In Search of the Trojan War (19 page)

The passage from Josephus quoted above was used by early modern scholars who concluded that, no matter how old the manuscripts, it would be impossible to hope for a sound text of an author who had composed orally perhaps centuries before he was ‘collected’ and put down in writing. Early scholars generally followed the tradition found first in the Roman writer Cicero that Homer had only been written down in
c
.550 BC at the command of the Athenian tyrant Pisistratus. The first modern attempt to set Homer in his culture was that of the philosopher Vico, who maintained that Homer was really a collective name for the work of successive generations of poets who made up the oral tradition. The
Iliad
, then, would be a ‘collective’ work only set down in writing by the Pisistratids in the sixth century; there were, in short, many Homers. Vico’s brilliant theory anticipated much of modern research, but at the time he had no influence. Instead it was the Anglo-Irish traveller Robert Wood, whom we met in the search for Troy, who was the first to argue critically for Homer’s orality in his
Essay on the Original Genius of Homer
of 1769. Among the languages into which Wood’s book was translated was German, and in Germany it had its profoundest influence. Indeed it was instrumental in provoking what is widely regarded as the greatest of all books on Homer, F. A. Wolf’s
Prolegomena
. Wolf wrote in 1795, with the advantage of the recent (1788) publication of the greatest of all manuscripts of the
Iliad
, the Venetus A, which, though of the tenth century AD, is packed with the marginal notes of centuries of commentators,
going back to the Alexandrian criticism of the third century BC. Wolf was convinced that Homer had been illiterate, that he had composed around 950 BC, and that his poems were transmitted by memory until, around 550 BC, they were committed to writing by Pisistratus. He was, however, also prepared to believe in a real Homer, a single poet of genius who ‘began the weaving of the web’ and, he wrote in his
Preface to the
Iliad,

carried the threads down to a certain point. … Perhaps it will never be possible to show – even with probability – the precise points at which new threads in the weave begin: but if I am not mistaken we can say that Homer was responsible for a major part of the songs, the remainder the Homeridae who followed the lines laid down by him.

After Wolf, there was a tendency to ‘disintegrate’ the text of Homer into a mass of interpolations and shorter oral poems grafted on to a primitive ‘original
Iliad
’ by later poets and editors. Some, though, still emphasised the ‘single poet’ idea: Goethe, for instance, wrote a short treatise on the unity of the Homeric poems, a view, incidentally, strongly held at the present time. But Wolf stated all the problems with a clarity and tact which have not been bettered, and it would be misleading to suggest that an answer has yet been reached.

In the two centuries since Wolf wrote, three major discoveries have been made which have had a fundamental influence on the Homeric question. Two we have already met. The first was the rise of scientific archaeology, and the opportunity it offered to discover a ‘real’ Bronze Age underneath the Homeric poems. This we have seen as the driving force of Schliemann’s obsession with Homer and Troy. And indeed this bore rapid fruits in the discovery that Homer did indeed describe artefacts from the Bronze Age: at Mycenae Schliemann himself was soon looking at representations of boar’s-tusk helmets and tower shields, and handling silver-studded swords: a ‘real’ connection seemed to be demonstrated. Soon enough the palace at Tiryns presented an image of a Bronze-Age royal establishment
which again bore clear similarities to the Homeric megaron (
see here
). Archaeology was also suggesting that the places Homer mentioned as being important in the Bronze Age were indeed so, even if insignificant afterwards. The decisive discovery was Dörpfeld’s unearthing of the Mycenaean-period citadel on Hisarlik, since this suggested for the first time that the central tale of the
Iliad
was indeed based on a real Bronze-Age place and real events. Archaeology has continued to build on these impressions over the last century, impressions both tantalisingly evocative of Homer and at other points utterly divergent. But the assumption of a strong connection remains, and given a degree of critical scepticism seems justified.

The second discovery was largely the work of Milman Parry and his follower Albert Lord, who were able to prove that oral transmission lies behind Homer’s text, thus supporting the argument of Josephus, and of scholars up to Wolf, that this text was composed without writing. The way in which oral poets work, the nature of formulaic composition, has been examined in many cultures and field workers have recorded comparable material in a number of countries, as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. The lines of this are clear, and some of the important publications are listed in the bibliography.

The third and most recent revolution in Homeric scholarship was the discovery that the Linear B tablets were in Greek, and that therefore there was a cultural and linguistic continuity between Homer and the Bronze Age. Parry’s discoveries about oral techniques could now be applied to the transmission of the epic through the Dark Ages up to the time when writing began again in Greece (the first monumental inscriptions appear a little before 700 BC). Moreover it was now possible to look at the continuity of the language in detail, to study dialect change and to see, for instance, how many of Homer’s words appear in Linear B Greek, how many actual phrases there are in which Homer is describing Bronze-Age artefacts with Mycenaean words, or where the subject is accurately described even though the older language has dropped out. Much work needs to be done on this: for instance,
no work has yet been done on Mycenaean Greek words existing in inferior texts of Homer which were dropped out of the main tradition by later editors, though they may actually have greater authority. The decipherment of Linear B has opened up possibilities for Homeric studies which are only just starting to be explored.

WHEN WAS THE
ILIAD
COMPOSED?

The general opinion today about the
Iliad
(and the
Odyssey
too) is that they were composed not orally, but by a poet building on oral tradition though using writing. In the eyes of many people, the introduction of writing into Greece was in some way tied up with Homer’s genius: it has even been suggested that the Greek alphabet was actually devised to write down the Homeric poems in
c
.700 BC. There are obvious objections to this idea. First, the writing of these two immense poems in a predominantly oral culture at the very moment of the introduction of writing goes against all we know of such processes in history; this is not how the introduction of ‘communications technology’ works in relation to creative art, whether in the transition from preliterate to literate culture, from writing culture to print, or (to point to our own time) from print to electronic systems. It is difficult to imagine that such a mammoth and expensive task as recording (on papyrus or parchment?) such lengthy poems could have been undertaken when society – and, more important, the poet’s audience – was still to all intents and purposes illiterate. This idea is based on the idea that Homer’s originality was such that he
foresaw
the importance of writing. In fact, as we know now, the poem’s language and style point to oral composition. There is nothing in either poem, however long and sophisticated they are, which exceeds what we now know of oral composition. Homer then could have composed orally, but his work may have been recorded in writing considerably later.

On this scenario the earliest time of recording would be around 650 BC, when writing was developed in Greece. But the oral epic tradition was still thriving in the fifth century BC, so oral
‘composition’ of the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
as late as the sixth century BC is not impossible. In fact, as we have seen, there existed in antiquity a tradition that the Homeric poems had been collected and given their final form in Athens during the reign of Pisistratus, one of the last of the Athenian tyrants, in the sixth century. The history of the texts could go something like this.

Once upon a time there was a famous oral poet whose name was Homer. He came from the world of the Ionian Greek colonies, perhaps from Chios or Smyrna, and it is thought that he may have composed around 730 BC. For some reason, perhaps because he was the best, he came to be regarded as the embodiment of oral epic poetry as such, and the most famous later group of singers considered themselves to be his descendants; these were the so-called Homeridae, the ‘sons of Homer’, on Chios. Homer lived perhaps in the eighth century BC, by which time the tale of Troy was evidently widely told in Aegean courts, for we find potentates naming themselves after its heroes: Hector of Chios, Agamemnon of Kyme. Perhaps their courts were where Homer found his patrons and sang his songs, along with the festivals of the Ionian cities, especially the Panionion at Mykale. Such was Homer’s impact that later generations came to consider much of the early epic poetry as his, and much of it may have been handed down, taking care to preserve the words ‘as Homer sang them’. Then, during the expansion of sixth-century Athens, a tyrant with political ambitions wished to turn the local festival to the goddess Athena into one with a more ‘national’ appeal. A magnificent temple of Athena was built on the acropolis (predecessor of the surviving Parthenon), public festivals were promoted, and among other activities recitals of epic and historical poems were arranged to glorify the Athenian state. At this time, as he sought the leadership of Greece for Athens, he conceived the idea of securing for Athens what were unanimously viewed as the most magnificent of the traditional Greek epics, especially the
Iliad
, which told of the first undertaking by a united Hellas. He therefore paid for the best of the Homeridae to come to Athens to dictate Homer as ‘truly’, as fully and as beautifully as possible to an Athenian scribe.

The
Iliad
text which lies behind the one we know could have been recorded from a bard so late on, then; but even if this specific scenario be rejected we should probably look after 650 BC. Such collection and writing down of the ancient songs usually takes its impetus from the outside, and often comes at times when writing is beginning to be more widely used. An obvious parallel is Charlemagne’s collection and recording of the old oral vernacular epics of the Frankish and Germanic peoples following his reforms in writing and literacy in eighth-century-AD Europe. Today, in the early twenty-first century, as oral traditions are all but dead in industrialised countries, we ourselves are attempting to do something similar. Homer then, we may guess, was recorded by a ‘collector’, if posthumously.

We began with the premise of Josephus that these poems were created when writing was unknown in Greece. As mentioned earlier, when modern studies of Homer began, Robert Wood and F.A. Wolf agreed that Homer had not known writing, and Wolf concluded that Homer’s original was irretrievably lost. The oral-formulaic views of Milman Parry and his school, by analogy with Yugoslav bards, were in many ways a return to Wolf’s point of view. In recent years we have had to combine the ‘oral’ view with the idea that it was Homer’s originality to see the way his great work could be preserved by writing, in other words that Homer composed at an important cultural moment, just as writing was introduced into Greece: thus the ‘great man’ theory of literary creation found its advocates. Today, our interpretation presents a synthesis of all these views: poems perhaps ‘composed’ only in the seventh or sixth century BC – specifically to be written down – but poems which carefully preserved more ancient strata handed down in the oral poetic traditions of Ionia. We may therefore say that, because of the oral nature of the poems, we have the ‘originals’ fairly closely; that is, the poems recorded in 650–550 BC. What relation they have to Homer, if he existed, is no longer so easy to prove, but it seems likely that the Homeridae of the sixth century BC could give a reasonably close account of stories already
formulated in the eighth century BC. But like all oral poets they selected, omitted and innovated to suit the occasion and the patron, singing their poems in the form most pleasing to the audience at hand. Later editors certainly played their part in altering the text after the sixth century BC; the most influential period was the third century BC, when the Alexandrian school of critics tried to establish a definitive text. An interesting case is their alteration made at the start of Book Six where a line ‘in the ancient books’ about fighting ‘between the river Scamander and the
stomalimne
’ was changed to ‘between the waters of Xanthos and Simois’ by Aristarchos because it did not fit the topography of the Troad in his own day. Some passages were condemned simply for their ‘low tone’; many other words have evidently dropped out of the transmission because they were no longer understood, though this must have gone on long before the poems were committed to writing.

WAS THERE MYCENAEAN EPIC POETRY?

From what tradition of poetry did Homer ultimately derive? Was there oral epic in Mycenaean times which has come down, however dimly, in Homeric epic? Was the tale of Troy itself already sung in Mycenaean citadels before their world collapsed? The Linear B tablets, of course, are the very antithesis of poetry in their bureaucratic notations. But there were certainly singers of songs or tales, for one of the Pylos frescoes showed a lyre player or bard, and fragments of a lyre were found in a tholos tomb at Menidi. It is, on the face of it, likely that there was actual epic poetry celebrating the deeds of the Mycenaean kings which came down to us in Homer, and this is assumed now by many scholars. Certainly themes like those in the
Iliad
and other Greek myths are commonly found in the poetry of many contemporary Bronze-Age peoples, especially in Ugarit, the great trading city in northern Syria, where the epic of
Krt
is another tale of abduction of a royal woman and the siege of a city.