Homeric Question

The Homeric Question concerns the doubt and consequent debate over the identity of Homer, the authorship of the "Iliad" and "Odyssey", and their historicity. It has its roots in classical antiquity and the scholarship of the Hellenistic period, but reached a floruit among Homeric scholars of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The main subtopics of the Homeric Question are:

*"Who is Homer?" [Kahane, p. 1.]
*" [M] ultiple or single authorship?" [Jensen, p. 10. This question has attracted luminaries from all walks of life, including William 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".]
*"By whom, when, where, and under what circumstances were the poems composed?" [Fowler, p. 23.]

To these questions the possibility of archaeological answers have added a few more:

*"How reliable is the tradition embodied in the Homeric poems?" [Luce, p. 15.]
*"How old are the oldest elements in Homeric poetry which can be dated with certainty?" [Nilsson, p. 11.]

Homer as the manifestation of an oral tradition

Most Classicists agree that, whether or not there was ever such a composer as Homer, the poems attributed to him are the product of oral tradition, a generations-old technique that was the collective inheritance of many singer-poets (or "aoidoi"). An analysis of the structure and vocabulary of the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" shows that the poems consist of regular and repeating phrases; indeed, even entire verses are repeated. Could the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" have been products of Oral-Formulaic Composition, composed on the spot by the poet using a collection of memorised traditional verses and phases? Milman Parry and Albert Lord have pointed out that such elaborate oral tradition, foreign to today's literate cultures, is typical of epic poetry in an exclusively oral culture. The crucial words here are "oral" and "traditional". Parry starts with the former: the repetitive chunks of language, he says, were inherited by the singer-poet from his predecessors, and were useful to him in composition. Parry calls these chunks of repetitive language "formulas". [Gibson: "Milman Parry".]

Scholars generally agree that the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" underwent a process of standardisation and refinement out of older material, beginning in the 8th century BC. This process, often referred to as the "million little pieces" design, seems to acknowledge the spirit of oral tradition. As Albert Lord notes in his "magnum opus", "The Singer of Tales", poets within an oral tradition, as was Homer, tend to create and modify their tales as they perform them. Although this suggests that Homer may simply have "borrowed" from other bards, he almost certainly made the piece his own when he performed it. [Lord: "The Singer of Tales".]

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 and Croatian 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 Serbo-Croatian poet, who was merely "reproductive". [Kirk, pp. 88-91.] [Foley, p. 35.]

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. [Foley, p. 36.] 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 Serbo-Croatian tradition to an "unfortunate" extent, choosing to elevate the Greek model of oral-tradition above all others. [Foley, pp. 36, 505.] [Parry, pp. 177-216.] 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 Yugoslav poetry and its similarities to Homer, and downplayed the intellectual and literary role of the reciters of Homeric epic. [Foley, pp. 40, 406.]

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 hypothecated 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. [Harris: "Homer the Hostage".]

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. [Graziosi, pp. 79-81.]

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. More radical Homerists, such as Gregory Nagy, contend that a canonical text of the Homeric poems as "scripture" did not exist until the Hellenistic period (3rd to 1st century BC).

The modern debate, whose ancient forebear lies with the Chorizontes, begins with the "Prolegomena" of Friedrich August Wolf, who shows how the question of the date of writing meets us on the threshold of the textual criticism of Homer and accordingly enters into a full discussion, first of the external evidence and then of the indications furnished by the poems. 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. Thus comes the conclusion to which all this has been tending: the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" cannot 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 till about 500 years after. 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. The voice of antiquity is unanimous in declaring that Peisistratus first committed the poems of Homer to writing and placed them in the order in which we now read them.

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. ["The Homeric Question". Online.]

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". [Homer - Books and Biography.]

Controversy over Homer's identity

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. His 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 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. [Caldecott, p. 1.] 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.

References

* "The Homeric Question". Online. Available http://www.varchive.org/dag/homer.htm. 3 November 2007.
* Homer - Books and Biography.http://www.readprint.com/author-47/-Homer
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* Gibson, Twyla. Milman Parry: The Oral-Formulaic Style of the Homeric Tradition. Online. Available http://www.utoronto.ca/mcluhan/tsc_parry_homeric_tradition.htm. 6 December 2007.
* Harris, William. "Homer the Hostage". Online. Available: http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/hostage.html. 6 December 2007.
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* Parry, Adam. "Have we Homer's Iliad?" Yale Classical Studies. 20 (1966), pp. 177-216.
* Varsos, Georges Jean, [http://www.unige.ch/cyberdocuments/theses2002/VarsosG/these.pdf "The Persistence of the Homeric Question"] , Ph.D. thesis, University of Geneva, July 2002.

Notes

ee also

*Homer
*Homeric scholarship