by Homer
While such repetitions—of formulaic phrases, scenes, and themes—are characteristic of oral poetry (although not characteristic of only oral poetry), it is evident that these traditional features still afforded a gifted poet great latitude. Presumably the themes sketched above, of abduction and wrath, could have been exploited more fully had the poet so chosen. The typical scenes of arming, as the reader will see, display staggering variety, with each scene adapted to characterize a particular warrior: In the case of the arming of Agamemnon, Homer has dramatically adapted the arming template so as to mirror the power, prestige and materialism of Agamemnon, and in so doing stretched the template almost beyond its recognizable limits. And while many formulaic phrases are indeed only functional, a number have been exploited to great dramatic purpose. When, in Book 6, for example, Hector removes his helmet because its fierce crest terrifies his infant son, we can be sure that the poet was playing off Hector’s most famous epithet—“Hector of the shimmering helm,” which elsewhere is a symbol of his fierceness. When, in Book 22, Hector flees for his life as Achilles chases him around the walls of Ilion, the fact that his pursuer is “swift-footed Achilles” adds an element of horror to the scene.
We have no way of knowing whether such exploitation of traditional elements, or a bravura adaptation such as the scene of Agamemnon’s arming, are authentically traditional, meaning part of a living oral process, or innovations occurring at the end of a long tradition. The Iliad, one must bear in mind, is not only informed by a long tradition, it is the last iteration of that long tradition. There is no other Iliad after the Iliad. Did centuries of tradition simply end because the performance of the last poet, Homer, was so exceptional as to deter all other competing bards and versions? Or had the tradition, as an oral process, already ended, allowing an individual poet—Homer—to address the inherited material with untraditional liberty?
Central to the question as to how the Homeric epics achieved their final form is the role that may have been played by the rediscovered art of writing. It is a very striking coincidence that a long epic poem comprising 15,693 lines of verse should happen to have been unveiled to the world precisely around the time that writing was rediscovered. Furthermore, the new system of writing was unlike any other of time past. Hitherto, writing systems had been encoded in hieroglyphs, cuneiform, the ideograms of Mycenaean Linear B—systems devised for an inner circle of professional scribes, but wholly unpronounceable to the uninitiated. The new Greek system, however, based upon the so-called Phoenician, or West Semitic, script, was a true alphabet; it was designed to capture the sounds of words as they were spoken. Menin aeide thea—anyone knowing the sound of each letter of the Greek alphabet can roughly make out the first three words of the Iliad, even with no knowledge of what the words mean. In theory, then, an epic poem that had for centuries flowed forth only by means of the spoken word could now be written as it was spoken.45
The Homeric poems themselves contain a single, enigmatic reference to writing: In the Iliad Book 6, the story is told of a wicked king who sent the hero Bellerophon to Lycia “and gave him baneful signs, / scratching on a folded tablet many destructive things.”46 Does this reference reflect an oral poet’s genuine and total ignorance of any form of writing? Is it a knowing reference to an artifact—in this case, some stray shard of Linear B scratching—belonging, like types of armor and palatial ruins, to the distant, dimly remembered past? Or could it be a witty reference to the re-emergence of writing in the poet’s own time, after the Dark Age had ended?
That the earliest known examples of phonetic Greek should date from the time of Homer, be written in hexameter verse, and in one case make reference to Homer has struck many scholars as more than coincidence. Might it not be the case, they argue, that the Greek alphabet was devised precisely in order to capture the sounds of the spoken words of hexameter poetry? If so, two possible theories emerge in response to the Homeric Question: That an individual poet, Homer, wrote his poems; or that as he sang or recited them, they were written down in dictation by someone adept in the new alphabetic art. History offers several examples of the latter possibility: a long poem dedicated to the god Baal was written in West Semitic script as dictated to a scribe around 1400 B.C., accompanied by a note naming both the poet-priest and the scribe; and a Hittite birth incantation appears to have been hastily written by a scribe taking dictation.47
My own views are shaped by my experience in the 1980s establishing a small department of classics at the University of Malawi, in southeast Africa. In discussing Homer, my Malawian students and colleagues, who had grown up with genuine, living oral traditions and knew the genre intimately, were emphatic that the Iliad did not “feel” like an oral poem. To their sensibilities, despite the obvious evidence of an oral legacy, Homer was a literary poet. He did not honor oral conventions. In particular, his characters are “round,” which is to say fully formed. The Iliad’s dramatic speeches serve as much to reveal a speaker’s character as to further epic action, for example, while traditional oral poetry, being intensely communal, is not similarly invested in individual characterization. Homer is celebrated by literary people in literary cultures, my associates maintained, because his compositions meet literary expectations.
The attention lavished on the question of whether the Homeric poems owe their final form to oral or to literary composition has focused excessively on mechanics, on the physical act of recitation versus that of writing. The more interesting question is not whether a traditional poem was ultimately recorded by the spoken or the written word, but rather in what relationship the final poet stood to his tradition. Did Homer see himself as simply one poet in a long line of traditional poets, improvising and transmitting the tradition he had inherited, more or less as it had always been done? Or did he see himself as standing in a different relationship to the traditional material than the poets before him? Regardless of whether he sang, dictated, or wrote—did he see himself as doing something with the traditional material that had never been done before? This, it seems to me, is the fundamental Homeric Question.
The duel between Menelaos and Paris, the description of which began this introductory overview, ends inconclusively. Its stated purpose was to allow the chief protagonists to decide the issue of the Trojan War. Achaeans and Trojans alike are united, “hoping to make an end of the sorrowful war.” But the immortal gods, who direct all human action, decree otherwise. Despite the fears of his Achaean comrades, Menelaos gets the upper hand, only to have Paris whisked to safety by Aphrodite, the goddess of love and his adoring protector. High on Olympus, Zeus turns to the assembled deities who have been intently watching the human activity below: “Yet let us consider how this matter will be,” he declares;
“whether, then, we again rouse evil war and dread battle,
or cast friendship between the two sides.
And if somehow this plan should be desirable and pleasing to all,
then the city of lord Priam may still remain a place of habitation.”
Although Zeus himself tends toward a peaceful conclusion, his strong-willed wife, Hera, passionately objects. Zeus surrenders the argument, and so peace is averted and the war rolls on:
for many Trojans and Achaeans on that day
lay sprawled face down in the dust beside one another.48
Even when no one desires it, war still happens, whether by the will of the gods or the nature of man. If we were to take any random hundred-year period within the last five thousand years, it has been calculated, we would find on average ninety-four of that hundred to have been occupied with large-scale conflicts in one or more regions of the globe.49 The result of at least three thousand years of storytelling, the Iliad is still with us because it has resonated powerfully with every passing age. Majestic similes that conjure the world of nature; magnetic characters defined by stirring and momentous speeches; and a broad and generous humanity that reveals a panorama of human life locked in heroic struggle beneath a mischievous or indifferent
heaven—these are the hallmarks of Homeric poetry. Through such high artistry did this mysterious master poet transform an ancient tale of one obscure campaign into a sublime and sweeping evocation of the devastation of every war, of any time.
NOTES
1.Book 3:111–15; 3.297–302.
2.9.410–15
3.Herodotus, The Histories, 2:116.
4.For a survey of the dates and possible authorship of the poems of the Trojan Epic Cycle, see M. L. West, Greek Epic Fragments (Cambridge, Mass., 2003). For an examination of the Trojan poems (and other lost epics of the cycle covering different mythic themes) and their relation to the poems of Homer, see Jonathan S. Burgess, The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle (Baltimore, 2001).
5.24:25ff.; for the authenticity of these lines, see Nicholas Richardson, The Iliad: A Commentary, Vol. VI: books 21–24 (Cambridge, 1996), sub vv. 23–30, 276ff.
6.3.171–76.
7.18.490–96.
8.3.10–14.
9.19.375–81.
10.While there are numerous specialized studies of the Mycenaean world, the most accessible overview is K. A. Wardle and Diana Wardle, Cities of Legend: The Mycenaean World (London, 1997). Nic Fields, Mycenaean Citadels c. 1330–1200 B.C. (Botley, Oxon., 2004) is a well-illustrated, up-to-date guide to the great Mycenaean sites.
11.For Mycenaean interference in Anatolia, see Trevor Bryce, Life and Society in the Hittite World (Oxford, 2004), 259.
12.9.328–30.
13.A very few objects mentioned appear to date back to the sixteenth century B.C.—well before the conjectured thirteenth-century B.C. date of the Trojan War. Arguing from this, and other evidence, some scholars have suggested that a fourteenth-century B.C. date for the war is more defensible; a counterview is that the story of Troy was drawn into an already established tradition about seaborne raids: See Carol G. Thomas and Craig Conant, The Trojan War (Westport, Conn., 2005) 41ff. and 63ff.
14.The story of the Linear B tablets is excitingly told by John Chadwick, The Decipherment of Linear B (Cambridge, 1990). After Michael Ventris cracked the code, he and Chadwick were largely responsible for making the contents of the Linear B tablets accessible to the world; for the documents themselves, see M. Ventris and J. Chadwick, Documents in Mycenaean Greek, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1973). The different categories of women’s work is described in John Chadwick, “The Women of Pylos,” in Texts, Tablets and Scribes: Studies in Mycenaean Epigraphy and Economy, ed. J. P. Olivier and T. G. Palaima (Salamanca, 1988), 43–96.
15.Manfred Korfmann, “Beşik Tepe: New Evidence for the Period of the Trojan Sixth and Seventh Settlements,” in Troy and the Trojan War, ed. Machteld J. Mellink (Bryn Mawr, Pa., 1986), 17–28.
16.The topography of Troy is described in Manfred Korfmann, “Troy: Topography and Navigation,” in ibid., 1–16. For the likelihood of malaria, and Trojan health in general, see J. Lawrence Angel, “The Physical Identity of the Trojans,” in ibid., 63–76. Skeletal remains for the Trojans of any of its eras are slight—forty-five samples from Troy VI to VIIb, mostly from cremations. An infant-to-child-to-adult death ratio is calculated at 6:2:10, “possibly better than in contemporary Greece” (p. 68).
17.After a lapse of some centuries, later levels were built from the eighth century B.C. on into Roman times.
18.For a guide to Troy, see Nic Fields, Troy c. 1700–1250 B.C. (Botley, Oxon., 2004). The detailed and excellent field reports from the excavation at Troy, under the auspices of the University of Tübingen, and under the direction of Manfred Korfmann until his untimely death, in 2005, have been published since 1991 in the periodical Studia Troica. Michael Wood, In Search of the Trojan War, rev. ed. (London, 2005), 46ff., gives a very good account—and a very readable one—of the history of excavation on the site from Heinrich Schliemann onward. H. Craig Melchert, ed., The Luwians (Leiden, 2003) contains a collection of essays about Luwian culture and history.
19.The size and significance of Troy VI has been the subject of unexpectedly heated debate. For an assessment and succinct overview of the site and its probable population, see D. F. Easton, J. D. Hawkins, A. G. Sherratt, and E. S. Sherratt, “Troy in Recent Perspective,” Anatolian Studies 52 (2002):75–109.
20.For the evidence and date of Troy’s fall, see Manfred Korfmann, “Altes und Neues aus Troia,” Das Altertum 36 (1990):230–40, and especially p. 232.
21.See Trevor R. Bryce, “Ahhiyawans and Mycenaeans—An Anatolian Viewpoint,” Oxford Journal of Archaeology vol. 8, no. 3, (1989):297–310.
22.Confirmation of the Hittite geographical and political landscape was made only relatively recently with the translation of a key monumental and much weathered cliff-face inscription; see J. D. Hawkins, “Karabel, ‘Tarkondemos’ and the Land of Mira: New Evidence on the Hittite Empire Period in Western Anatolia,” Würzburger Jahrbücher für die Altertumswissenshaft 23 (1998):7–14; and J. D. Hawkins, “Tarkasnawa King of Mira: ‘Tarkondemos,’ Boğazköy sealings and Karabel,” Anatolian Studies 48 (1998):1–31.
23.For the full, fragmented text of this letter, see John Garstang and O.R. Gurney, The Geography of the Hittite Empire (London, 1959): 111–14; the referece to Wilusa is at p. 113.
24.Dafna Langgut, Israel Finkelstein, and Thomas Litt, “Climate and the Late Bronze Collapse: New Evidence from the South Levant,” Tel Aviv 40 (2013):149–75.
25.Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, rev ed. trans. Rex Warner (New York, 1972), i.11–12, p. 42.
26.For the end of the Mycenaean world and the Dark Age that followed, see Carol G. Thomas and Craig Conant, Citadel to City-State: The Transformation of Greece, 1200–700 B.C.E. (Bloomington, Ind., 1999); and Robin Osborne, Greece in the Making: 1200–479 B.C. (London, 1996).
27.Helen’s origins are paraphrased from M. L. West, Indo-European Poetry and Myth (Oxford, 2007), 229ff.
28.The percentage of direct speech is given in Jasper Griffin, “Homeric Words and Speakers,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 106 (1986):36–57. Dramatic versus narrative and the dramatic character of Near Eastern literature closely follows G. S. Kirk, The Iliad: A Commentary, Vol. II, books 5–8 (Cambridge, 1990), 28ff.
29.On the Vedic cognates see Gregory Nagy, Comparative Studies in Greek and Indic Meter (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), 229–61; for a succinct overview of the different theories about the origin of the hexameter, see Richard Janko, The Iliad: A Commentary, Vol. IV, books 13–16, (Cambridge, 1992), 9ff.
30.Later Greeks, recounting fragmentary knowledge of their post-Mycenaean history, called these colonists Aeolians, from Aeolis, a son of Hellen, the eponymous clan hero of the Hellenes, or Greeks, and the term is used by historians today. For Mycenaean Thessaly, see Brian Feuer, The Northern Mycenaean Border in Thessaly (Oxford, 1983). V. R. d’A Desborough, The Greek Dark Ages (New York, 1972), 87ff., discusses the Thessalian migration.
31.For a survey of the evidence for early Mycenaean control of Lesbos, see Annette Teffeteller, “Singers of Lazpa: Reconstructing Identities on Bronze Age Lesbos,” in Luwian Identities: Culture, Language and Religion Between Anatolia and the Aegean, ed. Alice Mouton, Ian Rutherford, and Ilya Yakubovich (Leiden, 2013), 567–89. For the numerous associations of Lesbos with the Trojan War tradition, see Emily L. Shields, “Lesbos in the Trojan War,” Classical Journal 13 (1917–1918):670–81.
32.For the evolution of the epic and the Aeolic phase, see M. L. West, “The Rise of the Greek Epic,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 108 (1988):151–72.
33.18.464–67.
34.For Achilles’ complex origins, see Caroline Alexander, The War That Killed Achilles (New York, 2009), 87ff.
35.For the the arrival of the Mycenaeans on Lesbos and their apparent coexistence with the Lesbian population, see Nigel Spencer, “Early Lesbos between East and West: A ‘Grey Area’ of Aegean Archaeology,” Annual of the British School at Athens 90 (1995): 273ff.
36.For Anatolian phraseology in the Iliad, see, for example, Emile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society, tra
ns. Elizabeth Palmer (Coral Gables, Fla., 1973), 371ff., on the Aeolo-Phrygian word for “the people” of the king in Homer; and Jaan Puhvel, “An Anatolian Turn of Phrase in the Iliad,” American Journal of Philology 109 (1988):591–93. For the Troad landscape, see John Victor Luce, Celebrating Homer’s Landscapes: Troy and Ithaca Revisited (New Haven, 1998).
37.A fragment of verse in Luwian, the presumed language of the Trojans, embedded in a thirteenth-century Hittite ritual text, gives a tantalizing hint of just such a story: “ahha-ta-ta alati awienta wilusati . . .” This has been translated as “When they came from steep Wilusa . . .”; “steep” is a common epithet of Ilios in the Iliad, thus suggesting that this may have been a fragment of a Trojan account of the Trojan War. See Calvert Watkins, “The Language of the Trojans,” in Mellink, ed., Troy and the Trojan War, 58ff. This translation has, however, been disputed. Alternate versions range from “When they came from the sea, from Wilusa” to “when they came from the meadow-lands”, the latter suggesting not an epic but a shepherd’s song. For these alternative readings see, respectively, F. Starke, “Troja im Kontext des historisch-politischen und sprachlichen Umfeldes Kleinasiens im 2 Jahrtausend,” Studia Troica 7 (1997):473, n. 78; and G. Neumann, “Wie haben die Troer im 13. Jahrhundert gesprochen?,” Würzburger Jahrbücher für die Altertumswissenschaft, n.f. 23 (1999):20ff., n. 20.
38.The likelihood of Euboea as the place of transference, and similar examples of transferences across languages of other cultures, are described in West, “The Rise of the Greek Epic,” 166ff. Compelling evidence of Euboean diffusion is also given in Thomas and Conant, The Trojan War, 65ff.
39.B. B. Powell, Homer and the Origins of the Greek Alphabet (Cambridge, 1991), 49. The Homeric lines referenced are 11.632–37.