This system, obviously the product of invention, refinement and elimination of superfluities over generations, could only be the work of oral bards, and in fact similar phenomena, though infinitely less sophisticated, are found in oral poetry, living and dead, in other languages. There was more to it, of course, than handy epithets. Whole lines, once honed to perfection by the bards of the tradition, became part of the repertoire; they are especially noticeable in recurring passages like descriptions of sacrifice, of communal eating and drinking. Such passages give the oral singer time to concentrate on what is coming next and, if he is a creative oral poet, to elaborate his own phrases mentally as he recites the formulas that he can sing without effort. He is helped, too, by the formulaic nature of whole themes, great type-scenes —the arming of the warrior for battle, the launching and beaching of ships. These are traditional patterns that the audience expects and the bard may vary but not radically change.
There is one aspect of Parry’s discovery, however, that changed the whole problem of the nature of our Homeric text. The oral bard who uses such formulaic language is not, as scholars in the nineteenth century who struggled with the problem of illiterate bards all assumed, a poet reciting from memory a fixed text. He is improvising, along known lines, relying on a huge stock of formulaic phrases, lines and even whole scenes; but he is improvising. And every time he sings the poem, he may do it differently. The outline remains the same, but the text, the oral text, is flexible. The poem is new every time it is performed.
If Homer’s poetry is the culmination of a long tradition of such oral composition, many of the problems that bedeviled the Analysts are solved. Over the course of generations of trial and error, formulas are introduced and rejected or retained for their usefulness in improvisation, without regard to linguistic consistency or historical accuracy. The language of the poets becomes a repository of all the combinations that have proved useful. Small wonder that Aeolic and Ionic forms appear in the same line, that a Mycenaean boar-tusk helmet can turn up in a passage in the Iliad, full of late linguistic forms, that people in the Odyssey sometimes give dowries and sometimes demand payment for their daughter’s hand, that cremation and inhumation are practiced side by side. As each new generation of singers re-creates the song, new formulas may be invented, new themes and scenes introduced; reflections of contemporary reality creep into descriptions of the fighting, especially into the similes. But the dedication of epic poetry to the past and the continuing usefulness of so much traditional phraseology will slow the process of modernization and produce the unhistorical amalgam of customs, objects and linguistic forms that we find in our Homeric text.
It is the fate of most new and valuable insights to be enthusiastically developed beyond the limits of certainty, or even of probability, and Parry’s demonstration that Homeric poetry had an oral base has not escaped that fate. Phrases, even whole lines, that are repeated often enough to qualify as formulaic are indeed characteristic of the poet’s diction, but they do not account for more than a part of it —about one third of the whole. In an attempt to raise the formulaic element to a higher level, Parry counted as formulas expressions whose metrical pattern and position in the line were identical and that contained one word in common: for example, tēuchĕ ĕthēkĕ; ālgĕ’ ĕthēkĕ; kūdŏs ĕthēkĕ —he “put” the arms, the sorrows, the glory on. Not content with this, Parry went on to suggest, hesitantly, the inclusion in the system of similar expressions that, however, did not contain one word in common: dōkĕn hĕtāirŏ, for example, and tēuchĕ kŭnēssĭn —“he gave to his comrade,” “he made [him prey] for the dogs.” Some of Parry’s followers have been less hesitant, and by this and other extensions of the meaning of “formula” have boosted the inherited content of Homer’s verse to ninety percent. This of course leaves very little room for Homer as an individual creative poet. It seems in fact to be a return to the idea of Giambattista Vico: the poems are the creation of a people, of a tradition, of generations of nameless bards.
But the argument for full formularity has feet of clay. A poet composing in a strict, demanding meter is bound to repeat syntactical combinations in identical positions, and the stricter the meter, the higher the incidence of such repeated patterns. English has no meters as precisely demanding as Homer’s, but Alexander Pope, to take an example, is rich in lines that by rigid Parryite standards would qualify him as an illiterate bard:
The Smiles of Harlots, and the Tears of Heirs
The Fate of Louis and the Fall of Rome
Proclaim their Motions, and provoke the War
Maintain thy Honours, and enlarge thy Fame
The shining Helmet, and the pointed Spears
The silver Token, and the circled Green
Weak was his Pace, but dauntless was his Heart
Lame are their Feet, and wrinkled is their Face
Samuel Johnson, in fact, wrote a description of Pope’s technique that has more than a little resemblance to Parry’s conception of the oral poet. “By perpetual practice, language had in his mind a systematical arrangement; having always the same use for words, he had words so selected and combined as to be ready at his call.”
Extravagant claims for the predominance of formula in Homeric poetry have now been generally discounted, and even Parry’s basic theses have been shown to need modification in the light of later examination. There are many cases, for example, where a truly formulaic epithet does in fact seem to be poetically functional in its context. There are cases where verbal repetition is so poetically effective that it must be the result of poetic design rather than the working of a quasi-mechanical system. Careful investigation of the type-scenes —the ceremony of sacrifice, the arming of the warrior, and so on —has revealed that although sometimes whole verses are repeated from one scene to another, no two scenes are exactly similar. “Each occurrence,” to quote a recent evaluation (Edwards, p. 72), “is unique, and often specifically adapted to its context.” Even the basic concept of economy, the strict limitation of the epithets for one god or hero to those needed in different cases and positions, has been questioned: a recent study shows that in his analysis of the epithets for Achilles, Parry considered only the phrases containing the hero’s name, ignoring other ways of identifying Achilles, such as “Peleus’ son” (Shive, passim). All this, together with the monumental scale and magnificent architecture of the Iliad, the complex structure of the Odyssey, makes the image of Homer as an illiterate bard, totally dependent on ready-made formulas and stock scenes for improvised performance, hard to accept.
There is nevertheless fairly general agreement that Parry was right in one thing: Homer’s unique style does show clearly that he was heir to a long tradition of oral poetry. There is, however, one problem that Parry raised but did not solve: Homer may or may not have been as illiterate as his forerunners, but at some time the Iliad and the Odyssey were written down. When, by whom, for what purpose and in what circumstances was this done?
The most likely date for the composition of the Iliad is the fifty years running from 725 to 675 B.C.; for the Odyssey, somewhat later in the period. That is also the time to which the earliest examples of Greek alphabetic writing can be dated. Did Homer take advantage of the new technique to record for future singers the huge poems he had composed without the aid of writing? Did writing perhaps play a role in its composition? To both these questions Parry’s collaborator and successor, Albert Lord, gave an emphatically negative answer. “The two techniques are . . . mutually exclusive . . . It is conceivable that a man might be an oral poet in his younger years and a written poet later in life, but it is not possible that he be both an oral and a written poet at any given time in his career” (p. 129). Lord based this assertion on his experience with Yugoslav oral poets who, when they came in contact with literate urban societies, lost their gift for improvised recitation. He envisaged a Homer, an oral bard at the height of his powers, who dictated his poem to a scribe, one who had mastered the new art of writing. This was o
f course how the songs of illiterate Yugoslav bards had been written down (sometimes with the aid of recording equipment, sophisticated for its time) by Parry and Lord.
This scenario did not satisfy everyone. The analogy with modern Yugoslavia, for example, was flawed. When the bards there learned to read and write, they were immediately exposed to the corrupting influence of newspapers, magazines and cheap fiction, but if Homer learned to write in the late eighth century, there was little or nothing for him to read. Lord’s generalization about the incompatibility of the two techniques has been questioned by students of oral poetry; in other parts of the world (particularly in Africa), they find no such dichotomy. “The basic point . . . is the continuity of oral and written literature. There is no deep gulf between the two: they shade into each other both in the present and over many centuries of historical development, and there are innumerable cases of poetry which has both ‘oral’ and ‘written’ elements” (Finnegan, p. 24). Furthermore, the extant specimens of alphabetic writing of the eighth and early seventh centuries B.C. make it hard to believe in a scribe of the period who could take dictation at or, for that matter, anywhere near performance speed: the letters are freestanding capitals, crudely and laboriously formed, written from right to left, or from right to left and left to right on alternate lines. One critic, in fact, irreverently conjured up a picture of Homer dictating the first line (or rather the first half-line) of the Iliad: “Mênin aeide thea . . . You got that?”
A different scenario for the transition from oral performance to written text was developed by Geoffrey Kirk. The epics were the work of an oral “monumental composer,” whose version imposed itself on bards and audiences as the definitive version. They “then passed through at least a couple of generations of transmission by decadent and quasi-literate singers and rhapsodes” (Kirk, The Iliad: A Commentary, I, p. xxv) — that is, performers who were not themselves poets. Lord’s objection to this, that memorization plays no part in the living oral tradition, was based on Yugoslav experience, but elsewhere —in Somalia, for example —very long poems are recited from memory by professional reciters who are themselves, in many cases, poets.
What neither of these theories explains, however, is the immense length of the poem. Why should an oral, illiterate poet, whose poetry exists only in its performance before an audience, create a poem so long that it would take several days to perform? For that matter, if his poetry existed only in performance, how could he create a poem of such length? If, on the other hand, he delivered different sections of it at different times and places, how could he have elaborated the variations on theme and formula and the inner structural correspondences that distinguish the Homeric epics so sharply from the Yugoslav texts collected by Parry and Lord?
It is not surprising that many recent scholars in the field have come to the conclusion that writing did indeed play a role in the creation of these extraordinary poems, that the phenomena characteristic of oral epic demonstrated by Parry and Lord are balanced by qualities peculiar to literary composition. They envisage a highly creative oral poet, master of the repertoire of inherited material and technique, who used the new instrument of writing to build, probably over the course of a lifetime, an epic poem on a scale beyond the imagination of his predecessors.
The last half of the eighth century was the time in which writing was coming into use all over the Greek world. Homer must have known of its existence, but the traditional nature of his material naturally forbade its appearance in the relentlessly archaic world of his heroes, who belonged to the time when men were stronger, braver and greater than men are now, a world in which men and gods spoke face-to-face. Even so, Homer does show, in one particular instance, that he was conscious of the new technique. In Book 6 of the Iliad Glaucus tells the story of his grandfather Bellerophon, whom Proetus, king of Argos, sent off with a message to the king of Lycia, Proetus’ father-in-law; it instructed the king to kill the bearer: “[He] gave him tokens, / murderous signs, scratched in a folded tablet” (6.198–99). There has been much discussion about the nature of these signs, but the word Homer uses —grapsas, literally “scratching” —is later the normal word used for “writing,” and pinax —“tablet” —is the word used by later Greeks to describe the wooden boards coated with wax that were used for short notes.
If Homer could write, what did he write on? Obviously, “tablets” would not be adequate. We do not know when papyrus, the paper of the ancient world, was first available in Greece, though we do know that it came at first not from its almost exclusive source, Egypt —which was not opened to Greek merchants until the sixth century B.C. —but from the Phoenician port the Greeks called Byblos (the Greek word for book was biblion —our “Bible”). Archaeological evidence for Phoenician imports into Greece dates from the ninth century B.C., and Phoenician traders are mentioned in the Iliad (23.828) and their operations described with a wealth of detail in the Odyssey. But even if papyrus was not available in quantity, there were other materials, such as animal skins. Herodotus, writing in the fifth century B.C., says that in his time the Ionian Greeks still used the word diphthera —“skin” —when they meant “book.”
The crudity of the script in the eighth century meant that writing was a laborious business. If Homer did use writing in the composition of the poem, it is likely that the process extended over many years. Episodes from the Odyssean voyages (the one-eyed giant) or from the return of Odysseus (the slaughter in the hall) would be brought to near perfection in oral performance, perhaps combined with other episodes to form longer units for special occasions (Odysseus among the Phaeacians, the beggar in the palace) and eventually committed to writing. Gradually a complete text would be assembled, to be refined in detail and extended by insertions, the longer sections welded into unity by connecting links. It was inevitable in such a process, with writing a newly acquired skill and writing materials, papyrus or leather, not convenient for cross-reference, that the final version should contain inconsistencies. No one has ever, in spite of repeated and ingenious efforts, been able to produce a totally convincing ground plan of the palace of Odysseus; people enter and emerge from rooms that seem to shift position from one episode to the next. There are also inconsistencies in the location of the characters. In Book 15, for example, when Telemachus and Theoclymenus, the fugitive he has taken under his wing, arrive at Ithaca, they go ashore and Theoclymenus sees a hawk carry off a dove, a bird sign that he interprets as a prophecy of victory for Telemachus. But later, when he refers to this incident, he says that he saw the hawk as he “sat on the benched ship” (ref).
These are inconsistencies typical of poetry improvised in dramatic presentation; the wonder is that there are not many more of them in so long and complex a poem. Though pointed out in scholarly commentaries, they rarely disturb the ordinary reader today, and of course Homer’s original audiences, even if they had been critically disposed, would have been hard put to cite chapter and verse for their objections. But in fact the poet’s listeners were not in a critical frame of mind. The word Homer uses to describe audience reaction to the longest epic recital in the Odyssey —the hero’s tale of his wandering course from Troy to the court of the Phaeacian king, where he now sits at the banquet table —is kêlêthmos, “enchantment.” “His story [held] them spellbound down the shadowed halls” (ref). Many centuries later, in Plato’s dialogue Ion, a rhapsode, a professional reciter of the Homeric epics, echoes Homer’s words as he describes the audience’s reaction to his performance. “I look down on them weeping, gazing at me with an awe-struck look, joining me in my astonishment at the words I am speaking.”
The surprising thing is that the inconsistencies stayed in the text. If Homer, as in Lord’s model, had dictated his poem, the scribe could hardly have failed to notice and correct them. In fact, Lord records such corrections in the course of dictation in Yugoslavia. And it seems hard to imagine the lines going uncorrected in Kirk’s scenario of a monumental poem preserved by recitation for a generation
or two before being written down. Any rhapsode (and in the earlier generation he would have been an oral poet himself) could have corrected the lines without effort and would have seen no reason not to do so. There seems to be only one possible explanation of their survival in the text: that the text was regarded as authentic, the exact words of Homer himself. And that can only mean that there was a written copy.
This is of course pure speculation, but so are all other attempts to explain the origin of the text that has come down to us. We shall never be able to answer the questions it raises with any certainty and must rest content with the fact that a great poet marshaled the resources of an age-old traditional art to create something new —the tales of the wrath of Achilles and the wanderings of Odysseus that have been models for epic poetry ever since.
THE ODYSSEY AND THE ILIAD
It has always been assumed that the Odyssey was composed later than the Iliad. One ancient critic, the author of the treatise On the Sublime, thought that the Odyssey was the product of Homer’s old age, of “a mind in decline; it was a work that could be compared to the setting sun —the size remained, without the force.” He did, however, temper the harshness of that judgment by adding: “I am speaking of old age —but it is the old age of Homer.” What prompted his comment “without the force” is clearly his preference for the sustained heroic level of the Iliad over what he terms the Odyssey’s presentation of “the fabulous and incredible” as well as the realistic description of life in the farms and palace of Odysseus’ domain, which, he says, “forms a kind of comedy of manners.” His judgment is of course determined by the conception of the “sublime” which is the focus of his book, one that did not welcome scenes like those offered by Book 18 of the Odyssey —a fistfight between two ragged beggars, for example, or the award of a sizzling-hot goat’s-blood sausage full of fat to the winner.
The Odyssey(Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) Page 3