τιμή and the Nurturing Principle in the Iliad and the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (original) (raw)

In her set of interpretive essays on the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Foley famously analyzed what she termed “the mother/daughter romance,” suggesting that “for ancient women, Demeter and Persephone may have represented the extraordinary endurance of the bond between women of different generations in the same family.” By contrast, Clay insists in her chapter on the hymn that “while the hymn-poet is by no means unaware of the psychological and sexual implications of his narrative, his attention remains fixed on the larger political and theological ramifications of his story.” Clay and Foley each bring out different points of emphasis in Demeter’s well-known hymn, but I believe there is a way to read these various elements as complementary to one another. In this paper, I argue that the hymnic poet places the bereaved mother’s intensely personal and even guilty anguish on an equal plane with the combined grief and anger of a Homeric hero derived of personal τιμή. With the rape of Persephone cruelly framed as a breach of the maternal protective-instinct—which is central to Demeter’s τιμή as the goddess of nurturing and fertility—Demeter’s subsequent grief and rage are brought into parallel with those of the tragically ironic mother-figure, Achilles himself. Too often overlooked by those wishing to focus on the more “political” elements of the hymn, Demeter’s early period of mourning for her lost daughter shares numerous parallels with that of Achilles for Patroclus. Both Achilles’ grieving process, however, and his correspondence to the bereaved, anti-mother Niobe draw attention to his undeniable guilt in the death of his beloved. Demeter, on the other hand, can take no rational responsibility for the rape of her daughter. Rather, the hymnic poet parallels her mourning process to that of the shamed and guilty Achilles in order not only to place her personal grief on a level with that of the archetypal Homeric hero, but even more so to bring out her inviolable dedication to her maternal duty. In the mind of the hymnic poet, Demeter is such a paragon of Homeric motherhood that her sense of personal responsibility for the well-being of her child leads her to grieve in the very same manner as the pitiably failed mother-figures, Achilles and Niobe. Throughout the body of her hymn, Demeter is consumed with the desire either to restore her personal τιμή as the goddess of nurturing and fertility or at least to avenge its deprivation. Her final success depends upon her effective manipulation of the aspect of her nurturing τιμή which has not been stolen from her—her patronage of human agriculture. By withholding her maternal care from the fields of men and threatening her fellow gods with a loss of all γέρα and θυσίαι, Demeter finally reasserts her own power as a maternal nurturing figure—a force absolutely necessary for the maintenance of Zeus’ cherished cosmic order. Nickel summarizes, “Her position in the Olympian community is thereby confirmed and even augmented. No longer having any reason to be angry, Demeter returns with her daughter to Olympus.” As numerous scholars have pointed out, Demeter and Persephone act as mirror images for one another throughout the body of the hymn. Thus, with Zeus’ final redistribution of τιμαί at the hymn’s close, Persephone actually becomes an extension of her mother’s power into the realm of Hades. As mother and daughter return physically to Olympus, the primal maternal force which they together embody is stretched out over all three realms of the cosmos—Hades, earth, and Olympus. Paradoxically, the temporary break in the mother-daughter relationship of protection and care serves finally to extend and augment the power of that relationship and to reestablish its central importance for the solidarity of Zeus’ cosmos.