To coin a phrase... Clipeus and Coins

The Clipeus Virtutis, Res Gestae 34, Aeneid VII and Augustus' Image

Coins are a welcome aspect of the OCR Classical Civilisation A-Level course, one (arguably) wrongly omitted as inessential from the old AQA. In this post rather than focussing on one of the set coins I have picked out a similar one to think through:

Berlin, Pergamon Museum. Credits: Barbara McManus, 2005 minted in Spain, 19-18 BCE
http://www.vroma.org/images/mcmanus_images/indexcoins.html

Silver Denarius - RIC I, 36a

Augustus. 27 BCE-CE 14. AR Denarius (3.62 g, 6h). Spanish mint (Colonia Caesaraugusta?). Struck circa 19-18 BCE. Head facing right, wearing oak wreath / CAESAR AVGVSTVS, S P Q R above and below shield inscribed CL•V; laurel branches flanking. RIC I 36a; BMCRE 354 var. (laureate bust); BN -; RSC 51. (Image courtesy CNG)  http://www.ancientcoins.ca/RIC/

This coin is a good place to think through the ways that Roman Imperial Coinage cab carry meaning and inform us about the messages being disseminated and constructed through a variety of media in this period.

Legends

CAESAR
The coin emphasises two names for the first Princeps, neither his by birth: Caesar he took as an inheritance from Julius Caesar in 44BCE and of it Antony is quoted by Cicero as saying, "et te, o puer, qui omnia nomini debes" " You boy, who owes everything to a name". The coin shows us very clearly that Augustus was continuing to emphasise this link some 26 years later.
AUGUSTUS
The name Augustus has even wider resonances. Suetonius tells us that in 27BCE:

Suetonius, Divus Augustus VII

...he adopted the name Gaius Caesar to comply with his great-uncle Julius Caesar’s will; while the title Augustus was granted him after Munatius Plancus introduced a Senate motion to that effect. Though the opinion was expressed that he should take the name Romulus, as a second founder of the city, Plancus carried the day, arguing that Augustus was a more original and honourable title, because sacred sites and anything consecrated by the augurs are called augusta. The custom is derived either from the ‘increase’, auctus, in their holiness, or from the familiar phrase avium gestus gustusve, ‘the posture and pecking of birds’ which this line from Ennius supports:

‘When with august augury illustrious Rome was born.’

So the name Augustus was both unique and new, and yet simultaneously reminiscent of the augury associated with Romulus, whose monarchic associations Augustus felt compelled to avoid. That the elite of his time were aware of the association between Augustus, Augury, Romulus is very obvious in Propertius:

Propertius IV.vi

Then he [Apollo] spoke: ‘O Augustus, world-deliverer…

acknowledged as greater than your … ancestors

conquer now by sea…

Free your country from fear…

Unless you defend her, Romulus misread the birds flying from the Palatine,

he the augur of the foundation of Rome’s walls.

So the coin advertises a title bespeaking monarchy even whilst eschewing it.

Brunt and Moore suggest in their notes to the Res Gestae:

SYMBOLISMS

The name Augustus should not be seen in isolation from the images on the coin. In 27BCE during the so called First Settlement, the symbols and name were granted to Caesar (hence forward Augustus) as a package of which he was immensely proud and about which he boasted in Res Gestae 34:

Res Gestae  XXXIV

In consulatu sexto et septimo, postquam bella civilia exstinxeram, per consensum universorum potitusrerum omnium, rem publicam ex mea potestate in senatus populique Romani arbitrium transtuli. Quopro merito meo senatus consulto Augustus appellatus sum et laureis postes aedium mearum vestitipublice coronaque civica super ianuam meam fixa est et clupeus aureus in curia Iulia positus, quemmihi senatum populumque Romanum dare virtutis clementiaeque et iustitiae et pietatis caussatestatum est per eius clupei inscriptionem. Post id tempus auctoritate omnibus praestiti, potestatisautem nihilo amplius habui quam ceteri qui mihi quoque in magistratu conlegae fuerunt.

In my sixth and seventh consulships, after I had extinguished civil wars, after by universal consent, I was in control of all affairs, I transferred the republic from my power to the control of the senate and the Roman people. For my service, by senatorial decree, I was named Augustus, and the doors of my house were publicly clothed in laurel, and a civic crown [Corona Civica] were fixed over my door and a golden shield was put in the Curia Julia, which was given to me by the senate and the people of Rome [SPQR] for my courage [Virtus], clemency [Clementia], justice [Iustitia] and piety [Pietas], as attested by this inscription. After that time, I surpassed all in influence [Auctoritas] had no more power than those who were my colleagues in the magistracies. 

The package is all alluded to on this coin: We see the laurels associated with military victory; we see the oak wreath/Civic Crown showing him to have saved a life (or perhaps many Roman lives) being worn by Augustus on the obverse;

Brunt and Moore suggest in their notes:

we see the name Augustus of course; we see the fact he was given this not by his own appropriation, but by the Roman Senate and People and of course we have the Clipeus Virtutis a copy of which was discovered in Arles

http://www.livius.org/pictures/france/arles/clipeus-virtutis-of-augustus/

on which his outstanding personal virtues are recorded as he has them in Res Gestae
SENATVS
POPVLVSQVE ROMANVS
IMP CAESARI DIVI F AVGVSTO
COS VIII DEDIT CLVPEVM
VIRTVTIS CLEMENTIAE
IVSTITIAE-PIETATIS-ERGA
DEOS PATRIAMQVE

(http://www.socalcoins.com/collection/caesars/pages/AUGUSTUS_ric42a.htm)


Thus the coin is able to capture for us the whole package of awards and virtues he took and advertised. The combined effect of these was to demonstrate the Auctoritas, which is untranslatable, but means more than influence and has connotations of standing in the community.

As Augustus says the gold shield was placed in the Senate House, the Curia Julia, the laurel and oak wreath at his rather modest home on the Palatine  and there it would be seen by the elite, but perhaps not by the masses who awarded it to him. 

CIRCULATION

The coin is part of Augustus' ability to ensure that aspects of his programme of which he was proud were widely recognised. This coin from Spain, some eight years after the award, is playing up these symbolisms for an audience far removed from the Senate House as, in a less mobile way, is the marble version of teh Clipeus Virtutis above. The coin is one of many to show the Clipeus Virtutis and the ability to compress the shield's name to CL.V and omit any description suggests a wide familiarity with its content's meanings. 

As a silver coin and one of many showing similar designs (the shield with a Victory was also popular) it seems reasonable to suggest that many tens or hundreds of thousands of people would be exposed to this image.

DESIGNED BY?

It is always tempting to speak of Augustus putting things on coins, but it seems inherently unlikely that the mint in Spain was being fed designs sketched by Augustus when bored between meetings. Rather there must be some form of diffusion of ideas in both directions: that which Augustus and those close to him emphasise is the subject local minters are tempted to create, but where images go wrong or are inappropriate the centre or a local may correct them. We see this in a later spanish coin showing Sejanus with Tiberius hurriedly slighted (see an excellent video here) or, in a related manner with the Senate offering Tiberius a range of honours after Piso's maiestas [treason]:

 Tacitus, Annals III.18.ii

Likewise, when Valerius Messalinus  proposed that a golden statue should be set up in the temple of Mars the Avenger, and Caecina Severus an altar to  vengeance, he demurred, insisting that such consecrations were for foreign victories: domestic afflictions should be shrouded in sadness.

So whoever designed this coin was at the least responding to the emphasis that was being placed on this honour from the centre and thereby contributing to that emphasis. We might compare this profitably with the coins celebrating Augustus' buildings. Did anybody have to tell the minters of coins that Augustus would be thrilled to have the temple of Mars Ultor with the standards he had retrieved from Parthia on coins, or did they notice that the temple and celebrations made this abundantly clear and thereby disseminate that message more widely than the temple itself ever could? 

RIC I 39b here

VIRGIL'S AENEID

In a blog post I read recently here by Mike Fontaine  some associations (covered up in OCR's specified West translation with ancile as "augural staff" rather than shield) are suggested as possible readings:

The Oxford Latin Dictionary certainly suggests West's translation has missed a trick here (note the associations with Mars too):

The authors, coin minters and people of Rome certainly knew Augustus' priorities and how important the images were to him; whether or not he was directing their imagery, playful allusions, etc. is more questionable.

The Imperator

 The Role of Augustus as Imperator is an important theme in the OCR Classical Civilisation syllabus, so having spent a pleasant day or two reading a new (2018) book on Augustus at War, I thought I'd draw upon it to give some ideas.

Powell has written a very mixed genre text:  narratives of the various wars fought by and on behalf of Octavian/Augustus (pp.1-170); a shorter (pp.171-220) analysis of these, though there is relatively little new in the analysis not already present in the narratives; extensive prosopography (large tracts are devoted to potted biographies of figures) pp.236-85); an old (out of copyright) translation of the Res Gestae is also included.

Powell's basic premise is that Augustus was a competent commander himself, but exceptional in identifying and promoting military talent to make his an age of expansion and peace won through war. He notes the ways in which Augustus appropriated the acclamation Imperator as a name or title and counted the acclamations of his subordinates as being his in virtue of his position as proconsul of the imperial province.

He could perhaps have made more of this and have emphasised the ways in which the triumph came to be purely for the imperial family and how the spoila opima was denied to Crassus on a technicality as Augustus not merely acquiring military prestige through others, but acting to block theirs and stifle rivals. These ideas are mentioned, but not emphasised.

The lists of wars fought by Augustus and collated by Powell:

is very effective in making the point regarding the sheer scale of military activity and the limited role taken by Imp. Caesar/Augustus in personally effecting these, though his role in planning and his constant journeying to be near the theatres of action are noted.

Following the narrative of these is made easier in some cases by maps with armies and their movements marked (e.g. for Illyricum in 8CE) and harder by their absence for others (e.g. no map of the Yemen to explain the movements of the Arabian expedition). The decision to only use ancient place names is also disconcerting in places (I read the whole narrative of the wars in Iudaea without realising that Hierosolyma was Jerusalem).

His collection of coins is useful for thinking about messages and his claim that the cumulative impact of so many coins showing victory trophies, returned standards, triumphal images, crocodiles and the like would be to create an image of a time of victories even despite the panic of the 9CE Varian disaster is very plausible. He does not though seem to stop and consider who chose the images (presumably not Augustus?), approved them (perhaps Augustus?), decided which images went on which coinage etc. (Augustus?) and instead implies a very top-down model of propaganda (the word is the chapter's title [Appendix 4]). In this area he does seem a little weak, for instance noting (p.275) that Maecenas was patron to poets including Propertius, who, "lauded the new era led by Augustus and sang the praises of his legati". It is not clear that that is entirely the case (e.g. Propertius II.15.41ff trans Guy Lee):

or in a poem actually part of the OCR course:

(trans A.S Kline taken from Poetry in Translation. http://www.poetryintranslation.com)

in which we might note how far from seeing glory Propertius is!

Virgil and propaganda is of course a whole debate in itself.

Discussion of the Prima Porta Augustus (shown at the top) was interesting with the suggestion the ad locutio pose represented the time at which an acclamation as imperator was received, but the idea the bare feet indicate modesty (the Cupid clinging to the leg is omitted entirely) doesn't quite ring true - bare-footed statues are possibly indicative of divinity (see for instance Squire, M. (2013), Embodied Ambiguities on the Prima Porta Augustus. Art History, 36: 242–279.).

There were elements too that seemed to point in interesting directions and I could have wished he had explored. Powell has Beard in the bibliography, but never engages with any of the issues about how a triumph worked that she raises, instead giving a description of it with no hint that there may be debate. He also noted coordinates for locations in Germany, but I had to Google this to discover discussion at Lacus Curtius about Ptolemy giving coordinate locations (I had no idea this happened). 

I found this to be an immensely useful book, clarifying issues about the Vindelici (as appearing in Horace), summarising Augustus' wars and successes to make the case for him as an imperator, providing a resource on who fought where, when and why to which there will be many reasons to return in future.

Augustus, Tiberius, Clementia and the Lex de Imperio Vespasiani

Clementia (mercy)

Writing of the First Settlement in 27BCE Augustus says:

"...by senatorial decree, I was named Augustus, and the doors of my house were publicly clothed in laurel, and a civic crown were fixed over my door and a golden shield was put in the Curia Julia, which was given to me by the senate and the people of Rome for my courage, clemency, justice and piety, as attested by this inscription. After that time, I surpassed all in influence, although I had no more power than those who were my colleagues in the magistracies." (Res Gestae 34)

mihi senatum populumque Romanum dare virtutis clementiaeque et iustitiae et pietatis caussa testatum est per eius clupei inscriptionem. Post id tempus auctoritate omnibus praestiti, potestatisautem nihilo amplius habui quam ceteri qui mihi quoque in magistratu conlegae fuerunt.

maarjaara [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Clementia was not always very much in evidence during the civil wars and proscriptions:

Suet. Div. Augustus

CLEMENTIA as AUTOCRATIC and MONARCHIC

SENECA on CLEMENTIA

To offer clementia (mercy) is not within the reach of normal people because it requires that you explicitly give less punishment than is required by justice and law. Seneca writing of Clemency in the middle First Century says, "None is better graced by mercy than a king or a prince (quam regem aut principem)"(de Clementia I.2.iii) and further notes in the voice of the ruler "anybody can kill against the law, but no one other than I can break it to save  (Occidere contra legem nemo non potest, servare nemo praeter me)" (De Clementia I.v.4). That is, he explicitly links this ability to step outside the law with the power of monarchs and princes. 

So, whilst Augustus is boasting, "I had no more power than those who were my colleagues" he is simultaneously advertising his ability to do less than the law demanded (and so be above or outside it).  Exactly why he chooses to advertise this virtue in the same breath as describing his powers as limited to the levels of senatorial colleagues I am unsure and thinking about.

LEX DE IMPERIO VESPASIANI

In the Capitoline Museum you can see a law granting Vespasian (the emperor from 69-79CE) his powers. 

It famously grants Vespasian many powers and exemptions from laws because those were the powers held by his Julio-Claudian predecessors.

https://droitromain.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/Anglica/vespas_johnson.html

The exemption from laws, which is tracked back to Augustus (though given how much his position changes through 43BCE-14CE, it is not obvious when this means or even if it is true), identifies perhaps the nature of Imperial power - the laws which bind others, do not have to bind them.

TIBERIUS - autocracy

Under Tiberius the problem that Clementia indicates a princeps being outside/above the law becomes very pronounced. I want to think and read more about this, but you might think about:

The aftermath of Libo Drusus' trial, where Tiberius stated he would have intervened AFTER due process had happened had he not committed suicide (Tacitus Annals, II.27-32)
 or 
Urgulania's trial, where Tiberius undertook to appear for his mother Livia's client, but in dismissing the Praetorian Guard to a distance publicly showed he intended to appear as a privatus (private citizen), not as the Princeps, with attendant powers to stand outside the law. (Tacitus Annals, II.34)
or 
Clutorius Priscus' trial, where Tiberius' desire to show clementia is flagged by Lepidus and Tiberius seems to have required a ten day delay in future between legal condemnation and execution to allow room for him to exercise Clementia and overturn legal process. (Tacitus Annals, III.49-50)

Sappho - He is Like A God That Man

He Is Like a God That Man

This is the (an?) opening to Sappho's most famous poem 31 (one on the OCR Specification) in one rendering. I first came across the poem in Davidson's book, "The Greeks & Greek Love", in which Davidson offers a translation of the poem and some thoughts on how it radically shifts perspective.

Davidson translates:

He comments:

His translation (in a book whose object is not poetry) starts to capture some of the magic of Sappho, but other translations do it differently.

Anne Carson's translation is exceptional

and she captures with her more lyrical language the force of the poem. We might compare, "puts the heart in my chest on wings" with the rather more pedestrian, "makes my heart thump"

The line "greener than grass" seems odd in combination with death, and you will find translations suggesting that we should instead think of the colour of grass in the hot mediterranean where it is bleached and pale. 

You will notice in the Carson translation (left) the final line makes no sense and that this is a fragment of a possibly rather longer poem.

Tony Kline, whose translations you have met in the Augustus module, both uses the pale grass motif and drops as unwieldy the last fragmentary line. 

Kline translates: (@PoetryInTransl

www.poetryintranslation.com )

We are left in no doubt by Sappho of how love makes her feel and the symptoms of love and in this way she can see astonishingly contemporary. 

Daniel Mendelsohn (writing at greater length here) has phrased it like this:

Slyly, the speaker avoids physical description of the girl, instead evoking her beauty by detailing the effect it has on the beholder; the whole poem is a kind of reaction shot. The verses subtly enact the symptoms they describe: as the poet’s faculties fail one by one in the overpowering presence of her beloved, the outside world—the girl, the man she’s talking to—dissolves and disappears from the poem, too, leaving the speaker in a kind of interior echo chamber. The arc from “he seems to me” in the first line to the solipsistic “I seem to me” at the end says it all.

Even Red Dwarf are direct inheritors of her description of the symptoms of love:

Tongue-tied, cold sweat, feel like death... nothing in the human condition changes. That Sappho, a woman, admires not the man's beauty, but his composure when talking to the female object of her love reminds us of the envy we universally feel for those more at ease and more articulate than us when Eros is about. 

https://sententiaeantiquae.com/2015/10/19/before-redbull-eros-gave-you-wings-alcaeus-plato-and-homer/

Amy Pistone 

This universality and modern feel to Sappho has also provoked rather freer translations/adaptations of Sappho with a more explicitly modern twist. My favourite, which I came across recently, is by Amy Pistone (@apistone https://www.amypistone.com/)

It is clear that this translation is trying to do something other than a verbatim translation (though the inclusion of parallel Greek to give an illusion of authenticity to those brought up on Loeb texts is a particularly nice touch) and instead use and remake the poem for a modern readership.

I also like how the broken thought in the last line, with ellipses for effect, picks up the fragmentary line.








This is not a new development, the Roman poet Catullus also sought to use the poem (already centuries old and in Greek to his Latin) with a similar mixture of translation and free adaptation and he too made use of its fragmentary state. I borrow here a translation by Lauren Hunter  (https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4nm542kj)

 of Sappho and Catullus side-by-side:

You will notice that Catullus too chooses to use the fragmentary end to move the poem's end to a new purpose.

What do we learn? Well most obviously never assume that any translation is "right" in any definitive way, they reflect choices and possibilities. In addition that the poetry and ideas of the past need not be studied as fossils, but can be used, reworked and enjoyed in new ways. I would add too that Sappho is a poet who, even in current fragmentary state, gives us reason to understand why Plato (perhaps Plato, the attribution is not certain) said:

For More on Plato see the excellent In Our Time episode.

Bibliography

Carson A., (2003), If Not Winter, Virago Press

Davidson J., (2007), The Greeks and Greek Love, Phoenix

Cavafy and the Classical Civilisation A-Level

Cavafy, Homer and Augustus

The Greek Poet Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933) wrote on many themes (age, sex, place, and more) and very often wrote based on classical sources. I would like to look (briefly) at two.

Caesarion

Daniel Mendelsohn, from whose fabulous translation (available here) this is taken, adds in his notes:

"Octavian (later Augustus) had Caesarion put to death; as he gave the order for the murder, one of his advisors is said to have complained sardonically of the dangers of polykaisariê, “too many Caesars.” 

The Greek, polykaisariê, is a punning allusion to Homer's polykoiraniê, “too many rulers,” which appears in Homer’s Iliad, 2.203–6. In this famous passage, Odysseus berates the mutinous Greek troops who wish to abandon the siege of Troy and return home:

Not all of us Achaeans can be masters here;
too many rulers [polykoiraniê] is no good thing; let one man rule,
one king, to whom the crooked-minded son of Kronos gave the scepter and royal rights, that he may use them to be king."



Given the wars of words between Antony and Augustus prior to their clash in 31BCE at Actium, we might expect it to be Antony's children by Cleopatra who suffered, but in fact they seem to have survived. Caesarion was a threat because he too was apparently Julius Caesar's child; Antony declared him King of Kings and Caesar's heir!

Suetonius's account of the aftermath of Actium makes it clear why the clementia to be celebrated on the clupeus virtutis could hardly extend to Caesarion.

17 He returned to Italy [after Actium]... He stayed no more than twenty–seven days at Brundisium, just long enough to pacify the mutineers, then took a roundabout route to Egypt by way of Asia and Syria, besieged Alexandria, where Antony had fled with Cleopatra, and soon reduced it. At the last moment Antony sued for peace, but Augustus ordered him to commit suicide, and inspected the corpse. He was so anxious to save Cleopatra as an ornament for his triumph that he actually summoned doctors to suck the poison from her wound, supposedly the bite of an asp.

[compare Horace I.37 she scorned to be in the triumph & Propertius III.11 suggesting he saw her (effigy) in the triumph & Propertius IV.6 suggesting it would be shameful to have a woman led in triumph where once great men like Jugurtha were]

Though he allowed them honourable burial in the same tomb and gave orders that the mausoleum which they had begun to build should be completed, he had the elder of Antony’s sons by Fulvia dragged from the image of Divus Julius, to which he had fled with vain pleas for mercy, and executed. Augustus also sent cavalry in pursuit of Caesarion, whom Cleopatra claimed to be the son of Caesar, and killed him when captured. However, he spared Cleopatra’s children by Antony, brought them up no less tenderly than if they had been members of his own family, and gave them the education which their rank deserved. (Suetonius, Augustus 17)

With Caesarion and Cleopatra dead (on paper they had been co-pharaoh since 44BCE, though she was in charge), Octavian could get on with becoming the de facto Pharaoh himself (never took the title though)

18. About this time he had the sarcophagus containing Alexander the Great’s mummy removed from the mausoleum at Alexandria and, after a long look at its features, showed his veneration by crowning the head with a golden diadem and strewing flowers on the trunk. When asked, ‘Would you now like to visit the mausoleum of the Ptolemies?’ he replied, ‘I came to see a king, not a row of corpses.’ Augustus turned the kingdom of Egypt into a Roman province, and then, to increase its fertility and its yield of grain for the Roman market, set troops to clean out the irrigation canals of the Nile, which had silted up after many years’ neglect. 

Augustus annointed by Egyptian gods

So this young man of 17 had to die. Cavafy notes how few lines there are describing him in history and very few certain images. He plays with the flattery of the court "unstinting laudations" and with the cruelty of Octavian as history records, but uses the gap where history is silent, about the young man's appearance, character, etc. to play with a more homoerotic image of his being visited by an image of the prince when the light went out "I let it go out". Art exists in and exploits the gaps in history.

ITHACA

Cavafy's use of the Classics is also to be seen in perhaps his most famous poem, his reworkings of Odysseus's journeys in Ithaca.
This poem is also available spoken by Sean Connery. In this poem you will notice (again in Mendelsohn's translation) how Cavafy takes the stories of the Odyssey and allegorises them.

The Laestrygonians, Cyclops, Poseidon are none of them beings, but our own mental blocks and the issues you allow your soul to "set up before you".

The journey of Odysseus becomes an allegory for a life lived to the full travelling through Egyptian Alexandria (Cavafy's home) and Phoenicia with Ithaca never the reward we strive to reach, only the endpoint.

In some ways this plays with Tennyson's poem Ulysses which imagines Odysseus bored by the humdrum Ithaca.

"Ithaca gave you the journey"

This way of reading Homer is by no means unique, many writers have recognised the psychological possibilities of aspects of the Odyssey. Tantalus has entered English as our experience of wanting that which is just out of reach,

Sisyphus has entered English as Sisyphean meaning a task too hard for our endurance and as a model of pointless, but endless, even absurd, endeavour.

The Sirens of course are divorced from their original offering of knowledge and made erotic and tempting in everything from paintings to children's films.

Herbert James Draper Sirens and Ulysses

Of course they also leave room for humorous reworkings:

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/110 

In studying the classics, we also open up modern literature and begin to understand that more fully.

Formulaic Lines and the Gruffalo

Where are you going to Little Brown Mouse?

I have a weak spot for the Gruffalo, having read it endlessly, and in reading the introduction and notes to Wilson's Odyssey found myself coming back to it. I read it again this evening and it recrystalised my thoughts about how it takes the form of a mini epic.

In the introduction (p.5) and translator's note (pp.83-4) to her new translation of Homer's Odyssey, Emily Wilson comments on how she has handled Formulaic Lines:

...

As she notes the repetitions can feel like moments to skip. Indeed one Twitterer made a similar (joking) point about the catalogue of ships in the Iliad being omitted from BBC's Troy

But there is a modern genre sharing many of the stylistic features of the Odyssey and showing how successful repetition, patterning and direct speech can be.



Julia Donaldson's Gruffalo shares with the Odyssey the tendency toward formulaic lines to mark a standard point:

Like The Odyssey this is a text designed to be heard rather than read so different rules apply and the verbal cues set up tension and in the final case "gruffal..." can be subverted.  It might also be noted that the poetic form of the Gruffalo (though rhymed rather than metrical) adds to its impact.

That being so the features of reading the Gruffalo aloud (or Dr Seuss's Zinniga-Zanniga with which it shares many features) perhaps carry over into the Odyssey. 

                                                                                         

The direct speech demands voices and inflections - would one speak Polyphemus as one does Odysseus, anymore than the Mouse as the Gruffalo?

The poetic form always takes second place to the dramatic impact, so anybody rests and extends, as Donaldson signposts, on the ooooooooo of that last Gruffalo as one might pause in BkX127 when Odysseus,
"...drew out my sword
and cut the ropes that moored my dark-cheeked ship"

Surely we expect Odysseus to fight a few cannibals killing his men, he does have twelve ships of warriors capable of sacking cities, so the sword drawing requires a pause before he fails us again.

Beyond that one trope of the Odyssey,  that it is better to have brains than brawn, to be Odysseus than the Cyclops, The Mouse than the Gruffalo is clearly stable across the millenia. The journey motif and the homecoming is likewise stable, though surprisingly Donaldson's mouse finds no reason to exterminate anybody: his/her (we are never told) nostos is altogether happier.

Clearly Donaldson is at some remove a literary descendent of Homer, but we do not only understand a modern work by reading the ancient, the impact of oral patterns we rapidly find are to felt most keenly when reading a story to an attentive (if quite young) audience.

We can only mourn Donaldson's abject failure to invoke the muses, have an arming scene, or bring a deity or two on.