Apostrophe in the Homeric Narrative

  Although the Homeric narrator maintains a third-person narrative for the vast majority of both the Iliad and the Odyssey, in both epics the narrator departs from this format and directly addresses a character within the tale. This is referred to as apostrophe by scholars.(1) Apostrophe is the rhetorical figure used when a speaker "turns away" from one topic, person, or grammatical construction to another.(2)
  Lengthy and formulaic texts like the Homeric epics naturally train the reader to expect certain expressions and create a sense of appropriate dialogue for the reader. The text teaches the reader how it will communicate over the great length of the text and which characters "should" say what types of things. I do not mean that the the poetry, read or heard, has the intended function of instructing readers and hearers in metapoetics, but that this is one natural result of the experience with the epic poems. In other words, because the narrator of the Odyssey describes the action of the narrative in the third person for the first thirteen books of the epic, the reader naturally develops the expectation that this is the mode of narrative expression. Consequently, the appearance early in the fourteenth book of a second person address from the narrator to one of the characters jars the reader.
  When I encountered this phenomenon during my reading today (Od. 14.55), the shift to second person narration immediately struck me as odd, and I wondered if there were not some textual problem. After a quick check, de Jong (2001) set me on the right path. This has, of course, been noted for some time, and scholars debate the significance of it. These apostrophes in the Odyssey are particularly striking because they only occur at the introduction of the speeches of Eumaeus, Odysseus' pig farmer. Here is de Jong's brief comment on this phenomenon:

Whereas in the Iliad several characters are apostrophized, this happens in the Odyssey only in the case of Eumaeus: cf. 165, 360, 442, 507; 16.60, 135, 464; 17.272, 311, 380, 512, 579; and 22.194. Scholars are divided as to whether the apostrophe is merely a technical device to accommodate names with a difficult metrical shape, or is a narratively significant device designed to focus on or sympathize with characters. The apostrophes of Eumaeus always form part of speech introductions and it would be forced to claim a special effect in all cases. Taken together, however, these passages do reveal the sympathy of the narrator for this gentle character. Only the narrator, Odysseus, Telemachus, and Penelope address the swineherd by name; the Suitors refer to him as ‘swineherd’.(1)

  I cannot help but wonder if the narrator's second person address to Eumaeus alone in the Odyssey does not represent the epic in a previous form. Although much needs to be researched, I am inclined to think of these apostrophes as remnants of an earlier placement of the entire Eumaeus sequence. In simple terms, the epic trains the reader to think of the narrator using only third person address and the characters alone capable of second person address. So, instead of believing that something unusual has occurred in the Homeric tradition at each apostrophe, it seems possible to view these instances in light of the process of tradition creation. At an earlier point in the tradition of the Odyssey, the Eumaeus sequence might have been spoken by a character, retold by Odysseus after the defeat of the suitors. At the point in the tradition in which the Eumaeus portion of the Odyssey is crystallized from oral performance into written text, it has been moved to another point in the narrative. This would explain the second person addresses.
  More investigation is necessary. This might not answer the reason for the occurrences of apostrophe in the Iliad. Also, there might be a correlation between which character is in dialogue when an apostrophe occurs.

Follow-up sources:

Parry, A. (1972) ‘Language and Characterization in Homer’, HSPh 76: 1–22

Matthews, V. J. (1980) ‘Metrical Reasons for Apostrophe in Homer’, LCM 5: 93–9

Block, E. (1982) ‘The Narrator Speaks: Apostrophe in Homer and Vergil’, TAPhA 112: 7–22

Yamagata, N. (1989) ‘The Apostrophe in Homer as Part of the Oral Technique’, BICS 36: 91–103

Footnotes:
(1) de Jong (2001) A Narratological Commentary on the Odyssey, 345.
(2) Anderson (2000) Glossary of Greek Rhetorical Terms, 25 and 16-17 under alloiosis.