Gregory Nagy, Homeric Questions

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Let us return to the subject of the earliest phases of Greek poetic inscriptions, starting with the eighth century B.C.E. For an ancient reader to read such inscriptions out loud is to participate passively in this fait accompli, in that the reader's voice is being lent to the speech-act which is in this case the very act of writing down the poetic utterance.¹ To repeat, the Greek poetic inscription in the earliest period, before 550 B.C.E., , is not conceived as a transcript of performance, of a short poem: it is rather conceived as a poem, because it is written down, and because this writing down is conceived as an authoritative equivalent to performance.² To read the inscription out loud is to become part of the performance that is the writing down: it is to hear the writing itself, not any live performance. The words of written inscriptions can therefore even be quoted in real live performance, as seems to be the case in the passage from the Iliad where Hektor is described as imagining the words that implicitly call out from what sounds like an imaginary epigram (Iliad VII 89-90).³

If indeed alphabetic writing was perceived as an equivalent to live performance already in the earliest stages of this technology in ancient Greece, and if indeed it continued to be so perceived down to 550 B.C.E., or so, then it is justifiable to doubt the hypothesis that writing had been used, in its earliest phases, as a medium for recording live performance. I would therefore wish to modify slightly the wording of the suggestion that "the alphabet developed specifically or largely in order to record hexameter poetry."⁴ To record epigraphical poetry: yes, maybe, but not necessarily to record epic poetry. Looking at the period before 550 B.C.E., , we may well ask: why would live epic poetry have to be recorded in the first place? The fact that Homeric poetry was meant to be performed live, and that it continued to be performed live through the Classical period and beyond, remains the primary historical given.⁵ So we are still left, I maintain, without any internal Greek evidence to prove that the technology of alphabetic writing, as it existed during its earliest phases in the Greek archaic period, was necessary for the performance of the Homeric poems any more than it was necessary for their composition.⁶

It is in this light that I offered, in my earlier work, a different solution to the historical problem of the Homeric text. My solution combined the comparative evidence about composition and performance in attested living oral poetic traditions with the internal evidence of ancient Greek testimony about the diffusion of Homeric poetry in the archaic period of Greece. The comparative evidence from living oral epic traditions, as we are about to see, helps corroborate the internal evidence about the ancient Greek circumstances of diffusion.

Before we proceed with comparing other epic traditions with those of ancient Greece, however, a few words of background are in order about the internal Greek evidence itself. I offer here a minimalist formulation of two basic concepts, "epic" and "Homer." For Classicists, the idea of "epic" is clear in its application, if not in its definition. Following the usage of authorities like Aristotle, Hellenists can easily distinguish the poetic art-form of ἐποποιία 'making of epic' (as at the beginning of Aristotle, Poetics 1447a13) from such other poetic art-forms as τραγωιδίας ποίησις 'making of tragedy' (ibid.). The application of Homer's name to the authorship of the Iliad and Odyssey, the prime examples of Greek epic, is also clear. True, the earliest attested references to Ὅμηρος attribute to him not only the Iliad and Odyssey but also the epics of the so-called Cycle, such as the Cypria and the Little Iliad.⁷ In fact, the very concept of κύκλος, usually translated as 'circle' or 'Cycle', stems from the ancient pre-Aristotelian tradition of applying the metaphor of cycle to the sum total of epic poetry, as if all of it were composed by Homer.⁸ By the time of Aristotle, however, the epics of the Cycle are conventionally assigned to distinct authors (Poetics 23.1459b1-7).⁹ Such eventual disruption in the semantics of the very concept of Cycle is not a matter of common knowledge among contemporary experts in Homer.

What made decisive the differentiating of the Iliad and Odyssey from all other epic poems was the influence exerted by the scholars at the Library of Alexandria, particularly by Zenodotus of Ephesus: "it was of the utmost importance for the whole future that [Zenodotus] ... accepted the differentiation between these two poems as Homeric and the rest of epic narrative poetry as non-Homeric."¹⁰ Though there were attempts to narrow down the Homeric corpus even further, as when scholars known as the "separators" or χωρίζοντες tried to separate the authorship of the Odyssey from that of the Iliad (Proclus p. 102.2-3 Allen), the Alexandrian verdict on Homer as the author of the Iliad and Odyssey held firm in the ancient world. The "Homeric Question," as reformulated in the Renaissance and thereafter, must be viewed against this background; so also the comparative insights pioneered by Parry and Lord.

The progressive restriction of what exactly in Greek epic is to be attributed to Homer can be connected with the historical process that I have just highlighted, to wit, the relatively early diffusion of the Iliad and Odyssey throughout the Greek-speaking world. In my earlier work, I adduced archaeological evidence, as assembled by Anthony Snodgrass, pointing towards a trend of pan-Hellenism that becomes especially pronounced in archaic Greece in the eighth century before our era and thereafter.¹¹ The epic tradition of Homer, as Snodgrass inferred from the early proliferation of the Iliad and Odyssey, was a reflex of this trend of pan-Hellenism.¹² I extended Snodgrass's concept of pan-Hellenism, setting it up "as a hermeneutic model to help explain the nature of Homeric poetry, in that one can envisage as aspects of a single process the ongoing recomposition and diffusion of the Iliad and Odyssey."¹³ I had called this model for the text-fixation of Homeric tradition "evolutionary," without intending any Darwinian implications about progressive superiority.¹⁴ According to this evolutionary model, as I have formulated it in my earlier work, the process of composition-in-performance, which is a matter of recomposition in each performance, can be expected to be directly affected by the degree of diffusion, that is, the extent to which a given tradition of composition has a chance to be performed in a varying spectrum of narrower or broader social frameworks.¹⁵ The wider the diffusion, I argued, the fewer opportunities for recomposition, so that the widest possible reception entails, teleologically, the strictest possible degree of adherence to a normative and unified version.¹⁶

I continue to describe as text-fixation or textualization the process whereby each composition-in-performance becomes progressively less changeable in the course of diffusion--with the proviso that we understand text here in a metaphorical sense.¹⁷ The fixity of such a "text," of course, does not necessarily mean that the process of composition-in-performance-let us continue to call it recomposition-has been stopped altogether. So long as the oral tradition is alive, some degree of ongoing recomposition is still possible in each performance, even if the tradition itself proclaims its own absolute fixity. A case in point is the so-called "Invocation of the Bagre," a "hymn" sung among the LoDagaa of Northern Ghana.¹⁸ It is clear that the expectation of both the audience and the reciters of the Bagre is that each performance be exactly like every other performance, but empirical observation shows that it is not. Reaching a size of up to 12,000 lines, the Bagre in fact exists in a variety of versions, and the differences among the versions can be considerable.¹⁹ In sum, the rate of retardation or acceleration of change in the process of composition-in-performance depends on the stage of evolution in which we happen to find any given living oral tradition.²⁰