“HOMER”

Scholarly study of the Iliad and the Odyssey has been shaped by recurring versions of the Homeric Question: Who composed the two epics, and how? Were the two epics composed by a single poet whose comprehensive vision organized the whole, or are they the product of generations of poets working within an oral tradition? Does “Homer” denote an individual, or rather a tradition of bards and a form of poetry that attained prominence throughout Greece? Though the debate has been vituperative and long-lived (its modern formulation dates from F. R. Wolf ’s Prolegomena to Homer of 1795), it has flourished especially in the absence of historical evidence that definitively locates Homer or his poems within a specific time or place. Though there is a profuse and fascinating body of ancient lore about “Homer” and his career, the accounts are multiple and competitive; few cities could resist claiming Homer as their own. Within this vacuum of historical certainty and profusion of lore, scholars and readers have often found a “Homer” who snugly conforms to their interpretation of the poems themselves.

Within contemporary Homeric studies, the researches of Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord have transformed our understanding of the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Parry confirmed and furthered his initial, text-based studies of Homeric composition (of the late 1920s) by his field research (1933—1935) among the performing oral poets of Yugoslavia. Parry’s immersion in the performance culture of practicing bards permitted him to develop a comparative account of Homeric composition-in-performance; recording and analyzing the performances of actual bards allowed him to see how these working singers used the given components of their tradition—repeated epithets, type-scenes, narrative patterns—to improvise a new poem, uniquely fitted to the immediate conditions of its performance and the demands of its particular audience. Parry’s work was continued and extended by his student Albert Lord, whose researches in a great variety of performing song cultures broadened and deepened the comparative context within which the Homeric poems might be studied and appreciated. The research of Parry and Lord has offered a model for the composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey that can account for the entirety of each poem in its present form (there is no need to differentiate between “early” and “late” strata, between interpolation and original—all are equally part of the performance tradition). But their work also decisively challenges the idea that there was a single poet to whose genius each poem (or both poems) can be attributed; in place of a poet of genius, it is an ingenious tradition that emerges.

If we set aside the quest for the one true Homer, we might speak instead of historical stages in the transmission of the Iliad and the Odyssey, in which the poems moved from a relatively fluid state to an increasingly fixed, textualized form. In this model (brilliantly and controversially developed by Gregory Nagy), the first stage spanned from the early second millennium to the middle of the eighth century B.C.E.—a period of oral transmission and composition-in-performance wholly without written texts. A final stage of Homeric transmission can be dated to about 150 B.C.E., when the scholar Aristarchus of Samothrace, the head of the great library of Alexandria, completed his edition of the Homeric poems, at which point something like a fixed “library edition” of Homer appeared; such an edition no longer presupposes performance. In the 700 years between these two poles, the poems moved from a state of relative fluidity to one of increasing fixity; so, too, the role of the singer moved from one who composed in performance to one who re-performed a poem that was increasingly fixed and that finally, in a late stage, was simply learned by rote and available in written, if not yet authoritative, form.