Homeric Question
Encyclopedia
The Homeric Question concerns the doubts and consequent debate over the identity of Homer
, the authorship of the Iliad
and Odyssey
, and historicity, especially of the Iliad
. The subject has its roots in classical antiquity
and the scholarship
of the Hellenistic period
, but has flourished among Homeric scholars
of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The main subtopics of the Homeric Question are:
To these questions the possibilities of modern textual criticism
and archaeological answers have added a few more:
, most Classicists agree that, whether or not there was ever such a composer as Homer, the poems attributed to him are to some degree dependent on oral tradition, a generations-old technique that was the collective inheritance of many singer-poets (or ἀῳδοί (aoidoi)
). An analysis of the structure and vocabulary of the Iliad and Odyssey shows that the poems contain many regular and repeated phrases; indeed, even entire verses are repeated. Could the Iliad and Odyssey have been products of Oral-Formulaic Composition
, composed on the spot by the poet using a collection of memorised traditional verses and phases? Milman Parry
and Albert Lord
have pointed out that such elaborate oral tradition, foreign to today's literate cultures, is typical of epic poetry
in an exclusively oral culture
. The crucial words here are "oral" and "traditional". Parry starts with the former: the repetitive chunks of language, he says, were inherited by the singer-poet from his predecessors, and were useful to him in composition. Parry calls these chunks of repetitive language "formulas".
Many scholars agree that the Iliad and Odyssey underwent a process of standardisation and refinement out of older material, beginning in the 8th century BC. This process, often referred to as the "million little pieces" design, seems to acknowledge the spirit of oral tradition. As Albert Lord
notes in his magnum opus, The Singer of Tales
, poets within an oral tradition, as was Homer, tend to create and modify their tales as they perform them. Although this suggests that Homer may simply have "borrowed" from other bards, he almost certainly made the piece his own when he performed it.
The 1960
publication of Lord's book, which focused on the problems and questions that arise in conjunction with applying oral-formulaic theory to problematic texts such as the Iliad, the Odyssey and even Beowulf
influenced nearly all subsequent work on Homer and oral-formulaic composition. In response to his landmark effort, Geoffrey Kirk
published a book entitled The Songs of Homer, in which he questions Lord's extension of the oral-formulaic nature of Serbian literature
(the area from which the theory was first developed) to Homeric epic. He holds that Homeric poems differ from those traditions in their "metrical strictness", "formular system[s]" and creativity
. Kirk argued that Homeric poems were recited under a system that gave the reciter much more freedom to choose words and passages to achieve the same end than the Serbian poet, who was merely "reproductive".
Shortly afterwards, Eric A. Havelock
's book Preface to Plato revolutionised how scholars looked at Homeric epic by arguing not only that it was the product of an oral tradition but that the oral-formulas contained therein served as a way for ancient Greeks to preserve cultural knowledge across many different generations. In his 1966
work Have we Homer's Iliad?, Adam Parry theorised the existence of the most fully developed oral poet up to his time, a person who could (at his discretion) creatively and intellectually form nuanced characters in the context of the accepted, traditional story; in fact, Parry altogether discounted the Serbian tradition to an "unfortunate" extent, choosing to elevate the Greek model of oral-tradition above all others. Lord reacted to Kirk and Parry's respective contentions with Homer as Oral Poet, published in 1968
, which reaffirmed his belief in the relevance of Serbian epic poetry and its similarities to Homer, and downplayed the intellectual and literary role of the reciters of Homeric epic.
In further support of the theory that Homer is really the name of a series of oral-formulas, or equivalent to "the Bard" as applied to Shakespeare, the Greek name Homēros is etymologically noteworthy. It is identical to the Greek word for "hostage". It has been hypothesised that his name was back-extracted from the name of a society of poets called the Homeridae
, which literally means "sons of hostages", i.e., descendants of prisoners of war. As these men were not sent to war because their loyalty on the battlefield was suspect, they would not be killed in conflicts, so they were entrusted with remembering the area's stock of epic poetry, to remember past events, from the time before literacy came to the area.
In a similar vein, the word "Homer" may simply be a carryover from the Mediterranean seafarers' vocabulary adoption of the Semitic word base ’MR, which means "say" or "tell". "Homer" may simply be the Mediterranean version of "saga". It has also been suggested by Pseudo-Plutarch
that the name comes from a word meaning "to follow" and another meaning "blind". Other sources connect Homer's name with Smyrna
for several different etymological reasons.
first committed the poems of Homer to writing and placed them in the order in which we now read them. More radical Homerists, such as Gregory Nagy
, contend that a canonical text of the Homeric poems did not exist until established by Alexandria
n editors in the Hellenistic period (3rd to 1st century BC).
The modern debate began with the Prolegomena of Friedrich August Wolf
(1795). According to Wolf, the date of writing is among the first questions in the textual criticism
of Homer. Having satisfied himself that writing was unknown to Homer, Wolf considers the real mode of transmission, which he purports to find in the Rhapsodists, of whom the Homeridae were an hereditary school. Wolf reached the conclusion that the Iliad and Odyssey could not have been composed in the form in which we know them without the aid of writing. They must therefore have been, as Bentley has said, a sequel of songs and rhapsodies, loose songs not collected together in the form of an epic poem until about 500 years after their original composition. This conclusion Wolf supports by the character attributed to the Cyclic poems (whose want of unity showed that the structure of the Iliad and Odyssey must be the work of a later time), by one or two indications of imperfect connection, and by the doubts of ancient critics as to the authenticity of certain parts.
This view is extended by the complicating factor of the period of time now referred to as the "Greek Dark Ages
". This period, which ranged from approximately 1250 to 750 BC, is estimated to have been immediately preceded by the historical counterpart to Homer's Trojan War
. The composition of the Iliad, on the other hand, is placed immediately following the Greek Dark Age period. The conflict arises over the question of how Homer could have written about events that preceded his own life by several centuries. This question is complicated by the poet's amazingly accurate depiction of a Mycenaean
civilization of which he was not a part, while also containing elements of the Greek culture of his own time.
Further controversy surrounds the difference in composition dates between the Iliad and Odyssey. It seems that the latter was composed at a later date than the former because the works' differing characterisations of the Phoenicians align with differing Greek popular opinion of the Phoenicians between the 8th and 7th centuries BC, when their skills began to hurt Greek commerce. Whereas Homer's description of Achilles
's shield in the Iliad exhibits minutely detailed metalwork that characterised Phoenicial crafts, they are characterised in the Odyssey as "manifold scurvy tricksters".
The first considerable antagonist of the Wolfian school was Gregor Wilhelm Nitzsch
, whose writings cover the years between 1828
and 1862
, and deal with every side of the controversy. In the earlier part of his Metetemata (1830
), Nitzsch took up the question of written or unwritten literature, on which Wolf's entire argument turned, and showed that the art of writing must be anterior to Peisistratus. In the later part of the same series of discussions (1837
), and in his chief work (Die Sagenpoesie der Griechen, 1852
), he investigated the structure of the Homeric poems, and their relation to the other epics of the Trojan cycle.
These epics had in the meantime been made the subject of a work which, for exhaustive learning and delicacy of artistic perception, has few rivals in the history of philology
, the Epic cycle of Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker
. The confusion which previous scholars had made between the ancient post-Homeric poets (such as Arctinus of Miletus
and Lesches
) and the learned mythological writers (like the scriptor cyclicus of Horace
) was first cleared up by Welcker. Wolf had argued that, had the cyclic writers known the Iliad and Odyssey which we possess, they would have imitated the unity of structure which distinguishes these two poems. The aim of Welcker's labours was to show that the Homeric poems had influenced both the form and the substance of epic poetry.
Thus arose a conservative school who admitted more or less freely the absorption of pre-existing lays in the formation of the Iliad and Odyssey, and also the existence of considerable interpolations, but assigned the main work of formation to prehistoric times and the genius of a great poet. Whether the two epics were by the same author remained an open question; the tendency of this group of scholars was towards separation. Regarding the use of writing, too, they were not unanimous. Karl Otfried Müller
, for instance, maintained the view of Wolf on this point, while strenuously combating the inference which Wolf drew from it.
The Prolegomena bore on the title-page the words "Volumen I", but no second volume ever appeared; nor was any attempt made by Wolf himself to compose it or carry his theory further. The first important steps in that direction were taken by Johann Gottfried Jakob Hermann
, chiefly in two dissertations, De interpolationibus Homeri (Leipzig
, 1832
), and De iteratis apud Homerum (Leipzig, 1840
), called forth by the writings of Nitzsch. As the word "interpolation" implies, Hermann did not maintain the hypothesis of a conflation of independent lays. Feeling the difficulty of supposing that all ancient minstrels sang of the wrath of Achilles or the return of Odysseus (leaving out even the capture of Troy itself), he was led to assume that two poems of no great compass, dealing with these two themes, became so famous at an early period as to throw other parts of the Trojan story into the background and were then enlarged by successive generations of rhapsodists. Some parts of the Iliad, moreover, seemed to him to be older than the poem on the wrath of Achilles; and thus, in addition to the Homeric and post-Homeric matter, he distinguished a pre-Homeric element.
The conjectures of Hermann, in which the Wolfian theory found a modified and tentative application, were presently thrown into the shade by the inure trenchant method of Karl Lachmann
, who (in two papers read to the Berlin Academy in 1837 and 1841) sought to show that the Iliad was made up of sixteen independent lays, with various enlargements and interpolations, all finally reduced to order by Peisistratus. The first book, for instance, consists of a lay on the anger of Achilles (1-347), and two continuations, the return of Chryseis
(430-492) and the scenes in Olympus (348-429, 493-611). The second book forms a second lay, but several passages, among them the speech of Odysseus
(278-332), are interpolated. In the third book, the scenes in which Helen and Priam
take part (including the making of the truce) are pronounced to be interpolations; and so on.
Homer
In the Western classical tradition Homer , is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.When he lived is...
, the authorship of the Iliad
Iliad
The Iliad is an epic poem in dactylic hexameters, traditionally attributed to Homer. Set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greek states, it tells of the battles and events during the weeks of a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles...
and Odyssey
Odyssey
The Odyssey is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is, in part, a sequel to the Iliad, the other work ascribed to Homer. The poem is fundamental to the modern Western canon, and is the second—the Iliad being the first—extant work of Western literature...
, and historicity, especially of the Iliad
Historicity of the Iliad
The extent of the historical basis of the Iliad has been a topic of scholarly debate in classical studies since the 19th century.While the Age of Enlightenment had rejected the story of the Trojan War as fable, the discoveries made by Heinrich Schliemann at Hisarlik reopened the question in modern...
. The subject has its roots in classical antiquity
Classical antiquity
Classical antiquity is a broad term for a long period of cultural history centered on the Mediterranean Sea, comprising the interlocking civilizations of ancient Greece and ancient Rome, collectively known as the Greco-Roman world...
and the scholarship
Scholarship
A scholarship is an award of financial aid for a student to further education. Scholarships are awarded on various criteria usually reflecting the values and purposes of the donor or founder of the award.-Types:...
of the Hellenistic period
Hellenistic period
The Hellenistic period or Hellenistic era describes the time which followed the conquests of Alexander the Great. It was so named by the historian J. G. Droysen. During this time, Greek cultural influence and power was at its zenith in Europe and Asia...
, but has flourished among Homeric scholars
Homeric scholarship
Homeric scholarship is the study of Homeric epic, especially the two large surviving epics, the Iliad and Odyssey. It is currently part of the academic discipline of classical studies, but the subject is one of the very oldest topics in all scholarship or science, and goes back to antiquity...
of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The main subtopics of the Homeric Question are:
- "Who is Homer?"
- "Are the epics of multiple or single authorship?"
- "By whom, when, where, and under what circumstances were the poems composed?"
To these questions the possibilities of modern textual criticism
Textual criticism
Textual criticism is a branch of literary criticism that is concerned with the identification and removal of transcription errors in the texts of manuscripts...
and archaeological answers have added a few more:
- "How reliable is the tradition embodied in the Homeric poems?"
- "How old are the oldest elements in Homeric poetry which can be dated with certainty?"
Homer as the manifestation of an oral tradition
Following the seminal work of Milman ParryMilman Parry
Milman Parry was a scholar of epic poetry and the founder of the discipline of oral tradition.-Biography:He was born in 1902 and studied at the University of California, Berkeley and at the Sorbonne . A student of the linguist Antoine Meillet at the Sorbonne, Parry revolutionized Homeric studies...
, most Classicists agree that, whether or not there was ever such a composer as Homer, the poems attributed to him are to some degree dependent on oral tradition, a generations-old technique that was the collective inheritance of many singer-poets (or ἀῳδοί (aoidoi)
Aoidos
The Greek word aoidos or aōidos referred to a classical Greek singer. In modern Homeric scholarship aoidos is used by some as the technical term for a skilled oral epic poet in the tradition to which the Iliad and Odyssey are believed to belong .- Song and poetry in the Iliad and Odyssey :In...
). An analysis of the structure and vocabulary of the Iliad and Odyssey shows that the poems contain many regular and repeated phrases; indeed, even entire verses are repeated. Could the Iliad and Odyssey have been products of Oral-Formulaic Composition
Oral-Formulaic Composition
The theory of oral-formulaic composition originated in the scholarly study of epic poetry, being developed in the second quarter of the twentieth century...
, composed on the spot by the poet using a collection of memorised traditional verses and phases? Milman Parry
Milman Parry
Milman Parry was a scholar of epic poetry and the founder of the discipline of oral tradition.-Biography:He was born in 1902 and studied at the University of California, Berkeley and at the Sorbonne . A student of the linguist Antoine Meillet at the Sorbonne, Parry revolutionized Homeric studies...
and Albert Lord
Albert Lord
Albert Bates Lord was a professor of Slavic and comparative literature at Harvard University who, after the death of Milman Parry, carried on that scholar's research into epic literature.-Personal life:...
have pointed out that such elaborate oral tradition, foreign to today's literate cultures, is typical of epic poetry
Epic poetry
An epic is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation. Oral poetry may qualify as an epic, and Albert Lord and Milman Parry have argued that classical epics were fundamentally an oral poetic form...
in an exclusively oral culture
Orality
Orality is thought and verbal expression in societies where the technologies of literacy are unfamiliar to most of the population. The study of orality is closely allied to the study of oral tradition...
. The crucial words here are "oral" and "traditional". Parry starts with the former: the repetitive chunks of language, he says, were inherited by the singer-poet from his predecessors, and were useful to him in composition. Parry calls these chunks of repetitive language "formulas".
Many scholars agree that the Iliad and Odyssey underwent a process of standardisation and refinement out of older material, beginning in the 8th century BC. This process, often referred to as the "million little pieces" design, seems to acknowledge the spirit of oral tradition. As Albert Lord
Albert Lord
Albert Bates Lord was a professor of Slavic and comparative literature at Harvard University who, after the death of Milman Parry, carried on that scholar's research into epic literature.-Personal life:...
notes in his magnum opus, The Singer of Tales
The Singer of Tales
The Singer of Tales is a book by Albert Lord that discusses the oral tradition as a theory of literary composition and its applications to Homeric and medieval epic. It was published in 1960.-Summary:The book is divided into two parts...
, poets within an oral tradition, as was Homer, tend to create and modify their tales as they perform them. Although this suggests that Homer may simply have "borrowed" from other bards, he almost certainly made the piece his own when he performed it.
The 1960
1960 in literature
The year 1960 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*November 2 – Penguin Books is found not guilty of obscenity in the Lady Chatterley's Lover case in the United Kingdom....
publication of Lord's book, which focused on the problems and questions that arise in conjunction with applying oral-formulaic theory to problematic texts such as the Iliad, the Odyssey and even Beowulf
Beowulf
Beowulf , but modern scholars agree in naming it after the hero whose life is its subject." of an Old English heroic epic poem consisting of 3182 alliterative long lines, set in Scandinavia, commonly cited as one of the most important works of Anglo-Saxon literature.It survives in a single...
influenced nearly all subsequent work on Homer and oral-formulaic composition. In response to his landmark effort, Geoffrey Kirk
Geoffrey Kirk
Geoffrey Stephen Kirk DSC, FBA was a British classical scholar, known for his books on Ancient Greek literature and mythology.-Life:...
published a book entitled The Songs of Homer, in which he questions Lord's extension of the oral-formulaic nature of Serbian literature
Serbian literature
Serbian literature refers to literature written in Serbian and/or in Serbia.The history of Serbian literature begins with theological works from the 10th- and 11th centuries, developing in the 13th century by Saint Sava and his disciples...
(the area from which the theory was first developed) to Homeric epic. He holds that Homeric poems differ from those traditions in their "metrical strictness", "formular system[s]" and creativity
Creativity
Creativity refers to the phenomenon whereby a person creates something new that has some kind of value. What counts as "new" may be in reference to the individual creator, or to the society or domain within which the novelty occurs...
. Kirk argued that Homeric poems were recited under a system that gave the reciter much more freedom to choose words and passages to achieve the same end than the Serbian poet, who was merely "reproductive".
Shortly afterwards, Eric A. Havelock
Eric A. Havelock
Eric Alfred Havelock was a British classicist who spent most of his life in Canada and the United States. He was a professor at the University of Toronto and was active in the Canadian socialist movement during the 1930s. In the 1960s and 1970s, he served as chair of the classics departments at...
's book Preface to Plato revolutionised how scholars looked at Homeric epic by arguing not only that it was the product of an oral tradition but that the oral-formulas contained therein served as a way for ancient Greeks to preserve cultural knowledge across many different generations. In his 1966
1966 in literature
The year 1966 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*February 14 - Dissident writers Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky are sentenced to hard labour for "anti-Soviet activity"....
work Have we Homer's Iliad?, Adam Parry theorised the existence of the most fully developed oral poet up to his time, a person who could (at his discretion) creatively and intellectually form nuanced characters in the context of the accepted, traditional story; in fact, Parry altogether discounted the Serbian tradition to an "unfortunate" extent, choosing to elevate the Greek model of oral-tradition above all others. Lord reacted to Kirk and Parry's respective contentions with Homer as Oral Poet, published in 1968
1968 in literature
The year 1968 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:* Dean R. Koontz's first novel, Star Quest is published....
, which reaffirmed his belief in the relevance of Serbian epic poetry and its similarities to Homer, and downplayed the intellectual and literary role of the reciters of Homeric epic.
In further support of the theory that Homer is really the name of a series of oral-formulas, or equivalent to "the Bard" as applied to Shakespeare, the Greek name Homēros is etymologically noteworthy. It is identical to the Greek word for "hostage". It has been hypothesised that his name was back-extracted from the name of a society of poets called the Homeridae
Homeridae
The Homeridae were a family, clan or professional lineage on the island of Chios claiming descent from the legendary Greek epic poet Homer.The origin of the name seems obvious: in classical Greek the word should mean "children of Homer". An analogous name, Asclepiadae, identified a clan or guild of...
, which literally means "sons of hostages", i.e., descendants of prisoners of war. As these men were not sent to war because their loyalty on the battlefield was suspect, they would not be killed in conflicts, so they were entrusted with remembering the area's stock of epic poetry, to remember past events, from the time before literacy came to the area.
In a similar vein, the word "Homer" may simply be a carryover from the Mediterranean seafarers' vocabulary adoption of the Semitic word base ’MR, which means "say" or "tell". "Homer" may simply be the Mediterranean version of "saga". It has also been suggested by Pseudo-Plutarch
Pseudo-Plutarch
Pseudo-Plutarch is the conventional name given to the unknown authors of a number of pseudepigrapha attributed to Plutarch.Some of these works were included in some editions of Plutarch's Moralia...
that the name comes from a word meaning "to follow" and another meaning "blind". Other sources connect Homer's name with Smyrna
Smyrna
Smyrna was an ancient city located at a central and strategic point on the Aegean coast of Anatolia. Thanks to its advantageous port conditions, its ease of defence and its good inland connections, Smyrna rose to prominence. The ancient city is located at two sites within modern İzmir, Turkey...
for several different etymological reasons.
Homer's time frame
Exactly when these poems would have taken on a fixed written form is subject to debate. The traditional solution is the "transcription hypothesis", wherein a non-literate singer dictates the poem to a literate scribe in the 6th century BC or earlier. The voice of antiquity is unanimous in declaring that PeisistratusPeisistratos (Athens)
Peisistratos was a tyrant of Athens from 546 to 527/8 BC. His legacy lies primarily in his institution of the Panathenaic Festival and the consequent first attempt at producing a definitive version for Homeric epics. Peisistratos' championing of the lower class of Athens, the Hyperakrioi, can be...
first committed the poems of Homer to writing and placed them in the order in which we now read them. More radical Homerists, such as Gregory Nagy
Gregory Nagy
Gregory Nagy , born in Budapest Hungary in 1942, is an American professor of Classics at Harvard University, specializing in Homer and archaic Greek poetry. Nagy is known for extending Milman Parry and Albert Lord's theories about the oral composition-in-performance of the Iliad and Odyssey...
, contend that a canonical text of the Homeric poems did not exist until established by Alexandria
Alexandria
Alexandria is the second-largest city of Egypt, with a population of 4.1 million, extending about along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea in the north central part of the country; it is also the largest city lying directly on the Mediterranean coast. It is Egypt's largest seaport, serving...
n editors in the Hellenistic period (3rd to 1st century BC).
The modern debate began with the Prolegomena of Friedrich August Wolf
Friedrich August Wolf
Friedrich August Wolf was a German philologist and critic.He was born at Hainrode, a village not far from Nordhausen, Germany. His father was the village schoolmaster and organist...
(1795). According to Wolf, the date of writing is among the first questions in the textual criticism
Textual criticism
Textual criticism is a branch of literary criticism that is concerned with the identification and removal of transcription errors in the texts of manuscripts...
of Homer. Having satisfied himself that writing was unknown to Homer, Wolf considers the real mode of transmission, which he purports to find in the Rhapsodists, of whom the Homeridae were an hereditary school. Wolf reached the conclusion that the Iliad and Odyssey could not have been composed in the form in which we know them without the aid of writing. They must therefore have been, as Bentley has said, a sequel of songs and rhapsodies, loose songs not collected together in the form of an epic poem until about 500 years after their original composition. This conclusion Wolf supports by the character attributed to the Cyclic poems (whose want of unity showed that the structure of the Iliad and Odyssey must be the work of a later time), by one or two indications of imperfect connection, and by the doubts of ancient critics as to the authenticity of certain parts.
This view is extended by the complicating factor of the period of time now referred to as the "Greek Dark Ages
Greek Dark Ages
The Greek Dark Age or Ages also known as Geometric or Homeric Age are terms which have regularly been used to refer to the period of Greek history from the presumed Dorian invasion and end of the Mycenaean Palatial civilization around 1200 BC, to the first signs of the Greek city-states in the 9th...
". This period, which ranged from approximately 1250 to 750 BC, is estimated to have been immediately preceded by the historical counterpart to Homer's Trojan War
Trojan War
In Greek mythology, the Trojan War was waged against the city of Troy by the Achaeans after Paris of Troy took Helen from her husband Menelaus, the king of Sparta. The war is among the most important events in Greek mythology and was narrated in many works of Greek literature, including the Iliad...
. The composition of the Iliad, on the other hand, is placed immediately following the Greek Dark Age period. The conflict arises over the question of how Homer could have written about events that preceded his own life by several centuries. This question is complicated by the poet's amazingly accurate depiction of a Mycenaean
Mycenaean Greece
Mycenaean Greece was a cultural period of Bronze Age Greece taking its name from the archaeological site of Mycenae in northeastern Argolis, in the Peloponnese of southern Greece. Athens, Pylos, Thebes, and Tiryns are also important Mycenaean sites...
civilization of which he was not a part, while also containing elements of the Greek culture of his own time.
Further controversy surrounds the difference in composition dates between the Iliad and Odyssey. It seems that the latter was composed at a later date than the former because the works' differing characterisations of the Phoenicians align with differing Greek popular opinion of the Phoenicians between the 8th and 7th centuries BC, when their skills began to hurt Greek commerce. Whereas Homer's description of Achilles
Achilles
In Greek mythology, Achilles was a Greek hero of the Trojan War, the central character and the greatest warrior of Homer's Iliad.Plato named Achilles the handsomest of the heroes assembled against Troy....
's shield in the Iliad exhibits minutely detailed metalwork that characterised Phoenicial crafts, they are characterised in the Odyssey as "manifold scurvy tricksters".
Controversy over Homer's identity
Wolf's speculations were in harmony with the ideas and sentiment of the time, and his historical arguments, especially his long array of testimonies to the work of Peisistratus, were hardly challenged. The effect of Wolf's Prolegomena was so overwhelming, and its determination so decisive, that, although a few protests were made at the time, the true Homeric controversy did not begin until after his death in 1824.The first considerable antagonist of the Wolfian school was Gregor Wilhelm Nitzsch
Gregor Wilhelm Nitzsch
Gregor Wilhelm Nitzsch was a German classical scholar known chiefly for his writings on Homeric epic.Brother of Karl Immanuel Nitzsch, he was born at Wittenberg. In 1827, he was appointed professor of ancient literature at Kiel but, in 1852, was dismissed by the Danish government for his German...
, whose writings cover the years between 1828
1828 in literature
The year 1828 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:* The first volume of John James Audubon's 10-volume The Birds of America is published....
and 1862
1862 in literature
The year 1862 in literature involved some significant new books.-Events:*February - Ambrose Bierce joins the staff of General William Badcock Hazen....
, and deal with every side of the controversy. In the earlier part of his Metetemata (1830
1830 in literature
The year 1830 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*Amos Bronson Alcott marries Abby May.*Edgar Allan Poe takes up an appointment at the United States Military Academy, West Point....
), Nitzsch took up the question of written or unwritten literature, on which Wolf's entire argument turned, and showed that the art of writing must be anterior to Peisistratus. In the later part of the same series of discussions (1837
1837 in literature
The year 1837 in literature involved some significant new books.-Events:* The Little, Brown and Company publishing house opens its doors.* First publication of the The United States Magazine and Democratic Review.-New books:...
), and in his chief work (Die Sagenpoesie der Griechen, 1852
1852 in literature
The year 1852 in literature involved some significant new books.-New books:*Manuel Antônio de Almeida - Memoirs of a Police Sergeant*Wilkie Collins - Basil: A Story of Modern Life...
), he investigated the structure of the Homeric poems, and their relation to the other epics of the Trojan cycle.
These epics had in the meantime been made the subject of a work which, for exhaustive learning and delicacy of artistic perception, has few rivals in the history of philology
Philology
Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin...
, the Epic cycle of Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker
Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker
Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker was a German classical philologist and archaeologist.-Biography:Welcker was born at Grünberg, Hesse-Darmstadt. Having studied classical philology at the University of Giessen, in 1803 he was appointed master in the high school, an office which he combined with that of...
. The confusion which previous scholars had made between the ancient post-Homeric poets (such as Arctinus of Miletus
Arctinus of Miletus
Arctinus of Miletus or Arctinus Milesius was a Greek epic poet whose reputation is purely legendary, as none of his works survive. Traditionally dated between 775 BC and 741 BC, he was said to have been a pupil of Homer. Phaenias of Eresus placed him in the 7th century BC and claimed that he was...
and Lesches
Lesches
Lesches is a semi-legendary early Greek poet and the reputed author of the Little Iliad. According to the usually accepted tradition, he was a native of Pyrrha in Lesbos, and flourished about 660 BC . Proclus refers to him as "Lesches of Mytilene"...
) and the learned mythological writers (like the scriptor cyclicus of Horace
Horace
Quintus Horatius Flaccus , known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus.-Life:...
) was first cleared up by Welcker. Wolf had argued that, had the cyclic writers known the Iliad and Odyssey which we possess, they would have imitated the unity of structure which distinguishes these two poems. The aim of Welcker's labours was to show that the Homeric poems had influenced both the form and the substance of epic poetry.
Thus arose a conservative school who admitted more or less freely the absorption of pre-existing lays in the formation of the Iliad and Odyssey, and also the existence of considerable interpolations, but assigned the main work of formation to prehistoric times and the genius of a great poet. Whether the two epics were by the same author remained an open question; the tendency of this group of scholars was towards separation. Regarding the use of writing, too, they were not unanimous. Karl Otfried Müller
Karl Otfried Müller
Karl Otfried Müller , was a German scholar and Philodorian, or admirer of ancient Sparta, who introduced the modern study of Greek mythology.-Biography:...
, for instance, maintained the view of Wolf on this point, while strenuously combating the inference which Wolf drew from it.
The Prolegomena bore on the title-page the words "Volumen I", but no second volume ever appeared; nor was any attempt made by Wolf himself to compose it or carry his theory further. The first important steps in that direction were taken by Johann Gottfried Jakob Hermann
Johann Gottfried Jakob Hermann
Johann Gottfried Jakob Hermann was a German classical scholar and philologist.-Biography:He was born at Leipzig. Entering its university at the age of fourteen, Hermann at first studied law, which he soon abandoned for the classics...
, chiefly in two dissertations, De interpolationibus Homeri (Leipzig
Leipzig
Leipzig Leipzig has always been a trade city, situated during the time of the Holy Roman Empire at the intersection of the Via Regia and Via Imperii, two important trade routes. At one time, Leipzig was one of the major European centres of learning and culture in fields such as music and publishing...
, 1832
1832 in literature
The year 1832 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:* The Houghton Mifflin publishing house founded in Boston, Massachusetts* Publishers begin the use of a paper jacket to wrap book covers...
), and De iteratis apud Homerum (Leipzig, 1840
1840 in literature
The year 1840 in literature involved some significant new books.-Events:*Novelist Fritz Reuter is freed from the fortress of Dömitz after two years' imprisonment on a charge of high treason....
), called forth by the writings of Nitzsch. As the word "interpolation" implies, Hermann did not maintain the hypothesis of a conflation of independent lays. Feeling the difficulty of supposing that all ancient minstrels sang of the wrath of Achilles or the return of Odysseus (leaving out even the capture of Troy itself), he was led to assume that two poems of no great compass, dealing with these two themes, became so famous at an early period as to throw other parts of the Trojan story into the background and were then enlarged by successive generations of rhapsodists. Some parts of the Iliad, moreover, seemed to him to be older than the poem on the wrath of Achilles; and thus, in addition to the Homeric and post-Homeric matter, he distinguished a pre-Homeric element.
The conjectures of Hermann, in which the Wolfian theory found a modified and tentative application, were presently thrown into the shade by the inure trenchant method of Karl Lachmann
Karl Lachmann
Karl Konrad Friedrich Wilhelm Lachmann was a German philologist and critic.-Biography:He was born in Brunswick, in what is now Lower Saxony....
, who (in two papers read to the Berlin Academy in 1837 and 1841) sought to show that the Iliad was made up of sixteen independent lays, with various enlargements and interpolations, all finally reduced to order by Peisistratus. The first book, for instance, consists of a lay on the anger of Achilles (1-347), and two continuations, the return of Chryseis
Chryseis
In Greek mythology, Chryseis was a Trojan woman, the daughter of Chryses. Chryseis, her apparent name in the Iliad, means simply "Chryses' daughter"; later writers give her real name as Astynome ....
(430-492) and the scenes in Olympus (348-429, 493-611). The second book forms a second lay, but several passages, among them the speech of Odysseus
Odysseus
Odysseus or Ulysses was a legendary Greek king of Ithaca and the hero of Homer's epic poem the Odyssey. Odysseus also plays a key role in Homer's Iliad and other works in the Epic Cycle....
(278-332), are interpolated. In the third book, the scenes in which Helen and Priam
Priam
Priam was the king of Troy during the Trojan War and youngest son of Laomedon. Modern scholars derive his name from the Luwian compound Priimuua, which means "exceptionally courageous".- Marriage and issue :...
take part (including the making of the truce) are pronounced to be interpolations; and so on.