The Fox and the Hedgehog:
Narrative Style in Homer and Archilochus

Donald E. Lavigne (Texas Tech University)

In the Margites, Homer peppers his hexameters with iambic trimeters, formally and aurally signifying the poem's departure from his typical epic practice.  One line of this poem is variously attributed to either Homer or Archilochus: πόλλ᾿ οἶδ᾿ ἀλώπηξ, ἀλλ᾿ ἐχῖνος ἓν μέγα (Marg. fr. 5 W=Ar. fr. 201 W).  The combination of iambic and epic in the Margites has led scholars, motivated by Aristotelian notions of genre, to see this poem as parodic and to justify a late archaic date by virtue of its affinity to late 6^th century poetic experimentation.  This chronological argument is (often implicitly) based on the notion of the "purity" of the genres and the mechanics of allusion—if Archilochus is the first iambic poet and he uses this line then Homer could not have written the line or Homer would, in fact, be the prôtos heurêtês of Iambos.  In this paper, I argue that the two distinct poetic contexts of this line reveal the complementary relationship between the narrative voices of Homeric and Archilochean poetry.

Through their reliance on the rhetoric of allusion, scholars are put in the awkward position of having to disagree with Aristotle, who confidently attributes the Margites to Homer.  Rather than assume that Aristotle is simply mistaken and that the poem is un-Homeric, I argue that the Margites is better explained as an example of the reciprocity of archaic Greek song culture, a culture peopled by distinct narrative personae.  Although Homer and Archilochus embody opposing poles of praise and blame in archaic poetry, they could, as the fox and hedgehog show, make forays into each other's poetic domain, provided they did so within the limits of their personae.  In a well-known passage of the Poetics, Aristotle focuses on the narrative style of the Margites in order to illustrate its affinities to comedy.  In general, Aristotle links Homeric poetry with dramatic mimesis and suggests that a major feature of such poetry is the distance it effects between narrator and narrative (Poet. 1448b24).  In fact, Aristotle goes on to say that narrative style is precisely what separates "heroic" poems from iambic poems and Homer from those base poets who, when they compose psogoi, are personally involved in their stories.  This oppositional typology of narrative style works like that of praise and blame—each style defines itself through the other.  Since the poet's persona was a primary factor for the archaic understanding of poetry, this complementarity of narrative styles is significant; such a focus on the poets themselves as they reveal themselves surmounts a typical hurdle to analyses of archaic poetics by reassessing the complex interrelationship of poet, genre and occasion.