Welcome to the podcast An Ancient Language for a Modern Soul. Poemi Conviviali by Giovanni Pascoli. Today we will discuss the second poem in this collection titled “The Blind Man from Chios”. “The Blind Man from Chios” refers to Homer, traditionally depicted as a blind, wandering poet. In this poem, Pascoli tells the story of how Homer became blind, and how he became the great poet we all know.
I'm joined today by Professor Ruth Scodel, Ruth is a distinguished classicist specialising in Homeric epic. Her scholarship explores narrative technique, oral tradition, and audience engagement in the Iliad and the Odyssey, offering fresh insight into ancient Greek poetics. She has significantly advanced our modern understanding of Homer's composition and storytelling. You will hear the poem in the translation produced by James Ackhurst and me, published by Italica Press in 2022. The poem is read by David Carter. The music is composed by Marianne Gubri and performed on the Celtic harp by Ariana Mornico.
ELENA
Welcome, Ruth, and thank you very much for being our guest today.
RUTH
Well, I'm very happy to be here.
ELENA
Thank you. “The Blind Man from Chios” ( or “kee-os”: this is the name of an island in Greece) is an extraordinary poem full of striking images. As in all Poemi Conviviali, Pascoli draws on and even directly quotes various ancient texts about Homer. An old bard whom we know is Homer, addresses his young lover, a girl from the island of Delos. He thanks her for preferring him over her many younger suitors, and in return for her love, he offers her the gift of poetry which he received from the gods. Well, let us now listen to the first stanzas.
Scholars of Pascoli have identified in the poem’s opening lines a reference to the Hymn to Apollo (that's a part of the Homeric Hymns, a collection of 33 hymns plus one epigram that were attributed to Homer in antiquity). And Pascoli himself translated this hymn for a textbook he wrote for high-school students called Lira, when he was a professor. In the hymn, the girls of Delos are said to prefer the blind man from Chios “because his songs are the most beautiful”. Before we delve into the story of Homer's blindness, I'd like to ask Ruth to tell us who Homer was and what we actually know about him, or what sources allow us to glimpse into this towering figure of the Western tradition.
RUTH
Actually, I would say that we know practically nothing about him. We have two very long poems, both rather peculiar compositions. The Iliad in particular is in certain ways quite odd in that in its first section it seems to be including material that doesn't belong in the story as it's telling it. That is, the Iliad is about a few weeks near the very end of the Trojan War, but it has, for instance, a famous scene in which Helen stands on the walls of Troy and identifies Greek leaders for Priam, which is a very bizarre thing to be doing when the war has gone on for years. So somebody had the idea of composing a poem that would only narrate the end of the war, but would somehow include enough material that its audience would have a sense of the much bigger story. And that was an idea that someone had. It would not be obvious. So that gets into the question of who Homer is, because it leads me to believe pretty firmly that there really was a Homer, that somebody had the idea of composing an insanely long poem that would manage to be the whole story of the Trojan War without actually starting at the beginning and going to the end. Now it is fashionable, nowadays it is probably the most common view that there really was no Homer at all that the various stories and traditions that developed within this very ritual tradition. And nobody doubts that. There was a very ritual tradition that they came to form the epics that we have through a process in which performers did them at Panhellenic festivals. And this required that purely local elements be weeded out and eventually institutional pressure created the poems that we know as holes. I just don't believe that. I tend to think that such a process would have created poems that were much blander than what we have. They would probably have been in chronological order.
The Odyssey is not as odd as the Iliad, but it jumps around in terms of place so that it sends Telemachus off on this trip and then has to go back to Odysseus. And it puts a great deal of material into the subordinate narrative that Odysseus tell. So again, I think somebody has to have had the idea of doing it that way, and that's what I call Homer. Whether it was the same person or not, I don't know. That was already a great dispute in antiquity. It could be, but it could also be that once an epic of this kind had been created, a second poet from generally the same group, from the same branch of the tradition could have thought, oh, I could do something like that too. And again, the Odyssey tries to be a kind of all in one story about the aftermath of the Trojan War. Although it is primarily about Odysseus, it manages to incorporate the story of Agamemnon, the story of Menelaus, the story of Nestor. These are curiously ambitious poems. Their other odd quality is that they're practically unperformable. They're just too long now that some people imagine that you could do the Iliad over say a three day at a festival, and that's certainly possible, but nobody would have listened to all of it. And one thing that came up in my research is that even in much shorter performances in various kinds of oral traditions, much of the audience is not actually listening all the time. But yes, then you would need to think through why you would do such a performance unless the poem was already famous. And so if you did this kind of performance in the classical period, it would make perfectly good sense because this is our great canonical text. We have it performed all the way through. Audiences will come and go, there will only be a big crowd for the parts that people like the most, and we can guess at what those are. But that doesn't matter because it's important to perform it at an early stage, though I find that rather hard to imagine. So no, I think in effect we don't know anything about Homer, and everything I've just said is pure inference from the nature of the poems that we have and our rather thin knowledge of things like festival practises. The other huge issue is of course how the poems come to be written down, and I again think there is probably an early text, but I am in the minority, at least in the Anglophone world, about that.
ELENA
Well, thank you very much Ruth. And back to to Pascoli's poem. It seems the scholars have identified the Vita Homeri Erodotea or the Life of Homer by Pseudo-Herodotus as one of the likely sources for his poem for the blind men from Chios. So what does this text tell us about Homer?
RUTH
About a real Homer, I don't think it tells us anything at all. What it does tell us quite a lot about is how Greeks thought about Homer, the Homer that they imagined, and they imagined him partly from the poets who are depicted in the poems. He's almost certainly blind because Demodocus is blind in the Odyssey, and Greek biography in general tends to assume that there is an autobiographical basis for practically everything. But that makes it really interesting because the poets who appear in the Odyssey, Phemius and Demodocus, are not wanderers. They are attached to the homes of local leaders. I mean, Demodocus does not live in the palace. Somebody has to go and get him. But you know, he sings when he's asked, and he lives nearby. Phemius is a direct dependent of the household of Odysseus. So the fact that in the ancient biographical tradition, Homer is a wanderer may reflect several things. One, that by the time the biography, the biographical traditions behind this text came about, there are professional poetry reciters and they travel wherever they're from. They go from festival to festival, and they are surely part of another part of the model that lies behind the imagined Homer. Another is that everybody, by the time Homer is the great canonical poet, wants a claim. It used to be a joke in America, I don't know if it still is, that every tavern that went back before 1800 claimed that George Washington had slept there, right? It's something people do. And there were seven cities that claimed to be where Homer came from. Now, one way of producing a biography that more people will accept is to have your poet travel around. But also quite apart from local claims, once Homer is the author for all the Greeks, the more he travels the better. He belongs to everybody and he goes almost everywhere.
ELENA
That's very interesting. Thank you. That's fascinating. Let's go back to the poem again. And the central part of this poem tells how Homer became blind. So in the poem, the narrator remembers sitting by a spring with his lyre enchanted by the sound of the water and the magic of the place. He begins playing, unknowingly engaging in a contest with the song of the spring, which turns out to be a goddess, as it happens, likely one of the Muses. And as soon as he finishes playing, the goddess appears and punishes him for his hubris. Let us now listen to another section of the poem.
ELENA
So in this part of the poem we heard how the goddess punishes Homer by making him blind. It is a curse, but it's also a gift. She gives him the inner eye of poetry, the ability to see beyond the veil of things. So the blind poet becomes a symbol of the idea that true vision and understanding can come from sources beyond physical sight and blindness, here, is a metaphor for inner vision, intuition, and spiritual insight. And indeed, antiquity and later traditions are full of blind poets.
RUTH
Well, right, one reason they're full of blind poets is probably that this was a real phenomenon that in a world in which cataracts, for example, could not be treated, there were probably a fair number of older blind people. And performing poetry and playing music is something blind people can do well. I mean, I would not be surprised if younger boys who were blinded in some way were not encouraged to become performers because it's a skill many of them have mastered. One of the Great American folk singers of my lifetime, Doc Watson, is a blind man. So there's that, I mean, and then there is of course, this association with understanding, with this idea that if you're not part of the everyday, relatively trivial world, you will have access to something else. The story in the poem is really quite interesting. Again, it surely has a base in Homer himself, in that in passing in the early, and you hear the story of Thamyris, who challenged the Muses to a contest, but they actually took away his power of song. Demodocus, the singer in the Odyssey is said to have been given both a good and a bad thing by the music is they took away his sight but gave him song, so that's clearly what the poem is working from. It's pretty easy to infer that if they, you know, if the gods take away your sight, it's because you did something to offend them. Then the theme of the contest is already there. What's interesting in the poem, though, is that he seems to be trying to mitigate it as much as possible. Homer does not sit down and brag about what a great singer he is and so on. It's something that that happens naturally, kind of organically. From this situation, and that too I mean, there are ancient antecedents. In particular, one version of the story of Tiresias has Tiresias accidentally see Athena naked when she's swimming and she blinds him because there can't be somebody who has seen this. It's just not acceptable. But she gives him the gift of prophecy, and I'm sure that also lies behind this idea. But it is a peculiarly poignant version of this motif, in that it's nearly not completely accidental the way it is in the story of Tiresias. And yet it's as close to accidental as you can easily get. His Homer is not impious, and therefore he deserves this compensation of poetry. Now I myself think it quite unlikely that the Iliad poet was blind, because I just cannot imagine that every sharply visual simile was inherited. Some of them surely were, but you know, when the armies before battle, when you have this comparison to flies buzzing around milk in the buckets on a hot day, I think that's somebody who's seen it. It is true that there are a lot of purely auditory similes I've never gone through and counted, but I bet somebody has, you know?
ELENA
Very interesting. So the theme of a curse mixed with a blessing, as you mentioned, or a pharmakon like the ancient Greeks called it. something that both harms and and heals, appears again in the poem's final lines. So the narrator speaks to Delias once more, saying that he has left her the gift of poetry. Those are the marvellous stories that he heard from the gods and saw with his inner eye, and he adds that now, being with Delias, the curse of blindness is even more painful because he cannot see her beauty. I think there's a deeply human touch here because, well, not even the gift of poetry can fully compensate for the inability to see one's beloved. Let us listen to the final lines.
ELENA
So the idea of a love story between the old poet and a young girl might strike us as inappropriate today, and as far as I know, no ancient or modern sources link Homer with a romantic partner, male or female. This element must be Pascoli's own invention, and it should be understood within the context of Pascoli's vision of poetry, which he articulated in the prose piece The Little Child, written in 1897. And that's the very year “The Blind Man from Chios” was published in the literary journal La Vita Italiana. So in The Little Child, Pascoli explains that poetry originates in our inner child, that's the sense of wonder that we feel before the world when we are children. And the sense fades with age but returns in old age when life struggles subside. So he writes that the poet is essentially old and he's a poet because he has seen and he cites mythical poet figures such as the Finnish Väinämöinen. The poet is old, but his song is young because it springs from the inner child and he writes: “If one had to depict the poet, he would be a blind man led by the hand by a child”. So Delias can be seen as a metaphor for the inner child, silenced during adulthood but returning in the calm of old age.
RUTH
Yes. Yeah, I mean, one needs to be a little careful there because this is a young woman. But I don't think Homer is a pedophile in the poem. She's not literally a child. She is a girl of marriageable age whom you know, more normal suitors have also been interested in. You know that the age thing doesn't bother me because it's basically about praise of poetry. I am very mildly amused, of course, that he seems to know that she's beautiful, although he has never seen her. But of course he's not a fool. If there are all these other men interested in her, she must be beautiful. It's just it's, it's a little charming. I'm really quite taken in some ways with the idea that the girl then becomes apparently the vehicle of transmission, that she's quite important in this story, and I also may be a little disappointed that she is only secondarily an agent of the power of song. It has to come from him. But there, too, I wonder about his transformation of the Hymn to Apollo. Because, you know, the girls actually don't praise Homer. They are told to praise him, he says. And when somebody asks you who's the best poet you've ever heard, you say the best is the blind man from Chios. But he also says that this chorus of young women is able to imitate anyone they meet. And we don't know exactly what he means, but they, too were artists. And yet there are has something secondary about it. They can only respond they aren't original. So I'm a little saddened there. But you know, when you compose poetry, in responding to a tradition, you're not going to move too radically away from that tradition. So there we are. In so far as you know, she does perhaps represent some kind of way of seeing the world that is fresh and uncontaminated. It's still interesting though that he comes to her when he is already old, and if I remember the poem, it doesn't really clarify whether he too had a true inner child when he composed. That is where the place of that quality is in the composition and transmission.
ELENA
Yes, I think it's a yes. The poet is sort of displacing his inner child onto Delias. But and as you said also, Pascoli is responding to a long tradition of poems, as he often does in his Poemi Conviviali, which are absolutely intertexual and very full of references of all kinds. Well, I want to thank Ruth for being our guest today and for this very fascinating conversation. And to our listeners, I want to say you can now enjoy the full track of the poem at the end of this episode. Episode. Thank you very much, Ruth.
RUTH
Thank you.