The Composition of the Poem

Hello, my name is Barbara Graziosi. I'm Professor of Classics at Durham

University, and today I'm going to talk about the Iliad, one of

my favourite texts. What I plan to do is to start by saying something about the

composition of the poem, then I look at its content,

and we are told at the beginning, it's about the anger of Achilles,

so I'll say something about that. Then I'd look at the Iliad as a poem about

Troy, and that's what ‘Iliad’ means. In the last two mini-lectures

I'll focus on Hector, and I'd look at his life,

and then at his death in Book 22. So, let's start with the composition of

the Iliad. If we didn't have anything from Greek literature, and we had to

speculate about what the ancient Greeks might have done by way of verbal art,

we certainly wouldn't expect Greek literature to start with a massive poem

about the anger of Achilles. We would speculate that the beginnings of

literature had to do perhaps with songs or poems linked to specific occasions like

funerals, or weddings or parties, where you might want to

have some songs. The Iliad gives us plenty of evidence that such songs linked

to particular context or rituals existed, but it gives no indication about when,

why, by whom, in what context it was composed itself, and so there has been a

long history of speculation about precisely those questions, which are

generally summarised under the title the Homeric Question.

The Homeric Question is not just about who composed the Iliad,

but also for whom and why, which seemed to me, equally interesting questions.

Now, we know something about the date of the poem. It refers to material

circumstances that did not obtain much before the end of the 8th century BC

or the beginning of the 7th century BC. For example, temples,

cult statues, knowledge of the world extending from Thrace to Egypt and

Phoenicia, narrative art, all these things are so embedded in the

poem that we can't imagine the poem without them. They're not just bits that

were added later on. So that gives us a date before which the Iliad

couldn't have been composed. We also know that by the late

6th century BC, the poem was well-known throughout the Greek-speaking world.

The two authors that first mentioned Homer by name, come from opposite ends of

the Greek world. One is Theagenes of Rhegium in Southern Italy,

and the other is Xenophanes of Colophon in what is now the coast of Turkey, which is

called Asia Minor if you're a classicist, usually. So, we know that by that point,

the poems and indeed the mythical Homer were well-known to all who spoke

and heard Greek. We also know that the poem the Iliad, was performed at

important city festivals, which were also religious festivals,

most famously at the Panathenaea in Athens,

which was a big festival in honour of the

patron goddess of the city, and professional reciters called rhapsodes

went from city to city performing the Iliad at religious festivals.

That is not necessarily the original context for which the poems were intended,

but if we think about that context, we must conclude that the composition of

the Iliad must have involved a degree of institutional support.

It's a very, very long poem. It takes about three days or three nights

to perform it from start to finish. So, we have to imagine a committed

audience that would put themselves through such an experience, and also some

infrastructure to ensure that such an audience would have breaks,

would have food available for the duration, would have the possibility to

sleep in between, and so on. So, that also suggests to me that the poem

was intended for reperformance, because you don't go through the trouble

of putting something like this on with, you know, not necessarily expense,

but you need to have a place, you need to have an audience,

you need to have a structure, and so it is reasonable to assume that

the poem was intended as something that would be performed again.

You can take this from me, because I've taught the Iliad often and

reread it many times. It does repay reperformance.

If you know it already and you hear it again, you get more out of it.

So, that also seems to be a way that is in tune with how it was

composed and intended. The language is a strange mixture of

different dialects that was never talked by a specific community in real life.

It has a lot of Ionian in it, a little bit of Aeolic

and other bits and pieces, and it's a language that developed

overtime precisely in order to sing of the great deeds of heroes,

of gods, and of men to a specific rhythm, the rhythm of the hexameter.

Given the bits of dialect that it uses, we know that it must have originated in

what is now the coast of Turkey, Asia Minor as I said before,

but also that it comes from a very long tradition of composition and

re-composition in performance. The techniques used suggest that there

were ready-made formulas, bits and pieces of language that could be

assembled and reassembled in different ways, in order to compose orally without

the use of writing in front of live audiences, but it's also true that writing

started to develop and be used precisely at the time when we know that

the Iliad was composed. So, to be perfectly honest about this,

we can conclude that the Iliad was composed at a time where there was both

writing and a long and elaborate and sophisticated tradition of oral

composition in performance. And that probably, both techniques of oral

composition and writing, played a role in the poem as we

have it now. After all, what we have is a written text,

so this became a written text at some point, though again that's not something

that interested the Greeks very much, because what they wanted was to experience

the poem in live performance even after scripts must have existed.