6 See Milman Parry, Collected Papers (New York, Oxford University Press, 1971). I wish to thank both Randall Warner and Judith Griessman for discussion on some of these points.
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Not only is there no reason to believe that the aoidoi had any conscious psychology they were trying to express, such a notion is quite foreign to the whole texture of the poem. The Iliad is about action and it is full of action — constant action. It really is about Achilles' acts and their consequences, not about his mind. And as for the gods, the Iliadic authors and the Iliadic characters all agree in the acceptance of this divinely managed world. To say the gods are an artistic apparatus is the same kind of thing as to say that Joan of Arc told the Inquisition about her voices merely to make it all vivid to those who were about to condemn her.
It is not that the vague general ideas of psychological causation appear first and then the poet gives them concrete pictorial form by inventing gods. It is, as I shall show later in this essay, just the other way around. And when it is suggested that the inward feelings of power or inward monitions or losses of judgment are the germs out of which the divine machinery developed, I return that the truth is just the reverse, that the presence of voices which had to be obeyed were the absolute prerequisite to the conscious stage of mind in which it is the self that is responsible and can debate within itself, can order and direct, and that the creation of such a self is the product of culture. In a sense, we have become our own gods.
Objection: If the bicameral mind existed, one might expect utter chaos, with everybody following his own private hallucinations. The only possible way in which there could be a bicameral civilization would be that of a rigid hierarchy, with lesser men hallucinating the voices of authorities over them, and those authorities hallucinating yet higher ones, and so on to the kings and their peers hallucinating gods. Yet the Iliad does not present any such picture with its concentration on the heroic individual.
Reply: This is a very telling objection that puzzled me for a long time, particularly as I studied the history of other bicameral civilizations in which there was not the freedom for individual action that there was in the social world of the Iliad.
The missing pieces in the puzzle turn out to be the well-known
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Linear B Tablets from Knossos, Mycenae, and Pylos. They were written directly in what I am calling the bicameral period. They have long been known, yet long resistant to the most arduous labors of cryptographers. Recently, however, they have been deciphered and shown to contain a syllabic script, the earliest written Greek used only for record purposes.7 And it gives us an outline picture of Mycenaean society much more in keeping with the hypothesis of a bicameral mind: hierarchies of officials, soldiers, or workers, inventories of goods, statements of goods owed to the ruler and particularly to gods. The actual world of the Trojan War, then, was in historical fact much closer to the rigid theocracy which the theory predicts than to the free individuality of the poem.
Moreover, the very structure of the Mycenaean state is profoundly different from the loose assemblage of warriors depicted in the Iliad. It is indeed quite similar to the contemporary divinely ruled kingdoms of Mesopotamia (as described later in this essay, particularly in II.2). These records in Linear B call the head of the state the wanax, a word which in later classical Greek is only used for gods. Similarly, the records call the land occupied by his state as his temenos, a word which later is used only for land sacred to the gods. The later Greek word for king is basileus, but the term in these tablets denotes a much less important person. He is more or less the first servant of the wanax, just as in Mesopotamia the human ruler was really the steward of the lands 'owned' by the god he heard in hallucination — as we shall see in II.2. The material from the Linear B tablets is difficult to piece together, but they do reveal the hierarchical and leveled nature of centralized palace civilizations which the succession of poets who composed the Iliad in the oral tradition completely ignored.
7 M. C. F. Ventris and J. Chadwick, Documents in Mycenaean Greek (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). A summary of this material and its relationship to archaeological finds may be found in T. B. L. Webster, From Mycenae to Homer (London: Methuen, 1958).
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This loosening of the social structure in the fully developed Iliad may in part have been caused by the bringing together of other much later stories into the main theme of the Trojan War.
One of the most telling pieces of evidence that the Iliad is a composite of different compositions is the large number of inconsistencies in the poem, some in very close proximity. For example, when Hector is withdrawing from the battle, one line (6:117) says, "The black hide beat upon his neck and ankles."
This can only be the early Mycenaean body-shield. But the next line refers to "The rim which ran round the outside of the bossed shield," and this is a very different kind and a much later type of shield. Obviously, the second line was added by a later poet who in his auditory trance was not even visualizing what he was saying.
Further Qualifications
Indeed, since this is the chaotic period when the bicameral mind breaks down and consciousness begins (as we shall see in a later chapter), we might expect the poem to reflect both this breakdown of civil hierarchies as well as more subjectification side by side with the older form of mentality. As it is, I have in the previous pages omitted certain discrepancies to the theory which I regard as such incursions. These outcroppings of something close to subjective consciousness occur in parts of the Iliad regarded by scholars as later additions to the core poem.8
Book 9, for example, which was written and added to the poem only after the great migration of the Achaeans into Asia Minor, contains references to human deception unlike any in the other books. Most of these occur in the great, long rhetorical reply of Achilles to Odysseus about Agamemnon's treatment of him (9:344, 371, and 375). In particular is Achilles' slur on Agamemnon: "Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is the man who 8 I am here drawing on Walter Leaf, A Companion to the Iliad (London: Macmillan, 1892), pp. 170-173.
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hides one thing in his heart and speaks another." (9:3123f.). This is definitely an indication of subjective consciousness. So also may be the difficult-to-translate optative constructions of Helen (3:173ff.; 6:344ff.) or the apparent reminiscence of Nestor (1:26off.).
There are also two extraordinary places in the text where first Agenor (21:553) and then Hector (22:99) t0 themselves.
The fact that these two speeches occur late in the poem, in close proximity, have highly inappropriate content (they contradict the previous characterizations of the speakers), and use some identical phrases and lines, all suggest that they are formulaic insertions into the story by the same aoidos at a later time.9 But not much later. For they are sufficiently unusual to surprise even their speakers. After these soliloquies, both heroes exclaim precisely the same astonished words, "But wherefore does my life say this to me?" If, indeed, such talks to oneself were common, as they would be if their speakers were really conscious, there would be no cause for surprise. We shall have occasion to return to these instances when we discuss in more detail how consciousness arose.10