In two separate, timely books Bozzone and Christensen draw from a wide range of scientific disciplines and modern parallels to consider how Homeric language and epic stories are in some ways living and alive. For Bozzone, who analyses the various formal features of Homer’s poetic technique by incorporating cognitive and linguistic frameworks, Homeric language is ‘living’ insofar as it operates on mechanisms analogous to those a speaker uses for natural languages and other kinds of speaking performances. Christensen, on the other hand, applies a series of biological analogies to epic poetry and imagines that the narrative of Homeric epic is ‘alive’ like an actual organism, since it can grow and adapt on its own beyond the design of its creators. In what follows I will review each book on its own terms before bringing them into conversation with each other to reflect on their different contributions.

Bozzone’s Homer’s Living Language offers an important reassessment of the complex ‘machinery’ involved in the production of Homeric poetry. She situates Homer within the oral tradition and argues that formularity, metre and dialect are ‘adaptive technologies’ that ‘serve to enable Homer’s particular kind of improvisational creativity’ (p. 223). These formal features are accordingly recast from poetic constraints to integral supports for the demands and art of oral composition in performance. They variously help to reduce the poet’s overall cognitive load by scaffolding his memory or limiting his creative choices and facilitate his performance identity and genius through conscious or unconscious processes. Each poetic feature receives extensive, independent treatment in the first three chapters. The fourth and final chapter weaves them all into a comprehensive model of Homeric compositional practice, conceived as a system finely tuned for oral performance.

The first chapter (the standout of an overall outstanding book) focuses on the traditional cornerstone of Homeric studies: the formula. Bozzone presents Homeric formularity as ‘a reliance on prefabricated linguistic sequences’ (p. 5), expressions that are stored and retrieved from memory. In this sense Homeric versification is not dissimilar to natural language production, which also makes extensive use of prefabricated expressions or chunked sequences. What distinguishes the formulaic phenomena in Homer is their density and systematicity; Homer’s chunks are longer and more numerous than those found in natural languages or in other texts. These data points are indications of the degree of mental strain involved in composing poetry orally as well as the poet’s fluency in the Homeric repertoire.

The idea that Homeric formulas are an efficient cognitive resource may make Homer sound too mechanical and artless, but Bozzone shows that the process of retrieval from one’s memory is dynamic, allowing for creative variation and innovation. Drawing on the cognitive model of connectionism, the usage-based linguistic theory of lexical priming and the syntactic concept of construction from Construction Grammar, Bozzone explores an assortment of formulaic expressions ranging from loose collocations to fully crystalised formulas, which can span over an entire line or even over multiple lines. By demonstrating the vast continuum of Homeric formularity, she shows that formulaic language operates as a network of probabilistic associations in which lexical items inform grammatical structure. An important application of this understanding is the ability to track the poet’s thought process in composing a verse, and even the potential to determine where in a verse he might first start shaping it (see pp. 55–6). As Bozzone rightfully notes, further study is necessary, since verses can be generated in many ways. Some questions I would like to see answered more thoroughly are how we should go about identifying the principal lexical primer that influences its environment, and how that may or may not intersect with larger narratological considerations of the epics. But the basic method of tracing poetic activations through careful consideration of a line’s unique discourse factors and information structure is a fruitful one, offering new possibilities for accessing and assessing the rich network of formulaic variations in Homeric epic.

The second chapter presents metre as another kind of ‘emergency technology’ for the poet based on the view that the fundamental components of the hexameter are cola, defined as ‘prosodic (as opposed to semantic) in nature’ (p. 102). By focusing on phonological phrases, intonational phrases and phonological utterances within the prosodic hierarchy of ancient Greek, Bozzone shows how metre offers the poet an attention-saving and attention-grabbing strategy. Much like the prosodic regularisation of auctioneers and horse-race callers, the use of predictable and intonational features helps the poet to streamline his choices while also captivating and entertaining his audience.

Observations of performance tendencies in the contemporary world again provide a key form of argument for Bozzone’s views on dialect in the third chapter. This time she uses examples drawn from popular music, such as the worldwide spread of punk rock and its accumulation of different American and British dialectical features, which offers the closest modern parallel to Homeric phrase theory. This example, among several more illuminating cases, underscores how performers adopt stylised linguistic registers to signal their musical persona or genre, regardless of their regional dialect. Bozzone applies this cross-cultural phenomenon to how we might understand the Homeric Kunstsprache. Rather than attempting to pin the mixed dialect of Homer to a map, she presents it as a deliberately cultivated performance code in which dialectal mixture signals the poet’s affiliations to a given performance tradition. This has consequences on how we view metre and linguistic innovations in Homer, and what we interpret to be the result of diachronic language change or a matter of sociolinguistic connections. Bozzone’s discussion is careful in reviewing many scenarios that account for the potential prominence of a poet’s actual dialectical features and the reasons for variations within performance dialects, although I wonder about the possibility of deliberate code-switching within a given performance, and how much of a cognitive toll that practice may have taken on the singer.

The fourth chapter brings Bozzone’s model to its climax with a discussion of the paradox of Homeric creativity: ‘how can Homer’s poetry be great even though so much in it appears “automatic”?’ (p. 220). Her answer draws on known improvisational practices, specifically that of jazz musicians, and neuroscience. Like jazz musicians, Homeric poets relied on learned patterns but recombined them dynamically in performance. Creativity emerges in the ‘flow state’, a mental condition characterised by reduced executive control (hypofrontality) and heightened automaticity. Thus far from being mechanical reciters, oral poets can be better understood as highly skilled improvisers, whose artistry lies precisely in the balance between conscious and unconscious processing. Bozzone’s reconciling of technical devices (tékhnē) and divine inspiration (enthousiasmós) in the ancient treatments of poetic craft is emblematic of her approach. The Muses themselves, as daughters of Mnemosyne (memory recall) and divine sources of song, symbolise well the dynamic interplay of neural mechanisms, the poet’s fluency and his resulting creativity.

While Bozzone’s book is anchored in the poet’s mind, Christensen’s Storylife asks readers to centre narratives and the communities within which they grow and adapt. Homeric poetry serves as a test case, almost like a fruit fly that is a model organism for studying fundamental biological processes, to understand narrative in all its forms (textual, visual etc.) as an organic lifeform. The ‘weak form’ of Christensen’s argument is that ‘this analogy helps us understand the complexity of meaning making; the strong form is that narrative has an agency and purpose of its own, and we are merely part of its environment’ (p. 21). By the book’s end Christensen reveals his thought experiment to be more than mere analogy or even metaphor, and encourages a sustained understanding that stories are living things. To build up to this provocation, Christensen organises all five chapters around a core biological concept applied to an aspect of narrative formation and development, culminating in what may very well be one of the most thoughtful reflections on the ethical consequences of understanding stories as active agents in human life.

The two opening chapters employ the concepts of DNA and multi-cellular life to establish the analogy of story-as-life within the model of a ‘narrative ecosystem’. The first chapter shows how stories initially take shape through words (the basic genetic material of a narrative) and how their expression is partially regulated by encounters with environmental factors such as different audiences (an epigenetic process). The second chapter turns to the growth and development of words through repetition, gradually stacking into increasingly complex structures like doublets, type-scenes or ring compositions. Christensen proposes that such narrative structures can arise and endure through natural dynamics with their environment, comparable to processes that produce tree rings or spirals in mollusc shells. Likewise, both the complexity and the meaning of stories are conditioned by context and audience engagement over time rather than residing intrinsically in an intentionally designed poetic form.

This discussion is in many ways reminiscent of reader-response theory and of Stanley Fish’s concept of interpretative communities, but I believe Christensen’s biological reframing offers us something new with his emphasis on tracing the diachronic development of a story’s continual use and impact by different audiences on the story itself. One key limitation I can foresee is the fact that the choice vehicles are somewhat dense and perhaps not immediately familiar enough to all, which may potentially obscure a general understanding of the tenors for some people. Christensen, however, is careful in providing the necessary background information and demonstrating the pay-off. Tracking the epigenetic changes of a narrative to their respective sources raises the stakes of our interpretative responsibilities both individually and collectively – an important implication that Christensen continues to explore at the end of the book. Other areas of the humanities and social sciences have already begun exploring this intervention offered by the concept of epigenetics throughout the past decade, and it is long overdue in classical scholarship.

The third chapter uses evolutionary biology to think about how different narrative traditions develop over time and why similarities among them emerge across cultures. To account for resemblances between the heroic narratives of the Iliad and Gilgamesh, for example, Christensen introduces the evolutionary models of parallelism and convergence. Parallel evolution is when species with some kind of ancestral relationship develop similar traits independently (e.g. old and new world monkeys), while convergent evolution is when unrelated species develop similar traits in adaptation to different environments but similar environmental pressures (e.g. different crab-like forms). The popular monomyth theory of Joseph Campbell constitutes an example of parallel evolution. The Homeric epics and Gilgamesh poems, on the other hand, better fit the convergent evolutionary model of crab development. Comparable constraints, conditions and receptions make up their respective cultural contexts, which can help to explain the presentation of similar narrative traits/themes (e.g. mortality) between them. This is probably the most delightful and effective analogy for demonstrating a story’s development by the interaction between organism and environment, since it encourages us to think more carefully about how and why we select the traits and narratives that we do. Recognition of these different evolutionary forces can help us to squash the over-reductive default to universalism and the teleological narrative of western advancement in storytelling.

The final two chapters turn to examining the interrelationship between narratives and their human hosts. In the fourth chapter Christensen discusses how stories such as those about immortal fame in early Greece, kleos narratives, are viral in their reproductive capabilities and impact on humans as a biological agent. The fifth and final chapter further explores the consequences of conceiving of ourselves as hosts to such stories by applying the symbiotic models of mutualism and parasitism. Stories can inadvertently mutate as they proliferate and shift narrative contexts and environments. In doing so, they may benefit humans, such as giving them a sense of purpose, or harm them, such as encouraging a toxic kind of heroism at the expense of the community. So what recourse do we have when narratives do us harm? Christensen suggests that ‘the cure for the dangers of the story, the vaccine for this narrative virus, is engaging with story itself’ (p. 191). To some extent, there is a lost opportunity here to refine the discussion of our consequent responsibilities with narratives by envisioning humans as not only hosts infected by a narrative pathogen, but also as vectors that carry and transmit it from one host to another. But even without this added discussion, Christensen’s urgent admonition to engage directly with the power of stories, rather than let us be passively shaped by its forces, still stands: ‘Understanding narrative as being like a living thing can help us better conceptualize our relationship with it. But imagining that narrative is alive puts us in a position to be better stewards of the lives we live alongside it’ (p. 180).

Bozzone and Christensen have each produced powerful, important books that both contribute to the study of Homeric epic and, more importantly, help us to understand the mechanisms behind creating, receiving and living with stories. The richest parts of Homer’s Living Language are its introduction of cognitive and linguistic frameworks as well as its instructive use of modern examples and parallels. The strength of the deeply humanistic Storylife lies in its integration of close readings of archaic Greek epic with biological understandings, ethical reflection and cultural critique. Despite their different theoretical frameworks, these two books remarkably demonstrate the non-exceptionalism of Homer by similarly arguing with a kind of extended Homeric simile: the poet is like a speaker of a natural language and the poetic techniques he employs are technologies (Bozzone); stories are living things, and we humans are their environment (Christensen). Comparisons such as these always run the risk of analogical overreach, but they are a refreshing turn from the predominance of metaphors drawn from the field of computing, such as the concept of hypertextuality. And as Christensen so eloquently puts it, ‘the test of an analogy’s efficacy is whether I understand something differently – if not better than I did before’ (p. 56). The new analogies that Bozzone and Christensen each newly introduce in their respective studies certainly add intellectual and emotional depth to the understanding of Homeric poetry. Bozzone is strongest in detailing the mechanics of oral poetics, while Christensen is strongest in articulating the stakes of narrative for human life. In short, Bozzone explains how Homer works, while Christensen explains why an understanding of Homer and other narratives matters.