Kleos / Penthos Axis

The axis Nagy draws between kleos and penthos is the structural law that governs how an epic story falls upon its hearer. The Muses, Hesiod tells us, are born to be a lēsmosunē kakōn, “a forgetting of ills” (Theogony 53–55); their song confers kleos and so suspends grief. But this suspension is not unconditional: it holds only for the listener who is not personally involved.

Penelope, hearing Phemios sing the nostos of the Achaeans, calls the song a penthos alaston, “an unforgettable grief,” and asks him to stop (Odyssey i 342). For the rest of the audience the same song is kleos; for the wife of Odysseus it is penthos. Helen, in Odyssey iv, administers a pharmakon “without penthos, without anger, making one forget all ills” (iv 221) — the drug turns potential mourners into a kleos-audience and so permits her tale of Troy to be entertainment rather than lamentation. Odysseus, hearing Demodokos sing of Troy in Odyssey viii, is the inverse case: he becomes the involved listener and so suffers what the rest of Alkinoos’ court receives as kleos (viii 521–541).

The factor is involvement. Kleos is the affect of the outsider; penthos is the affect of the insider. The capacity to weep at a story is the mark of one’s belonging to its world. Nagy’s larger argument follows from this: the Iliadic tradition assigns the overtly ritual dimension of akhos / penthos to Patroklos because the kin of Achilles are the audience; Achilles’ own death, which would induct that whole audience into penthos, is reserved for cult rather than epic (Nagy 1979).

Relationships

• penthos
• akhos
• kleos-aphthiton
• kleos-nostos-opposition
• mnemosyne-as-social-apparatus

Primary sources

• theogony (Hesiod 53–55, 98–105)
• iliad (Homer, esp. IX 524–525, XXIII)
• odyssey (Homer, esp. i 326–352, iv 100–243, viii 73–541)
• nagy-best-of-achaeans (Nagy 1979)