HOMERIC QUESTIONS AND SOME MODERN ANSWERS
There exists a Homeric “question” (more accurately questions) because no reliable information about a historical Homer exists. It is not known who composed the Iliad or Odyssey, when, where, for what audience, and how.
Guesses abound. For many readers in antiquity, Homer was a revered, albeit shadowy, figure whose works included not only the two major epics about Troy and its aftermath, but also a picaresque tale (Margites—a few scraps of which survive), shorter heroic poems concerning Troy and Thebes, a mock epic called Batrachomyomachia (“Battle of the Frogs and Mice”), brief epigrams, longer hymns to the gods, prayers, and curses. A handful of Lives of Homer, probably dating to the second century AD (but embedding earlier materials) attempted to fill in the missing details. According to these amusing compilations of folktale and legend, Homer was the illegitimate son of a woman from Aeolis, the Greek-speaking region of Asia Minor near Troy. After journeys as far as Ithaca (during which he loses his sight), Homer returns to Ionia, the region of the central coast of what is now western Turkey, and wanders from city to city, performing in civic centers and cobblers’ shops, bargaining with his hosts for food and employment, several times even trading his precious poems, before setting out for Athens but on his way expiring on the island of Ios.
The Lives are obviously aimed at explaining the dialect mix of Homeric poetry (Aeolic and Ionic), finding “real” models for characters in the poems, and giving a nod to local lore. Seven main contenders vied for the honor of being his birthplace, their names (with suspect neatness) fitting a hexameter verse: “Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, Salamis, Rhodos, Argos, Athenai.” As for his dates, ancient opinion ranged from a century after the Trojan War itself (according to Eratosthenes) to around 1000 BC (the Homeric critic Aristarchus) through a rather hazy period around 850 BC (Thucydides and Herodotus) all the way down to the seventh century: the historian Theopompus thought Homer was contemporary with the lyric poet Archilochus, flourishing around 650 BC. The last-mentioned deserves attention since Theopompus, coming from Chios, might have had privileged sources. Chios looms above the other proposed birth spots for several reasons. At least two poets from the archaic period apparently refer to Homer as the “man from Chios” (Simonides, and the author of the Hymn to Apollo, who identifies himself as the “blind man” from that rocky isle). And the Homeridai (“descendants of Homer”), a widely known guild of “rhapsodes,” or traveling performers of Homeric poetry, made the island their base. Furthermore, a sense of the past ran deep on Chios: an inscription from the fifth century BC, honoring the Chian official Heropythos, tallies his ancestors going back fourteen generations.
A small group of critics named “Separators” (Khôrizontes) thought Homer had written only the Iliad, while the Odyssey was another man’s work. But most readers in antiquity, including professional scholars, were satisfied with whatever patchy or fantastic information they possessed concerning the author. Not even the most hardened cynic doubted that Homer the master poet once existed. Then again, we should remember, the Greeks with unerring instinct managed to find a single master figure, person or god, for every one of their cultural achievements, ranging from meat sacrifice to the horse bit. If Homeric poetry existed, that must mean there had been a Homer.
The rational approaches of the Enlightenment (including the new “scientific” study of sacred texts) and burgeoning Romantic notions about “primitive” poetry led in the eighteenth century to a crisis of belief in the productions of an individual genius named Homer. The new skepticism about whether one person had composed the epics as we have them relied on bits of ancient evidence. The Hellenistic Jewish historian Josephus (circa 37–100 AD), seeking to show how recently Greek literature had arisen compared to Hebrew, asserted that Homer was illiterate and his works were preserved as songs and put together much later (Against Apion 1.12). A few other ancient sources reported that this assembling of the Iliad and Odyssey happened during the rule of Peisistratos and his sons in Athens (560–510 BC), when rhapsodic contests in Homeric recitation were established at the great Panathenaic games, and rules were put in place to ensure the correct sequence of episodes (apparently so no one rhapsode could get a competitive edge by grabbing the most gripping parts first).
Aware of such anecdotes, several scholars even in the Renaissance denigrated the style and overall design of the epics, noting their roughness and repetitiveness as compared with the elegant Latin epic of Virgil (considered the apogee of poetic style at the time). Later, the Abbé d’Aubignac (1604–1676), tutor of Richelieu’s nephew, held Homer to the standard of French classicism and found him sadly lacking in politeness and good taste. His Conjectures académiques ou Dissertation sur l’Iliade (written in the 1660s, but not published until 1715) took the side of the moderns in what would soon become a “quarrel” with the tyranny of ancient literature. “Homer” had never existed; the poetry attributed to him represented simply a disorderly mass of separate compositions compiled sometime in the fourth century BC.
On the other side of the Channel, the depiction of humble things, and plain speaking, were virtues of Homer, as imagined by the Scottish scholar Thomas Blackwell (1701–1757). His book, An Inquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (1735), sought to elevate the poor poet of Asia Minor above all who had written afterward. Blackwell treated Homer as a largely improvising singer, called him “bard,” and noted his resemblance to the medieval Provençal troubadours, as a wandering minstrel with a good knowledge of men, lands, and manners. Such a view is understandable, coming in the same decades that saw a renewed appreciation of Chaucer’s importance and Thomas Percy’s recovery of fifteenth-century English verses (Reliques of Ancient Poetry, 1765). Blackwell also paved the way for readier appreciation of James Macpherson’s hugely influential Fingal (1761) and Temora (1763), alleged translations of ancient Gaelic heroic ballads attributed to “Ossian” that he claimed (falsely) to have collected in the Highlands. To make the Classical analogy clearer, Macpherson himself translated the Iliad (1773) into a rhythmic prose even more primitive than the epic songs of his fictional ancient Scot.
Thus destabilized by both modernists and primitivists, the image of a magisterial literate poet Homer was toppled by two publications of the century’s end. In 1788, J. B. C. d’Ansse de Villoison published the earliest full manuscript of the Iliad, Venetus Marcianus Graecus 454.6 This precious codex preserved a great mass of marginal commentary compiled from ancient monographs on Homer. For the first time, scholars could see that thousands of lines from the texts that had been accepted as Homeric had as early as the third century BC been called into question by one or another learned critic—Zenodotus, Aristophanes of Byzantium, and the greatest of all, Aristarchus. They were either not in the right linguistic form, not in the right place in the poem, or not appropriate in tone or style for the august Homer. Then, in 1795, Prolegomena AD Homerum, a small book by the brilliant German classicist Friedrich August Wolf (1759–1824) drew logical conclusions from the newly available notes: an illiterate Homer may have composed heroic songs at an early period that were then passed down orally for generations, but the additions and distortions of countless rhapsodes and editors meant that he probably wasn’t the person who left us the Iliad and Odyssey in the form we have them.
Wolf’s careful study started a deconstructive craze that consumed the energy of a century of Homerists. Scores of scholars spent careers sorting out “real” from false Homer, authentic verses from interpolations, padded episodes from the kernel elements of the epics (sometimes reckoned at just a few thousand lines). Finding Homer became so difficult that it was much easier to invent your own, as J. V. Cunningham summarized the resulting effusion:7
Homer was poor. His scholars live at ease
Making as many Homers as you please.
And every Homer furnishes a book.
Though guests be parasitic on the cook
The moral is: It is the guest who dines.
I�
��ll write a book to prove I wrote these lines.
By the early twentieth century, the French Homerist Victor Bérard (known as one of James Joyce’s main informants about the Odyssey) could characterize the “Homeric question” in religious terms. Describing the state of scholarship after a century of destructive Analyst criticism, Bérard said: “In 1890 the infallible church of the critics demanded that each catechumen renounce Homer, his existence and his works, the fraternity of the two poems and the unity of each one.” By contrast, noted Bérard, at the time of his own writing, after another aesthetic revolution, the “Unitarians” were in the ascendant. Homer had been resuscitated; it was he who had composed both Iliad and Odyssey according to rules of art, with their admirable style. It could be that very little in the poems was originally his, but without him we would not have the poems. Faith and love, says Bérard, are apparently the only ways that can lead us back to Him.8
Bérard published these words in 1924. The same year, a twenty-two-year-old Californian, Milman Parry, fresh out of Berkeley, arrived in Paris with his wife and small child to work with Victor Bérard on a doctorate focused on Homeric style. With the completion of Parry’s dissertation four years later, the real revolution in Homeric studies began.
Parry was interested in the style of Homer, on which he had completed a master’s thesis. He approached this the way one investigates the style of Jane Austen or John Milton—as a phenomenon with consistent tendencies and conventions, idiosyncrasies and predictabilities. Parry found precisely these things, but also discovered that Homer’s could not be a style invented or developed by any one poet. By 1924, several philologists had already demonstrated that Homeric Greek contains a mixture of dialect forms, innovations, and archaisms governed by metrical convenience. That is why, for example, there exist five different forms for “of me” (the genitive of the personal pronoun ego) in Homeric diction, each with a different metrical shape. They are useful depending on what the poet needed to fit into the dactylic hexameter verse at a given point (something like the way nineteenth-century poets use English o’er and e’er versus the two-syllable over and ever). Duplicates in meaning existed only when their metrics were distinct. Parry found the same “economy” at work when he meticulously investigated the well-known system of adjectives applied to the important personages of the poems. “Achilleus of the swift feet” and “crafty” or “brilliant” Odysseus are at other lines described in the poetry as “shining Achilleus” or “Odysseus of many designs.” When this happens, there is no perceptible shift in the narrative’s emphasis, but the phrases involved match a different metrical shape (podas ôkus Akhilleus, for example, is two syllables longer than dios Akhilleus). Parry proved that for each and every major heroic and divine figure in Homer there existed one (and almost always only one) epithet per grammatical case. Therefore, Homeric poetry represents a multigenerational art form: no one poet would have devised a system so large, tight, and pervasive. It was most likely created for the rapid composition of verse and passed down as part of a popular art form, from older to younger poets. In a word, it was traditional, not individual.
It was only in a second phase of his research that Parry and his collaborator Albert Lord found through fieldwork in the former Yugoslavia, in the early 1930s, that similar extensive and convenient phraseological systems were employed by demonstrably illiterate performers of traditional heroic poetry. Lord, after the tragic early death of Parry in 1935, continued to visit the Balkans, eventually publishing the landmark presentation of their work in The Singer of Tales (1960). That volume makes the first sustained case for the proposition that Homeric poetry was indeed oral poetry, that is to say that it was the product of “composition-in-performance”—the poet putting together the epic on the fly each time it was sung to an audience, from a well-stocked storehouse of traditional words and narrative templates.
Since the first edition of Lord’s study, more than five thousand books and articles relating to oral-traditional poetics in at least ninety languages, from the Native American West to the White Mountains of Crete to rural Japan, have emerged. From the behavior of the Homeric simile to the poetics of speeches and embedded genres such as lament and proverb, from associations with myth and hero cult to studies of type-scenes and cognitive scripts, the investigations prompted by Parry and Lord’s groundbreaking work have clarified more of Homeric epic than any other scholarly advance since antiquity. What answers has this body of work provided to the Homeric question? Many aspects of it are now no longer either/or dilemmas. In a long and multiplex oral tradition, we can no longer expect to pinpoint the inventor of any given phrase, scene, or plot—and yet it is not only possible but in many places expected for individual poets to repurpose, reinvent, and add constantly to the tradition. Social contexts and competition are also crucial. As Minna Skafte Jensen has put it, compositions of the scale and beauty of our epics “must have sprung from an environment where many Homers were singing and where other long beautiful poems were produced besides the Iliad and the Odyssey.”9
Despite such awareness, however, there is still some resistance to the notion that the tradition of the Homeric poems was, until quite late, open-ended, constantly subject to recomposition depending on performance contexts. Eight decades of oralist work have not managed to dislodge one major objection to the evidence that would closely connect the Iliad and Odyssey to the dynamics of oral tradition. This objection holds that the Homeric poems are different from other works with which they have been compared, because they are better; and they are better because they were the singular masterwork of a master poet—Homer—who may have employed the conventions of oral tradition but transcended them in making monumentally big epics. Proponents of a “big bang” theory of Homeric textualization believe that a one-time event, either the activity of an oral poet who learned to write, or a compressed series of dictations, produced the epics. The motive and opportunity for such an event are still difficult to imagine.10
By contrast, a multiple-event model seems more realistic. Gregory Nagy’s present-day approach to the development of the Homeric epics offers the most plausible one. Nagy’s theory, as formulated in the 1996 book Homeric Questions and expanded in Homer the Classic (2009), posits five stages in an evolutionary development from earliest beginnings near the time of the Trojan War: a fluid stage lasting from the second millennium through the mid-eighth century, in which there are a large variety of heroic poems and no written texts; a Panhellenic stage from mid-eighth century to mid-sixth century BC, during which time, with no written texts, a crystallization process has set in concerning what is accepted as Homeric by communities throughout the Greek world. The spread of rhapsodes out of the Greek east and the rise of regional festivals probably assisted this. After the hinge Peisistratean period (mid to late sixth century), there comes a definitive period centered on Athens, with potential texts arising from transcripts that aided rhapsodes and judges in what had become the major Homer-centered event, the Panathenaic contests. From an eventually established Athenian text, successive standardizations in the late fourth century at Athens and at Alexandria in the third and second centuries took place, with the continuing influence of rhapsodes, still performing their sometimes idiosyncratic versions, in evidence. Nagy’s views of the longue durée of Homeric poetry never deny the possibility that one or more “genius” composers could have shaped the tradition at some point. But the individual genius is not required. Put another way, the genius of Homeric poetry is the powerful and flexible imaginative conception that keeps renewing itself through generations of performers and audiences.
THE STYLE OF THE ILIAD
The generations now alive may be in the optimal position to appreciate the style of the Iliad. Those familiar with the Westerns of John Ford, the samurai sagas of Akira Kurosawa, or American battle films from Apocalypse Now to The Hurt Locker understand how a sweeping scope and close-up cinematic realism can memorably portray the stories of individual soldiers. That is to say, Ho
meric epic already has developed the major tropes and techniques of the modern war movie. Thinking of the Iliad in visual terms, as the original blockbuster, can bring us closer to its greatness as verbal art.
First, its size must be taken into account. Experimental readings have shown that a full performance of the poem would take twenty-four hours. (The closest film equivalent might be Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz of 1983, running fifteen hours.) Plausible break points occur at the ends of book 8 and book 16, giving the whole composition a neat triadic structure of the type that every contemporary scriptwriter’s manual recommends. Perhaps it was sung or recited in the course of three-day festivals, known from the archaic period onward. The most immediate consequence of the Iliad’s monumental proportions is its characteristic fullness, the sense that a world of experience has been packed into its 15,693 lines. And this, in turn, is achieved through several identifiable stylistic strategies. That the invention of a large epic automatically entailed such techniques cannot be proven, since smaller heroic poems from the period do not survive. That the Homeric poems are distinctive, however, was already seen in the fourth century BC by Aristotle (who had many shorter Cyclic epics for comparison). In the Poetics, his analysis of literary history and theory, he noted that Homer “takes only one portion of the story and makes use of many episodes, such as the Catalogue of Ships and others by means of which he diversifies his poetry. But the others make their poems about one person, one time, one action having many parts, as the composer of the Kupria and the Little Iliad did” (1459a35–1459b5). Homeric epic was unified but did not attempt to tell all, while the Cyclic epics comprised strung-together events, attempting a much longer expanse.
The Iliad of Homer Page 6