Homeric scholarship
Encyclopedia
Homeric scholarship is the study of Homer
ic 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. Purely in terms of quantity it is one of the largest of all literary sub-disciplines: the annual publication output rivals that on Shakespeare.
For the purpose of the present article, Homeric scholarship is divided into three main phases: antiquity; the 18th and 19th centuries; and the 20th century and later.
Different commentaries survive in many different manuscripts: so, for example, the most important ancient commentary is known as the A scholia. Different branches of scholia replicate material from other branches. The scholia are compilations, and material in them probably ranges from the 5th century BCE (the D scholia) to as late as the 7th or 8th century CE (the very latest bT scholia). Some branches of scholia are known by the initial of their first modern owner or publisher, e.g., the T "Townleian" scholia, which are largely exegetical. The D scholia or scholia minora are explanations of the meanings of obscure words that were once thought to be the work of the 1st century BCE scholar Didymus
; they are now known to go back to 5th and 4th century scholarship.
The A scholia are our most important source. They are found in a 10th century CE manuscript known as Venetus A
(cod. Marc. Gr. 454), so they are also sometimes called the "Venetian scholia". Venetus A contains the best text of the Iliad and the critical marks of the Alexandria
n scholar Aristarchus of Samothrace
, as well as scholia in the margins of the text. The scholia in turn consist mainly of extracts from four scholarly works: that of Didymus
, on Aristarchus' recension of Homer; Aristonicus
(fl.
24 BCE) on Aristarchus' critical marks; Herodian
(fl. 160 CE) on accents; and Nicanor
(fl. 127 CE) on punctuation. Among the A scholia, one series is written in the usual way, on a margin reserved for the purpose; another consists of brief scholia written in very small characters (but of the same period) on the narrow space left vacant round the text. Occasionally a scholion of this kind gives the substance of one of the longer extracts, but as a rule they are distinct. It therefore seems that after the manuscript was finished the marginal scholia were discovered to be extremely defective, and a new series of extracts was added in a form which interfered as little as possible with the appearance of the book. The existence of two groups of the Venetian scholia was first noticed by Jacob La Roche, and they were first distinguished in Dindorf
's edition.
The first philosopher to focus intensively on the intellectual problems surrounding the Homeric epics was Zoilus
of Amphipolis in the early 4th century BCE. His work Homeric Questions does not survive, but it seems that Zoilus enumerated and discussed inconsistencies of plot in Homer. Examples of this are numerous: for example, in Iliad 5.576-9 Menelaus
kills a minor character, Pylaemenes, in combat; but later, at 13.643-59, he is still alive to witness the death of his son. These have been humorously described as points where Homer "nodded off," from which comes the proverbial phrase
"Homeric nod." Aristotle
's Homeric Problems, which does not survive, was probably a response to Zoilus.
Critical editions of Homer discuss three special steps in this process. First is the hypothetical "Peisistratean recension". There is a long-standing, but somewhat old-fashioned, tradition in modern scholarship which holds that in the mid-6th century BCE the Athenian
tyrant
Peisistratus
had the Homeric epics compiled in a definitive edition. It is known that under Peisistratus, and later, rhapsode
s competed in performing Homer at the Panathenaic festival; and a scholion on Iliad 10.1 accuses Peisistratus of inserting book 10 into the Iliad. But there is little evidence for a Peisistratean recension, and most present-day scholars doubt its existence; at the very least it is disputed what is to be understood by the term "recension". The second and third key moments are the critical editions made by the 3rd and 2nd century BCE Alexandria
n scholars Zenodotus of Ephesus and Aristarchus
respectively; both of these scholars also published numerous other works on Homer and other poets, none of which survive. Zenodotus' edition may well have been the first to divide the Iliad and Odyssey into 24 books.
Aristarchus' edition is probably the single most important moment in the whole history of Homeric scholarship. His text was more conservative than Zenodotus', but it became the standard edition of Homer for the ancient world, and almost everything in modern editions of Homer passed through Aristarchus' hands. Like Zenodotus, Aristarchus did not delete passages that he rejected, but (fortunately for us) preserved them with an annotation indicating his rejection. He developed Zenodotus' already sophisticated system of critical symbols to indicate specific kinds of issues with particular lines, and a significant proportion of the terminology is still in use today (obelus
, athetising, etc.). From the scholia a great deal is known about his guiding principles, and those of other editors and commentators such as Zenodotus and Aristophanes of Byzantium
. The chief preoccupations of the Alexandrian scholars may be summarised as follows:
To a modern eye it is evident that these principles should be applied at most on an ad hoc basis. When they are applied across the board the results are frequently bizarre, especially as no account whatsoever is taken of poetic licence. However, it should be remembered that the reasoning seems persuasive when built up gradually, and then it is a very difficult mindset to escape: 19th century Analyst scholars (see below) adopted most of these criteria, and applied them even more stringently than the Alexandrians did.
It is also sometimes difficult to know what exactly the Alexandrians meant when they rejected a passage. The scholia on Odyssey 23.296 tell us that Aristarchus and Aristophanes regarded that line as the end of the epic (even though that is grammatically impossible); but we are also told that Aristarchus separately rejected several passages after that point.
is opposed to Poseidon
because fire is opposed to water.
Allegory is also represented in some surviving ancient monographs: the Homeric Allegories by an otherwise unknown 1st century BCE writer Heraclitus
, the 2nd century CE Plutarch
's On the Life and Poetry of Homer, and the works of the 3rd century CE Neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry
, particularly his On the Cave of the Nymphs in the Odyssey and Homeric Questions. Many extracts from Porphyry are preserved in the scholia, especially the A scholia (although the current standard edition, that of Erbse
, omits them).
Allegorical interpretation continued to be influential on Byzantine
scholars such as Tzetzes
and Eustathius
. But allegorising non-allegorical literature has not been a fashionable activity since the Middle Ages
; it is common to see modern scholars refer to such allegorising in the scholia as "inferior" or even "contemptible". As a result, these texts are now rarely read.
". Homer was first seen as the product of his primitive time by the Scottish scholar Thomas Blackwell, in An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (1735).
Another major development was the enormous growth of linguistic study on Homer and the Homeric dialect. In 1732, Bentley
published his discovery of the traces left in the text of Homer by the digamma
, an archaic Greek consonant that was omitted in later, classical, Greek orthography
. Bentley showed conclusively that the vast majority of metrical anomalies in Homeric verse could be attributed to the presence of digamma (though the idea was not well received at the time: Alexander Pope
, for one, satirised Bentley). Important linguistic studies continued throughout the next two centuries alongside the endless arguments over the Homeric question, and the work by figures such as Buttmann
and Monro
is still worth reading today; and it was the linguistic work of Parry
that set in motion a major paradigm shift in the mid-20th century. Another major 18th century development was Villoison's 1788 publication of the A and B scholia on the Iliad.
The Homeric question is essentially the question of the identity of the poet(s) of the Homeric epics, and the nature of the relationship between "Homer" and the epics. In the 19th century it came to be the fulcrum between two opposed schools of thought, the Analysts and the Unitarians. The issue came about in the context of 18th-century Romantic interest in popular lays and folktale, and the growing recognition that the Homeric epics must have been transmitted orally before being written down, possibly much later than "Homer" himself. The Italian philosopher Vico
argued that the epics were the products not of an individual genius poet but rather the cultural products of an entire people; and Wood
’s 1769 Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer argued emphatically that Homer had been illiterate and the epics had been transmitted orally. (Less fortunately, Wood drew parallels between Homer and the poetry of the supposed Scottish
oral poet Ossian
, published by James Macpherson
in 1765; Ossian turned out later to have been wholly invented by Macpherson.)
The scholar Friedrich August Wolf
brought matters to a head. His review of Villoison's edition of the scholia acknowledged that they proved conclusively the oral transmission of the poems. In 1795, he published his Prolegomena ad Homerum, in which he argued that the poems were composed in the mid-10th century BCE; that they were transmitted orally; that they changed considerably after that time in the hands of bards performing them orally and editors adapting written versions to contemporary tastes; and that the poems' apparent artistic unity came about after their transcription. Wolf posed the perplexing question of what it would mean to restore the poems to their original, pristine, form.
In the wake of Wolf, two schools of thought coalesced to oppose one another: Analysts and Unitarians.
Among Analysts, Hermann's 1832 De interpolationibus Homeri ("On interpolations in Homer") and 1840 De iteratis apud Homerum ("On repetitions in Homer") argued that the epics, as they now stood, were encrustations of second-rate later material around a pristine kernel: a hypothetical "Ur-Iliad". Conversely, Lachmann
's 1847 Betrachtungen über Homers Ilias ("Studies on Homer's Iliad") argued that the Iliad was a compilation of 18 independent folk-lays, rather as the Finnish Kalevala
actually was, compiled in the 1820s and 1830s by Lönnrot
: so, he argued, Iliad book 1 consists of a lay on Achilleus' anger (lines 1-347), and two continuations, the return of Chryseis (430-492) and the scenes in Olympus (348-429, 493-611); book 2 is a separate lay, but containing several interpolations such as Odysseus' speech (278-332); and so on. (Lachmann also tried to apply Analyst principles to the mediaeval German Nibelungenlied
.) Kirchhoff's 1859 edition of the Odyssey argued that the Ur-Odyssey had comprised just books 1, 5-9, and parts of 10-12, that a later phase had added most of books 13-23, and a third phase had added the bits about Telemachos, and book 24.
The climax of Analysis came with Wilamowitz
, who published Homerische Untersuchungen ("Homeric studies") in 1884 and Die Heimkehr des Odysseus ("The homecoming of Odysseus") in 1927. The Odyssey, he argued, was compiled about 650 BCE or later from three separate poems by a Bearbeiter (editor). Subsequent Analysts often referred to the hypothesised Bearbeiter as the "B-poet" (and the original genius, Homer himself, was sometimes the "A-poet"). Wilamowitz' examination of the relationship between these three layers of the Odyssey, further complicated by later, minor, interpolations, is enormously detailed and complex. One of the three poems, the "old Odyssey" (most of books 5-14 and 17-19) had in turn been compiled by a Redaktor from three even earlier poems, two of which had originally been parts of longer poems. Like most other scholars caught up in the opposition between Analysis and Unitarianism, Wilamowitz equated poetry that he thought poor with late interpolations. But Wilamowitz set such a high standard in the sophistication of his analysis that 20th century Analysts seem to have found difficulty in moving forward from where Wilamowitz left off; and over the course of the following decades attention drifted away, particularly in the English-speaking world.
was the earliest scholar to oppose Wolf and argue that the two Homeric epics showed an artistic unity and intention that was the work of a single mind. Nitzsch's writings cover the years 1828 to 1862. In his Meletemata (1830) he took up the question of written versus unwritten literature, on which Wolf's whole argument had turned; and in his 1852 Die Sagenpoesie der Griechen ("The oral poetry of the Greeks") he investigated the structure of the Homeric poems and their relation to other, non-extant, epics which narrated the story of the Trojan War
, the so-called Epic Cycle.
However, most Unitarian scholarship tended to be driven by literary interpretation and was therefore often more ephemeral. Even so, many scholars who examined the archaeology and social history of Homeric Greece did so from a Unitarian perspective, perhaps out of a wish to avoid the complexities of Analysis and Analysts' tendency to re-write each other's work indefinitely. Niese's 1873 Der homerische Schiffskatalog als historische Quelle betrachtet ("The Homeric catalogue of ships studied as a historical source") stands out. Schliemann
, who began excavating Hisarlik
in the 1870s, treated Homer as a historical source from an essentially Unitarian viewpoint.
But artistic merit was the unspoken motivation behind both schools of thought. In both cases, "Homer" must at all costs be hallowed as the great, original, genius; everything good in the epics was to be attributed to him; the Romantic image of the great artist who never makes errors was to be preserved. So Analysts hunted for "errors" (as Zoilus had done), and blamed them on incompetent editors; Unitarians tried to explain errors away, sometimes even claiming they were really the best bits.
In both cases, therefore, there came to be a very strong tendency to equate "good" with "authentic", and "shoddy" with "interpolated". This, too, was a mindset inherited from the Alexandrians.
was done by Analyst scholars such as Reinhold Merkelbach and Denys L. Page (whose 1955 The Homeric Odyssey is a merciless but sometimes hilariously witty polemic against Unitarians). The biggest commentary on the Odyssey, published in the 1980s under the general editorship of Alfred Heubeck, is largely Analyst in tone, especially the commentary on books 21-22 by Manuel Fernández-Galiano. Some monographs from a strongly Analyst perspective continue to come out, primarily from the German-speaking world.
However, the most important new work on Homer done in the 20th century was dominated by two new schools of thought, most frequently referred to as "Oral Theory" (the term is resisted by some Oralists, especially Gregory Nagy
); and "Neoanalysis". Unlike in the 19th century, however, these schools of thought are not opposed to one another; and in the last few decades they have been drawing on each other more and more in very constructive ways.
in the 18th century, and more immediately by Gilbert Murray
. Murray was an Analyst, but his 1907 book The Rise of the Greek Epic contained some of the core ideas of Oralism: particularly the idea that the epics were the end result of a protracted process of evolution, and the idea that an individual poet named Homer had relatively little importance in their history.
The two figures at the head of Oralism are Milman Parry
and his student Albert Lord
, who continued his work after Parry's premature death. Parry was a structuralist
linguist (he studied under Antoine Meillet
, who in turn studied under Saussure
) who set out to compare Homeric epic with a living oral tradition of epic poetry. In the 1930s and 1950s he and Lord recorded thousands of hours of oral performance of epic poetry in the former Yugoslavia
, primarily in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Lord's later work (his 1960 book The Singer of Tales is the most pertinent to Homer) kick-started oral poetics as an entire new sub-discipline in anthropology. For Homeric scholarship the most important results of their work, and that of later Oralists, have been to demonstrate that:
The biggest complete commentary on the Iliad, 1993's six volume The Iliad: A Commentary as edited by G.S. Kirk, is Oralist in its approach and emphasizes issues related to live performance such as rhythm; and the pedagogical commentaries by Peter Jones
are heavily Oralist.
Some Oralists do not go so far as to claim that the Homeric epics actually are products of an oral epic tradition: many limit themselves to claiming that the Homeric epics merely draw on earlier oral epic. For much of the mid-20th century much of the resistance to Oral Theory came from scholars who could not see how to preserve the 19th century Romantic image of Homer as the great original poet: they could not see how there was any room for artistry and creativity in a formulaic system where set-piece episodes (Walter Arend's "type scene
s") were as formulaic as Parry's metrical epithet-noun combinations. Some scholars divided Oralists into "hard Parryists", who believed that all aspects of Homeric epic were predetermined by formulaic systems, and "soft Parryists", who believed that Homer had the system at his command rather than the other way round. More recently, books such as Nagy's influential 1979 book about epic heroes, The Best of the Achaeans, and Egbert Bakker's 1997 linguistic study Poetry as Speech, work on the principle that the radical cross-fertilisation and resonances between different traditions, genres, plot lines, episodes, and type scenes, are actually the driving force behind much of the artistic innovation in Homeric epic.
Where the joke about 19th century Analysts had it that the epics "were not composed by Homer but by someone else of the same name", now the joke is that Oral Theorists claim the epics are poems without an author. Many Oralists would happily agree with this.
is usually regarded as the founding figure of this school of thought, with his 1949 book Homeric Researches, but Wolfgang Kullmann's 1960 Die Quellen der Ilias ("The sources of the Iliad") is even more influential. Neoanalytic topics have become much more prominent in English-language scholarship since 1990, notably in a series of articles by M. L. West in Classical Quarterly and in Jonathan Burgess' 2001 book The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle. The recent upsurge is due in no small part to the publication of three new editions of the fragmentary Greek epics, including a translation by West for the Loeb Classical Library
series.
Probably the most frequently cited and characteristic topic raised in Neoanalysis is the so-called "Memnon theory" outlined by Wolfgang Schadewaldt in a 1951 paper. This is the hypothesis that one major plot-line in the Iliad is based on a similar one in one of the Cyclic epics, the Aithiopis
of Arctinus. The parallels run as follows:
What is debated in the Memnon theory is the implications of these similarities. The most immediate implication is that the poet of the Iliad borrowed material from the Aethiopis. The debatable points are the poet's reasons for doing so; the status and condition of the Aethiopis story when this borrowing took place, that is to say whether it was Arctinus' epic that Homer borrowed from, or something less concrete, like a traditional legend; and the extent to which the Aethiopis and Iliad played off one another in their subsequent development.
Since the 1970s, Homeric interpretation has been increasingly influenced by literary theory
, especially in literary readings of the Odyssey. Post-structuralist
semiotic
approaches have been represented in the work of Pietro Pucci (Odysseus Polytropos, 1987) and Marylin Katz (Penelope's Renown, 1991), for example.
Perhaps the most significant developments have been in narratology
, the study of how storytelling works, since this combines empirical linguistic study with literary criticism. Irene de Jong's 1987 Narrators and Focalizers: The Presentation of the Story in the Iliad draws on the work of the theorist Mieke Bal, and de Jong followed this up in 2001 with her Narratological Commentary on the Odyssey; Bakker has published several linguistic-narratological studies, especially his 1997 Poetry as Speech; and Elizabeth Minchin
's 2001 Homer and the Resources of Memory draws on several forms of narratology and cognitive science, such as the script theory
developed in the 1970s by Roger Schank
and Robert Abelson.
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...
ic epic
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...
, especially the two large surviving epics, 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...
. 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. Purely in terms of quantity it is one of the largest of all literary sub-disciplines: the annual publication output rivals that on Shakespeare.
For the purpose of the present article, Homeric scholarship is divided into three main phases: antiquity; the 18th and 19th centuries; and the 20th century and later.
Scholia
Not many monographs by ancient scholars survive. The most valuable source for our knowledge of ancient scholarship is the scholia on Homer. These are ancient commentaries, usually preserved in the margins of manuscripts of Homer; and they are very copious, far more substantial than for any other ancient work. The Iliad scholia are published in:- ErbseHartmut ErbseHartmut Erbse was a German classical philologist.-Life:The son of a dentist from Thüringen, Erbse studied classical philology in Hamburg, where he was well known for his lively hat-wear and received his doctorate in 1940...
's 1969-1988 edition (seven volumes) -- all except allegorical scholia, including A, B, T, Ge(nevese) scholia, and scholia from recently discovered papyri; and - van Thiel's 2000 edition—D scholia ("scholia minora"), including allegorical scholia and material derived from PorphyryPorphyry (philosopher)Porphyry of Tyre , Porphyrios, AD 234–c. 305) was a Neoplatonic philosopher who was born in Tyre. He edited and published the Enneads, the only collection of the work of his teacher Plotinus. He also wrote many works himself on a wide variety of topics...
Different commentaries survive in many different manuscripts: so, for example, the most important ancient commentary is known as the A scholia. Different branches of scholia replicate material from other branches. The scholia are compilations, and material in them probably ranges from the 5th century BCE (the D scholia) to as late as the 7th or 8th century CE (the very latest bT scholia). Some branches of scholia are known by the initial of their first modern owner or publisher, e.g., the T "Townleian" scholia, which are largely exegetical. The D scholia or scholia minora are explanations of the meanings of obscure words that were once thought to be the work of the 1st century BCE scholar Didymus
Didymus Chalcenterus
Didymus Chalcenterus , ca. 63 BCE to 10 CE, was a Hellenistic Greek scholar and grammarian who flourished in the time of Cicero and Augustus.- Life :...
; they are now known to go back to 5th and 4th century scholarship.
The A scholia are our most important source. They are found in a 10th century CE manuscript known as Venetus A
Venetus A
Venetus A is the more common [or original] name for the tenth century manuscript catalogued in the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice as Codex Marcianus Graecus 454, now 822....
(cod. Marc. Gr. 454), so they are also sometimes called the "Venetian scholia". Venetus A contains the best text of the Iliad and the critical marks of the 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 scholar Aristarchus of Samothrace
Aristarchus of Samothrace
Aristarchus of Samothrace was a grammarian noted as the most influential of all scholars of Homeric poetry. He was the librarian of the library of Alexandria and seems to have succeeded his teacher Aristophanes of Byzantium in that role.He established the most historically important critical...
, as well as scholia in the margins of the text. The scholia in turn consist mainly of extracts from four scholarly works: that of Didymus
Didymus Chalcenterus
Didymus Chalcenterus , ca. 63 BCE to 10 CE, was a Hellenistic Greek scholar and grammarian who flourished in the time of Cicero and Augustus.- Life :...
, on Aristarchus' recension of Homer; Aristonicus
Aristonicus of Alexandria
Aristonicus of Alexandria was a distinguished Greek grammarian who lived during the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius, contemporary with Strabo...
(fl.
Floruit
Floruit , abbreviated fl. , is a Latin verb meaning "flourished", denoting the period of time during which something was active...
24 BCE) on Aristarchus' critical marks; Herodian
Aelius Herodianus
Aelius Herodianus or Herodian was one of the most celebrated grammarians of Greco-Roman antiquity. He is usually known as Herodian except when there is a danger of confusion with the historian also named Herodian....
(fl. 160 CE) on accents; and Nicanor
Nicanor Stigmatias
Nicanor Stigmatias was a celebrated grammarian who lived during the reign of the Roman emperor Hadrian in the early 2nd century....
(fl. 127 CE) on punctuation. Among the A scholia, one series is written in the usual way, on a margin reserved for the purpose; another consists of brief scholia written in very small characters (but of the same period) on the narrow space left vacant round the text. Occasionally a scholion of this kind gives the substance of one of the longer extracts, but as a rule they are distinct. It therefore seems that after the manuscript was finished the marginal scholia were discovered to be extremely defective, and a new series of extracts was added in a form which interfered as little as possible with the appearance of the book. The existence of two groups of the Venetian scholia was first noticed by Jacob La Roche, and they were first distinguished in Dindorf
Karl Wilhelm Dindorf
Karl Wilhelm Dindorf , German classical scholar, was born at Leipzig....
's edition.
Hellenistic scholars and their aims
Many ancient Greek writers discussed topics and problems in the Homeric epics, but the development of scholarship per se revolved around three goals:- Analyzing internal inconsistencies within the epics;
- Producing editions of the epics' authentic text, free of interpolations and errors;
- Interpretation: both explaining archaic words, and exegetical interpretation of the epics as literature.
The first philosopher to focus intensively on the intellectual problems surrounding the Homeric epics was Zoilus
Zoilus
Zoilus or Zoilos was a Greek grammarian, Cynic philosopher, and literary critic from Amphipolis in East Macedonia, then known as Thrace...
of Amphipolis in the early 4th century BCE. His work Homeric Questions does not survive, but it seems that Zoilus enumerated and discussed inconsistencies of plot in Homer. Examples of this are numerous: for example, in Iliad 5.576-9 Menelaus
Menelaus
Menelaus may refer to;*Menelaus, one of the two most known Atrides, a king of Sparta and son of Atreus and Aerope*Menelaus on the Moon, named after Menelaus of Alexandria.*Menelaus , brother of Ptolemy I Soter...
kills a minor character, Pylaemenes, in combat; but later, at 13.643-59, he is still alive to witness the death of his son. These have been humorously described as points where Homer "nodded off," from which comes the proverbial phrase
Proverbial phrase
A proverbial phrase or a proverbial expression is type of a conventional saying similar to proverbs and transmitted by oral tradition. The difference is that a proverb is a fixed expression, while a proverbial phrase permits alterations to fit the grammar of the context.Another similar construction...
"Homeric nod." Aristotle
Aristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...
's Homeric Problems, which does not survive, was probably a response to Zoilus.
Critical editions of Homer discuss three special steps in this process. First is the hypothetical "Peisistratean recension". There is a long-standing, but somewhat old-fashioned, tradition in modern scholarship which holds that in the mid-6th century BCE the Athenian
Athens
Athens , is the capital and largest city of Greece. Athens dominates the Attica region and is one of the world's oldest cities, as its recorded history spans around 3,400 years. Classical Athens was a powerful city-state...
tyrant
Tyrant
A tyrant was originally one who illegally seized and controlled a governmental power in a polis. Tyrants were a group of individuals who took over many Greek poleis during the uprising of the middle classes in the sixth and seventh centuries BC, ousting the aristocratic governments.Plato and...
Peisistratus
Peisistratos (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...
had the Homeric epics compiled in a definitive edition. It is known that under Peisistratus, and later, rhapsode
Rhapsode
A rhapsode or, in modern usage, rhapsodist, refers to a classical Greek professional performer of epic poetry in the fifth and fourth centuries BC . Rhapsodes notably performed the epics of Homer but also the wisdom and catalogue poetry of Hesiod and the satires of Archilochus and others...
s competed in performing Homer at the Panathenaic festival; and a scholion on Iliad 10.1 accuses Peisistratus of inserting book 10 into the Iliad. But there is little evidence for a Peisistratean recension, and most present-day scholars doubt its existence; at the very least it is disputed what is to be understood by the term "recension". The second and third key moments are the critical editions made by the 3rd and 2nd century BCE 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 scholars Zenodotus of Ephesus and Aristarchus
Aristarchus of Samothrace
Aristarchus of Samothrace was a grammarian noted as the most influential of all scholars of Homeric poetry. He was the librarian of the library of Alexandria and seems to have succeeded his teacher Aristophanes of Byzantium in that role.He established the most historically important critical...
respectively; both of these scholars also published numerous other works on Homer and other poets, none of which survive. Zenodotus' edition may well have been the first to divide the Iliad and Odyssey into 24 books.
Aristarchus' edition is probably the single most important moment in the whole history of Homeric scholarship. His text was more conservative than Zenodotus', but it became the standard edition of Homer for the ancient world, and almost everything in modern editions of Homer passed through Aristarchus' hands. Like Zenodotus, Aristarchus did not delete passages that he rejected, but (fortunately for us) preserved them with an annotation indicating his rejection. He developed Zenodotus' already sophisticated system of critical symbols to indicate specific kinds of issues with particular lines, and a significant proportion of the terminology is still in use today (obelus
Obelus
An obelus is a symbol consisting of a short horizontal line with a dot above and below. It is mainly used to represent the mathematical operation of division. It is therefore commonly referred to as the division sign.- History :The word "obelus" comes from the Greek word for a sharpened stick,...
, athetising, etc.). From the scholia a great deal is known about his guiding principles, and those of other editors and commentators such as Zenodotus and Aristophanes of Byzantium
Aristophanes of Byzantium
Aristophanes of Byzantium was a Greek scholar, critic and grammarian, particularly renowned for his work in Homeric scholarship, but also for work on other classical authors such as Pindar and Hesiod. Born in Byzantium about 257 BC, he soon moved to Alexandria and studied under Zenodotus,...
. The chief preoccupations of the Alexandrian scholars may be summarised as follows:
- Consistency of content: the reasoning is that internal inconsistencies imply that the text has been ineptly changed. This principle apparently pursues the work of Zoilus.
- Consistency of style: anything that appears only once in Homer — an unusual poetic image, an unusual word (a hapax legomenonHapax legomenonA hapax legomenon is a word which occurs only once within a context, either in the written record of an entire language, in the works of an author, or just in a single text. The term is sometimes used incorrectly to describe a word that occurs in just one of an author's works, even though it...
), or an unusual epithet (e.g. the epithet "Kyllenian Hermes" in Odyssey 24.1) — tends to be rejected. - No repetitions: if a line or passage is repeated word-for-word, one of the exemplars is often rejected. Zenodotus is known to have applied this principle rigidly, Aristarchus less so; it is in tension with the principle of "consistency of style" above.
- Quality: Homer was regarded as the greatest of poets, so anything perceived to be poor poetry was rejected.
- Logic: something that makes no sense (such as Achilleus nodding at his comrades as he goes running after Hektor) was not regarded as the product of the original artist.
- Morality: PlatoPlatoPlato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
's insistence that a poet should be moral was taken to heart by Alexandrian scholars, and scholia accuse many passages and phrases of being "unsuitable" ( ou prepon); the real Homer, goes the reasoning, being a paragon of perfection, would never have written anything immoral himself. - Explaining Homer from Homer : this motto is Aristarchus', and means simply that it is better to solve a problem in Homer using evidence from within Homer, rather than external evidence.
To a modern eye it is evident that these principles should be applied at most on an ad hoc basis. When they are applied across the board the results are frequently bizarre, especially as no account whatsoever is taken of poetic licence. However, it should be remembered that the reasoning seems persuasive when built up gradually, and then it is a very difficult mindset to escape: 19th century Analyst scholars (see below) adopted most of these criteria, and applied them even more stringently than the Alexandrians did.
It is also sometimes difficult to know what exactly the Alexandrians meant when they rejected a passage. The scholia on Odyssey 23.296 tell us that Aristarchus and Aristophanes regarded that line as the end of the epic (even though that is grammatically impossible); but we are also told that Aristarchus separately rejected several passages after that point.
Allegorical readings
Exegesis is also represented in the scholia. When the scholiasts turn to interpretation they tend to be most interested in explaining background material, e.g., reporting an obscure myth to which Homer alludes; but there was also a fashion for allegory, especially among the Stoics. The most notable passage is a scholion on Iliad 20.67, which gives an extended allegorical interpretation of the battle of the gods, explaining each god as symbolic of various elements and principles in conflict with one another, e.g., ApolloApollo
Apollo is one of the most important and complex of the Olympian deities in Greek and Roman mythology...
is opposed to Poseidon
Poseidon
Poseidon was the god of the sea, and, as "Earth-Shaker," of the earthquakes in Greek mythology. The name of the sea-god Nethuns in Etruscan was adopted in Latin for Neptune in Roman mythology: both were sea gods analogous to Poseidon...
because fire is opposed to water.
Allegory is also represented in some surviving ancient monographs: the Homeric Allegories by an otherwise unknown 1st century BCE writer Heraclitus
Heraclitus (commentator)
Heraclitus was a grammarian and rhetorician who wrote a Greek commentary on Homer which is still extant.Nothing is known about Heraclitus. It is generally accepted that he lived sometime around the 1st century AD...
, the 2nd century CE Plutarch
Plutarch
Plutarch then named, on his becoming a Roman citizen, Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus , c. 46 – 120 AD, was a Greek historian, biographer, essayist, and Middle Platonist known primarily for his Parallel Lives and Moralia...
's On the Life and Poetry of Homer, and the works of the 3rd century CE Neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry
Porphyry (philosopher)
Porphyry of Tyre , Porphyrios, AD 234–c. 305) was a Neoplatonic philosopher who was born in Tyre. He edited and published the Enneads, the only collection of the work of his teacher Plotinus. He also wrote many works himself on a wide variety of topics...
, particularly his On the Cave of the Nymphs in the Odyssey and Homeric Questions. Many extracts from Porphyry are preserved in the scholia, especially the A scholia (although the current standard edition, that of Erbse
Hartmut Erbse
Hartmut Erbse was a German classical philologist.-Life:The son of a dentist from Thüringen, Erbse studied classical philology in Hamburg, where he was well known for his lively hat-wear and received his doctorate in 1940...
, omits them).
Allegorical interpretation continued to be influential on Byzantine
Byzantine Empire
The Byzantine Empire was the Eastern Roman Empire during the periods of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, centred on the capital of Constantinople. Known simply as the Roman Empire or Romania to its inhabitants and neighbours, the Empire was the direct continuation of the Ancient Roman State...
scholars such as Tzetzes
John Tzetzes
John Tzetzes was a Byzantine poet and grammarian, known to have lived at Constantinople during the 12th century.Tzetzes was Georgian on his mother's side...
and Eustathius
Eustathius of Thessalonica
Archbishop Eustathius of Thessalonica was a Greek bishop and scholar. He is most noted for his contemporary account of the sack of Thessalonike by the Normans in 1185, for his orations and for his commentaries on Homer, which incorporate many remarks by much earlier researchers.- Life :After being...
. But allegorising non-allegorical literature has not been a fashionable activity since the Middle Ages
Middle Ages
The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...
; it is common to see modern scholars refer to such allegorising in the scholia as "inferior" or even "contemptible". As a result, these texts are now rarely read.
The 18th and 19th centuries
The 18th century saw major developments in Homeric scholarship, and also saw the opening phase of the discussion which was to dominate the 19th century (and, for some scholars, the 20th): the so-called "Homeric questionHomeric Question
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...
". Homer was first seen as the product of his primitive time by the Scottish scholar Thomas Blackwell, in An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (1735).
Another major development was the enormous growth of linguistic study on Homer and the Homeric dialect. In 1732, Bentley
Richard Bentley
Richard Bentley was an English classical scholar, critic, and theologian. He was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge....
published his discovery of the traces left in the text of Homer by the digamma
Digamma
Digamma is an archaic letter of the Greek alphabet which originally stood for the sound /w/ and later remained in use only as a numeral symbol for the number "6"...
, an archaic Greek consonant that was omitted in later, classical, Greek orthography
Orthography
The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...
. Bentley showed conclusively that the vast majority of metrical anomalies in Homeric verse could be attributed to the presence of digamma (though the idea was not well received at the time: Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope was an 18th-century English poet, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of Homer. He is the third-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson...
, for one, satirised Bentley). Important linguistic studies continued throughout the next two centuries alongside the endless arguments over the Homeric question, and the work by figures such as Buttmann
Philipp Karl Buttmann
Philipp Karl Buttmann , German philologist, was born at Frankfurt am Main.He was educated in his native town and at the university of Göttingen. In 1789 he obtained an appointment in the library at Berlin, and for some years he edited Spener's Journal. In 1796 he became professor at the...
and Monro
David Binning Monro
David Binning Monro was a Scottish Homeric scholar.-Life:David Monro was born in Edinburgh, the grandson of Alexander Monro tertius, professor of anatomy at the University of Edinburgh, whose own father, Alexander Monro secondus , and grandfather, Alexander Monro primus , had both filled the same...
is still worth reading today; and it was the linguistic work of 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...
that set in motion a major paradigm shift in the mid-20th century. Another major 18th century development was Villoison's 1788 publication of the A and B scholia on the Iliad.
The Homeric question is essentially the question of the identity of the poet(s) of the Homeric epics, and the nature of the relationship between "Homer" and the epics. In the 19th century it came to be the fulcrum between two opposed schools of thought, the Analysts and the Unitarians. The issue came about in the context of 18th-century Romantic interest in popular lays and folktale, and the growing recognition that the Homeric epics must have been transmitted orally before being written down, possibly much later than "Homer" himself. The Italian philosopher Vico
Giambattista Vico
Giovanni Battista ' Vico or Vigo was an Italian political philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist....
argued that the epics were the products not of an individual genius poet but rather the cultural products of an entire people; and Wood
Robert Wood
Robert Wood may refer to:*Robert B. Wood , American Civil War sailor and Medal of Honor recipient*Robert Coldwell Wood , American political scientist and academic*Robert E. Wood , Canadian landscape artist...
’s 1769 Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer argued emphatically that Homer had been illiterate and the epics had been transmitted orally. (Less fortunately, Wood drew parallels between Homer and the poetry of the supposed Scottish
Scotland
Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...
oral poet Ossian
Ossian
Ossian is the narrator and supposed author of a cycle of poems which the Scottish poet James Macpherson claimed to have translated from ancient sources in the Scots Gaelic. He is based on Oisín, son of Finn or Fionn mac Cumhaill, anglicised to Finn McCool, a character from Irish mythology...
, published by James Macpherson
James Macpherson
James Macpherson was a Scottish writer, poet, literary collector and politician, known as the "translator" of the Ossian cycle of poems.-Early life:...
in 1765; Ossian turned out later to have been wholly invented by Macpherson.)
The scholar 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...
brought matters to a head. His review of Villoison's edition of the scholia acknowledged that they proved conclusively the oral transmission of the poems. In 1795, he published his Prolegomena ad Homerum, in which he argued that the poems were composed in the mid-10th century BCE; that they were transmitted orally; that they changed considerably after that time in the hands of bards performing them orally and editors adapting written versions to contemporary tastes; and that the poems' apparent artistic unity came about after their transcription. Wolf posed the perplexing question of what it would mean to restore the poems to their original, pristine, form.
In the wake of Wolf, two schools of thought coalesced to oppose one another: Analysts and Unitarians.
Analysts
19th-century Analysts argued that the epics were composed by many hands, a hodge-podge of interpolations and incompetent editing that concealed the original genius of Homer, or at the very least that the Iliad and Odyssey were composed by different poets. In this they followed in the steps of ancient scholars like Zoilos and the so-called "separatists" (χωρίζοντες chōrizontes, the best known of whom, Xenon and Hellanicus, are nonetheless very obscure figures).Among Analysts, Hermann's 1832 De interpolationibus Homeri ("On interpolations in Homer") and 1840 De iteratis apud Homerum ("On repetitions in Homer") argued that the epics, as they now stood, were encrustations of second-rate later material around a pristine kernel: a hypothetical "Ur-Iliad". Conversely, 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....
's 1847 Betrachtungen über Homers Ilias ("Studies on Homer's Iliad") argued that the Iliad was a compilation of 18 independent folk-lays, rather as the Finnish Kalevala
Kalevala
The Kalevala is a 19th century work of epic poetry compiled by Elias Lönnrot from Finnish and Karelian oral folklore and mythology.It is regarded as the national epic of Finland and is one of the most significant works of Finnish literature...
actually was, compiled in the 1820s and 1830s by Lönnrot
Elias Lönnrot
Elias Lönnrot was a Finnish philologist and collector of traditional Finnish oral poetry. He is best known for compiling the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic compiled from national folklore.-Education and early life:...
: so, he argued, Iliad book 1 consists of a lay on Achilleus' anger (lines 1-347), and two continuations, the return of Chryseis (430-492) and the scenes in Olympus (348-429, 493-611); book 2 is a separate lay, but containing several interpolations such as Odysseus' speech (278-332); and so on. (Lachmann also tried to apply Analyst principles to the mediaeval German Nibelungenlied
Nibelungenlied
The Nibelungenlied, translated as The Song of the Nibelungs, is an epic poem in Middle High German. The story tells of dragon-slayer Siegfried at the court of the Burgundians, how he was murdered, and of his wife Kriemhild's revenge....
.) Kirchhoff's 1859 edition of the Odyssey argued that the Ur-Odyssey had comprised just books 1, 5-9, and parts of 10-12, that a later phase had added most of books 13-23, and a third phase had added the bits about Telemachos, and book 24.
The climax of Analysis came with Wilamowitz
Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff
Enno Friedrich Wichard Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff was a German Classical Philologist. Wilamowitz, as he is known in scholarly circles, was a renowned authority on Ancient Greece and its literature.- Youth :...
, who published Homerische Untersuchungen ("Homeric studies") in 1884 and Die Heimkehr des Odysseus ("The homecoming of Odysseus") in 1927. The Odyssey, he argued, was compiled about 650 BCE or later from three separate poems by a Bearbeiter (editor). Subsequent Analysts often referred to the hypothesised Bearbeiter as the "B-poet" (and the original genius, Homer himself, was sometimes the "A-poet"). Wilamowitz' examination of the relationship between these three layers of the Odyssey, further complicated by later, minor, interpolations, is enormously detailed and complex. One of the three poems, the "old Odyssey" (most of books 5-14 and 17-19) had in turn been compiled by a Redaktor from three even earlier poems, two of which had originally been parts of longer poems. Like most other scholars caught up in the opposition between Analysis and Unitarianism, Wilamowitz equated poetry that he thought poor with late interpolations. But Wilamowitz set such a high standard in the sophistication of his analysis that 20th century Analysts seem to have found difficulty in moving forward from where Wilamowitz left off; and over the course of the following decades attention drifted away, particularly in the English-speaking world.
Unitarians
NitzschGregor 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...
was the earliest scholar to oppose Wolf and argue that the two Homeric epics showed an artistic unity and intention that was the work of a single mind. Nitzsch's writings cover the years 1828 to 1862. In his Meletemata (1830) he took up the question of written versus unwritten literature, on which Wolf's whole argument had turned; and in his 1852 Die Sagenpoesie der Griechen ("The oral poetry of the Greeks") he investigated the structure of the Homeric poems and their relation to other, non-extant, epics which narrated the story of the 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 so-called Epic Cycle.
However, most Unitarian scholarship tended to be driven by literary interpretation and was therefore often more ephemeral. Even so, many scholars who examined the archaeology and social history of Homeric Greece did so from a Unitarian perspective, perhaps out of a wish to avoid the complexities of Analysis and Analysts' tendency to re-write each other's work indefinitely. Niese's 1873 Der homerische Schiffskatalog als historische Quelle betrachtet ("The Homeric catalogue of ships studied as a historical source") stands out. Schliemann
Heinrich Schliemann
Heinrich Schliemann was a German businessman and amateur archaeologist, and an advocate of the historical reality of places mentioned in the works of Homer. Schliemann was an archaeological excavator of Troy, along with the Mycenaean sites Mycenae and Tiryns...
, who began excavating Hisarlik
Hisarlik
Hisarlik , often spelled Hissarlik, is the modern name for the site of ancient Troy, also known as Ilion, and is located in what is now Turkey...
in the 1870s, treated Homer as a historical source from an essentially Unitarian viewpoint.
Common ground between Analysts and Unitarians
Broadly speaking, Analysts tended to study the epics philologically, bringing to bear criteria, linguistic and otherwise, that were little different from those of the ancient Alexandrians. Unitarians tended to be literary critics who were more interested in appreciating the artistry of the poems than in analysing them.But artistic merit was the unspoken motivation behind both schools of thought. In both cases, "Homer" must at all costs be hallowed as the great, original, genius; everything good in the epics was to be attributed to him; the Romantic image of the great artist who never makes errors was to be preserved. So Analysts hunted for "errors" (as Zoilus had done), and blamed them on incompetent editors; Unitarians tried to explain errors away, sometimes even claiming they were really the best bits.
In both cases, therefore, there came to be a very strong tendency to equate "good" with "authentic", and "shoddy" with "interpolated". This, too, was a mindset inherited from the Alexandrians.
The 20th century
20th century Homeric scholarship had the shadow of Analysis and Unitarianism hanging over it, and much important work was done by old-style Analysts and Unitarians even up to the end of the century. Perhaps the most important Unitarian in the first half of the century was Samuel E. Bassett; and, as in the 19th century, some interpretive work argued for Unitarianism (e.g. George E. Dimock's 1989 The Unity of the Odyssey), while other literary criticism merely took a Unitarian perspective for granted. Some of the most important work on textual criticism and papyrologyPapyrology
Papyrology is the study of ancient literature, correspondence, legal archives, etc., as preserved in manuscripts written on papyrus, the most common form of writing material in the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Greece, and Rome...
was done by Analyst scholars such as Reinhold Merkelbach and Denys L. Page (whose 1955 The Homeric Odyssey is a merciless but sometimes hilariously witty polemic against Unitarians). The biggest commentary on the Odyssey, published in the 1980s under the general editorship of Alfred Heubeck, is largely Analyst in tone, especially the commentary on books 21-22 by Manuel Fernández-Galiano. Some monographs from a strongly Analyst perspective continue to come out, primarily from the German-speaking world.
However, the most important new work on Homer done in the 20th century was dominated by two new schools of thought, most frequently referred to as "Oral Theory" (the term is resisted by some Oralists, especially 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...
); and "Neoanalysis". Unlike in the 19th century, however, these schools of thought are not opposed to one another; and in the last few decades they have been drawing on each other more and more in very constructive ways.
Oral Theory
Oral Theory, or Oralism, is a loosely-used term for the study of the mechanisms of how the Homeric epics were orally transmitted, in terms of linguistics, cultural conditions, and literary genre. It therefore embraces philological analysis and literary criticism simultaneously. It has its origins in linguistics, but it was foreshadowed in some respects by VicoGiambattista Vico
Giovanni Battista ' Vico or Vigo was an Italian political philosopher, rhetorician, historian, and jurist....
in the 18th century, and more immediately by Gilbert Murray
Gilbert Murray
George Gilbert Aimé Murray, OM was an Australian born British classical scholar and public intellectual, with connections in many spheres. He was an outstanding scholar of the language and culture of Ancient Greece, perhaps the leading authority in the first half of the twentieth century...
. Murray was an Analyst, but his 1907 book The Rise of the Greek Epic contained some of the core ideas of Oralism: particularly the idea that the epics were the end result of a protracted process of evolution, and the idea that an individual poet named Homer had relatively little importance in their history.
The two figures at the head of Oralism are 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 his student 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:...
, who continued his work after Parry's premature death. Parry was a structuralist
Structural Linguistics
Structural linguistics is an approach to linguistics originating from the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. De Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, published posthumously in 1916, stressed examining language as a static system of interconnected units...
linguist (he studied under Antoine Meillet
Antoine Meillet
Paul Jules Antoine Meillet was one of the most important French linguists of the early 20th century. Meillet began his studies at the Sorbonne, where he was influenced by Michel Bréal, Ferdinand de Saussure, and the members of the Année Sociologique. In 1890 he was part of a research trip to the...
, who in turn studied under Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics...
) who set out to compare Homeric epic with a living oral tradition of epic poetry. In the 1930s and 1950s he and Lord recorded thousands of hours of oral performance of epic poetry in the former Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia refers to three political entities that existed successively on the western part of the Balkans during most of the 20th century....
, primarily in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Lord's later work (his 1960 book The Singer of Tales is the most pertinent to Homer) kick-started oral poetics as an entire new sub-discipline in anthropology. For Homeric scholarship the most important results of their work, and that of later Oralists, have been to demonstrate that:
- Homeric epic shares many stylistic characteristics with known oral traditions;
- thanks to the sophistication and mnemonic power of the formulaic system in Homeric poetryOral-Formulaic CompositionThe theory of oral-formulaic composition originated in the scholarly study of epic poetry, being developed in the second quarter of the twentieth century...
, it is entirely possible for epics as large as the Iliad and Odyssey to have been created in an oral tradition; - many curious features that offended the ancient Alexandrians and the Analysts are most probably symptomatic of the poems' evolution through oral transmission and, within limits, poets re-inventing them in performance (some have compared this to improvisation, rather as jazz musicians improvise upon a theme).
The biggest complete commentary on the Iliad, 1993's six volume The Iliad: A Commentary as edited by G.S. Kirk, is Oralist in its approach and emphasizes issues related to live performance such as rhythm; and the pedagogical commentaries by Peter Jones
Peter Jones (classicist)
Peter V. Jones is a Cambridge graduate with a doctorate on Homer. He is a former senior lecturer in Classics at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, and co-founded with Jeannie Cohen the Friends of Classics charity...
are heavily Oralist.
Some Oralists do not go so far as to claim that the Homeric epics actually are products of an oral epic tradition: many limit themselves to claiming that the Homeric epics merely draw on earlier oral epic. For much of the mid-20th century much of the resistance to Oral Theory came from scholars who could not see how to preserve the 19th century Romantic image of Homer as the great original poet: they could not see how there was any room for artistry and creativity in a formulaic system where set-piece episodes (Walter Arend's "type scene
Type scene
A type scene is a literary convention employed by a narrator across a set of scenes, or related to scenes already familiar to the audience. The similarities with, and differences from, the established type are used to illuminate developments in plot and character...
s") were as formulaic as Parry's metrical epithet-noun combinations. Some scholars divided Oralists into "hard Parryists", who believed that all aspects of Homeric epic were predetermined by formulaic systems, and "soft Parryists", who believed that Homer had the system at his command rather than the other way round. More recently, books such as Nagy's influential 1979 book about epic heroes, The Best of the Achaeans, and Egbert Bakker's 1997 linguistic study Poetry as Speech, work on the principle that the radical cross-fertilisation and resonances between different traditions, genres, plot lines, episodes, and type scenes, are actually the driving force behind much of the artistic innovation in Homeric epic.
Where the joke about 19th century Analysts had it that the epics "were not composed by Homer but by someone else of the same name", now the joke is that Oral Theorists claim the epics are poems without an author. Many Oralists would happily agree with this.
Neoanalysis
Neoanalysis is quite separate from 19th century Analysis. It is the study of the relationship between the two Homeric epics and the Epic Cycle: the extent to which Homer made use of earlier poetic material about the Trojan War, and the extent to which other epic poets made use of Homer. The main obstacle to this line of research – and, simultaneously, the main impetus for it – is the fact that the Cyclic epics do not survive except in summaries and isolated fragments. Ioannis KakridisIoannis Kakridis
Ioannis Kakridis was a Greek classical scholar.He was born in Athens in 1901 and received his PhD at the University of Athens. He went on to become a professor at the universities of Athens, Thessaloniki, Tübingen, Stockholm, Lund and Uppsala. Kakridis was a Homer scholar and one of most...
is usually regarded as the founding figure of this school of thought, with his 1949 book Homeric Researches, but Wolfgang Kullmann's 1960 Die Quellen der Ilias ("The sources of the Iliad") is even more influential. Neoanalytic topics have become much more prominent in English-language scholarship since 1990, notably in a series of articles by M. L. West in Classical Quarterly and in Jonathan Burgess' 2001 book The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle. The recent upsurge is due in no small part to the publication of three new editions of the fragmentary Greek epics, including a translation by West for the Loeb Classical Library
Loeb Classical Library
The Loeb Classical Library is a series of books, today published by Harvard University Press, which presents important works of ancient Greek and Latin Literature in a way designed to make the text accessible to the broadest possible audience, by presenting the original Greek or Latin text on each...
series.
Probably the most frequently cited and characteristic topic raised in Neoanalysis is the so-called "Memnon theory" outlined by Wolfgang Schadewaldt in a 1951 paper. This is the hypothesis that one major plot-line in the Iliad is based on a similar one in one of the Cyclic epics, the Aithiopis
Aithiopis
The Aethiopis or Aithiopis is a lost epic of ancient Greek literature. It was one of the Epic Cycle, that is, the "Trojan" cycle, which told the entire history of the Trojan War in epic verse. The story of the Aethiopis comes chronologically immediately after that of the Homeric Iliad, and is...
of Arctinus. The parallels run as follows:
| Aithiopis | Iliad |
|---|---|
| Achilleus' comrade Antilochus Antilochus In Greek mythology, Antilochus was the son of Nestor, king of Pylos. One of the suitors of Helen of Troy, he accompanied his father and his brother Thrasymedes to the Trojan War. He was distinguished for his beauty, swiftness of foot, and skill as a charioteer... excels in battle |
Achilleus' comrade Patroclus Patroclus In Greek mythology, as recorded in the Iliad by Homer, Patroclus, or Patroklos , was the son of Menoetius, grandson of Actor, King of Opus, and was Achilles' beloved comrade and brother-in-arms.... excels in battle |
| Antilochus is killed by Memnon Memnon (mythology) In Greek mythology, Memnon was an Ethiopian king and son of Tithonus and Eos. As a warrior he was considered to be almost Achilles' equal in skill. During the Trojan War, he brought an army to Troy's defense. The death of Memnon echoes that of Hector, another defender of Troy whom Achilles also... |
Patroclus is killed by Hector Hector In Greek mythology, Hectōr , or Hektōr, is a Trojan prince and the greatest fighter for Troy in the Trojan War. As the first-born son of King Priam and Queen Hecuba, a descendant of Dardanus, who lived under Mount Ida, and of Tros, the founder of Troy, he was a prince of the royal house and the... |
| An enraged Achilleus pursues Memnon to the gates of Troy, where he kills him | An enraged Achilleus pursues Hector to the gates of Troy, chases Hector around the city walls, and kills him |
| Achilleus is in turn killed there by Paris Paris (mythology) Paris , the son of Priam, king of Troy, appears in a number of Greek legends. Probably the best-known was his elopement with Helen, queen of Sparta, this being one of the immediate causes of the Trojan War... |
(It has previously been foretold to Achilleus that his own death will follow upon Hector's) |
What is debated in the Memnon theory is the implications of these similarities. The most immediate implication is that the poet of the Iliad borrowed material from the Aethiopis. The debatable points are the poet's reasons for doing so; the status and condition of the Aethiopis story when this borrowing took place, that is to say whether it was Arctinus' epic that Homer borrowed from, or something less concrete, like a traditional legend; and the extent to which the Aethiopis and Iliad played off one another in their subsequent development.
Recent developments
The dating of the Homeric epics continues to be a controversial topic. The most influential work in this area in the last few decades is that of Richard Janko, whose 1982 study Homer, Hesiod and the Hymns uses statistics based on a range of dialectal pointers to argue that the text of both epics became fixed in the latter half of the 8th century, though he has since argued for an even earlier date. There is no shortage of alternative datings, however, based on other kinds of evidence (literary, philological, archaeological, and artistic), ranging from the 9th century to as late as 550 BCE (Nagy suggests in a 1992 paper that the text's "formative" period lasted until 550). At present most Homeric scholars opt for the late 8th or early 7th century, and a date of 730 BCE is often quoted for the Iliad.Since the 1970s, Homeric interpretation has been increasingly influenced by literary theory
Literary theory
Literary theory in a strict sense is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for analyzing literature. However, literary scholarship since the 19th century often includes—in addition to, or even instead of literary theory in the strict sense—considerations of...
, especially in literary readings of the Odyssey. Post-structuralist
Post-structuralism
Post-structuralism is a label formulated by American academics to denote the heterogeneous works of a series of French intellectuals who came to international prominence in the 1960s and '70s...
semiotic
Semiotics
Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of signs and sign processes , indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication...
approaches have been represented in the work of Pietro Pucci (Odysseus Polytropos, 1987) and Marylin Katz (Penelope's Renown, 1991), for example.
Perhaps the most significant developments have been in narratology
Narratology
Narratology denotes both the theory and the study of narrative and narrative structure and the ways that these affect our perception. While in principle the word may refer to any systematic study of narrative, in practice its usage is rather more restricted. It is an anglicisation of French...
, the study of how storytelling works, since this combines empirical linguistic study with literary criticism. Irene de Jong's 1987 Narrators and Focalizers: The Presentation of the Story in the Iliad draws on the work of the theorist Mieke Bal, and de Jong followed this up in 2001 with her Narratological Commentary on the Odyssey; Bakker has published several linguistic-narratological studies, especially his 1997 Poetry as Speech; and Elizabeth Minchin
Elizabeth Minchin
Elizabeth Hume Minchin is an Australian classicist and Professor of Classics at the Australian National University. She is currently one of the two editors of Antichthon, the official journal of the Australasian Society for Classical Studies....
's 2001 Homer and the Resources of Memory draws on several forms of narratology and cognitive science, such as the script theory
Script theory
Script theory is a psychological theory which posits that human behaviour largely falls into patterns called "scripts" because they function analogously to the way a written script does, by providing a program for action...
developed in the 1970s by Roger Schank
Roger Schank
Roger Schank is an American artificial intelligence theorist, cognitive psychologist, learning scientist, educational reformer, and entrepreneur.-Academic career:...
and Robert Abelson.
Further reading
- Clark, M.E. (1986), "Neoanalysis: a bibliographical review", Classical World 79.6: 379-94.
- Lord, A.B. (1960), The Singer of Tales, (Cambridge, MA). ISBN 0-674-00283-0
- Pfeiffer, R. (1968), History of Classical Scholarship from the Beginnings to the End of the Hellenistic Age (Oxford). ISBN 0-19-814342-7
- Reynolds, L.D., and N.G. Wilson (1991), Scribes & Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek & Latin Literature, 3rd edition (Oxford). ISBN 0-19-872146-3
- Wolf, F.A. (1985), Prolegomena to Homer, = English translation of (1795) Prolegomena ad Homerum by A. Grafton, G.W. Most, and J.E.G. Zetzel (Princeton). ISBN 0-691-06639-6