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The Composition of the Poem
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Homer: Iliad
In this course, Professor Barbara Graziosi (Durham University) explores Homer’s Iliad. In the first module, we focus on the so-called ‘Homeric Question’, focusing on how and when the poem was composed, who composed it, as well as what it was like in performance. After that, we turn our attention to the driving force of the poem—namely, the rage of Achilles. In the third module, we think about the scope of the poem—both geographical and chronological—despite the fact that the narrative itself only covers eleven days of the ten-year war. In the final two modules, we focus on the character of Hector—first his appearance in Book 6, where he meets several members of his family, and then his appearance in Book 22, where he is killed by Achilles.
The Composition of the Poem
In this module, we think about the Homeric Question, including the question of how and when the poem was composed, who composed it, and what it was like in performance.
Hello, my name is Barbara Graziosi. I'm Professor of Classics at Durham
00:00:03University, and today I'm going to talk about the Iliad, one of
00:00:07my favourite texts. What I plan to do is to start by saying something about the
00:00:11composition of the poem, then I look at its content,
00:00:16and we are told at the beginning, it's about the anger of Achilles,
00:00:20so I'll say something about that. Then I'd look at the Iliad as a poem about
00:00:24Troy, and that's what ‘Iliad’ means. In the last two mini-lectures
00:00:30I'll focus on Hector, and I'd look at his life,
00:00:37and then at his death in Book 22. So, let's start with the composition of
00:00:41the Iliad. If we didn't have anything from Greek literature, and we had to
00:00:49speculate about what the ancient Greeks might have done by way of verbal art,
00:00:54we certainly wouldn't expect Greek literature to start with a massive poem
00:01:00about the anger of Achilles. We would speculate that the beginnings of
00:01:04literature had to do perhaps with songs or poems linked to specific occasions like
00:01:09funerals, or weddings or parties, where you might want to
00:01:17have some songs. The Iliad gives us plenty of evidence that such songs linked
00:01:20to particular context or rituals existed, but it gives no indication about when,
00:01:27why, by whom, in what context it was composed itself, and so there has been a
00:01:35long history of speculation about precisely those questions, which are
00:01:42generally summarised under the title the Homeric Question.
00:01:47The Homeric Question is not just about who composed the Iliad,
00:01:51but also for whom and why, which seemed to me, equally interesting questions.
00:01:54Now, we know something about the date of the poem. It refers to material
00:02:02circumstances that did not obtain much before the end of the 8th century BC
00:02:09or the beginning of the 7th century BC. For example, temples,
00:02:15cult statues, knowledge of the world extending from Thrace to Egypt and
00:02:19Phoenicia, narrative art, all these things are so embedded in the
00:02:24poem that we can't imagine the poem without them. They're not just bits that
00:02:30were added later on. So that gives us a date before which the Iliad
00:02:33couldn't have been composed. We also know that by the late
00:02:396th century BC, the poem was well-known throughout the Greek-speaking world.
00:02:45The two authors that first mentioned Homer by name, come from opposite ends of
00:02:52the Greek world. One is Theagenes of Rhegium in Southern Italy,
00:02:59and the other is Xenophanes of Colophon in what is now the coast of Turkey, which is
00:03:04called Asia Minor if you're a classicist, usually. So, we know that by that point,
00:03:13the poems and indeed the mythical Homer were well-known to all who spoke
00:03:20and heard Greek. We also know that the poem the Iliad, was performed at
00:03:26important city festivals, which were also religious festivals,
00:03:34most famously at the Panathenaea in Athens,
00:03:38which was a big festival in honour of the
00:03:41patron goddess of the city, and professional reciters called rhapsodes
00:03:44went from city to city performing the Iliad at religious festivals.
00:03:50That is not necessarily the original context for which the poems were intended,
00:03:56but if we think about that context, we must conclude that the composition of
00:04:03the Iliad must have involved a degree of institutional support.
00:04:10It's a very, very long poem. It takes about three days or three nights
00:04:15to perform it from start to finish. So, we have to imagine a committed
00:04:20audience that would put themselves through such an experience, and also some
00:04:26infrastructure to ensure that such an audience would have breaks,
00:04:32would have food available for the duration, would have the possibility to
00:04:35sleep in between, and so on. So, that also suggests to me that the poem
00:04:40was intended for reperformance, because you don't go through the trouble
00:04:46of putting something like this on with, you know, not necessarily expense,
00:04:49but you need to have a place, you need to have an audience,
00:04:57you need to have a structure, and so it is reasonable to assume that
00:04:59the poem was intended as something that would be performed again.
00:05:05You can take this from me, because I've taught the Iliad often and
00:05:11reread it many times. It does repay reperformance.
00:05:15If you know it already and you hear it again, you get more out of it.
00:05:19So, that also seems to be a way that is in tune with how it was
00:05:22composed and intended. The language is a strange mixture of
00:05:27different dialects that was never talked by a specific community in real life.
00:05:34It has a lot of Ionian in it, a little bit of Aeolic
00:05:39and other bits and pieces, and it's a language that developed
00:05:42overtime precisely in order to sing of the great deeds of heroes,
00:05:45of gods, and of men to a specific rhythm, the rhythm of the hexameter.
00:05:50Given the bits of dialect that it uses, we know that it must have originated in
00:05:56what is now the coast of Turkey, Asia Minor as I said before,
00:06:01but also that it comes from a very long tradition of composition and
00:06:07re-composition in performance. The techniques used suggest that there
00:06:11were ready-made formulas, bits and pieces of language that could be
00:06:17assembled and reassembled in different ways, in order to compose orally without
00:06:21the use of writing in front of live audiences, but it's also true that writing
00:06:25started to develop and be used precisely at the time when we know that
00:06:34the Iliad was composed. So, to be perfectly honest about this,
00:06:41we can conclude that the Iliad was composed at a time where there was both
00:06:47writing and a long and elaborate and sophisticated tradition of oral
00:06:54composition in performance. And that probably, both techniques of oral
00:06:59composition and writing, played a role in the poem as we
00:07:05have it now. After all, what we have is a written text,
00:07:10so this became a written text at some point, though again that's not something
00:07:13that interested the Greeks very much, because what they wanted was to experience
00:07:18the poem in live performance even after scripts must have existed.
00:07:23
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Graziosi, B. (2018, August 15). Homer: Iliad - The Composition of the Poem [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/homer-iliad-graziosi/the-scope-of-the-iliad
MLA style
Graziosi, B. "Homer: Iliad – The Composition of the Poem." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 15 Aug 2018, https://massolit.io/courses/homer-iliad-graziosi/the-scope-of-the-iliad