Have We
Homer's Iliad (Again)
by Prof. Steve Reece,
Saint Olaf College
Original text
2000 Steve Reece. All rights reserved.
Introduction
It
has to do with one of the most fundamental methodological issues
in Homeric studies -- the centerpiece of all "Homeric Questions":
what is the relationship between our inherited texts of Homer's
epics -- this modern eclectic scholarly edition, for example
(OCT) -- and the historical, live, oral performance of the epic
by a Greek bard on (let's say) the island of Chios in (let's
say) the 8th century B.C.?
To
put it in the language most familiar to Homerists: is this (OCT)
a more or less reliable record -- though passed through countless
hands over many generations -- of an oral-dictated text, i.e.,
a scribal transcription of a performance orally delivered by
a historical Homer in the 8th C. and thereafter for the most
part, except for some surface corruption, fixed in its form?
Or is this (OCT) the final product of a long evolution of a fluid
oral and textual transmission, attributable to a mythic figure
or "culture hero" -- a "symbol" of oral tradition
that we can call, for the sake of shorthand, "Homer"
-- but actually shaped by generations of mouths and hands, slowly
"crystallized," and not really fixed until the late
Classical or even Hellenistic period?
Albert
Lord's "oral dictation" model was challenged early
on by Geoffrey Kirk's "evolutionary" model, and the
debate has continued, with refinements and different terminology,
most recently, on the one side, by, among others, David Gunn,
Richard Janko, Martin West, Barry Powell, Cornelius Ruijgh, and
Michael Haslam, and, on the other side, by, among others, Raphael
Sealey, John Miles Foley, Gregory Nagy, Richard Seaford, and
Robert Lamberton.
The
"evolutionary" model appears to me to be the one gaining
momentum these days. I often hear at conferences like this one
such phrases as "the multiplicity of epic traditions,"
"multiple versions of the Iliad/Odyssey," "the
fluidity of the tradition," etc. when speaking not only
about the Archaic period but about the Classical and Hellenistic
periods as well -- at any rate, long after the traditional date
ascribed to Homeric composition. Among younger Homeric scholars,
at least in the U.S., the evolutionary model has almost achieved
the status of orthodoxy, while the model of a text generated
by the process of oral dictation and the concomitant hope of
a recoverable archetype of an epic song by a real person performing
at a particular time and place are notions often dismissed as
quaint and romantic.
At
the risk of sounding quaint and romantic, I wish to argue that
oral-dictation is not only still a valid model, but that the
nature and features of our inherited texts point to oral-dictation
as the more plausible of the two models.
The
evolutionary model is not an unattractive view, nor are its proponents
ill informed. On the contrary, it is in many ways a very attractive
view: it accounts for the surge in popularity in the late 6th
century of depictions of Homer in the graphic arts; it accounts
for the sometimes considerable differences between our inherited
texts, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the quotations
of Homer by Classical authors, the variants reported in the manuscripts
available to the Alexandrian editors, the longer and "eccentric"
readings of the Ptolemaic papyri, and the other variants reported
or suggested by the Hellenistic scholars; it also accounts for
the "late forms" and "Atticisms" that pervade
our inherited texts.
That
the Homeric epics reached the form in which we have inherited
them through a long evolutionary process is, of course, not a
recent idea: in many and various incarnations, this notion lay
at the foundation of the analytical approach to the genesis of
the Homeric epics (e.g., Wolf, Lachmann, Kirchhoff, Wilamowitz,
Leaf). G. Murray, in The Rise of Greek Epic, invoked all the
standard evolutionary arguments in his proposal that the Homeric
epics continued to remain in a fluid state through at least the
end of the Classical period, not only in matters of words and
verses but even in large portions of the story, and that they
did not take on their final form until the Hellenistic period,
during which time the editors of Homer continued to rewrite passages
with the freedom of the old bards.
But
the form of the debate has developed many new angles since the
almost universal acceptance of Milman Parry and Albert Lord's
theory that the Homeric epics, like the Serbo-Croatian epics
that they were recording, were in origin oral compositions-in-performance.
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