Articles on the multiformity of Homeric poetry now on-line

The Center for Hellenic Studies has published on-line two articles by Associate Editors of the Homer Multitext that directly address the multiformity of Homeric poetry.

The first of these, "Homeric Poetry and Problems of Multiformity: The 'Panathenaic Bottleneck'," by Gregory Nagy, was one of the works of scholarship that originally inspired this project. Nagy argues that the text fixation of Iliad and Odyssey occurred not through writing but in the context of the increasingly limited performance tradition at the Panhellenic festival of the Panathenaia in Archaic and Classical Athens. As the poems passed through this “bottleneck” the degree of variability became increasingly limited. The article offers an explanation for how the Iliad and Odyssey came to be crystallized into the relatively un-multiform versions in which we now have them. Nagy suggests that the highly regulated performance context of the Panathenaic Festival provided the mechanism by which multiformity was gradually screened out and a relatively fixed, "Panathenaic" text emerged for the two poems. Nagy's arguments also account for the fact the Iliad and Odyssey (which were performed at this festival) survive, whereas the poems of the Epic Cycle do not.

Leonard Muellner's article, "Grieving Achilles," explores Archaic vase paintings that depict Achilles in a silent gesture of mourning (veiling his head) and suggests that they are drawing on an variation of the epic tradition of the taking of Briseis and the subsequent embassy to Achilles that we find in Iliad 9. As Muellner writes, his work shows that these "vase paintings are not illustrations of epic poetry, or ad hoc inventions, or mistakes that intentionally or unintentionally disregard or misrepresent the putatively uniform Homeric versions of epic tales that served as their supposed models. Instead, the vase painter, just like a singer of tales, is engaged in a traditional, creative effort to select among myths that are by nature multiform." For more on the relationship between the multiforms of myth, vase paintings, and the Homeric epics, see also "Briseis and the Multiformity of the Iliad" (Chapter 1 in C. Dué, Homeric Variations on a Lament by Briseis.)

 Embassy to Achilles — Phoinix, Odysseus, Achilles veiled, and unnamed youth. Athenian red-figure hydria, Staatliche Antikensammlung, München 8770. Photo Bibi Saint-Pol, Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The traditional Trojan assembly

Over on our companion Oral Poetry blog, I continue my series on the Trojan catalogue in conjunction with and parallel to Casey’s blogging of the Catalogue of Ships. In my first post I looked at how the Trojans are introduced in our Iliad and how to understand some of the traditional language used. In my second post I continue looking at Iris's message to the Trojan assembly and how its use of traditional language both sets the “now” of the story into action and simultaneously evokes earlier episodes of the war.

Iris

Iliad 12 as Oral Traditional Poetry

Each year at the Homer Multitext Summer Seminar we introduce a new group of students to the scholarly principles that underlie the Homer Multitext project, which are grounded in the research and fieldwork of Milman Parry and Albert Lord on oral poetry. In addition to talking in a broad way about how the Iliad was composed and transmitted over time, we also think out loud about how our understanding of Homeric poetry as an oral traditional system affects how we interpret the poetry. And each year we ground that discussion by focusing on a particular book of the Iliad. The students create an XML edition of the text and scholia for that book in the Venetus A manuscript, and in a series of sessions we talk as a group about the poetics of that book. This year's book is Iliad 12 and it has led us to discuss such topics as the building of and battle before the Achaean wall (which caused such consternation among Analyst scholars in the 19th and early 20th centuries), the poetics of battle and the way that they overlap with the poetics of Catalogue poetry such as we find in Iliad 2, and the way that repetition functions in oral poetry, as well as text critical questions such as how to treat verses that are omitted from one or more of our medieval manuscripts (such as 12.219). These discussions have fostered a great deal of creative exchange among the participating students and faculty (who this year include Michiel Cock, Casey Dué, Eric Dugdale, Mary Ebbott, Olga Levaniouk, Gregory Nagy, Corinne Pache, Ineke Sluiter, and Neel Smith). This exchange has in turn influenced the latest post on our Oral Poetry blog, "Walk On Characters in the Iliad." 

Oral Poetics and the Homer Multitext

One of the central research questions that drives the Homer Multitext is this: “How do you make a critical edition of an oral tradition, like that of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey, that spanned a thousand years or more? What is the best way to represent the textual history of songs that were created in and for performance, but survive only in textual forms from later eras?” In our 2010 book, Iliad 10 and the Poetics of Ambush, Mary Ebbott and I attempted to demonstrate that a "multitextual"  approach to Homeric poetry is useful not only for understanding the transmission of the text of the epics, but also for better understanding the poetics of oral poetry. We could not have written that book, which is meant to be a sustained demonstration of the workings of oral poetry over the course of an entire book of the Iliad, without the data and tools of the Homer Multitext that were available to us at that time.

As new ways of viewing and working with the surviving documents that transmit Homeric poetry become possible, Mary and I would like to continue to use them to enhance our understanding of the poetics of the Iliad and Odyssey. With that in mind, we have decided to revive a long neglected Oral Poetry blog, which we will maintain along with this one, and in close coordination with one another. The Oral Poetry blog will be devoted primarily to questions of poetics, while we will continue to make posts here about the manuscripts and papyri and what they tell about the system of oral poetry in which the Iliad and Odyssey were composed.

To kick off this phase of the Oral Poetry blog, we are planning a series of posts about the poetics of Iliad 2. You can read my initial post about this work here. You can also read a much older post on this blog about the transmission of the Catalogue of Ships from Book 2 here. It is the special treatment and seemingly controversial place of the Catalogue in the surviving manuscripts and papyri that drives us to try to better understand the poetics of this fascinating record of names and places. 

Audiences and Tradition

ἔσπετε νῦν μοι Μοῦσαι Ὀλύμπια δώματ᾽ ἔχουσαι:
ὑμεῖς γὰρ θεαί ἐστε πάρεστέ τε ἴστέ τε πάντα,
ἡμεῖς δὲ κλέος οἶον ἀκούομεν οὐδέ τι ἴδμεν
(Iliad 2.484-486)

Tell me now, Muses, you who have Olympian abodes,
since you are goddesses and you are present for all that happens and you know everything,
while we only hear the kleos and we know nothing


Nikola: All right, but when you've learned my song, would... you sing it exactly as I do?
Sulejman: I would.
N: You wouldn't add anything... nor leave anything out?
S: I wouldn't... by Allah I would sing it just as I heard it. ...It isn't good to change or to add.
(Lord, The Singer of Tales, 27)

The notion of “innovation” is one of the most difficult ones that we grapple with when we, as members of a highly literate culture that prizes creativity and the concept of “genius,” encounter an oral tradition that explicitly claims not to prize it. Just as the South Slavic singers that Milman Parry and Albert Lord interviewed with the help of Nikola Vujnović claimed to always sing their songs the same way every time, so too the Homeric narrator claims to repeat exactly what he has heard from the Muses, because he himself “knows nothing.” In such a tradition, the poet claims that his song is the truth, and as such it must be unchanging. In reality, we as outside observers of the tradition, can demonstrate that in fact the songs do change from performance to performance and tradition, far from being fixed and static, dynamically evolves over time. But for the singers on the inside of the tradition, the song remains notionally unchanging.

What, then, is “genius” in an oral tradition? What distinguishes one poet from another? We should first acknowledge that in even asking this question we are revealing our own bias. But as Milman Parry himself put it [Parry 1932, 12-14 (= Parry 1971, 334-35)]: “One oral poet is better than another not because he has by himself found a more striking way of expressing his own thought but because he has been better able to make use of the tradition. . . . The fame of a singer comes not from quitting the tradition but from putting it to the best use.”

I have explored the history of our modern Western struggle with separating genius from innovation when it comes to Homer in a lengthy essay called “The Invention of Ossian” (available here). In this post I would like to approach the question a little differently by considering the role of performance and audience in the shaping of tradition.


I recently had the opportunity to attend a concert by Fleetwood Mac, a band that reached its peak of album sales and popularity in the mid-to-late 1970s. All the members of the band are much older now and their vocal abilities are no longer what they once were, and yet the giant arena in Houston (the Toyota Center) was sold out, and the band gave an outstanding three hour performance that thrilled the crowd. Why did we all pay so much money to attend this performance, when we could have listened to a technically superior version of all the songs on CD or mp3? There is something primal, it seems to me, in our desire to gather together as a community to hear music. Even today in 2013, in the fourth biggest city of the United States, in a giant basketball arena full of strangers, we still seek to experience music with other people. As disparate from each other as we all were, we were united through our shared love of the music for the duration of the performance. That experience, I would argue, is one that we can share however distantly with the traditional audiences of the Homeric or South Slavic epic traditions, whose members would have been united by their deep familiarity with and love of the poetry of their traditional culture. Because such poetry was experienced only in performance, I would argue that there would have been an even more important bond between the experience of performance and the connection between audience members generated by the performance.

Another aspect of the concert had me thinking about Homer. As much as we appreciate live performance today for its communal aspects, and for the interaction it creates between performer(s) and audience, there is inevitably a certain pull that we feel towards the “traditional” way of doing the song - that is the version that we know from our ipods and CDs, the version we have heard countless times. At this particular concert, as thrilled as I was to hear the legendary Stevie Nicks singing live, I was disappointed that many songs had been rearranged to better suit her now more limited vocal range. I'm sure we all would have preferred the arrangements with which we were all very familiar. Moroever, there were times during the concert when the band performed some new material. The energy in the room substantially dropped; people sat down, went to the concession stand, or the bathroom. This got me thinking: what other form of entertainment or art is like this? If your favorite tv show comes out with a new episode, or your favorite novelist comes out with a new novel, you are delighted and race to view it/read it. Yet here we all were disappointed that the band was singing a new song. I don't think this is only the case for bands like Fleetwood Mac who were popular 35 years ago. I can remember going to an R.E.M. concert when I was young and experiencing the same sensation. I can't remember what the new songs were that R.E.M. performed that night. For all I know they may have been their next number 1 hits, but in that moment of performance, I wanted what I already knew - and so did the rest of the audience.

Unlike a modern band, the traditional singers of the South Slavic or Homeric traditions did not need to sell new albums. There were of course no albums to sell or equipment on which to play them. The singers made their living performing live what audiences wanted to hear, and it seems that what they wanted to hear were the songs that they all knew and loved. It is hard for us to get our heads around the fact that the best singers would not have been the ones thrilling their audiences with a new song or a new way of telling the story. But perhaps it can help us to understand this process better if we realize that this kind of poetry was only experienced in performance, which is to say, before an audience who knows the song already and has to be pleased.

There is something about live performance that creates community and thereby reinforces tradition. “Newness” is not what is wanted or called for in that moment. And yet newness does happen. The songs at the Fleetwood Mac concert were sung a bit differently (though still, ultimately, they were “the same”) and new songs were performed. Audience interaction contributed to and shaped what transpired. The tradition was perpetuated, but was also evolving, through performance.

Hektor’s Variation on a Lament by Briseis

One of the topics that I am most interested in on this blog and in connection with the Homer Multitext more generally is the concept of multiformity. A primary research question addressed by the Homer Multitext is the extent to which the variation and multiformity that once characterized the performance and composition of the Homeric poems are still evident in the historical documents that transmit the text of these poems to us. As Albert Lord showed (see especially Lord 1960), in an oral epic song tradition like that in which the Iliad and Odyssey were composed, no song was ever sung the exact same way twice. The song was created anew each time, using the traditional building blocks of formula and theme, employed in varying degrees of expansion and compression. Every formula is traditional, but every formula carries with it many layers of accumulated meaning, meaning that resonates through time and even across geographical distances. What is “good” about such traditional poetry is not “newness,” but, as Milman Parry put it, putting tradition “to the best use” (Parry 1932, 12-14 [= Parry 1971, 334-35]).

Richard Martin built on the work of Parry and Lord to show how patterns and structures associated with different genres of poetry and speech outside of epic (such as boasting, lament, love song, etc) came to be incorporated into epic, and so formed building blocks with powerful resonance of their own (see especially Martin 1989). One of these genres that I have explored in my own research is that of the traditional lament for the dead, especially as performed by the captive (and soon-to-be captive) women of the Iliad, such as Briseis and Andromache. Laments have a traditional structure and have traditional content, themes, and imagery, but they are dynamic forms of song. They have particular relevance to the life of the woman singing the song and narrate her own personal experiences while at the same time drawing on universal patterns and the experiences of sorrow and grief within the community of mourners. In other words, every lament is a multiform of a notional or archetypal lament, but no two laments are ever the same.

This week I happened to be reminded of the laments for Achilles in the epic of Quintus of Smyrna, whose Posthomerica (which might be translated as “epic events after Homer”) narrates the death of Achilles and the sack of Troy. In that epic, Achilles’ prize of war Briseis gives the following lament (3.551-576):

πασάων δ’ ἔκπαγλον ἀκηχεμένη κέαρ ἔνδον
Βρισηὶς παράκοιτις ἐυπτολέμου Ἀχιλῆος
ἀμφὶ νέκυν στρωφᾶτο καὶ ἀμφοτέρῃς παλάμῃσι
δρυπτομένη χρόα καλὸν ἀύτεεν· ἐκ δ’ ἁπαλοῖο
στήθεος αἱματόεσσαι ἀνὰ σμώδιγγες ἄερθεν
θεινομένης· φαίης κεν ἐπὶ γλάγος αἷμα χέασθαι
φοίνιον. Ἀγλαΐη δὲ καὶ ἀχνυμένης ἀλεγεινῶς
ἱμερόεν μάρμαιρε, χάρις δέ οἱ ἄμπεχεν εἶδος.
τοῖον δ’ ἔκφατο μῦθον ὀιζυρὸν γοόωσα·
ὤ μοι ἐγὼ πάντων περιώσιον αἰνὰ παθοῦσα·
οὐ γάρ μοι τόσσον περ ἐπήλυθεν ἄλλό τι πῆμα,
οὔτε κασιγνήτων οὔτ’ εὐρυχόρου περὶ πάτρης,
ὅσσον σεῖο θανόντος· ἐπεὶ σύ μοι ἱερὸν ἦμαρ
καὶ φάος ἠελίοιο πέλες καὶ μείλιχος αἰὼν
ἐλπωρή τ’ ἀγαθοῖο καὶ ἄσπετον ἄλκαρ ἀνίης
πάσης τ’ ἀγλαΐης πολὺ φέρτερος ἠδὲ τοκήων
ἔπλεο· πάντα γὰρ οἶος ἔης δμωῇ περ ἐούσῃ,
καί ῥά με θῆκας ἄκοιτιν ἑλὼν ἄπο δούλια ἔργα.
νῦν δέ τις ἐν νήεσσιν Ἀχαιῶν ἄξεται ἄλλος
Σπάρτην εἰς ἐρίβωλον ἢ ἐς πολυδίψιον Ἄργος·
καί νύ κεν ἀμφιπολεῦσα κακὰς ὑποτλήσομ’ ἀνίας
σεῦ ἀπονοσφισθεῖσα δυσάμμορος. Ὡς ὄφελόν με
γαῖα χυτὴ ἐκάλυψε πάρος σέο πότμον ἰδέσθαι.
ὣς ἣ μὲν δμηθέντ’ ὀλοφύρετο Πηλείωνα
δμωῇς σὺν μογερῇσι καὶ ἀχνυμένοισιν Ἀχαιοῖς
μυρομένη καὶ ἄνακτα καὶ ἀνέρα·

(For a translation, see Theoi.com.)

In my 2002 book, Homeric Variations on a Lament by Briseis, I argued that this lament in Quintus of Smyrna may well reflect (however dimly) an archaic epic lament by Briseis for Achilles that has not survived. Instead, we have an echo of that lament in her lament for Patroklos in Iliad 19.282-302, a lament which seems to be in many ways a lament for Achilles himself. An ancient audience would have been able to connect the deaths of the two comrades, and so her lament for Patroklos would have resonated on multiple levels. (See Dué 2002: 1-16 and 74-76.) The traditional formulaic language of oral poetry (and indeed lament) would have evoked all at the same time the deaths of Briseis’ first husband, Patroklos, Achilles, and indeed all husbands who die in battle—including Hektor.

Many scholars, including myself, have noted that Briseis’ lament for Patroklos in Iliad 19 shares many features with the speech of Andromache to Hektor in Iliad 6 (405-432), in which Andromache attempts to persuade Hektor not to return to battle. And in fact, as John Foley has shown (1999:188-198), Andromache’s speech is a lament in every way, even though it is not explicitly called a goos or thrēnos. (Please see chapter four of Homeric Variations for a full analysis.) She first addresses Hektor in the second person directly, then narrates the deaths of her family members in the sack of her city, and then concludes by addressing Hektor once again. The content of Andromache’s speech in Iliad 6 likewise resonates with other traditional laments in the Iliad. For example, the reproach that has been noted as characteristic of laments often takes the form of an accusation of abandonment. Andromache does not reproach Hektor directly in this speech, but she does warn him not to leave her a widow and their son an orphan. Hektor admits he would rather die than see Andromache led off into captivity (6.464-465). Andromache herself expresses a wish to die if she loses Hektor (6.410-411), and this wish too is a common feature of laments. The accusation of abandonment in both ancient and modern Greek laments is typically accompanied by a description of the lamenting woman’s endangered position in the community. Andromache relates how she has lost the protection of all of her family members, and sets up Hektor as her last resource. Many of the traditional lament themes that are featured in Andromache’s speech recur when she learns of the death of Hektor in Iliad 22 and in her lament at Hektor’s funeral in Iliad 24. She relates how Hektor has left her a widow and their son an orphan. She describes the life of servitude that will be hers, and speculates that Astyanax will likewise be a slave or else hurled to his death from the walls (24.727-728, 732-735).

Andromache’s and Briseis’ laments are representative of the way that wives and women in general comment on their status in the community once the man whom they are mourning is dead. Michael Herzfeld has shown in his study of a modern Cretan funeral how women may actually manipulate their status by evoking the sympathy of their audience and warding off potential reproach. Mary Ebbott, following up on the work of Herzfeld, has analyzed Helen’s language of self-blame in the Iliad in order to show how Helen uses the language of lament in even non-lament contexts to voice a view of herself that other characters in the Iliad never express. We can see in Andromache’s speech a similar kind of positioning through lament language even before Hektor’s death.

Likewise, Briseis’ lament for Patroklos deals more with defining her relationship to Achilles than it does with Patroklos. Like Andromache, Briseis uses the medium of lament to narrate the pains of her life and manipulate her status within her community. Briseis sets up first Patroklos and then Achilles as her primary resource after the deaths of her brothers and husband. She mentions the kindness of Patroklos (19.300) in order to comment on her own vulnerability. When she notes that Patroklos always promised to make her Achilles’ “wedded wife” (kouridiê alokhos) she seeks to legitimize her position through lament. She creates a status for herself that might protect her in some way when Achilles himself dies.

With the laments of Book 24 that conclude the Iliad comes an awareness that Andromache, Hecuba, and every Trojan wife will soon be captive women. And just as Achilles’ death is constantly foreshadowed, but does not occur in the Iliad, so the capture of Andromache by Greek warriors, an event that is foretold in Books 6, 18, and 24, does not take place within the confines of the Iliad itself. Her capture is instead realized in the figure of Briseis, the “wife” of Achilles. Just as Patroklos and then Hektor are substitutes in death for Achilles within the poem, so Briseis can be a substitute for Andromache. And as the funeral of Hektor foreshadows that of Achilles, Andromache’s fears for herself in turn reverberate back to Briseis, whose story, upon the death of Achilles, will come full circle, and she will be a widow and a captive once more.

As you can see, I am fascinated by the way that the traditional diction of Homeric poetry creates meaning and interconnection between different characters and different parts of the poem. For me, the repetitiveness of the poetry allows for more meaning not less. The patterns and structures of lament that I have been discussing here would have been very familiar to an ancient audience, who would have grasped them on an unconscious level. When Andromache begins using what I have called the “language of lament,” the emotional power of that speech would have connected with an ancient audience in a particular and powerful way, just as it does, within the poem, with Hektor.

This brings me back to the lament of Briseis in the Posthomerica, and, in an interesting way, Hektor. Indeed the bulk of Briseis’ lament in the Posthomerica evokes her lament for Patroklos in Iliad 19, with her narration of the loss of her homeland, parents, and brothers, and her “wife”-like (ἄκοιτιν) status with Achilles. But the last part of her lament, in which she tells of her soon-to-be captive (once again) status to a master in Greece, and her longing for death before seeing him dead, recall above all the fears that Hektor expresses for Andromache, as he explains to her why he must return to battle. In a justifiably much admired passage (the first part of which is itself a repetition of Agamemnon’s words at Iliad 4.163-165) he says (6.447-465):

εὖ γὰρ ἐγὼ τόδε οἶδα κατὰ φρένα καὶ κατὰ θυμόν:
ἔσσεται ἦμαρ ὅτ᾽ ἄν ποτ᾽ ὀλώλῃ Ἴλιος ἱρὴ
καὶ Πρίαμος καὶ λαὸς ἐϋμμελίω Πριάμοιο.
ἀλλ᾽ οὔ μοι Τρώων τόσσον μέλει ἄλγος ὀπίσσω,
οὔτ᾽ αὐτῆς Ἑκάβης οὔτε Πριάμοιο ἄνακτος
οὔτε κασιγνήτων, οἵ κεν πολέες τε καὶ ἐσθλοὶ
ἐν κονίῃσι πέσοιεν ὑπ᾽ ἀνδράσι δυσμενέεσσιν,
ὅσσον σεῦ, ὅτε κέν τις Ἀχαιῶν χαλκοχιτώνων
δακρυόεσσαν ἄγηται ἐλεύθερον ἦμαρ ἀπούρας:
καί κεν ἐν Ἄργει ἐοῦσα πρὸς ἄλλης ἱστὸν ὑφαίνοις,
καί κεν ὕδωρ φορέοις Μεσσηΐδος ἢ Ὑπερείης
πόλλ᾽ ἀεκαζομένη, κρατερὴ δ᾽ ἐπικείσετ᾽ ἀνάγκη...
ἀλλά με τεθνηῶτα χυτὴ κατὰ γαῖα καλύπτοι
πρίν γέ τι σῆς τε βοῆς σοῦ θ᾽ ἑλκηθμοῖο πυθέσθαι.

For I know this well in my heart and soul,
a day will come when holy Ilium will be destroyed,
and Priam and the people of Priam of the good spear.
But the pain of the Trojans in the future is not so much a concern for me
nor that of Hecuba herself nor of Lord Priam,
nor that of my brothers, who many and noble
have fallen in the dust at the hands of enemy men,
as much as your pain, when some one of the Achaeans with their bronze khitons
leads you away weeping, having deprived you of your day of freedom.
And then being in Argos you will weave at the loom for another woman,
and carry water from the Middle Spring and Upper Spring,
treated very shamefully, and powerful necessity will lie upon you...
May the heaped up earth of my tomb cover me dead
before I learn of your shout and your being dragged away.

What Hektor fears for Andromache, as we all know, will indeed come true, and in the Posthomerica, for Briseis, it has come true once again. Rereading the lament of Briseis in the Posthomerica I now see that in the Iliad Hektor, like Andromache, draws on the powerful language of lament to make his case. We have in essence, dueling proleptic laments from these two characters, which dramatically adds to the emotional effect of this scene.

Although anthropological research has shown that women were the traditional performers of lament in antiquity, the male heroes of epic do sometimes lament. Achilles in particular has been shown to be versed in both women’s and men’s song-making traditions. (See especially Monsacré 1984.) Here we see that Hektor has heard Andomache’s lamentation, and responded with a traditional lament of his own. This is particularly striking to me in part because ancient laments seems to have been antiphonal, with the mourner and audience responding to one another. (On the antiphonal nature of Greek laments, already represented in the laments of the Iliad, see Alexiou 1974: 131-60 and Dué 2006: 12-14.) This kind of responsion between the doomed couple makes their words even more evocative of an actual funeral.

Hektor’s variation on the captive woman’s lament is powerful precisely because it is a multiform of a pattern of speech deeply imprinted on the audience. It is powerful because it repeats, because it draws on formulas that have evolved over centuries to express precisely this kind of otherwise inexpressible sorrow. And so we see that the laments of Briseis and Andromache and Hektor are all multiforms of one another, and yet each perfectly communicates the very individual pain of each one.

(The image at the top of this post is of a painting by Zoie Lafis, Threnouses [2005], based on an ancient Greek vase.)

Works Cited
Alexiou, M. 1974. The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition. Cambridge.

Carlisle, M., and O. Levaniouk, eds. 1999. Nine Essays on Homer. Lanham, Md.

Dué, C. 2002. Homeric Variations on a Lament by Briseis. Lanham, Md.

Dué, C. 2006. The Captive Woman’s Lament in Greek Tragedy. Austin.

Ebbott, M. “The Wrath of Helen: Self-Blame and Nemesis in the Iliad.” In Carlisle and Levaniouk 1999: 3-20.

Foley, J. M. 1999. Homer’s Traditional Art. University Park.

Herzfeld, M. 1993. “In Defiance of Destiny: The Management of Time and Gender at a Cretan Funeral.” American Ethnologist 20.2: 241-55.

Lord, A. B. 1960/2000. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, MA. 2nd rev. edition, 2000.

Martin, R. P. 1989. The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the Iliad. Ithaca, N.Y.

Monsacré, H. 1984. Les larmes d'Achille: le héros, la femme et la souffrance dans la poésie d'Homère. Paris.

Parry, A., ed. 1971. The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry. Oxford.

Parry, M. 1932. “Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Versemaking. II. The Homeric Language as the Language of Oral Poetry.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 43 (1932): 1-50 [repr. in A. Parry 1971: 325-64].

The Catalogue of Ships

In this post I'd like to discuss the special treatment of the so-called "Catalogue of Ships" (Iliad 2.494–877) in the Venetus A and E4 manuscripts of the Iliad, as well as in the Venetus B and E3. The Catalogue of Ships, in which the Achaean and Trojan and allied forces at Troy are listed and described, has long been a subject of scholarly controversy, perhaps dating back to antiquity, and so it is worth making note of how it is treated in our oldest manuscripts of the poem. In the end, as we have seen several times now in other posts, E4 will be shown to have an intriguing connection with the scholarly material recorded in the Venetus A, and all four manuscripts will have something to say about the limitations of traditional critical editions of the Iliad.

Why is the Catalogue of Ships so controversial? It is by no means the only catalogue in surviving Homeric poetry, but at nearly four hundred verses in length it is by far the longest. Its placement in the narrative, at the start of a battle in the tenth year of the war, seems odd. The catalogue follows a circuitous geographical progression that begins in Boeotia, and the region of Boeotia and its neighboring areas are disproportionately represented. The Catalogue seems to reflect, for the most part, the political geography of Bronze Age Greece, but there are many exceptions and aspects that are hard to explain. As Oliver Dickinson (2011) has recently concluded:

All in all, the Catalogue is a strange compilation, and it does not seem possible to devise any rational explanation for its peculiarities. Here, as with many Homeric problems, the lack of pre-Homeric or contemporary "heroic" poetry is a major obstacle to the creation of plausible hypotheses. The most that can be safely said is that the Catalogue is likely to have been compiled from materials of different origins and dates and that care has been taken to harmonize it to other Greek traditions; but, although in some parts it does show a degree of historical consistency, on the whole it is most unlikely to bear any resemblance to the probable political configuration of those parts of Greece that it covers at any time period. 

In fact, many of the controversies associated with the Catalogue of Ships can be at least partially explained if we understand it to have been composed as part of a traditional system of oral composition-in-performance that evolved over many centuries. Names and places that seem obscure to us would have had a prominent place in the epic tradition at one time or another. Some places that flourished in the Bronze Age no doubt became obscure already even for ancient audiences of the Archaic period, but a brief record of their heroes was preserved and eventually crystallized as part of the Catalogue. In many ways, such a catalogue functions as an index to the full diachronic expanse of the Epic Tradition itself. As for the oddity of having the Achaean and Trojan forces listed in the tenth year of the war, we can easily see how, in an oral tradition in which the song is composed anew each time, episodes could be rearranged to meet the needs of the current composition. It has long been understood that there are many episodes in the Iliad that logically belong far earlier in the story of the Trojan War (such as the scene in Book 3 in which Helen points out the Achaean heroes to Priam and the old men watching from the walls, and indeed the duel for Helen by Paris and Menelaos, which also takes place in that book). As the Iliad evolved into the monumental poem that we know, those chronologically earlier episodes came to be folded into the narrative structure of the poem, and became integral to it.

Understanding the traditional and oral nature of the Catalogue does not explain all of the questions associated with it, however, and the controversies it has generated may explain why it is missing from several manuscripts of the Iliad, including the Townley and the Genavensis and a 3rd-century papyrus. The Venetus A, the Venetus B, E3, and E4 all include the Catalogue, but it is formatted in such a way that sets it apart visually.

Let's look first at E4, and the compare it to the other manuscripts. If you look at Folio 21v (you may want to look first, for comparison, at Folio 21r), you'll quickly see that it is not a typical one.  The folios of E4 usually have two columns of equal-sized text on each folio, and these columns are surrounded by scholia. The left columns contain the text of the poem and the right columns consist of a paraphrase. Here we are in the middle of Book 2, but what we find is in fact a title page.  

Each book of the Iliad in E4 has a title page that spreads over two folios, from the verso of one folio on the left side to recto of the other on the right. (See, e.g., folio 187v and 188r.) On the left side page, scholia surround a central text block, which typically includes scholia followed by one or more (usually two) brief prose summaries, or hypotheses. These hypotheses are transmitted in a variety of manuscripts, including Ve1 (= West Z, Rom. Bibl. Nat. Gr. 6 + Matrit. 4626), a ninth-century manuscript containing “D” scholia that is older than any of our minuscule manuscripts of the Iliad itself. After the hypothesis of each book, on the facing page and above the main text of the poem and its paraphrase, comes a title line (e.g. “rhapsody 10 of the Iliad of Homer”) followed by a one-verse summary of the plot of the book in dactylic hexameter. The title line is placed over the column of text that contains the Iliad, while the summary is placed over the column that contains the paraphrase.

Folio 21v of E4 in fact follows exactly the pattern that we find for the beginning of each book of the Iliad. A large portion of the page is taken up by a block of scholia, which is itself surrounded by other scholia. (The sources of these distinct groups of scholia will be explored in another post.) Next we find: ὑπόθεσις τῆς Βοιωτίας written in crimson ink at the center of the page. Instead of "Rhapsody ___," the Catalogue of Ships has been given the title of Βοιωτία, a title which may well have been a traditional way of referring to it in antiquity, reflecting the central importance of the region of Boeotia in the Catalogue. And, as for other books in E4, we find two hypotheses.

A question immediately springs to mind. Where do these hypotheses come from? Has the Catalogue always been treated as a separate composition, such that hypotheses survive for it just as for the twenty-four books of the Iliad? A closer look, however, reveals that these hypotheses are not quite the same as those of other texts. For one thing, they have lemmata: each begins with a quotation of Iliad 2.494. The other hypotheses in E4 have no such lemmata. Where there are two hypotheses for other books, the second one is usually preceded by ἄλλως or καὶ ἄλλως. That is not the case here. Moreover, if we turn to Folio 22r, we find other differences from other books. Though the folio is formatted much as the initial folio of a book of the Iliad would be in E4, there is no paraphrase in the right column. The right column is instead taken up with scholia. (This holds true for the entire length of the Catalogue of Ships in E4.) There is no metrical summary, and instead of a title, we find merely the ὑπόθεσις τῆς Βοιωτίας of the previous folio repeated (even though what follows is poetry, not a summary).

If the hypotheses for the Catalogue in E4 were related to those of the other books of the Iliad, we would expect to find them in the other manuscripts that preserve these hypotheses, such as Ve1, but we do not. To be more precise, they do not survive as hypotheses. They must have another source, and in fact we do find them preserved among the "D" scholia as scholia. The source seems to be most likely the same one that preserves the other scholia with lemmata in E4, scholia which, as we have seen, are related to the scholarly material that we find in the Venetus A. So let's turn now to the Venetus A (folio 34r), and see what we find there.

If we look at folio 34r of the Venetus A, we see that line 2.494 immediately follows upon what precedes it. There is no gap in the text nor a title line nor a metrical summary. But other features do indeed set it apart. The first letter of 2.494 in the Venetus A is a beautiful capital beta, such as you find at the beginning of books. Moreover a decorative line has been placed between verses 493 and 494. It is as if the scribe is aware of a tradition that treats the Catalogue of Ships as a separate unit, and formats it accordingly.

 
If we look above and to the right of the text block, we find several scholia that are easy to spot with their semiuncial lemmata—a quotation of verse 494. What follows the lemma of the first of these scholia is what has been formatted as the first hypothesis of E4. The comment following the second of these lemmata is very close to what has been formatted as the second hypothesis in E4:

The notes do not match perfectly, and I am not asserting that the Venetus A is the source of the hypotheses of E4, only that the scribe of E4 has drawn here from a scholia tradition that we also find in A.

If we compare the Venetus B (folio 31v) and E3 (folio 30v), we find that they too, like E4, format the start of the Catalogue of Ships as if it were the beginning of a new book of the Iliad. These manuscripts do not contain hypotheses for any of the books, so we would not expect to find one here. They both have a title line however: ἀρχὴ τῆς Βοιοτίας. And they both have an initial capital, as in the Venetus A.

Among the oldest manuscripts of the Iliad, we have seen that two omit the Catalogue of Ships entirely, and four format it in such way that make it clear that it was perceived as being in some sense a separate composition, or else its own "whole," much as the other books or "rhapsodies" of the Iliad. What does this formatting signify? Might it reflect, in some dim way, an ancient performance tradition, in which the Catalogue was performed on its own as a unit, as has been suggested for the individual books of the poem? (Cf. Aelian, Varia Historia 13.14, where the Catalogue of Ships is named explicitly as one of the episodes that "the ancients" used to perform separately.) Or is it the result of scholarly debate in antiquity, debates which may have deemed the Catalogue unHomeric? I don't yet have answers to these questions. But visual inspection reveals once again what is otherwise obscured in a traditional edition. If we did not have these images, we would only know that A, B, E3, and E4 include the Catalogue of Ships, and we would be unable to see how it has been so carefully set apart from the rest of Book 2 in each manuscript.

Further reading:

Dickinson, O. 2011. "Catalogue of Ships." In M. Finkleberg, ed. The Homer Encyclopedia.  Blackwell.

Tsagalis, C. 2010. "The Dynamic Hypertext: Lists and Catalogues in the Homeric Epics." In C. Tsagalis. ed. Homeric Hypertextuality. Trends in Classics 2. De Gruyter. 323–347.

Paradigm Shifts

This post is inspired by an episode of The Engines of Our Ingenuity, a daily 4 minute radio broadcast produced by the University of Houston's radio station, KUHF. The episode, entitled "Revisiting Stirrups" explores the notion of the paradigm shift, as first articulated by Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. As Dr. Lienhard notes in the episode, Kuhn demonstrated that "science develops, not by accretion, but by replacement -- by paradigm replacement." In other words, we can't make a scientific breakthrough unless we can somehow step out of our own paradigm and conceive of a new one. Lienhard goes on to talk about how many have attempted to point out flaws in Kuhn's bold assertions, but no one has been able to undermine their fundamental validity. In fact, "[a]s Kuhn's detractors have gone at him, and stripped him of his original hyperbole, they've left him much stronger." Finally, Lienhard compares the attacks on Kuhn's work to the criticism levied against Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution: "I'm astonished by people who try to refute natural selection by going back to Darwin himself. Never mind that we've spent a century and a half weaving the connecting tissue of evolution by natural selection. You'd think Darwin had written the last word on the subject, not the first."

As I listened to this episode, I could not help but think of the paradigm shift caused in Homeric studies caused by the fieldwork of Milman Parry and Albert Lord in the former Yugoslavia. Parry's 1928 doctoral dissertation on the traditional epithet in Homer is a brilliant demonstration of the economy and traditionality of Homeric diction, but even Parry himself did not grasp the implications of this work initially:

"My first studies were on the style of the Homeric poems and led me to understand that so highly formulaic a style could be only traditional. I failed, however, at the time to understand as fully as I should have that a style such as that of Homer must not only be traditional but also must be oral. It was largely due to the remarks of my teacher (M.) Antoine Meillet that I came to see, dimly at first, that a true understanding of the Homeric poems could only come with a full understanding of the nature of oral poetry. It happened that a week or so before I defended my theses for the doctorate at the Sorbonne, Professor Mathias Murko of the University of Prague delivered in Paris the series of conferences which later appeared as his book La Poésie populaire épique en Yougoslavie au début du XXe siècle. I had seen the poster for these lectures but at the time I saw in them no great meaning for myself. However, Professor Murko, doubtless due to some remark of (M.) Meillet, was present at my soutenance and at that time M. Meillet as a member of my jury pointed out with his usual ease and clarity this failing in my two books. It was the writings of Professor Murko more than those of any other which in the following years led me to the study of oral poetry in itself and to the heroic poems of the South Slavs." [The Making of Homeric Verse, 439]

It was only when Parry went to Yugoslavia to observe the still flourishing South Slavic oral epic song tradition that he came to understand that Homeric poetry was not only traditional, but oral—that is, composed anew every time in performance, by means of a sophisticated system of traditional phraseology and diction. For Parry, witnessing the workings of a living oral epic song tradition was a paradigm shift. Suddenly, by analogy with the South Slavic tradition, the workings of the Homeric system of composition became clear to him.

Parry planned a series of publications based on his observations and subsequent analysis of Homeric poetry which were never completed. His surviving writings have been incredibly influential, but he died at the age of 33, long before he had a chance to realize the many implications of his fieldwork. It became the work of his young undergraduate assistant, Albert Lord, to brings these ideas to the world. 

Albert Lord's The Singer of Tales, was published in 1960, just two years before Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, but nearly three decades after his and Parry's initial fieldwork. In the intervening years, Lord not only went to graduate school and became a scholar in his own right, he was undergoing his own paradigm shift.

Albert Lord (1912-1991) went to Yugoslavia for the first time at the age of 22, from June 1934-September 1935. Parry described his activities as follows:

"…my assistant, Mr. Albert Lord, is shortly leaving for a month in Greece. His help has been altogether indispensable to me, and I may say that I have done twice as much work since I had his very able assistance. He has relieved me altogether of the very long labeling and cataloguing of the manuscripts and discs, has helped me with the keeping of accounts and the presentations of reports, has typed some 300 pages of my commentary on the collected texts, and most particularly he has ably run the recording apparatus while we are working in the field, this for the first time leaving me free to be with the singer before the microphone, and to oversee and take part in the putting of questions to the singers […] I myself feel the greatest gratitude to him for the help which he has given me and the expedition is under the greatest obligation to him." (From M. Parry, “Report on Work in Yugoslavia, October 20, 1934-March 24, 1935,” Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature, p. 12. )

Albert Lord took photographs throughout the trip and kept a record of his experiences with a view to submitting them to a popular magazine such as National Geographic. The essay that he wrote, dated March 1937, was entitled “Across Montenegro: Searching for Gúsle Songs” and was never in fact published. We can see already in this early essay a fascination with two singers in particular that would shape much of Lord’s subsequent professional scholarship on the the creative process of oral tradional poetry and the analogy between the South Slavic and Homeric song traditions. The first is known as Ćor Huso (“Blind Huso”), a singer of a previous generation who was credited by many of the singers Parry interviewed as being the teacher of their teacher, and the source for all the best songs. Lord recounts one of these interviews (conducted by Nikola Vujnović) as he describes their initial attempts to find singers in Kolashin:

"In Kolashin we got to work. During the last century this was the home of one of the greatest singers. The name of old One-eye Huso Husovitch was a magic one in those days, and still is among the Turks (Moslems) in the region further east where the old masters of Kolashin now dwell. We sought eagerly for every trace of his tradition. What was he like? How did he sing? How did he make his living? How did he die? And so on. We had heard of him first from Sálih Uglian [sic] in Novi Pazar. From Huso Salih had learned his favorite song about the taking of Bagdad and its queen by Djérdjelez Aliya, hero of the Turkish border. In Salih’s own words, caught by our microphone, we have a bit of the tradition of the blind singer’s way of life.

Nikola: From whom did you learn your first Bosnian songs?
Salih: I learned Bosnian songs from One-eye Huso Husovitch from Kolashin.
N:     Who was he? How did he live? What sort of work did he do?
S:     He had no trade, only his horse and his arms, and he wandered about the world. He had only one eye. His clothes and his arms were of the finest. And so he wandered from town to town and sang to people to the gusle.
N:     And that’s all he did?
S:     He went from kingdom to kingdom and learned and sang.
N:     From kingdom to kingdom?
S:     He was at Vienna, at Franz’s court.
N:     Why did he go there?
S:     He happened to go there, and they told him about him, and went and got him, and he sang to him to the gusle, and King Joseph gave him a hundred sheep, and a hundred Napoleons as a present.
N:     How long did he sing to him to the gusle?
S:     A month.
N:     So there was Dutchman who liked the gusle that much?
S:     You know he wanted to hear such an unusual thing. He had never heard anything like it.
N:     All right. And afterwards, when he came back, what did he do with those sheep? Did he work after that, or did he go on singing to the gusle?
S:     He gave all the sheep to his relatives, and put the money in his purse, and wandered about the world.
N:     Was he a good singer?
S:     There could not have been a better."
(Trans. by Milman Parry)

Lord later wrote that for Parry Huso came to symbolize “the Yugoslav traditional singer in much the same way in which Homer was the Greek singer of tales par excellence.” He continues: “Some of the best poems collected were from singers who had heard Ćor Huso and had learned from him” (Lord 1948b:40). Interestingly enough, Parry and Lord do not seem to have questioned the existence of Huso, though, as John Foley has demonstrated, he is clearly legendary or “at most… a historical character to whom layers of legend have accrued” (Foley 1998:161).  So taken was Parry with the analogy between Homer and Huso that before his death he planned a series of articles entitled “Homer and Huso” which Lord completed based on Parry’s abstracts and notes.

The second singer highlighted in the essay is the one whose picture would grace the cover of The Singer of Tales, that is to say, Avdo Međedović. The Singer of Tales, which publishes the results of Parry and Lord’s investigation of the South Slavic song tradition and applies them to the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey, was Lord’s fulfillment of Parry’s own plan to write a book of that title. The singer referred to in the title is of course generic, because much of what was groundbreaking about Parry and Lord’s work was their demonstration of the system in which traditional oral poetry is composed, a system in which many generations of singers participate. But Lord’s essay makes clear (as does, to a lesser extent, The Singer of Tales) that there is also a particular singer behind the title that Parry and later Lord used to denote their work. That singer is simultaneously Avdo and Homer himself.

Just as Ćor Huso embodied for Parry the Yugoslav traditional singer, Avdo was for Lord on a practical level a living, breathing example of a supremely talented oral poet to whom Homer could be compared. Lord’s Singer of Tales is remarkable for its straightforward expostion of the practical workings of the traditional system in which poets like Avdo composed their songs; it is no surprise therefore that he found a great deal of power in the concrete example that Avdo provided.  Avdo dictated songs, was recorded on disk, and was even captured on a very early form of video called “kinescope.” After their initial encounter in the 1930’s, Lord found him and recorded him again in the 1950’s. He was in many ways the test case for Lord’s theories about the South Slavic (and by extension the Homeric) poetic system.

The photograph of Avdo that was featured on the cover of The Singer of Tales was one that Lord had taken on his first trip to Yugoslavia and was included among the images that were to accompany his unpublished essay (see image above). The caption reads: “Avdo Medjedovitch, peasant farmer, is the finest singer the expedition encountered. His poems reached as many as 15,000 lines. A veritable Yugoslav Homer!”

Here is Lord’s fuller description of Avdo in the essay:

"Lying on the bench not far from us was a Turk smoking a cigarette in an antique silver “cigárluk” (cigarette holder). He was a tall, lean and impressive person. At a break in our conversation he joined in. He knew of singers. The best, he said, was a certain Avdo Medjédovitch, a peasant farmer who lived an hour way. How old is he? Sixty, sixty-five. Does he know how to read or write? Nézna, bráte! (No, brother!) And so we went for him… Finally Avdo came, and he sang for us old Salih’s favorite of the taking of Bagdad in the days of Sultan Selim. We listened with increasing interest to this short homely farmer, whose throat was disfigured by a large goiter. He sat cross-legged on the bench, sawing the gusle, swaying in rhythm with the music. He sang very fast, sometimes deserting the melody, and while the bow went lightly back and forth over the string, he recited the verses at top speed. A crowd gathered. A card game, played by some of the modern young men of the town, noisily kept on, but was finally broken up. The next few days were a revelation. Avdo’s songs were longer and finer than any we had heard before. He could prolong one for days, and some of them reached fifteen or sixteen thousand lines. Other singers came, but none could equal Avdo, our Yugoslav Homer."

In these excerpts I think we can see how important Avdo was for Lord’s earliest conception of Homer as oral poet. Whereas Parry’s never completed articles comparing the South Slavic and Homeric traditions focused on the hazy figure of Ćor Huso, Lord, when invited to give a lecture on La poesia epica e la sua formazione, entitled his talk “Tradition and the Oral Poet: Homer, Huso, and Avdo Medjedović.”(See Lord 1970.) As early as his 1948 article, “Homer, Parry, and Huso,” Lord links Avdo directly with Parry’s Huso: “During the summer of 1935, while collecting at Bijelo Polje, Parry came across a singer named Avdo Međedović, one of those who had heard Ćor Huso in his youth, whose powers of invention and story-telling were far above the ordinary.”

Lord’s comments about Avdo, especially in these earliest descriptions of him, focus on his excellence as a composer (despite the weakness of his voice), his superiority to other poets, and the length of his songs. It is not insignificant that in his unpublished essay Lord misestimates the length of Avdo’s song at 15,000 to 16,000 verses, the approximate length of the Iliad, whereas in fact the longest song that Avdo recorded was 13,331 verses long. By 1948 Lord was careful to report the accurate total of Avdo’s verses, but he was also careful to point out how extraordinary the length of Avdo’s songs were in comparison with his fellow singers, whose songs averaged only a few hundred lines. Clearly it was Lord’s first impression that Avdo provided the answer to the still hotly debated Homeric Question.

It would be easy to criticize Lord's youthful essay, and few people would find it necessary to do so. And even if we jump forward, decades later, it seems obvious that Lord conceived of the paradigm of a dictating oral poet Homer because he was imagining him in Avdo’s image. The technology used to record Avdo was cutting edge at that time, and Lord would never have been so anachronistic as to suggest that Homer was recorded on audio disk. But to assume the technologies required for writing (pen, ink, loose or bound sheets of readily available paper, skilled scribes, etc) for “Homer’s time” is an equally anachronistic projection. As much as Lord’s work is responsible for the paradigm shift in Homeric studies that has allowed many scholars to abandon the Homer as original genius genre of criticism, he himself had his blind spots on this crucial point. Lord could have his Homer and his oral tradition too.

Few people seem to be aware, however, that Lord all but retracted his dictation thesis in his 1991 collection of essays, Epic Singers and Oral Tradition. There, together with the 1953 article, he included an addendum, from which I quote here:

"As I reconsidered very recently the stylization of a passage from Salih Ugljanin’s “Song of Bagdad” that was found in a dictated version but not in two sung texts, I was suddenly aware of the experience of listening to Salih dictate… the pause interrupted neither Salih’s thought nor his syntax… One might think that dictating gave Salih the leisure to plan his words and their placing in the line, that the parallelism was due to his careful thinking out of the structure. First of all, however, dictating is not a leisurely process… I might add that not all singers can dictate successfully. As I have said elsewhere, some singers can never be happy without the gusle accompaniment to set the rhythm of the singing performance."

Lord himself as far as I am aware never, in print, discussed the implications of this important revsion of his 1953 argument. (Lord died in the same year that Epic Singers and Oral Tradition was published.) But it is also true that Lord never speculated about the historical circumstances under which the Iliad and Odyssey might have been dictated. For Lord, the question of the text fixation of the Homeric poems was not essential; rather he was concerned with the dynamic process, that is to say their on-going recomposition in performance.

Parry, on the other hand, did not get the chance to rethink his earlier work, or to conduct further fieldwork or spend decades studying the the South Slavic tradition and the Homeric poems as Lord did. His early writings on the economy of Homeric diction are a brilliant first step towards an entirely new way of conceiving of the composition of the Homeric poems, but they are only the beginning. Like Kuhn or Darwin, Parry's work has been assailed by many as mistaken in this or that particular, or not sufficiently thorough so as to have worked out all aspects of the system it seeks to describe in detail. As Mary Ebbott and I discuss in our recent book, Iliad 10 and the Poetics of Ambush, much scholarship has been devoted to refining Parry’s initial findings about the economy of Homeric diction and the nature of the Homeric formula. There is strong resistance among those who feel that Parry’s work somehow minimizes the artistry of the poems or that the principles he outlined restrict the creativity of poets composing in this medium. Thus even those who accept Parry’s findings often seek to amend significant aspects of his arguments. We feel that the scope of Parry’s and Lord’s insights has been ignored, misread or misrepresented, or dismissed too quickly. Some (though certainly not all) efforts to revise Parry and Lord are built on a misunderstanding of the principles they documented in their fieldwork and a lack of awareness of, or at least appreciation for, the kind of meaning made possible by an oral poetic tradition. That is not to say, however, that our approach and interpretations in our book have not also greatly benefited from the work of scholars who have sought to better understand such essential concepts as the Homeric formula and the complex relationship between orality and literacy in ancient Greece. There is, however, a significant difference between scholarship that expands the central insights of Parry and Lord’s work, even while modifying certain notions or definitions, and scholarship that sets out to “prove” Parry (more often than Lord) “wrong” in order to conclude, usually with no further justification, that Homer wrote, or somehow “broke free” of the oral tradition of these epics.

These criticisms, like those cited by Dr. Lienhard against Kuhn and Darwin, seem to me to react to Parry as if he had "written the last word on the subject, not the first." As Dr. Lienhard concludes at the end of the episode:

Kuhn, White, and Darwin are fine reminders that nothing is finished in its first incarnation. Did the Wright Brothers get it wrong because they put the tail in front? Was Edison wrong to record sound on a wax cylinder instead of a CD? I suppose if we need only to be absolutely right we'll shy away from any of our important progenitors. But, if we want to see creative change in full flower, we have to go to the delicious flawed beginnings.

Bibliography

Lord, A. B. 1936. “Homer and Huso I: The Singer’s Rests in Greek and South Slavic Heroic Song. Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 67:106–113.
–––. 1938. “Homer and Huso II: Narrative Inconsistencies in Homer and Oral Poetry.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 69:439–445.
–––. 1948a. “Homer and Huso III: Enjambement in Greek and South Slavic Heroic Song. Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 79:113–124.
–––. 1948b. “Homer, Parry, and Huso.” American Journal of Archaeology 52:34–44.
–––. 1953. “Homer’s Originality: Oral Dictated Texts.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 94:124–34.
–––. 1960/2000. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, Mass. 2nd ed., ed. S. Mitchell and G. Nagy.
–––. 1970. “Tradition and the Oral Poet: Homer, Huso, and Avdo Medjedovic.” Atti del Convegno Internazionale sul Tema: La Poesia Epica e la sua Formazione (eds. E. Cerulli et al.) 13–28. Rome.
–––. 1991. Epic Singers and Oral Tradition. Ithaca, N.Y.
–––. 1995. The Singer Resumes the Tale. Ithaca, N.Y.

Parry, A., ed. 1971. The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry. Oxford.

Parry, M. 1928. L’épithète traditionelle dans Homère: essai sur un problème de style homérique. Paris. [Repr. and trans. in A. Parry 1971:1–190.]

Homeric Papyri and the Homer Multitext

The publication of ancient papyrus texts has always been central to the goals of the Homer Multitext project. The Homeric papyri are, with the exception of some ancient quotations, the oldest surviving witnesses to the text of Homer. The medieval manuscript tradition of Homer begins with the tenth century CE manuscripts of the Iliad known as D (Laurentianus 32.15) and Venetus A (Marcianus Graecus 454). Some papyrus fragments predate the medieval tradition by as many as 1200 years. In a 2001 article [Dué 2001a; on-line version], I argued that the multiformity of the Homeric texts, as evidenced by the earliest quotations of Homer and the Ptolemaic papyri, calls for a new approach to editing the texts of Homer. Building on the work of Gregory Nagy (especially Nagy 1996a), who was himself building on the insights of Parry and Lord into the oral traditional nature of Homeric poetry, I suggested that a web-based, “multitext” edition would be truer to the complexity of the transmission of the Homeric poems, which are oral-derived texts composed in performance. The texts as we now have them are the product of many singers over the course of many generations. What Parry and Lord’s work shows us most essentially is that there is not one original text that we should try to reconstruct. Instead of reconstructing an “original text,” the aim of the Homer Multitext, now at last becoming a reality after a decade of research and planning, is to present a series of complete, historically contextualized texts, together with images, and a variety of tools with which users can compare and analyze these historical documents.

The Homeric papyri are all fragmentary, and range in date from as early as the third century BCE to the seventh century CE. The vast majority of the fragments were discovered in Egypt, and now reside in collections located all over the world. They give us an otherwise irrecoverable picture of the Iliad and Odyssey as they were performed and recorded in ancient times. When taken altogether, Homeric papyri reveal a state of the Homeric texts in antiquity that can be quite surprising. There are numerous verses in the papyri that are seemingly intrusive from the standpoint of the medieval vulgate. These additional verses, the so-called plus verses, are not present in the majority of the medieval manuscripts of the Iliad and Odyssey. Other verses that are canonical in the medieval manuscripts are absent from the papyri—these may be termed minus verses. Also prevalent is variation in the formulaic phrasing within lines. In other words, it seems from this most ancient evidence that the poems were performed and recorded with a considerable amount of fluidity in antiquity. It is not until about 150 BCE that the papyrus texts begin to stabilize and present a relatively more uniform text.

The early Homeric papyri are the vestiges of a once vibrant performance tradition of the Iliad and Odyssey (see especially Nagy 1996a and Dué 2001a). In such a tradition no poem is ever composed, performed, or recorded in exactly the same way twice. In the earliest stages of the Iliad and Odyssey, each performance would have resulted in an entirely new composition. By the time of the first papyrus fragments, the oral composition and performance tradition of Homeric epic poetry had died out. But variation in the ancient textual tradition, the reflexes of this once oral and performative tradition, persisted for several more centuries. These variations, preserved for us in the Homeric papyri, are a unique window into the oral tradition that we have lost.

And yet in Homeric textual criticism, the papyri are not always attributed the weight that their antiquity should bestow on them. The variations are dismissed by a variety of strategies, including the often cited assertion that the variations are banal and uninteresting, and the labeling of the Ptolemaic papyri as “wild” or “eccentric” (for counter arguments, see especially Dué 2001a and 2001b and Dué and Ebbott 2009). In several publications I have suggested that the Medieval transmission is given more authority than the papyri precisely because modern editors find the multiformity of the papyri and early quotations disturbing (see especially Due 2006 as well as Dué 2001a and 2001b, Dué and Ebbott 2009). The seeming fluidity of these earliest witnesses conflicts with a basic desire (among Classicists at least) to find a single text and a single author behind our Iliad and Odyssey. The Medieval transmission, while by no means reducible to a single “vulgate” text, is more uniform, and offers the mirage of a reconstructable original that is just beyond the reach of our sources. This mirage has enticed many an editor to attempt to reconstruct what “Homer” actually composed (see especially Dué 2006).

Neither I nor my co- editors of the Homer Multitext are seeking to privilege the papyri in any special way over the Medieval transmission; rather we seek simply to make them available to scholars and anyone interested in the transmission of the Homeric poems over the course of three millennia or more, and to suggest that they have great historical value in the picture they present of the state of the Homeric texts in the earliest state in which we have it. Modern editions of the Iliad and Odyssey report papyrus readings only very selectively. The nature of a critical apparatus, moreover, necessarily obscures the context from which these readings arise. Not only can it be hard to locate the date or geographical origin of a particular papyrus when it is cited (in a highly abbreviated form) in an apparatus, it is also nearly impossible to reconstruct the character of the papyrus text that is being cited as a whole. In other words, is a particular reading one isolated variant, or is the papyrus as a whole quite multiform from the point of view of the Medieval transmission? Is the text preserved on the papyrus short or long? Is what survives a few letters per verse, whole verses, or something in between? Is the papyrus a deluxe edition of the text, a school text, a commentary? These are just a few of the questions that are almost impossible to answer by studying a critical apparatus alone. The limitations of the printed page of course prohibit including such information in a typical printed edition of the text.

But a web-based edition need not be limited in the same way, and can present complete historical documents side by side, as transcribed texts and as images. While the physical experience of touching the paper or parchment may be difficult to convey in digital form, metadata conveying such information can be easily included in the digital image files and precise scholarly descriptions can be linked. The editors of the Homer Multitext plan to do exactly this with the Homeric papyri. It is our goal to build a library of TEI XML-encoded diplomatic editions of the papyri, and to cooperate with scholars, libraries, and collections to put images, descriptions, and metadata for these papyri on-line. An initial set of editions, now available here, has been created by a group of graduate students. These students are now scholars in their right. It is our hope that they and other interested scholars will contribute more such editions as the project develops, and help us to develop the standards for such editions. The initial set referenced here is really, we hope, just the beginning of a collaborative effort that will include contributions from many people.

The idea of publishing the variations present in papyrus texts in digital form long predates the Homer Mutltitext. Homer and the Papyri was a project first created and edited by Professor Dana S. Sutton of the University of California, Irvine, who published it on CD-rom and later on the web. Homer and the Papyri, as it was established by Professor Sutton, was a website consisting of a) lists of published papyri and related items for the Iliad and the Odyssey, and b) a repertoire of the textual variants presented by this body of material, hypertextually linked to the lists of papyri. In 2001 Professor Sutton handed Homer and the Papyri over to the Center for Hellenic Studies, with a view to its continuation and incorporation into the publications of the Center, including a multitext edition of Homer. (Dana Sutton’s introduction to his original web-based edition may be found on the CHS website.) At that time Casey Dué, Mary Ebbott, and Dimitrios Yatromanolakis were appointed as editors, and a team of advisors selected. In 2005 we asked John Lundon to join our team of editors, and Alexander Loney became a contributing editor. Since then, Bart Huelsenbeck has also been a frequent contributor to the project.

When Professor Sutton first handed over Homer and the Papyri to the CHS team, the Homer Multitext project was in its infancy, and many questions immediately presented themselves. How could the data that Sutton had amassed be sustained over the long term? How could this data become interoperable within the architecture of the Homer Multitext? These somewhat technical questions raised more theoretical questions. Homer and the Papyri was an html list of variants, not complete texts of the papyri. How, then, to define a variant? What is the “original” from which the variants deviate? As I have noted, even the term “variant” fundamentally clashes with the findings of Parry and Lord that are the foundation on which the Homer Multitext project has been conceived. Sutton himself used a number of modern printed editions as points of comparison, and acknowledged some of the problems involved in doing so, including a lack of an equivalent for the Odyssey of T. W. Allen’s editio maior of the Iliad (see Sutton’s introduction to Homer and the Papyri).

The new editors quickly realized that a new approach to the project would be necessary, one that required a number of interconnected and labor intensive action items. First, Sutton’s data needed to be converted to TEI-XML, for its long term stability and so that it could be interoperable with other projects. Second, new papyri needed to be incorporated and assigned numbers in a systematic way. Not only are new papyri published every year (with new “variants,” however those are defined), often old papyri are joined, and so no longer require separate numbers. New descriptions must be written for the newly published or joined papyri and a bibliography maintained. Thirdly, we decided that we could expand the project’s utility by incorporating the data into a fully searchable relational database. Such a database was created by Michael Jones, with the cooperation and supervision of the Stoa Consortium, at that time edited by Anne Mahoney and Ross Scaife. This database allows the user to search in one of six fields, such as title (Iliad or Odyssey), book number, and line number. There are also fields for variants, witnesses, and a more general description field, in which the user may search for special features (such as material, location, or editor). The database, however, is flawed, for reasons that I will discuss further below. Our more theoretical concerns, moreover, were not solved.

These first three action items were our initial goal, and occupied several years of work on the project. But by this time, Martin West’s (1998-2000) Teubner edition of the Iliad had appeared. Not only did this edition track more papyrus readings than had been done by previous editors, it included a list of all Iliad papyri (including the papyri Sutton called “witnesses” and “Homerica”), and this list contained nearly 800 additional unpublished papyri in the Bodleian library, thereby doubling the previously known number. (This list was also published as chapter 4 of West’s Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad [West 2001a].) The editors of the new Homer and the Papyri faced a new dilemma. If we continued to assign numbers and  incorporate new papyri as they were published, our list would conflict with West’s. Our initial decision was to track the differences in a “comparatio numerorum” table. We have since had cause to reevaluate this decision, and are still debating the best solution.

But we faced a far greater dilemma in our continuation of the practice of reporting variants. Should the publication of West’s new edition affect what variants we report for the Iliad? Even as most papyrologists were beginning to make use of West’s edition for their own supplements when publishing new fragments, we wrestled with the idea of making it our default, notional text. Might not the Venetus A, the oldest complete text of the Iliad, make a better, more historical point of comparison? Yet the Venetus A is itself in its own way just an arbitrary edition. In fact, any one version of the text, whether historical or constructed in modern times, is simply one version. Providing only the “variants,” in isolation from their context (as Sutton’s method had been), is misleading, because it suggests that there is an historical “original” from which the variants are varying. For the Homeric poems, that’s simply not the case.

We realized that we wanted to undertake something quite different than what the founding editor, Dana Sutton, had originally envisioned when the internet was still quite new and few standards existed. Moreover, as we continued to test the new database, its problems became increasingly glaring. As is inevitable with a large amount of data entered manually in an unstructured way (I mean by using HTML, which is a descriptive mark up system, rather than XML, which is far more structured), we found numerous errors and contradictions in the data. These errors and a general lack of uniformity, despite the XML structure we attempted to impose on it, to this day prevent the database from working properly. Though it does have some functionality, few users have been able to use it regularly and successfully.

It soon became clear that in order for Homer and the Papyri to become current, useful, and fully integrated within the Multitext, we needed to conceive of the material in a new way. Therefore, just as we had begun to do for the Medieval manuscripts and their scholia, we began to commission new TEI-XML encoded diplomatic editions of the Homeric papyri. These papyri will be published as part of the Homer Multitext by means of the same services and tools that have been developed in conjunction with the manuscripts.

The editors of the Homer Multitext feel that this new vision is true to Dana Sutton’s project, whose aim was to make accessible to interested people and scholars the multiform texts that survive on papyrus. Not only will users be able to access these papyri as complete, diplomatic texts, they will also be able to view them side by side with other historical documents, including other papyri and Medieval manuscripts.

Accomplishing what we envision - a complete library of TEI-XML encoded diplomatic editions of all published Homeric papyri - will require a great deal of work. We very much welcome contributions from other editors, and such contributions will be properly attributed and given recognition. (All contributions must be openly licensed under a Creative Commons license.) We also very much hope to include images from collections who will allow publication under a Creative Commons License, and plan to link to those existing images on-line that have stable URLs. If you are interested in contributing diplomatic editions and/or images to the Homer Multitext please contact Casey Dué (casey at chs.harvard.edu) and Mary Ebbott (ebbott at chs.harvard.edu).

Works Cited and Further Reading

[Allen 1924] Allen, T. W. Homer: The Origins and Transmission. Oxford, 1924.
[Allen 1931] Homeri Ilias. Oxford, 1931.
[Dué 2001a] Dué, C. “Achilles’ Golden Amphora in Aeschines’ Against Timarchus and the Afterlife of Oral Tradition.” Classical Philology 96 (2001): 33-47.
[Dué 2001b] “Sunt Aliquid Manes: Homer, Plato, and Alexandrian Allusion in Propertius 4.7.” Classical Journal 96 (2001): 401-413.
[Dué 2002] Homeric Variations on a Lament by Briseis. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Press, 2002.
[Dué 2006] “The Invention of Ossian.” Classics@ 3 (2006).
[Dué and Ebbott 2009] Dué, C., and M. Ebbott. “Digital Criticism: Editorial Standards for the Homer Multitext.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 3.1 (2009).
[Haslam 1997] Haslam, Michael. "Homeric Papyri and Transmission of the Text." in I. Morris and B. Powell, eds., A New Companion to Homer. Leiden, 1997.
[Lord 1960] Lord, A. B. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, Mass., 1960. 2nd rev. edition, 2000.
[Lord 1991] Epic Singers and Oral Tradition. Ithaca, N.Y., 1991.
[Lord 1995] The Singer Resumes the Tale. Ithaca, N.Y., 1995.
[Nagy 1996a] Nagy, G.  Poetry as Performance. Cambridge, 1996.
[Nagy 1996b] Nagy, G. Homeric Questions. Austin, TX, 1996.
[Nagy 2000] Nagy, G. Review of Martin L. West (ed.) Homeri Ilias. Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2000.09.12.
[Nagy 2002] Plato’s Rhapsody and Homer’s Music: The Poetics of the Panathenaic Festival in Classical Athens. Cambridge, Mass., 2002.
[Nagy 2004] Homer’s Text and Language. Champaign, IL, 2004.
[M. West 1998–2000] West, M., ed. Homeri Ilias. Recensuit / testimonia congessit. Stuttgart and Leipzig, 1998–2000.
[M. West 2001a] Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad. Munich, 2001.
[M. West 2001b] “West on Nagy and Nardelli on West.” Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2001.09.06.
[M. West 2004] “West on Rengakos (BMCR 2002.11.15) and Nagy (Gnomon 75, 2003, 481–501) on West: Response to 2002.11.15.” Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2004.04.17.
[S. West 1967] West, Stephanie. The Ptolemaic Papyri of Homer. Köln, 1967.

* Papyrus image courtesy of Wikimedia.org