Zeus Homarios and for the designation of epic poets as Homeridai.^126
Certainly Greek poets competed at festivals. Hesiod won a tripod at the
funeral games for Amphidamas of Chalcis, and the author of the sixth
Homeric Hymn prays explicitly for ‘victory in this competition’.
There was a more intense kind of contest in which seers or poets did not
just perform separately before a judge but engaged in verse dialogue with each
other, asking difficult questions or setting each other challenges. This is
what lies behind the brahmódyam of the earlier Upanishads, a trial between
Brahmans involving an exchange of questions and answers about the Veda.
The Hesiodic poem Melampodia related a contest between the seers Calchas
and Mopsus. The motif continued to be productive in Greece: Aristophanes
has a contest between Aeschylus and Euripides in his Frogs, and the sophist
Alcidamas invented one between Homer and Hesiod, which later became the
basis for the extant Certamen Homeri et Hesiodi. In Irish there is the Colloquy
of the Two Sages (Immacaldam in dá thuarad), in which the filid Néde
and Ferchertne contest for the supreme title of ollam. A poetic contest with
riddles is also described in the Tromdám Guaire. The genre is represented
in Norse literature in the Vafþrúðnismál, where Odin contests with the
giant Vafthrudnir, setting him a series of tests of his mythological knowledge,
and in the Hervarar saga, where king Heiðrek engages in a riddle contest
with a man who has incurred his enmity and whom he will spare if he
wins.^127
As the examples indicate, the emphasis varies between depth of mytho-
logical learning, the insight needed for solving riddles, which is akin to
decoding poetic periphrases, and artistic quality. All of these formed parts
of the Indo-European poet’s expertise. One particular agonistic test that
links India, Greece, and Ireland is the completion of a half-finished poetic
utterance. In India, since at least the time of the Ka ̄masu ̄tra (1. 3. 15), poets
have challenged each other by presenting a verse or half a quatrain with a
deliberately paradoxical sense, which the other poet has to complete; this
remains a popular literary diversion among pandits (samasya ̄pu ̄ran
̇
a, samasya ̄-
pu ̄rti). In one section of the Certamen (8–9) Hesiod recites a series of
apparently absurd verses which Homer has to restore to sense by supplying
suitable continuations, and he succeeds in doing so. There is evidence that at
least some of these verses were already current in older tradition before
(^126) ‘Homeros’ was invented as their legendary eponym. See Durante (1976), 185–203; M. L.
West, CQ 49 (1999), 375 f.
(^127) Colloquy: Thurneysen (1921), 520–2; Tromdám Guaire: ibid. 263 f., Dillon (1946), 94 f.
Heiðrek’s riddles: Hervarar saga 10 (Edd. min. 106–20; translation in CPB i. 87ff.).
- Poet and Poesy 73