The essays in this part of The Cambridge Guide to Homer address the evolution and composition of the Homeric epics. What is Homeric poetry? What characterizes the language and style in which it is composed? How was it performed in the ancient Greek world and eventually written down? What are the main characters and themes? How does the Homeric narrative unfold? This part also explores the historical and cultural background in which Homeric poetry first appeared, including Indo-European and ancient Near Eastern myth and epic.
An organizing principle of the essays is that in their earliest incarnations the poems that came to be our Iliad and Odyssey were composed orally and in the context of performance (Ebbott, Homeric Epic in Performance). This process was occurring over hundreds of years and throughout a large geographical area. The Iliad and Odyssey are therefore synoptic representatives of an entire system of traditional songs that were composed and recomposed in performance over many hundreds of years, perhaps even millennia. These song traditions were multiform: they did not exist in a fixed form until very late in their evolution. The performance tradition in which the Homeric epics arose was creative and generative, but at the same time it was traditional, in that the poets told the story as it had been handed down using a poetic diction that had evolved for this purpose.
These basic facts about the creation of the Iliad and Odyssey came to be known through two different kinds of investigation. First, there is the evidence that can be gleaned from the poems themselves. The meter of the poetry is the dactylic hexameter, and the language of the poems is a poetic composite of several dialects that was never spoken in any one time or place (Bakker, The Language of Homer). The predominant layer consists of Ionic Greek forms, with the result that a large portion of the poem might be surmised to have come into shape in archaic Ionia (Frame Reference Frame2009, 551–620, §4.20–71). However, there are verses that are demonstrably much earlier, in Arcado-Cypriote and Aeolic dialects, and others much later, with a veneer of Attic Greek. Phrases, half verses, whole verses, and even whole scenes are repeated with a regularity that indicates this poetic composite was formed within a traditional system – that is to say, it could not be the product of a single author.
There are, moreover, several passages within the poems that depict the performance of epic poetry, such as the performances of Phemios for the suitors in the house of Odysseus and those of Demodokos for the Phaeacians in the house of King Alkinoos. These passages show a bard performing at banquets, often taking requests for various episodes involving well-known heroes. Such passages in the Homeric texts that refer to occasions of performance are fascinating windows into how ancient audiences imagined the creation of epic poetry (Ebbott, Homeric Epic in Performance). Certainly the process is entirely oral. References to writing in the epics are famously few and mysterious (Nagy Reference Nagy1996b, 14 and Shear Reference Shear1998). The absence of writing in the composition of the poetry is also reflected in ancient biographical traditions about Homer that conceive of him as being blind (Graziosi Reference Graziosi2002). In the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, the narrator proclaims that he is a blind man from Chios, and in Odyssey Book 8, the blind poet Demodokos, who entertains the feasting Phaeacians (and whom many readers equate with “Homer”), is said to be compensated for blindness by his talent: “Him the muse had dearly loved, but she had given to him both good and evil, for though she had endowed him with a divine gift of song, she had robbed him of his eyesight” (Od. 8.63–4).
From the perspective of the internal audience of these performances, such as the suitors who are entertained by Phemios in Odysseus’s house on Ithaca in Book 1 of the Odyssey, or the guests who listen in rapt silence to Demodokos in Alkinoos’s house in Phaeacia in Book 8, the events narrated are well known but at the same time come from the relatively recent past. The Trojan War has come to an end only ten years before the performances depicted. But for the external audience, such as Athenians at the Panathenaic festival in Athens in the Classical period, the songs of Phemios and Demodokos are the traditional material of poets working within the epic tradition. Phemios sings Nostoi, songs about the homeward voyages of the various heroes from Troy; Demodokos sings about a quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles at Troy, and later the sack of Troy. It is worth noting that, despite the differences in occasion, for the external audience the compositional process of these notionally “past” performances and that of the present, framing performance is imagined to be the same. In this way the very ancient performances represented within the poems are placed on a continuum that connects all the way to the audience’s present (Martin, Homer in a World of Song).
The second mode of inquiry into the creation of the Iliad and Odyssey that I wish to highlight is comparative. The work of Milman Parry and Albert Lord demonstrated that the traditional system of formulaic language in which the Iliad and Odyssey were composed evolved to serve the needs of poets composing in performance (Ebbott, Homeric Epic in Performance, and Dué and Marks, The Homeric Question). In the 1930s Milman Parry and his assistant Albert Lord went to Yugoslavia to study the oral epic tradition that at that time still flourished there, and soon understood that the Homeric poems were not only traditional in content and diction, but were in fact oral poems – that is, products of performance rather than composition through the technology of writing. Their fieldwork allowed Parry and Lord to discover in Homer (by analogy) the existence of a sophisticated, traditional, economical, and above all oral system that enabled great literature to be composed in performance. They showed how a singer, trained in techniques that were centuries if not millennia old, could draw upon a storehouse of traditional language, tales, and heroic figures to compose epic poetry on any given occasion.
How far back does the performance tradition of the Iliad and Odyssey go? Possibly very far back indeed. Greek is an Indo-European language and Greek mythology and poetics are thought to have evolved out of an Indo-European tradition that predates the Greek language (Cook, Mythic Background, and Levaniouk, Homer and Indo-European Myth). The dactylic hexameter meter in which Homeric epic is composed is related to the lyric meters of Sanskrit poetry, and Gregory Nagy has argued that the Greek and Indic meters are cognate, stemming from Indo-European prototypes (Nagy Reference Nagy1974 and Reference Nagy1990a, 459–64). This relationship alone is suggestive of how very ancient the poetic traditions that produced our Iliad and Odyssey may be. Linguists have shown, moreover, that it is possible to recover some of the poetics of the Indo-European tradition which Greek inherited through examination of cognate formulas (Watkins Reference Watkins1995, Katz Reference Katz2005 and Reference Katz2010). Archaeology adds another perspective. The work of E. S. Sherratt demonstrates that the Iliad reflects the material culture of more than one time period, the earliest of which is prepalatial, which is to say, at least as old as the middle of the second millennium BC (Sherratt Reference Sherratt1990). (See also the essays in Part II, Homeric World.)
We should not be surprised to learn that the Greek epic tradition is as old as it evidently is. It would seem that as long as there have been Greeks in Greece, there has been epic song. The Linear B texts excavated from the Mycenaean palaces of the Bronze Age are a form of Greek. These texts preserve nothing like poetry – nor should we expect them to, if an oral traditional song culture was flourishing, as I have posited – but they reveal that the Mycenaeans were Greek. And there is still more evidence to support the thesis that the Homeric epics were millennia in the making. Not only do we have the cognate traditions of Sanskrit epic to which we may compare the poetics of the Iliad and Odyssey, we also have the linguistically unrelated but nevertheless influential epic poetry of the Ancient Near East to consider, including especially the Epic of Gilgamesh, whose composition likewise evolved over many centuries, going back as far as the Sumerian civilization of the third millennium b.c. (See Wilson, Ancient Near Eastern Epic, and Cook, Mythic Background.) Just how precisely and when the poetry of the Ancient Near East influenced the composition of the Homeric epics is not known, but the many shared themes and narrative patterns, too many and too specific to be coincidence, point to interaction between the two traditions at some early formative stage.
The essays in this volume not only take a diachronic perspective on the Homeric epics, considering how they evolved through time, but also examine the poetic context in which they were composed. The Iliad and Odyssey were by no means the only epics composed and performed in ancient Greece, but rather they are the only two surviving out of many epic traditions that narrated the tale of the Trojan War and other cycles of myth, including those dealing with Oedipus and the Seven against Thebes (Marks, Epic Traditions). We must be careful to distinguish the texts of poems of the Epic Cycle, such as the Cypria and the Aethiopis – to the extent that we now know them from the surviving summaries made by the late antique scholar Proclus and a few fragments – from the traditional material from which they took shape. The Cyclic traditions, like those of the Iliad and Odyssey, have a very long history, but their texts seem to have become fixed at a later date than those of the Iliad and Odyssey (see Burgess Reference Burgess2001). Unlike the Iliad and Odyssey, the poems of the Epic Cycle were not performed at the Panathenaic festival in Athens, and so were not subject to the same competitive, regulatory, and Panhellenizing forces that shaped those epics (Nagy, From Song to Text). What we do know of the poems of the Epic Cycle, however, helps us to better understand the poetic tradition in which the Iliad and Odyssey were composed, and the traditionality of their structure and themes. Nor was epic by any means the only form of song in ancient Greece. The choral and monodic song and dance traditions of lyric poetry and lament infuse the poetics of the Iliad and Odyssey in such a way that it is impossible to fully separate the genre of epic from these other forms of song, which must have coevolved in parallel with epic traditions (Martin, Homer in a World of Song, and Beck, Lament).
How do the poetics of an oral tradition differ from those of a literate, text-based culture? Mary Ebbott and I have advocated an approach to the Homeric epics that seeks for the meaning made possible by an oral tradition (Dué and Ebbott Reference Dué and Ebbott2010). So too does Leonard Muellner (Homeric Poetics) in his explication of the poetics of the Iliad and Odyssey. Rather than look to the intention or skill of a particular composer in order to explain the poetry, Muellner examines how formulas, similes, and themes operate in the poetry, how Parry and Lord’s work explains certain features of the language, and how a traditional audience might have understood particular phrases and references (and he likewise explains how we can reconstruct that understanding). In deemphasizing authorship, the essays in this part do not preclude the possibility that some form of authorship, in terms of the poet as a creative artist composing in performance, could exist in this oral tradition. But when the search for Homer’s genius is abandoned, many more illuminating possibilities present themselves (Dué and Ebbott Reference Dué and Ebbott2010, 29).
How do we get from song to text? That question is the subject of Gregory Nagy’s essay in this part. In Archaic and Classical Greece, the primary access to the Iliad and Odyssey for most people would have been in the performances of professional rhapsodes (González, Rhapsodes and the Homēridai). But what “texts” were these rhapsodes performing? And how do their performances relate to the texts we now have? Both Sherratt, whose work I have mentioned earlier, and Nagy attribute the fixation of the Iliad and Odyssey to performance. When the primary venue for the transmission of Homeric poetry came to be the highly regulated competitive performances of the epics, first in regional festivals such as the Panionia and then at Panhellenic festivals, the Iliad and Odyssey became “possessions,” which is to say, static and (eventually) unchanging: “The emphasis had shifted from statement to possession. From now on the creative function of the bard (aoidos) gave way to the relaying role of the rhapsode” (Sherratt Reference Sherratt1990, 821). This process took many centuries, however. The evolutionary model for the crystallization of the epics outlined here by Nagy offers a flexible but historically grounded framework for understanding the multiformity of the texts of the Iliad and Odyssey that have come down to us (in the form of ancient quotations, papyri, and manuscripts). As Albert Lord first noted, the word multiform differs from variant in that it does not assume an original from which all other texts vary (Lord Reference Lord and Lord1995, 23; see also Lord [1960] Reference Lord2000, 100). So too do the essays in this volume embrace the richness and the complexity of the epic tradition through time and within the context of the diverse world of myth and song by which they were shaped.
