Why Homer Matters (42 page)

Flinders Petrie found:
William M. Flinders Petrie,
Hawara, Biahmu, and Arsinoe
(London, 1889). Plate xix shows many of these objects.

“The floating sand”:
Ibid., chapter 5, on the papyri, written by Archibald Sayce, p. 39.

“The roll had belonged”:
Ibid., p. 35.

This Hawara Homer:
P. Hawara 24–28 (Bodleian Libr., Gr. Class. A.1 (P)).
Iliad
I.506–10, II.1–877, with many lacunae.
http://ipap.csad.ox.ac.uk/Hawara-bw/72dpi/Hawara_Homer%28viii%29.jpg
.

“the grandeur of the dooms”:
Keats,
Endymion
, book 1, 20–21.

Phaeacians:
A mythical people, not to be confused with the Phoenicians, an ancient civilization with its origins on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, in modern Lebanon and Syria.
Odyssey
IX.8–10.

“Homer is the greatest”:
Plato,
The Republic
, 607 a 2–5.

“Just as a poppy”: Iliad
VIII.306–8.

“to a place”:
Ibid., VIII.491.

In Troy itself:
The Venetus A scholia on this passage are analyzed by Graeme Bird in “Critical Signs—Drawing Attention to ‘Special' Lines of Homer's
Iliad
in the Manuscript Venetus A,” in
Recapturing a Homeric Legacy: Images and Insights from the Venetus A Manuscript of the Iliad
, ed. Casey Du
é
(Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2009), 112–14.

“dogs, carried by the fates”: Iliad
VIII.526–40; combination of Murray/Dimock and Fagles VIII.617–28.

“We go to liberate”:
BBC News, 20 March 2003: “UK Troops Told: Be Just and Strong,” originally from a pooled report by Sarah Oliver,
Mail on Sunday.

Alexandrian scholars:
See Richard P. Martin, “Cretan Homers: Tradition, Politics, Fieldwork,”
Classics@
3 (Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2012).

“The further back”:
Casey Dué, “Epea Pteroenta: How We Came to Have Our Iliad,” in
Recapturing a Homeric Legacy,
25.

“young, headstrong”:
S. Butler,
The Authoress of the Odyssey
, 2nd ed. (London: Longmans, Green, 1922), 142.

Would a man:
Ibid., 9, referring to
Odyssey
IX.483, 540. But see the footnote on pp. 350–51 of
The Odyssey
, Murray/Dimock (1999), which justifies Homer's apparent mistake by explaining that between the two mentions of the rudder on Odysseus's ship, the Greeks had turned the ship around. The ship of course only had a rudder, or steering oar, at the stern, but within the course of the story, the ship was facing in two different directions.

“killed many men”:
David Garnett, ed.,
The Letters of T. E. Lawrence
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1938), letter no. 431, January 31, 1931, pp. 709–10.

in fact the Baltic:
Felice Vinci,
Omero nel Baltico
, with introductions by R. Calzecchi Onesti and F. Cuomo (Rome: Palombi Editori, 1998).

guidebook to the stars:
Florence Wood and Kenneth Wood,
Homer's Secret Iliad: The Epic of the Night Skies Decoded
(London: John Murray, 1999).

Homer was from Cambridgeshire:
Iman Wilkens,
Where Troy Once Stood
, 2nd ed. (London: Rider, 2009; a theory first developed by Théophile Cailleux, a Belgian lawyer, in
Pays atlantiques décrits par Homère. Ibérie, Gaule, Bretagne, Archipels, Amérique
(Paris, 1878) and
Théorie nouvelle sur les origines humaines. Homère en Occident. Troie en Angleterre
(Brussels, 1883).

Henriette Mertz:
Henriette Mertz,
The Wine Dark Sea: Homer's Heroic Epic of the North Atlantic
(Chicago: self-published, 1964).

everywhere and nowhere:
M. L. West, ed. and trans.,
Lives of Homer
, 433.

“The people of Ios”:
Ibid., 435.

“
For you were born”:
Ibid., 413. Pseudo-Plutarch is quoting the epigrammatist Antipater of Thessalonica, writing ca. 20
BC
.

He is the embodiment:
See, for example, ibid., 429.

“U re u re na-nam”: Quoted in M. L. West,
The East Face of Helicon
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 61.

“attend to what”:
J. Black, “Some Structural Features of Sumerian Narrative Poetry,” in
Mesopotamian Epic Literature: Oral or Aural?
, ed. M. E. Vogelzang and H. L. J. Vanstiphout (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), 71–101.

One more story:
See West,
Lives of Homer
, 399, 411, 421–23, 437–39, 441–43, 447–49, for versions of this story.

“Here the earth”:
Ibid., 448.

5: FINDING HOMER

“the purple on account”:
Eustathius VI.8, quoted in M. L. West,
The Making of the
Iliad
: Disquisition and Analytical Commentary
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 75; impossibly expensive editions of Eustathius commentaries are M. van der Valk, ed.,
Eustathii Archiepiscopi Thessalonicensis Commentarii
ad Homeri Iliadem Pertinentes ad Fidem Codicis Laurentiani Editi
, 4 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1971–1987).

“Remember me”:
H. G. Evelyn-White, trans.,
Hesiod, Homeric Hymns, Epic Cycle, Homerica
(Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb/Harvard University Press, 1914), vol. 57, pp. 165ff.

“a well-girt man”:
John Boardman
, Excavations in Chios, 1952–1955: Greek Emporio
(London: British School at Athens, 1967), supplementary vols., no. 6, pp. iii–xiv, 5.

“wretched throughout”:
Ibid., pp. iii–xiv, 4.

If Homer was an ancient inheritance:
It may feel a little awkward referring to Homer as “it,” but that awkwardness reflects the question at the heart of this book. Is Homer to be thought of as an author or a cultural phenomenon? A man or a society? Or a sequence of societies? The discomfort we feel is the point. If he is an ancient inheritance, then “he” must be an “it.”

“For masterpieces are not single or solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”—Virginia Woolf in
A Room of One's Own
.

Giorgio Buchner:
Giorgio Buchner, “Recent Work at Pithekoussai (Ischia), 1965–71,”
Archaeological Reports
17 (1970–1971), 63–67; D. Ridgway,
The First Western Greeks
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); G. Buchner and D. Ridgway,
Pithekoussai, La necropoli: Tombe 1–723. Scavate dal 1952 al 1961
(Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1993).

“to monkey about”:
Catherine Connors, “Monkey Business: Imitation, Authenticity, and Identity from Pithekoussai to Plautus,”
Classical Antiquity
23, no. 2 (Oct. 2004), 179–207.

Much of their pottery:
For images and information on the exhibits in the Museo Archeologico di Pithecusae in the Villa Arbusto on Ischia, see
http://www.pithecusae.it/colonia1.htm
.

“will lick the blood”: Iliad
XXI.122–27.

voracious monsters:
In 1934, part of the scapula of a young fin whale (average adult length sixty feet) was found in a well in the area that would later become the Agora in Athens. The pottery alongside it was slightly earlier than the Attic
crat
ē
r
found in Ischia. Terrifyingly vast fish undoubtedly swam in the Odyssean world. This shoulder blade was probably used as a cutting surface, perhaps by a butcher or fishmonger. John K. Papadopoulos and Deborah Ruscillo, “A Ketos in Early Athens: An Archaeology of Whales and Sea Monsters in the Greek World,”
American Journal of Archaeology
106, no. 2 (Apr. 2002), 187–227.

“someone whose name”:
From Kate Monk,
Onomastikon
(1997).
http://tekeli.li/onomastikon/Ancient-World/Greece/Male.html
.

Eighth-century inscriptions:
Rufus Bellamy, “Bellerophon's Tablet,”
Classical Journal
84, no. 4 (Apr.–May 1989), 293.

but witty remarks:
Ibid., 299.

the first joke:
Another scratched inscription on a mid-eighth-century wine jug unearthed in Athens may be slightly older. It was probably given as a prize in a dancing competition and carries the beautiful verse “
hos nun orcheston panton atalotata paiz
ēi
,” “whoever of all these dancers now plays most delicately” would, the implication is, receive this jug as a prize. This Greek Renaissance writing begins with dance and delight and competition. B. Powell, “The Dipylon Oinochoe Inscription and the Spread of Literacy in 8th Century Athens,”
Kadmos
27 (1988), 65–86.

during a passage: Iliad
XI.632–37.

giant unliftable cups:
M. L. West, “Grated Cheese Fit for Heroes,”
Journal of Hellenic Studies
118 (1998), 190–91.

bronze cheese graters:
D. Ridgway, “Nestor's Cup and the Etruscans,”
Oxford Journal of Archaeology
16 (1997), 325–44.

the joke and invitation:
Not everyone agrees it was a joke. See Christopher A. Faraone, “Taking the ‘Nestor's Cup Inscription' Seriously: Erotic Magic and Conditional Curses in the Earliest Inscribed Hexameters,”
Classical Antiquity
15, no. 1 (Apr. 1996), 77–112.

6: HOMER THE STRANGE

essentially oral:
M. S. Edmondson,
Lore: An Introduction to the Science of Folklore and Literature
(New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 323.

“a sequel of songs”:
R. Bentley,
Remarks Upon a Late Discourse of Free Thinking
(London, 1713).

“quiet in manner”:
William C. Greene, “Milman Parry (1902–1935),”
Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
71, no. 10 (Mar. 1937), 535–36.

the first to develop:
Albert Lord,
The Singer of Tales
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), vol. 1, p. x.

“an aura of the Latin Quarter”:
Harry Levin, “Portrait of a Homeric Scholar,”
Classical Journal
32, no. 5 (Feb. 1937), 259–66.

“How can we grasp”:
Renan's essay on
L'Avenir de Science
(Paris, 1892), 292, quoted in Adam Parry, ed.,
The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 2, 409.

Here … is an English hexameter:
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie
(1847), line 1.

Just under a third:
There are 9,253 repetitive lines out of a total of 27,803.

and so on through the whole cast:
Parry,
The Making of Homeric Verse
, 39.

“The poetry … was not one”:
Ibid., 425.

“Darwin of Homeric scholarship”:
Ibid., xxvi.

“a machine of memory”:
James I. Porter, “Homer: The Very Idea,”
Arion
, 3rd ser., 10, no. 2 (Fall 2002), 57–86.

up to 494:
Steve Reece, “Some Homeric Etymologies in the Light of Oral-Formulaic Theory,”
Classical World
93, no. 2, Homer (Nov.–Dec. 1999), 185–99; M. M. Kumpf,
Four Indices of the Homeric Hapax Legomena
(Hildesheim: 1984), 206; M. W. Edwards,
The Iliad: A Commentary
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), vol. 5, p. 55.

But for Parry:
Parry,
The Making of Homeric Verse
, 21.

“The tradition is”:
Ibid., 450.

“One's style should”:
Aristotle,
Rhetoric
, 1404 b 10.

“genuine poetry”:
T. S. Eliot,
Selected Essays
, 3rd ed. (London: Faber, 1999), 238.

not originally a written:
Parry,
The Making of Homeric Verse
, xxiii–xxiv.

You have your formulas:
Ibid., 448.

the overused recourse:
Ibid.

almost exactly a ton:
http://chs119.chs.harvard.edu/mpc/index.html
.

“a tall, lean”:
From the draft of a text intended for a popular audience written in 1937 by Parry's youthful assistant Albert Lord.
http://chs119.chs.harvard.edu/mpc/about/intro.html
.

“Finally Avdo came”:
Ibid.

“It takes the full strength”:
Parry,
The Making of Homeric Verse
, 457.

Each singer sang:
Ibid., 458, 460.

In June 1935:
Halil Bajgoric, “The Wedding of Mustajbey's Son Be
ć
irbey,” Parry, no. 6699.
www.oraltradition.org/static/zbm/zbm.pdf
.

“The moment he cherished”:
Harry Levin, “Portrait of a Homeric Scholar,”
Classical Journal
32, no. 5 (Feb. 1937), 259–66.

“But why did you”:
From Parry, Conversation 6698, in
An eEdition of “The Wedding of Mustajbey's Son Be
ć
irbey
,” as performed by Halil Bajgori
ć
, ed. and trans. John Miles Foley, on
www.oraltradition.org
.