2025.04.03, rewritten from 2017.12.09 | By Gregory Nagy
§1. I rewrite here what was once merely a draft, written toward the end of 2017, of what evolved into my Foreword to Richard P. Martin’s book, Mythologizing Performance, first published in 2020.
§2. This book appears in a series titled “Myth and Poetics II,” published by Cornell University Press, which is currently edited by me in collaboration with Leonard Muellner and Laura Slatkin. As I used to say in each foreword I wrote for each book included in the original series “Myth and Poetics,” likewise published by Cornell University Press, the driving force that inspired my original project of editing such a series stemmed from an understanding of mythand poeticsas formulated by Richard P. Martin in an earlier book, The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the Iliad, which appeared in 1989 and which was the first volume to appear in the original “Myth and Poetics” series. That earlier book has been for me the inspiration not only for the original series but also for the second phase of the same series—which I see as Myth and Poetics 2.0, as it were.
§3. Although Martin’s Mythologizing Performanceis chronologically the third, not the first, in the new series “Myth and Poetics II,” this book takes pride of place in tracing the intellectual genealogy of this new series, just as Martin’s first book, The Language of Heroes, was the inspiration for the original “Myth and Poetics” series. That is why I felt the need to write a second foreword for Mythologizing Performance, above and beyond a so-called “series foreword.”
§4. What the new series has in common with the original series is a commitment to promote the publication of books that build on connections to be found between different ways of thinking and different forms of verbal art in pre-literate as well as literate societies. The word “myth” in the title of the overall series corresponds to what I have just described as a way of thinking, while “poetics” covers any and all forms of pre-literature and literature.
§5. Although “myth” as understood, say, in the Homeric Iliadcould convey the idea of a traditional way of thinking that led to a traditional way of expressing a thought, such an idea was not to last—not even in ancient Greek society, as we see, for example, when we consider the fact that the meaning of the word was already destabilized by the time of Plato. And such destabilization is exactly why I prefer to use the word “myth” in referring to different ways of shaping different modes of thought: it is to be expected that any tradition that conveys any thought will vary in different times and different places. And such variability of tradition is a point of prime interest in any quest to seek out the widest variety of books about the widest possible variety of traditions.
§6. A similar point can be made in the case of “poetics,” if we think of this word in its widest sense, so as to include not only poetry but also songmaking on one side and prose on the other. As a series, “Myth and Poetics” avoids presuppositions about traditional forms such as genres, and there is no insistence on any universalized understanding of verbal art in all its countless forms.
§7. With such ideals in mind, I felt a special need to write a special foreword for the second book of Richard P. Martin to appear in the series “Myth and Poetics,” since Mythologizing Performance interweaves so effectively with his first book, The Language of Heroes. The task of writing such a special foreword was in one way easy, since so much of my own thinking about myth and poetics is indebted to the discoveries and discovery procedures of Richard Martin. In another way, however, the task was made more difficult by the fact that I intended to sum up in one paragraph the importance of Martin’s work. How could I sum up, in just one brief paragraph that I had set as my goal, an adequate statement of my indebtedness to this work?
§8. What made my task even more difficult is that I had discovered, as I was reading the page proofs for Mythologizing Performance, that the author had actually dedicated his book to me, his editor. That does not seem right, I first thought to myself when I made my surprise discovery of his gracious dedication. But then, on second thought, it all made sense to me: you see, Richard Martin was once, long ago, my student. And, I now tell myself, teachers should ideally learn more from their students than the other way around—and such an ideal is after all exactly what I have experienced over so many years of intellectual collaboration with my dear colleague Richard. So, without any further self-consciousness about the inherent difficulties of my task, I proceeded with an attempt to capture, in one paragraph, the importance of Martin’s new book. As I look back at what I wrote in the first draft of this paragraph, back in 2017, I find nothing that I want to change. Here, then, is the same paragraph, as originally printed in 2020.
§9. In Mythologizing Performance, what Richard P. Martin has given his readers is a dazzlingly concise and yet far-ranging overview of the earliest phases of ancient Greek verbal art. In the course of the seventeen essays contained in this riveting book, Martin delves into the fundamentals for understanding the poetry attributed to Homer and Hesiod, which he analyzes in terms of the traditions that went into the performing as well as the composing of ancient Greek myths in the context of their ritual settings. In addition, he deftly connects Homeric and Hesiodic poetry with the far less known poetic and prosaic traditions underlying the kinds of lore that the Greeks attributed mostly to the mystical figure of Orpheus. All along, Martin keeps in mind the performativityof ancient Greek verbal art, revealing brilliant new insights about ancient Greek performers known as citharodes, that is, singers who accompany themselves on the stringed instrument known as the kithara, and rhapsodes, that is, reciters of poetry that is musically unaccompanied. And the absolutized model for such performers, as Martin demonstrates most convincingly, is none other than Apollo himself, whose divinity comes to life in his charismatic role as god of mythologizing performance.