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This summary is the bare bones of an epic poem that consists in the original Greek of 15,693 lines of hexameter verse, composed-probably in the late eighth or early seventh century R.c.-by a poet known to later ages as Homer, for whose life and activity no trustworthy information has come down to us. The poem, in other words, is some 2,700 years old. How, the reader may well ask, did it survive through such an expanse of time? By whom, for whom, and how and in what circumstances was it composed? Perhaps the best way to proceed to an exploration of these questions (no one can promise a complete and certain answer) is backward-from the text of this book. It is a translation, by Robert Pagles. of the Greek text edited by David Monro and Thomas Alien, first published in 1902 by the Oxford University Press. This two-volume edition is printed in a Greek type, complete with lower- and uppercase letters, breathings and accents, which is based on the elegant handwriting of Richard Porson, an earlynineteenth-century scholar of great brilliance, who was also an incurable alcoholic as well as a great wit. This was of course not the first font of Greek type; in fact, the first printed edition of Homer, issued in Florence in 1488, was composed in type that imitated contemporary Greek handwriting, with all its complicated ligatures and abbreviations. Early printers tried to make their books look like handwritten manuscripts because in scholarly circles printed books were regarded as vulgar and inferior products-cheap paperbacks, so to speak. Back to 1488, then, there is a continuous history of the printed text of Homer, differing a little from one editor to another but essentially fixed. Before that Homer existed only as a handwritten book. Such handwritten copies had been in circulation in Italy for a hundred years or so before the first printed edition. Petrarch had tried to learn Greek but gave up; Boccaccio succeeded and also in 1360 had a chair of Greek founded in Florence. But before Petrarch, Dante, though he put Homer in his limbo of non-Christian poets, had never read him, and could not have read him even if he had seen a text. For the best part of a thousand years, since the end of the Roman Empire, the knowledge of Greek had been lost in Western Europe. In the fourteenth century it was reintro- 6 HO,'vIER: THE ILIAD duced into Italy from Byzantium. where a Greek-speaking Christian empire had maintained itself ever since Constantine made the city the capital of the eastern half of the Roman Empire. The knowledge of Greek and the manuscripts of the Greek classics, Homer included, came to Italy just in time; in May 1453 Byzantium fell to the Ottoman Turks, and the Greek empire of the East came to the end of its thousand-year career. During its long life it had carefully preserved, copied and recopied a select number of the Greek masterpieces of pre-Christian times, Homer prominent among them. The immediate predecessors of the printed edition of Florence were bound manuscript books written on vellum or on paper in a cursive minuscule script complete with accents and breathings. These books were the final phase of the process of copying by hand that went all the way back to the ancient world. In the ninth century the new minuscule handwriting had been adopted; since it separated words, it was easier to read than its predecessor. a hand consisting of freestanding capital letters without word division-the standard writing of the ancient world. In the second to fifth centuries A.D., the form and material of the books had changed: parchment with its longer life had replaced papyrus, and the codex form, our book form-folded quires of paper sewn at the back-had replaced the roll. In the ancient world the Iliad consisted of a number of papyrus rolls, the text written in columns on the inside surface. The rolls could not be too big (or they would break when opened for reading); a long poem like the Iliadmight require as many as twenty-four-in fact it is possible the so-called books of our text represent an original division into papyrus rolls. In this form the poem was known to the scholars who edited it and wrote commentaries on it in Alexandria, the city founded by Alexander before he set out on his epic march to India in the late fourth century B.C. And it was in this form (though, before the Alexandrian scholars made a standard edition, with many variations from one text to another) that copies were to be found all over the Greek world of the fourth and fifth centuries s.c. There must have been texts in circulation in the sixth century too, for we hear of official recitations at Athens and find echoes of Homer in sixth-century poets. In the seventh century a.c.. we are moving back into the dark. In the poets of this century (whose work survives only in fragments) there are epithets, phrases and even halflines that are also common in Homer. Though these poets-Tyrtaeus, Callinus. Alcman and Archilochus-may be using tags common to a general epic tradition, it seems more likely that these echoes betray acquaintance with the work we know as Homer's. There is also a vase, discovered on the island of Ischia, off the coast of Naples, and dated to INTRODUCTION 7 before 700 B.C., which has an inscription that seems to refer to the famous cup of Nestor described in our Iliad (11.745-53). And echoes in an are also found in the early seventh century-illustrations of scenes from the Odyssey, for example, on vases dated in the 670s. But back beyond about 700 B.C. we cannot go. Evidence for this period is rare; in fact we know very little about Greece in the eighth century, still less, if possible, about Greece in the ninth. All we have is the archaeological record-geometric pots, graves, some weapons. It is the era of Greek history known, because of our almost total Ignorance about it, as the Dark Age. All we have is the tradition, what the Greeks of historical times believed they knew about Homer. Herodotus believed that he lived four hundred years, not more, before his own time; that would put him in the ninth century. The great Homeric scholar Aristarchus of Alexandria believed that he lived about 140 years after the Trojan War; since the Trojan War was generally dated (in our terms) around 1200 B.C., Aristarchus' Homer was much earlier than the Homer of Herodotus. Men might disagree about his date, but everyone believed that he was blind, and though some thought he came from Chios (a so-called Homeric hymn mentions a blind singer from Chios], others traced his origin to Smyma. It was also generally assumed that Homer, though he speaks of singing and probably did sing in performance, was a poet using the same means of composition as his fifth-century successors-that is, writing. Even those who thought that his poems were not combined into their present shape until long after his death (that, for example, the last pan of the Odyssey is a later addition), even those who believed that different poets wrote the Iliadand the Odyssey, the so-called Separatistseveryone assumed that Homer was a poet composing as all poets since have done:' with the aid of writing. And so did all succeeding centuries down to the eighteenth. Pope, whose translation of the Iliad is the finest ever made, speaks of Homer as if he were a poet like Milton or Shakespeare or himself. "HOMER," so begins his Preface, "is universally allow'd to have had the greatest Invention of any Writer whatever ... " Homer. it is taken for granted, wrote. There had been one skeptic in the ancient world who thought differently. He was not a Greek but a Jew, Joseph ben Matthias. He wrote in Greek (for which, as he admits, he had a little help) a history of the Jewish rebellion against Roman rule in the first century A.D. and its savage repression by the emperor Titus-events in which he had played a prominent role. But he also wrote a pamphlet, countering the claim of a Greek writer, Apion, that the Jews had no history to speak of, since 8 HOMER: THE ILIAD they were hardly mentioned in the works of Greek historians. Besides defending the historicity of the Old Testament chronicles, Josephus (to give him his Greek name) counterattacked by pointing out that the Greeks did not learn to write until very late in their history. The heroes of the Trojan War were "ignorant of the present-day mode of writing," he said, and even Homer "did not leave his poems in writing"; his separate songs were "transmitted by memory" and "not unified until much later." It is true that (with one remarkable exception, which is discussed later) no one in the Iliad-or, for that matter, the Odyssey-knows how to read or write. The Mycenaean scribeshad used the complicated Linear B syllabary-eighty-seven signs for different combinations of consonant and vowel. It was a system only professional scribes could handle; in any case, all memory ofit was lost with the destruction of the Mycenaean centers in the twelfth century B.C. The Greeks did not learn to write again until much later. This time, they took over an alphabet of fewer than twenty-five letters from the Phoenicians, a Semitic people whose merchant ships, sailing from their cities Tyre and Sidon on the Palestinian coast, reached every island and harbor ofthe Mediterranean Sea. The Phoenician alphabet consisted of signs for consonants only. The Greeks appropriated their symbols (Alpha and Beta are meaningless words in Greek, but their Phoenician equivalents, Aleph and Beth, mean "ox" and "house"), but by assigning some of the letters to the vowels, they created the first efficient alphabet, a letter system that provided one, and only one, sign for each sound in the language. Just when this creative adaptation took place is a subject of scholarly disagreement. Some of the letter shapes of the earliest Greek inscriptions look as if they had been copied from Phoenician scripts that date from as far back as the twelfth century. On the other hand, the earliest examples of Greek alphabetic writing, scratched or painted on broken pottery and found all over the Greek world from Rhodes in the east to Ischia off the coast of Naples in the west, are dated, by their archaeological contexts, to the last half of the eighth century B.C. But it was not until the eighteenth century that the possibility of Homeric illiteracy was once again proposed. The English traveler Robert Wood, in his Essay on the Original Genius of Homer (1769), suggested that Homer had been as illiterate as his own Achilles and Odysseus. The German scholar F. A. Wolf elaborated the theory in a learned discourse entitled Prolegomena ad Homerum, and the Homeric Question was launched on its long and complicated career. For if Homer was illiterate, Wolf declared, he could not possibly have composed poems as long as INTRODUCTION 9 the Iliad and Odyssey; he must have left behind him shorter, ballad-like poems which, preserved by memory, were later (much later. in Wolf's opinion) put together in something like the form we now possess. Wolf's thesis was almost universally accepted as soon as published. It came at the right time. Almost a century before this, the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico had claimed that the Homeric poems were not the creation of one man but of the whole Greek people. The spirit of the age now sought to find works of untutored genius, songs and ballads, the expression of a people's communal imagination-a contrast to the artificial culture and literature of the Age of Reason. The Romantic rebellion was at hand. Everywhere in Europe scholars began to collect. record and edit popular song, ballad, epic-the German Nibelunqenlied, the Finnish Kalevala, Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. And this was the age that saw the popularity, especially in Germany and France, of a forged collective bardic epic: the story of Ossian. a Gaelic hero, translated from the original Gaelic and collected in the Highlands by James Macpherson. In spite of the fact that Macpherson was never able to produce the originals, "Ossian" was admired by Goethe and Schiller; it was the favorite book of Napoleon Bonaparte. They should have listened to Samuel Johnson, who called the book "as gross an imposition as ever the world was troubled with." In such an atmosphere of enthusiasm for folk poetry the discovery of a primitive Homer was more than welcome. And scholars, convinced that the Iliadand Odyssey consisted of ancient shorter poems which had been sewn together by later compilers and editors, now addressed with enthusiasm the task of deconstruction, of picking out the stitches and isolating the original "lays" or "ballads" in their primitive, pure beauty. The exercise continued throughout the whole of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. It continued because of course no two scholars could agree about how to take the poems apart. This was understandable, since the criteria they were using-inconsistency of character, imbalance of structure, irrelevance of theme or incident, clumsiness of transition-are notoriously subjective. At first the affair was a free-for-all; it seemed almost as if there were a competition to see who could find the greatest number of separate ballads. Karl Lachrnann, in the mid-nineteenth century, after claiming that the newly discovered Nibelunqenlied was a mosaic of short ballads (a theory now believed by no one), went on to divide the Iliad into eighteen original heroic songs. A similar theory of the origin of the Chanson de Roland was popular at about the same time. The idea was not as impossible as it now sounds; in fact, a contemporary of Lachmann, ID HOMER: THE ILIAD the Finnish scholar and poet Lonnrot, collected Finnish ballads on his travels as a country doctor in the most backward parts of the country and put them together to form the great Finnish epic, the Kalevala, a poem that has ever since been the foundation of the Finnish national consciousness. But Lachmann's analytical methods produced no agreement, only scholarly squabbles, conducted with the customary venom, about how long the pieces should be and exactly where to use the knife. A different approach to the problem was to claim that there was one original. fairly long poem. The Wrath of Achilles, not too long to have been composed orally and transmitted by memory, and that over the centuries additions were made-a theory of accretion. The most convincing champion of this theory was the English Liberal banker and historian George Grote. whose great History of Greece is still a classic in the field. He announced firmly that no history in the modern sense of the word could be written for Greece before the middle of the eighth century-there was no evidence. But since what the Greeks believed about those dark ages was all-important for their later ideas and actions, he devoted the first twenty-one chapters of his ten-volume work (published in 1846) to what he calls "Legendary Greece." And he there proposed that the original core of the Iliad was a short "Wrath of Achilles" containing what we now know as Books I, 8 and 11 to 22 of the poem. In this short Iliad, he claimed, "the series of events is more rapid, more unbroken and more intimately knit together in the way of cause and effect than in the other books." Grote's original Iliad-UrIlias as the Germans soon began to call it-is very different from ours. It contains the quarrel between the chieftains (Book I), the rout of the Greeks and Zeus's warning to the gods not to interfere (Book 8), the Trojan attack on the ships, the death of Patroclus, the reentry of Achilles into the fighting, the death of Hector. And there it stops. No meeting of Hector and Andromache at the Scaean Gates (Book 6), no embassy to Achilles (Book 9), no journey of Priam to ransom Hector's body (Book 24). A harsher, more savage poem; the humane touches, said Grote, belong to a later, more civilized age. This theory too could not be summarily dismissed; it seems likely that this is precisely how the great French medieval epic, the Chanson de Roland, had grown to its present size-from an original song commemorating the death of impetuous Roland and wise Oliver in a rearguard engagement at Roncevalles,fighting the Mohammedan infidels, to a vast epic which, reaching its final form at the end of the twelfth century, reflected the spirit of the Crusades. The nineteenth century was the age that saw the birth of the scientific historical spirit. And also of the history of language-the discipline of INTRODUCTION II linguistics. All this had a bearing on the problem. If in fact some sections of the Iliadwere older than others, they should contain linguistic features characteristic of an earlier stage of the language than that to be found in the more recent additions. Similarly, the later parts of the poem should contain allusions to customs, laws, objects and ideas belonging to the later historical period and vice-versa. Toward the end of the century a fresh criterion emerged for gauging the antiquity of different sections of the poem-the archaeological criterion. For with Heinrich Schliemann's excavations at Troy and Mycenae, and those of Sir Arthur Evans at Cnossos. a previously unknown civilization was revealed. If there was any historicity to Homer's account of the Achaean world which organized the attack on Troy, it must be a reference to this wOrld-a world of gold masks, bronze weapons, palaces and fortifications-not to the archaeologically poverty-stricken Greece of the Dark Age. Now, by finding in Homer descriptions of objects that corresponded to something excavated from a Bronze Age site, the scholar could date a passage, because it was clear that with the destruction of the Mycenaean and Minoan palaces, all memory of that age had disappeared in Greece. Schliemann and Evans had discovered things Herodotus and Thucydides had no idea of. Of these three approaches, the linguistic seemed the most promising, the most likely to yield objective criteria. Studies of the origins of Greek in the Indo-European family of languages had progressed along generally agreed and scientific lines: the history of the Greek language and the Greek dialects had become an exact discipline. Surely the linguistic analysis of the text would confirm or refute theories of earlier and later strata in the poems. The language of Homer is of course a problem in itself. One thing is certain: it is not a language that anyone ever spoke. It is an artificial, poetic language-as the German scholar Witte puts it: "The language of the Homeric poems is a creation of epic verse." It was also a difficult language. For the Greeks of the great age, that fifth century we inevitably think of when we say "the Greeks," the idiom of Homer was far from limpid (they had to learn the meaning of long lists of obscure words at school), and it was brimful of archaisms-of vocabulary, syntax and grammar-and of incongruities: words and forms drawn from different dialects and different stages of the growth of the language. In fact, the language of Homer was one nobody, except epic bards, oracular priests or literary parodists would dream of using. This does not mean that Homer was a poet known only to scholars and schoolboys; on the contrary the Homeric epics were familiar as 12 II11MEI< r u a ILIAD household words in the mouths of ordinary Greeks. They maintained their hold Oil the tongues and imaginations of the Greeks by their superb literary quality-the simplicity. speed and directness 01 the narrative technique, the brilliance and excitement of the action. the greatness and imposing humanity of the characters-and by the fact that they presented the Greek people. in memorable form. with the images of their gods and the ethical. political and practical wisdom of their cultural tradition. Homer was thus at once contemporary in content and antique in form. The texture of Homeric epic was for the classic age of Greece like that of the Elgin Marbles for us-weathered by time but speaking 10 us directly: august. authoritative. inimitable. a vision of life fixed forever in forms that seem to have been molded by gods rather than men. The language of Homer is the "creation of epic verse" in a strict sense too: it is created, adapted and shaped to fit the epic meter. the hexameter. This is a line, as its name indicates, of six metrical units, which may, to put it crudely, be either dactyls (a long plus two shorts) or spondees (two longs) in the first four places but must be dactyl and spondee in that order in the last two (rarely spondee and spondee, never spondee followed by dactyl). The syllables are literally long and short; the meter is based on pronunciation time, not, as in our language, on stress. But unlike most English verse, the meter does not allow departures from the basic norms-such phenomena as the Shakespearean variations on the basic blank verse line, still less the subtleties of Eliot's prosody in The Waste Land. Yet though it is always metrically regular, it never becomes monotonous; its internal variety guarantees that. This regularity imposed on variety is Homer's great metrical secret. the strongest weapon in his poetic arsenal. The long line, which no matter how it varies in the opening and middle always ends in the same way, builds up its hypnotic effect in book after book, imposing on things and men and gods the same pattern, presenting in a rhythmic microcosm the wandering course to a fixed end which is the pattern of the rage of Achilles and the travels of Odysseus. of all natural phenomena and all human destinies. The meter itselfdemands a special vocabulary, for many combinations of long and short syllables that are common in the spoken language cannot be admitted to the line-any word with three consecutive short syllables, for example, any word with one short syllable between two longs. This difficulty was met by choosing freely among the many variations of pronunciation and prosody afforded by Greek dialectal differences; the epic language is a mixture of dialects. Under a light patina INTRODUCTION 13 of Attic forms (easily removable and clearly due to the preeminence of Athens as a literary center and then of the book trade) there is an indissoluble mixture of two different dialects, Aeolic and Ionic. But the attempts of the linguists to use this criterion for early (Aeolic) and late (Ionic) ran into the dilemma that Aeolic and Ionic forms sometimes appear inextricably tangled in the same line or half-line. Much was hoped from the use of the digamma as a criterion. This was a letter, representing the sound we represent by w, that disappeared from the Greek alphabet early on, as the consonant ceased to be'sounded in the spoken language. Unfortunately, in many cases the relative dates assigned to passages on this basis conflicted with the data suggested by other criteria. In a passage in Book 23, for example, the meter shows that the word ergon was pronounced in its older form, (w)er,qon (it means "work" and in fact is from the same Indo-European root as our word). This would indicate that the account of the funeral games of Patroclus in Book 23 is one of the oldest parts of the poem. In Book 14 there is a passage that contains the same word, but this time the presence of the digamma would disrupt the meter: Book 14 then must be late. But this runs counter to Grote's theory; for him, Book 23 is part of the late addition and Book 14 is very old, part of the "original" Iliad. This example is one among many; Homer uses or discards the digamma at will. There is no way of isolating different strata on this basis. The attempts to dissect the l/iad along historical lines were no more satisfactory (except of course to their authors). There are indeed passages which seem to imply different historical backgrounds, but they are not passages that are identifiable as early or late by the criteria of linguistic difference or structural analysis. All through the poems, for example, the weapons and arms of the heroes are bronze; this was the Bronze Age. Iron is mentioned but as a precious metal (as one would expect during the early years of its appearance on the scene); in Book 23 a piece of iron is offered by Achilles as a prize for the weight-throwing contest. Yet in the fourth book the Trojan archer Pandarus has an iron arrowhead, mentioned quite casually as if that were normal. Arrowheads are not things you expect to get back once you have shot themthey are, to use a military cliche, expendable. In this passage iron is obviously cheap. Book 4 also presents us with a simile in which a man fellsa poplar tree with an iron ax; elsewhere we meet proverbial phrases like "heart hard as iron," which indicate complete familiarity with the metal. It certainly looks as if these are different historical layers, but once again, there is no way to extract them. Book 23 for example, which contains the reference to iron as a valuable rarity, is considered a late 14 110M~R: THE: ILIAD addition by the believersin an Ur-I1ias. And so with many other historical discrepancies-horseback riding only in Book 10 and in similes; twinhorse chariots in every battle except those of Books 8 and ) 1. where we find four-horse chariots; trumpets mentioned in similes but never employed in the action; fishing mentioned in similes, but none of the heroes ever eats fish (though they are encamped on the shore). Most of the shields are round but Ajax has a huge one like a tower. This sounds like the strange body-shield seen on some of the Mycenaean frescoes. Can Ajax be an older, Mycenaean component of the epic? Hardly, for Hector is described as having the same shield. Historical analysis, then, fails to account for the amalgam, and the high hopes aroused by archaeology soon faded too. There are not many objects in Homer that resemble anything discovered by the spade of the excavator. Two stand out. One is the cup of Nestor described in Book I1 (745-53), which has some resemblance to (and some differences from) a cup found at Mycenae by Schliemann. The other is a remarkable helmet: "a helmet made of leather / ... outside the gleaming teeth of a white-tusked boar / ran round and round in rows stitched neat and tight" (10.305-8). Such helmets, and artistic representations of them, have been found at Mycenaean sites, on Crete, at Mycenae, on Delos, but never in late archaeological contexts. Here there seems to be a genuine memory of the Bronze Age. But it is found in Book 10, the one book every so-called Analyst agrees must be a late addition to the original poem. It is not surprising, in view of such frustrating results, that by the beginning of the twentieth century, opinion had begun to swing away from analysis and to concentrate on the qualities of the poem itself, to stress the unity of the main action rather than the digressions and inconsistencies, above all to explore the elaborate correspondences of structure that often link scene to scene. The architecture of the poem is magnificent, and it strongly suggests the hand of one composer, but it is true that there is a certain roughness in the details of the execution. The poem does contain, in an indissoluble amalgam, material that seems linguistically and historically to span many centuries. And it does contain long digressions, and some disconcerting inconsistencies, some weaknesses of construction. What sort of poet composed it. and how did he work? The answer was supplied by an American scholar, whose name was Milman Parry. Parry, who came from California and was an assistant professor at Harvard when he was killed in a gun accident at an early age, did his most significant work in Paris; in fact. he wrote it in French. INTRODUCTION 15 It has only recently been translated, by his son, Adarn, who met an equally tragic end, also at an early age. Milman Parry's work was not appreciated or even fully understood until after his death; but once understood, it radically altered the terms of the problem. Parry's achievement was to prove that Homer was a master of and heir to a tradition of oral epic poetry that reached back over many generations, perhaps even centuries. He drew attention to the so-called ornamental epithets, those long high-sounding labels that accompany every appearance of a hero, a god, or even a familiar object. Agamernnon, for example, is "lord of men" or "wide-ruling," Achilles is "brilliant," "godlike" or "swift-footed," Apollo is "one who shoots from afar," the Achaeans are "strong-greaved" or "bronze-cloaked," Hera is "white-armed" and ships are "black," "round," "hollow" or "swift." These recurring epithets had of course been noticed before Parry, and their usefulness understood. They offer, for each god, hero or object, a choice of epithets, each one with a different metrical shape. In other words, the particular epithet chosen by the poet may have nothing to do with, for example, whether Achilles is "brilliant" or "SWift-footed" at this particular point in the poem-the choice depends on which epithet fits the meter. Parry pursued this insight of the German analytical scholars to its logical end and demonstrated that in fact there was an intricate system of metrical alternatives for the recurring names of heroes, gods and objects. It was a system that was economical-hardly any unnecessary aIternatives--but had great scope-there was a way to fit the names into the line in any of the usual grammatical forms they would assume. Parry demonstrated that the system was more extensive and highly organized than anyone had dreamed, and he also realized what it meant. It meant that this system had been developed by and for the use of oral poets who improvised. In Paris he met scholars who had studied such improvising illiterate bards still performing in Yugoslavia. He went there to study their operations himself. The Homeric epithets were created to meet the demands of the meter of Greek heroic poetry, the dactylic hexameter. They offer the improvising bard different ways of fitting the name of his god, hero or object into whatever section of the line is left after he has, so to speak, filled up the first half (that too, quite possibly, with another formulaic phrase). The Achaeans. for example-one of the names used for the Greeks, Achaioi-i-ete often "strong-greaved": ~ilknlmid~s Achaioi, a line ending. "Stay your ground, all of you strong-greaved Achaeans," says the prophet Calchas. encouraging the troops: all' d9~. mtmnne pdnt~s, ~u- 16 HOMER: THE ILIAD knemides Achaioi. Afew lines earlier, however, he has asked them, "Why have you fallen silent?": tipt' aneo egenesthe ... How will the bard finish this line? Euknemfdes Achdioi will fit the meter, for the two opening phrases are of the same metrical length. But it will produce a junction of two short open vowels: egenesthe euknbnides Achai6i, and this usually results in elision, the suppression of one of the two short vowelsegenesth' euknemides-an unacceptable metrical combination. The solution is simple. The Achaeans cease to be "strong-greaved" and become "long-haired't-e-a formula starting with a consonant, which avoids the hiatus: tipt' aneo egenesthe, kare komoontes Achai6i. The bard may also need to fit the Achaeans into a different part of the line and in a different grammatical case, In Book 7, for example, the gods watch the Greeks toil and suffer in the battle. "So they toiled ..."-hos hoimenponeonto- "the long-haired Achaeans"-kare komoontes Achaioi (not "stronggreaved"-that would have produced elision: poneant' euknemides). Two lines later, however, "the gods, seated by Zeus of the lightning bolt, watched the great labor"-mega ergan-"of the Achaeans": Achdiangenitive case. To fill the rest of this line the bard needs an epithet of the form - - - - -. The Achaeans can't be "strong-greaved" or "longhatred." then; they have to be "bronze-cloaked": chdlkochftonon. The choice of the epithet is dictated by the meter. Agamemnon is "shepherd of the people," "lord of men," "son of Atreus," "wide-ruling" or "brilliant" according to his grammatical case and his position in the line. So for Achilles and Zeus, Hera and Hector. As for ships, their position in the line and case determines whether they are "black," "round," "seagoing" or "well-benched." This system, obviously the product of invention, refinement and elimination of superfluities over generations, could only be the work of oral bards, and in fact similar phenomena, though infinitely less sophisticated, are found in oral poetry, living and dead, in other languages. There was more to it, of course, than handy epithets. Whole lines, once honed to perfection by the bards of the tradition, became part of the repertoire; they are especially noticeable in recurring passages like descriptions of sacrifice, of communal eating and drinking. Such passages give the oral singer time to concentrate on what is coming next, and if he is a creative oral poet to elaborate his own phrases mentally as he recites the formulas that he can sing without effort. He is helped, too, by the formulaic nature of whole themes, great type-scenes-the arming of the warrior for battle, the duels of the champions, the assembly of the warriors. These are traditional patterns which the audience expects and the bard may vary but not radically change. INTRODUCTION 17 There is one aspect of Parry's discovery, however. that changed the whole problem of the nature of our Homeric text. The oral bard who uses such formulaic language isnot, as scholars in the nineteenth century who struggled with the problem of illiterate bards all assumed, a poet reciting from memory a fixed text. He is improvising, along known lines, relying on a huge stock of formulaic phrases, lines and even whole scenes; but he is improvising. And every time he sings the poem, he does it differently. The outline remains the same but the text, the oral text, is flexible, The poem is new every time it is performed. If Homer's poetry is the culmination of a long tradition of such oral composition, many of the problems that bedeviled the Analysts are solved. Over the course of generations of trial and error, formulas are introduced and rejected or retained for their usefulness In improvisation, without regard to linguistic consistency or historical accuracy. The language of the poets becomes a repository of all the combinations that have proved useful. Small wonder that Aeolic and Ionic forms appear in the same line, that a Mycenaean boar-tusk helmet can turn up in a passage full of very late linguistic forms, that people sometimes give dowries and sometimes demand payment for their daughter's hand, that cremation and inhumation are practiced side by side. As each new generation of singers recreates the song, new formulas may be created. ew themes and scenes introduced; reflections of contemporary reality creep into descriptions of the fighting, especially into the similes. But the dedication of epic poetry to the past and the continuing usefulness of so much traditional phraseology will slow the process of modernization and produce the unhistorical amalgam of customs, objects and linguistic forms that we find in our Homeric text. It is the fate of most new and valuable insights to be enthusiastically developed beyond the limits of certainty, or even of probability, and Parry's demonstration that Homeric poetry had an oral base has not escaped that fate. Phrases, even whole lines, that are repeated often enough to qualify as formulaic are indeed characteristic of the poet's diction, but they do not account for more than a part of it-about one third of the whole. In an attempt to raise the formulaic element to a higher level. Parry counted as formulas expressions whose metrical pattern and position in the line were identical and which contained one word in common: for example, tiuchi erheke; alge' etheke; kudos ethek~ he "put" the arms, the sorrows, the glory on. Not content with this, Parry went on to suggest, hesitantly, the inclusion in the system ofsimilar expressions which, however, did not contain one word in common: doken hetairo, for example, and teuche kunessin-"he gave to his com- 18 HOMER: THE ILIAD rade." "he made [him prey) for the dogs." Some of Parry's followers have been less hesitant, and by this and other extensions ofthe meaning of "formula" have boosted the inherited content of Homer's verse to ninety percent. This of course leaves very little room for Homer as an individual creative poet. It seems in fact to be a return to the idea of Giambattista Vico: the poems are the creation of a people, of a tradition, of generations of nameless bards. But the argument for full formularity has feet of clay. A poet composing in a strict, demanding meter is bound to repeat svruactical combinations in identical positions and the stricter the meter, the higher the incidence of such repeated patterns. English has no meters as precisely demanding as Homer's, but Alexander Pope. to take an example, is rich in lines that by strict Parryite standards would qualify him as an illiterate bard. For example: The Smiles of Harlots. and the Tears of Heirs The Fate of Louis and the Fall of Rome Proclaim their Motions, and provoke the War Maintain thy Honours, and enlarge thy Fame The shining Helmet, and the pointed Spears The silver Token, and the circled Green Weak was his Pace, but dauntless was his Heart Lame are their Feet, and wrinkled is their Face Samuel Johnson, in fact, wrote a description of Pope's technique that has more than a little resemblance to Parry's conception of the oral poet. "By perpetual practice, language had in his mind a systematical arrangement; having always the same use for words, he had words so selected and combined as to be ready at his call." Extravagant claims for the predominance of formula in Homeric poetry have now been generally discounted, and even Parry's basic theses have been shown to need modification in the light of later examination. There are many cases, for example, where a truly fonnulaic epithet does in fact seem to be poetically functional in its context. There are cases where verbal repetition is so poetically effective that it must be the result of poetic design rather than the working of a quasi-mechanical system. Careful investigation of the type-scenes-the ceremony of sacrifice, the arming of the warrior, and so on-has revealed that although sometimes whole verses are repeated from one scene to another, no two scenes INTRODUCTION 19 are exactly similar. "Each occurrence," to quote a recent evaluation (Edwards, p. 72), "is unique, and often specifically adapted to its context." Even the basic concept of economy, the strict limitation of the epithets for one god or hero to those needed in different cases and positions, has been questioned: a recent study shows that in his analysis of the epithets for Achilles, Parry considered only the phrases containing the hero's name, ignoring other ways of identifying Achilles, such as "Peleus' son" (Shive. passim). All this, together with the monumental scale and the magnificent architecture of the Iliad. makes the image of Homer as an illiterate bard, totally dependent on ready-made formulas and stock scenes for improvised performance. hard to accept. There is nevertheless fairly general agreement that Parry was right in one thing: Homer's unique style does show clearly that he was heir to a long tradition of oral poetry. But there is one problem that Parry raised but did not solve: Homer mayor may not have been as illiterate as his forerunners, but at some time the Iliad and Odyssey were written down. When, by whom, for what purpose and in what circumstances was this done? The most likely date for the composition of the Iliad is the fifty years running from 725 to 675 B.C. That is also the time to which the earliest examples of Greek alphabetic writing can be dated. Did Homer take advantage of the new technique to record for future singers the huge poem he had composed without the aid of writing? Did writing perhaps play a role in its composition? To both these questions Parry's collaborator and successor, Albert Lord. gave an emphatically negative answer. "The two techniques are ... mutually exclusive ... It is conceivable that a man might be an oral poet in his younger years and a written poet later in life, but it is not possible that he be both an oral and a written poet at any given time in his career" (p. 129). Lord based this assertion on his experience with Yugoslav oral poets who, when they came into contact with literate urban societies, lost their gift for improvised recitation. He envisaged a Homer, an oral bard at the height of his powers, who dictated his poem to a scribe, one who had mastered the new art of writing. This was of course how the songs of the illiterate Yugoslav bards had been written down (sometimes with the aid of recording equipment sophisticated for its time) by Parry and Lord. This scenario did not satisfy everyone. The analogy with modem Yugoslavia, for example, was flawed. When the bards there learned to read and write, they were immediately exposed to the corrupting influence of newspapers, magazines and cheap fiction, but if Homer learned to write in the late eighth century; there was little or nothing for him 20 HOMER: TH E ILIAD to read, Lord's generalization about the incompatibility of the two techniques has been questioned by students-of oral poetry; in other parts of the world (particularly in Africa), they find no such dichotomy. "The basic point.', , is the continuity of oral and written literature. There is no deep gulf between the two: they shade into each other both in the present and over many centuries of historical development. and there are innumerable cases of poetry which has both 'oral' and 'written' elements" (Finnegan, p. 24), Furthermore, the extant specimens of alphabetic writing of the eighth and early seventh centuries H.C. make it hard to believe in a scribe of the period who could take dictation at or, for that matter, anywhere near performance speed: the letters are freestanding capitals, crudely and laboriously formed, written from right to left or from right to left and left to right on alternate lines. One critic, in fact, irreverently conjured up a picture of Homer dictating the first line (or rather the first half-line) of the Iliad: "Menin aeide thea , .. You got that?" A different scenario for the transition from oral performance to written text was developed by Geoffrey Kirk. The epics were the work of an oral "monumental composer," whose version imposed itselfon bards and audiences as the definitive version. They "then passed through at least a couple of generations of transmission by decadent and quasiliterate singers and rhapsodes" (Kirk, Commentary, I, 1985, p. xxv)- that is, performers who were not themselves poets. Lord's objection to this, that memorization plays no part in the living oral tradition. was based on Yugoslav experience, but elsewhere-in Somalia, for example-very long poems are recited from memory by professional reciters who are themselves, in many cases, poets. What neither of these theories explains, however, is the immense length of the poem. Why should an oral, illiterate poet, whose poetry exists only in its performance before an audience, create a poem so long that it would take several days to perform? For that matter, if his poetry existed only in performance, how could he c~ate a poem of such length? If, on the other hand, he delivered different sections of it at different times and places, how could he have elaborated the variations on theme and formula and the inner structural correspondences that distinguish the Homeric epics so sharply from the Yugoslav texts collected by Parry and Lord? It is not surprising that many recent scholars in the field have come to the conclusion that writing did indeed play a role in the creation of these extraordinary poems, that the phenomena characteristic of oral epic demonstrated by Parry and Lord are balanced by qualities peculiar INTRODUCTION 21 to literary composition. They envisage a highly creative oral poet master of the repertoire of inherited material and technique, who used the new instrument of writing to build, probably over the course of a lifetime, an epic poem on a scale beyond the imagination of his predecessors. The last half of the eighth century was the time in which writing was coming into use all over the Greek world. Homer must have known of its existence, but the traditional nature of his material naturally forbade its appearance in the relentlessly archaic world of his heroes, who belonged to the time when men were stronger, braver and greater than men are now, a world in which men and gods spoke face-to-race. Even so, Homer does show, in one particular instance, that he was conscious ofthe new technique. In Book 6 Glaucus tells the story of his grandfather Bellerophon. Proetus. king of Argos. sent him off with a message to the king of Lycia. Proetus' father-in-law; it instructed the king to kill the bearer. "[He] gave him tokens, I murderous signs, scratched in a folded tablet ... " (6.198-99). There has been much discussion about the nature of these signs but the word Homer uses-grapsas, literally "scratchtng'