Homeric Question
From Wikipedia, the free 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:
- "Who is Homer?"[1]
- "Are the epics of multiple or single authorship?"[2]
- "By whom, when, where, and under what circumstances were the poems composed?"[3]
To these questions the possibilities of modern
textual criticism and archaeological answers have added a few more:
- "How reliable is the tradition embodied in the Homeric poems?"[4]
- "How old are the oldest elements in Homeric poetry which can be dated with certainty?"[5]
Homer as the manifestation of an oral tradition
Following the seminal work of
Milman Parry,
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 memorized 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".
[6]
Many scholars agree that the
Iliad and
Odyssey
underwent a process of standardization 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.
[7]
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".
[8][9]
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.
[10] 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.
[11][12] 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.
[13]
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.
[14]
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.
[15]
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
Peisistratus, the tyrant of
Athens,
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
Alexandrian 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.
[16]
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".
[17]
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, 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.
[18]
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.
New methods try also to elucidate the question. Combining information technologies and statistics, the
stylometry
allows to scan various linguistic units: words, parts of speech,
sounds... Based on the frequencies of Greek letters, a first study of
Dietmar Najock
[19]
particularly shows the internal cohesion of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Taking into account the repetition of the letters, a recent study of
Stephan Vonfelt
[20]
highlights the unity of the works of Homer compared to Hesiod. The
thesis of modern Analysts being questioned, the debate remains open.
See also
Notes
- ^ Kahane, p. 1.
- ^ Jensen, p. 10. This question has attracted luminaries from all walks of life, including William Ewart Gladstone,
who amused himself in spare time by inditing a tome in dilation of the
view that Homer was one man, solely and individually responsible for
both the Iliad and the Odyssey.
- ^ Fowler, p. 23.
- ^ Luce, p. 15.
- ^ Nilsson, p. 11.
- ^ Gibson: Milman Parry.
- ^ Lord: The Singer of Tales.
- ^ Kirk, pp. 88-91.
- ^ Foley, p. 35.
- ^ Foley, p. 36.
- ^ Foley, pp. 36, 505.
- ^ Parry, pp. 177-216.
- ^ Foley, pp. 40, 406.
- ^ Harris: Homer the Hostage.
- ^ Graziosi, pp. 79–81.
- ^ "The Homeric Question". Online.
- ^ Homer - Books and Biography. Martin Litchfield West in his 2010 commentary on the Iliad
uses comparative evidence and the literary Shield of Achilles as one of
many data that for him establish a composition date of 680-650.
- ^ Caldecott, p. 1.
- ^ Najock Dietmar, 1995, "Letter Distribution and Authorship in Early Greek Epics", Revue informatique et Statistique dans les Sciences Humaines, XXXI, 1 à 4, p. 129–154.
- ^ Vonfelt Stephan, 2010, "Archéologie numérique de la poésie grecque", Université de Toulouse.
References
- "The Homeric Question". Online. 3 November 2007.
- Homer - Books, Biography, Quotes - Read Print
- Caldecott, Harry Stratford (1896). Our English Homer; or, the Bacon-Shakespeare Controversy. Johannesburg Times.
- Foley, John M. (1985). Oral-Formulaic Theory and Research: An Introduction and Annotated Bibliography. Garland.
- Fowler, Harold North (1903). A History of Ancient Greek Literature. Museum Tusculanum Press. ISBN 87-7289-096-7.
- Gibson, Twyla. Milman Parry: The Oral-Formulaic Style of the Homeric Tradition. Online. 6 December 2007.
- Harris, William. Homer the Hostage. Online. 6 December 2007.
- Graziosi, Barbara (2002). Inventing Homer: The Early Reception of Epic. Cambridge University Press.
- Jensen, Minna Skafte (1980). The Homeric Question and the Oral-Formulaic Theory. D. Appleton and Company.
- Kahane, Ahuvia (2005). Diachronic Dialogues: Authority and Continuity in Homer and the Homeric Tradition. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. ISBN 0-7391-1134-5.
- Kirk, Geoffrey S. (1962). The Songs of Homer. Cambridge University Press.
- Lord, Albert (1960). The Singer of Tales. Harvard University Press.
- Luce, J.V. (1975). Homer and the Homeric Age. Harper & Row. ISBN 0-06-012722-8.
- Nilsson, Martin P. (1972). The Mycenaean Origin of Greek Mythology. University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-01951-2.
- Parry, Adam. "Have we Homer's Iliad?" Yale Classical Studies. 20 (1966), pp. 177–216.
- Varsos, Georges Jean, "The Persistence of the Homeric Question", Ph.D. thesis, University of Geneva, July 2002.
- West, Martin L. (2010).
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press
