are we dealing with a historical development or something deeper, embedded in the very nature of an art form? In the light of the Greek evidence above, particularly about the status of epos as both marked (in literary history) and unmarked (in Homeric diction) we might notice that ‘‘epic’’ as a genre, as seen fTom a non-western stance, illustrates exactly this paradoxical bifocal relationship. On the one hand, it is as pervasive as everyday speech: intimate, simple, potential in any utterance. It can happen at any time; it can embody any matter and make it significant. On the other, ‘‘epic’’ - like the plural epea and especially its most famous occurrence, in the formulaic phrase describing speech as epea pteroenta ‘‘winged words’’ - is a mode of total communication, undertaking nothing less than the ideal expression of a culture. If the usefulness of ‘‘genre’’ is to provide a heuristic tool for honing inter-cultural communication, the good of‘‘epic’’ lies in its power to craft, through generations of performers and audiences, larger harmonies, in which the discrete pieces of the individual’s life fit and make sense.