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Starting in around 1928, Milman Parry and Albert Lord, after their studies of folk bards in the Balkans, developed the "Oral-Formulaic Theory" that the Homeric poems were originally composed through improvised oral performances, which relied on traditional epithets and poetic formulas. This theory found very wide scholarly acceptance and explained many previously puzzling features of the Homeric poems, including their unusually archaic language, their extensive use of stock epithets, and their other "repetitive" features. Many scholars concluded that the "Homeric question" had finally been answered.
The listeners must be sophoi ‘skilled’ in understanding the message encoded in the poetry. Britannica is the ultimate student resource for key school subjects like history, government, literature, and more. The dialect that The Iliad and The Odyssey are written in is considered Asiatic Greek, specifically Ionic. That fact, paired with frequent mentions of local phenomena such as strong winds blowing from the northwest from the direction of Thrace, suggests, scholars feel, a familiarity with that region that could only mean Homer came from there. Our summaries and analyses are written by experts, and your questions are answered by real teachers.
The Presence Of God And The Gods In Homer's Odyssey
In Homeric poetry, the making of poetry is itself an act of doing by way of speaking, and that act of doing is an act of performance . In Homeric poetry, the word for such a performative act is muthos, ancestor of the modern term myth. Homer is the first and greatest writer of the Greek literary form known as epic and so it's in his work that people look for information about the poetic form.
Scholars continue to debate questions such as whether the Trojan War actually took place – and if so when and where – and to what extent the society depicted by Homer is based on his own or one which was, even at the time of the poems' composition, known only as legends. The Homeric epics are largely set in the east and center of the Mediterranean, with some scattered references to Egypt, Ethiopia and other distant lands, in a warlike society that resembles that of the Greek world slightly before the hypothesized date of the poems' composition. In 1488, the Greek scholar Demetrios Chalkokondyles published the editio princeps of the Homeric poems.
Did Homer write the Odyssey?
So even some muthoi ‘myths’ retold by Pindar can be rejected as falsehoods in the process of retelling those myths. There is a comparable idea of pseudea ‘false things’ as told by the Muses in addition to the alēthea ‘true things’ they tell in the poetics of Hesiod (Theogony 27–28; PH 2§32). The oral traditional basis of Homeric poetry can be demonstrated by way of comparative as well as internal analysis. The decisive impetus for comparative research comes from the evidence of living oral traditions.
The Homeric epics are written in an artificial literary language or 'Kunstsprache' only used in epic hexameter poetry. Homeric Greek shows features of multiple regional Greek dialects and periods, but is fundamentally based on Ionic Greek, in keeping with the tradition that Homer was from Ionia. Linguistic analysis suggests that the Iliad was composed slightly before the Odyssey, and that Homeric formulae preserve older features than other parts of the poems. Most scholars now agree that the Homeric poems depict customs and elements of the material world that are derived from different periods of Greek history. For instance, the heroes in the poems use bronze weapons, characteristic of the Bronze Age in which the poems are set, rather than the later Iron Age during which they were composed; yet the same heroes are cremated rather than buried . Such helmets were not worn in Homer's time, but were commonly worn by aristocratic warriors between 1600 and 1150 BC.
The Life of the Blind Bard
The idea that the Homeric poems were originally transmitted orally and first written down during the reign of Peisistratos is referenced by the first-century BC Roman orator Cicero and is also referenced in a number of other surviving sources, including two ancient Lives of Homer. From around 150 BC, the texts of the Homeric poems seem to have become relatively established. After the establishment of the Library of Alexandria, Homeric scholars such as Zenodotus of Ephesus, Aristophanes of Byzantium and in particular Aristarchus of Samothrace helped establish a canonical text. Other scholars hold that, after the poems were created in the eighth century, they continued to be orally transmitted with considerable revision until they were written down in the sixth century. After textualisation, the poems were each divided into 24 rhapsodes, today referred to as books, and labelled by the letters of the Greek alphabet. Most scholars attribute the book divisions to the Hellenistic scholars of Alexandria, in Egypt.
It does not follow, however, that the myths conveyed by the poetry of Homer and Hesiod are consistently older than the myths conveyed by the poetry of lyric. In fact, the traditions of Greek lyric are in many ways older than the traditions of Greek epic, and the myths conveyed by epic are in many ways newer than the myths conveyed by lyric. The poems were composed in unrhymed dactylic hexameter; ancient Greek metre was quantity-based rather than stress-based. These habits aid the extemporizing bard, and are characteristic of oral poetry. For instance, the main words of a Homeric sentence are generally placed towards the beginning, whereas literate poets like Virgil or Milton use longer and more complicated syntactical structures.
So, for Odysseus to get his own kleos, which is the story of his homecoming to Ithaca in the Odyssey, he must get over the kleos of Achilles, which is the story of Troy in the Iliad. In other words, he must get on with his nostos, which is not only his homecoming to Ithaca but also the song about this homecoming. That is the essence of the master myth of the Odyssey (BA 1999 Preface §§16–18; 2§§10-18). As we see from such contrasts between lyric master myths that are seen and epic myths that are just heard, not all myths qualify as the truth in any single telling of myths.
So the hero Ajax misses the point when he accuses Achilles of loving Briseis more than he loves his comrades (IX 622–638). Achilles loves his would-be wife the same way that Meleager loves Kleopatra, but there is a deeper meaning to be found in that hero’s love for Kleopatra, and that deeper meaning has to do with the relevance of the name of Kleopatra to Achilles. What Achilles loves more than anything else in the whole world is what the name of Kleopatra means to Meleager – and what the name of his own nearest and dearest comrade Patroklos means to him. As we have seen, these two names Patrokleēs / Kleopatra both mean ‘the one who has the glory of the ancestors ’, and both these names amount to a periphrasis of the expression klea andrōn
For listeners of the Odyssey in the classical period of the fifth century BCE, this Ithaca of Odysseus was the island then known as Ithakē. In earlier periods, on the other hand, the Ithaca of Odysseus may well have been what is now the western peninsula of the island now known as Kefalonia. This peninsula, now known as Paliki, had once been an island west of Kefalonia , and such a prehistoric Ithaca would fit the Homeric description of the hero’s home as the westernmost of all the other islands nearby (Odyssey ix 25–26). Achilles is pictured as singing the klea andrōn ‘glories of heroes’ while accompanying himself on a lyre he plundered when he captured the native city of that greatest singer of lamentations in the Iliad, Andromache (IX 186–189). The kleos of Achilles is a form of song that dwells on the hatred and the fury, the love and the sorrow – and on the power of song in expressing all these intensely lyrical feelings.
The Greeks regarded the great epics as something more than works of literature; they knew much of them by heart, and they valued them not only as a symbol of Hellenic unity and heroism but also as an ancient source of moral and even practical instruction. Since then the proliferation of translations has helped to make them the most important poems of the Classical European tradition. Ancient Greece have always been attributed to the shadowy figure of Homer, little is known of him beyond the fact that his was the name attached in antiquity by the Greeks themselves to the poems.
The myths that Pindar’s song marks as ‘false’ have to do with things heard and not seen (Olympian 1.46–48). As I argue in the companion piece, “Lyric and Greek Myth,” such myths are ‘false’ not because they are myths but only because they are myths that differ from the master myth privileged by Pindar, and that master myth is notionally the only myth that can be ‘true’ at the moment of telling it. While the myths that are ‘false’ can merely be heard, details from the alternative myth that is ‘true’ can actually be visualized, that is, literally seen (Olympian 1.26–27). The epic failure of Ajax is a foil for the epic success of Odysseus, which is made possible by the poetic craft of Homer’s Odyssey. Just as the craftiness of Odysseus prevents Ajax from inheriting the armor of Achilles, so also the craft of Homer prevents Ajax from inheriting the epic status of being called ‘the best of the Achaeans’ after the death of Achilles. In the Odyssey, that epic status is earned by Odysseus through his own epic experiences after the death of Achilles (BA 2§§12–18).
The specific contents of each performance varied, but many popular stories were repeated in varying forms by the "rhapsodes" who specialized in reciting them. "myth" is another name for elements of oral tradition that refer to gods and heroes. Thus it is not really accurate to think ofhomeras using myths, but better to describe epic and myth as two aspects of ancient greek oral tradition. Each of these three features of the ainos is made explicit in the lyric poetry of Pindar, which as we have seen refers to itself as ainos (PH 6§§5–8). One of these features is also made explicit in the ainos narrated by Phoenix, that is, in the klea andrōn
The Greek epic poet credited with the enduring epic tales of The Iliad and The Odyssey is an enigma insofar as actual facts of his life go. Some scholars believe him to be one man; others think these iconic stories were created by a group. A variation on the group idea stems from the fact that storytelling was an oral tradition and Homer compiled the stories, then recited them to memory. The orally transmitted Homeric poems were put into written form at some point between the eighth and sixth centuries BC. Some scholars believe that they were dictated to a scribe by the poet and that our inherited versions of the Iliad and Odyssey were in origin orally-dictated texts.
Once muthoi ‘myths’ are delocalized, they become relative and thus multiple in application, to be contrasted with the alētheia ‘truth’ claimed by lyric, which is supposedly absolute and unique (PH 7§5n17). Phoenix is a hero in the epic of the Homeric Iliad, and this epic is a narrative about the distant heroic past – from the standpoint of listeners who live in a present tense devoid of contemporary heroes. But Phoenix here is narrating to listeners who live in that distant heroic past tense. And his narrative-within-a-narrative is about heroes who lived in an even more distant heroic past tense. In Homer's Iliad, the lead character is the quintessential Greek hero, Achilles.
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