La lira e la nave. Alle origini della poesia di nostos

Abstract: The analysis of the eighth book of the Odyssey hints at a more ancient narra- tive structure in which Demodocus’ singing performance in the presence of Odysseus and the Phaeacians took place during a public ritual banquet accompanying the launching and fitting out of the ship destined to bring the hero back home. Behind this connection of the art of music and song with the rituals associated with seafaring and sea voyages there was probably an ancient cultural memory dating back as far as the Aegean world of the second millennium. This is proven above all by a compari- son with another epic saga already recorded in the Odyssean narrative tradition and whose origins seem evidently linked to the Mycenaean age, i. e. the Argonautic saga, where a singer and lyre player (Orpheus, or someone else for him at the beginning) accompanied the entire expedition of heroes by sea with his presence. Moreover, in the Greek epic tradition there are other clear traces of what can be defined as a specific poetry on nautical subjects. It was within this tradition that the nostos tales originat- ed and developed their earliest function, an ancient function of which the text of the Odyssey itself at some points preserves memory. The structure of the Homeric poem as we know it, however, is the result of a narrative expansion of Odysseus᾽ episode with the Phaeacians that took place during the rhapsodic phase of the text’s reworking: in this expansion, the scene of his encounter with Demodocus was augmented and his nostos tale was relocated.