To trace a thread of thought starting from a Homeric song that seems to have no ending

Abstract

This posting of 2015.06.03 continues from where I left off in the posting of 2015.05.27, where I was focusing on the first song of Demodokos, contained in verses 72–83 of Odyssey 8 [Greek | English]. In that earlier posting and in the even earlier posting of 2015.04.10, I described this song as a micro-epic that refers to the macro-epics of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey. And I justify my calling the song “Homeric” here by recalling a point I made in my previous postings. The point is, the micro-epic of Demodokos is the story of a “big picture” that encompasses the two macro-epics of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey combined. And, paradoxically, the expansive bigness of this big picture is compressed into the acute smallness of the micro-epic that occupies the 10-odd verses of Odyssey 8.72–83. But the micro-narrative that we see there is in fact only the beginning of the narrative performed by Demodokos when he starts to sing the first of his three songs in Odyssey 8. As I will now show, the actual narrative of the first song is potentially so big and so long that it will never even come to an end if someone just lets it go on and on.