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The Homeric Question
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Homer: Iliad
In this course, we explore several aspects of Homer’s Iliad. The course begins with a consideration of one of the most fundamental questions asked of the Homeric epics – the so-called Homeric Question – which asks whether the Iliad was the work of a single poet or many. After that, we examine one of the key episodes of the poem, the Embassy to Achilles, before exploring the concept of heroism in the epic: why is it, we ask, that heroes such as Sarpedon, Hector and Achilles risk life and limb on the battlefield? In the fourth module, we think about characterization in the epic, and in the fifth we focus on the gods in the epic: what are they doing in a poem about the wrath of Achilles, and why are they presented in the way they are? In the final module, we look in more detail at the final two books of the epic, up to an including the final scene of the poem.
The Homeric Question
In this module, we explore one of the most fundamental questions asked of the Homeric epics – was the Iliad the work of a single poet or of many? Indeed, how do we begin to understand the concept of ‘authorship’ in a society where poetry was composed and performed orally, as opposed to being written down?
I'm Richard Jenkyns, and this is
00:00:03a set of short talks about Homer's Iliad.
00:00:05I'm going to start by considering what sort of poem
00:00:08this is.
00:00:11Since the end of the eighteenth century,
00:00:12scholars have debated what's called the Homeric question.
00:00:15In simple terms, was the Iliad, the work
00:00:17of one poet or of many?
00:00:21And the same question can be applied
00:00:23to the other Homeric epic, the Odyssey,
00:00:25but I'm going to set that on one side
00:00:27and simply talk about the Iliad.
00:00:29Now we know that there was a period in Greece when
00:00:32they lost the use of writing.
00:00:36Mycenaean civilization at its height,
00:00:38in the middle of the second millennium BC,
00:00:41knew the use of writing, but it disappeared from Greece, only
00:00:44to be reintroduced in a different form
00:00:47sometime in the 8th century BC.
00:00:50Between those two times, words can only be transmitted orally.
00:00:53Now the Homeric question was transformed by the discovery
00:01:01about eighty years ago that the Iliad
00:01:04is a poem in an oral tradition.
00:01:07So we need to consider why we think that and what it means.
00:01:10Anyone who reads Homer, soon becomes aware
00:01:18that there's a great deal of repetition.
00:01:21I should say that this is disguised
00:01:23in some English translations and it's best
00:01:25to go for a translation in which this is not disguised.
00:01:28But Homer is full of the repeated phrases.
00:01:31For example, phrases which yoke the same noun
00:01:39to the same adjective:
00:01:43‘cloud-gathering Zeus’
00:01:45or ‘unharvested sea’ and so on.
00:01:46Now it's not only that there are a lot of these phrases,
00:01:51but they are systematic.
00:01:54They show economy.
00:01:57For one amount of space, you have only one phrase.
00:01:59So for example, if the poet wants
00:02:03to say that Achilles is doing something
00:02:04and he wants to fill five syllables
00:02:06at the end of the line, he calls him ‘noble Achilles’.
00:02:09If he wants to fill seven syllables,
00:02:12he calls him, ‘rapid-footed Achilles’, and that's
00:02:15what he does consistently.
00:02:19Now the most obvious reason for this
00:02:21would be to assist composition without the use of writing when
00:02:25all composition has to go on in the poet's head,
00:02:29and he has these ready-made phrases
00:02:32to deploy when he wants to speak about a particular person
00:02:34or a particular thing.
00:02:38Now if we then look at the language of some
00:02:40of these phrases, we see that they must have come
00:02:43into being at different times.
00:02:47Some of the grammatical forms belong to different stages
00:02:53in the development of the Greek language.
00:02:57And some of them must be very ancient,
00:03:00centuries earlier than anyone whom we could call Homer.
00:03:02So if you – another consideration
00:03:07is that there are forms from different dialects.
00:03:12So not only is this not a language
00:03:16that could be been spoken in any one time.
00:03:18It's not a language that could have
00:03:23been spoken in any one place.
00:03:24It's created special language.
00:03:27Now putting all these things together,
00:03:31these different pieces of knowledge,
00:03:34it really seems clear that a great deal
00:03:36of the language and maybe other things,
00:03:40story patterns too, are inherited.
00:03:43They've been passed down through the centuries
00:03:45by purely oral means.
00:03:48Now what that shows is that the poem is in an oral tradition.
00:03:52There is another question whether the poem is fully
00:03:58oral itself, or was it composed in contact with writing.
00:04:02And either because the poet learnt to write himself
00:04:09and wrote it down or because he dictated it to someone who had
00:04:15this extraordinary new technology writing.
00:04:18But let's go back to the Homeric question
00:04:24and see how the discovery of all reality changes it.
00:04:26Before that the question was in a very simple.
00:04:32Some people said Homer composed the Iliad in the same sense
00:04:35that Virgil composed the Aeneid.
00:04:39Other people said no, it's a patchwork.
00:04:42And there were two versions of the patchwork theory.
00:04:44One was that there was a core poem,
00:04:47an original piece of patchwork.
00:04:49And then other poets came and added their own patches.
00:04:51The second theory is that there was a redactor or editor, who
00:04:54collected different lays,
00:04:58he collected different patches and stitched them together,
00:05:00adding some bits in to make them fit.
00:05:03Now once you recognize the oral nature of the poem,
00:05:07the question becomes fuzzier.
00:05:11It doesn't disappear but it becomes fuzzier.
00:05:13The picture is now on the one side not of a patchwork
00:05:16but of something more like a rumour.
00:05:21I mean, supposing a rumour goes around a village.
00:05:23A tells a piece of gossip to B, B passes it on to C, C
00:05:25add some sort of spicy extra bits,
00:05:30the next person mixes it in with another story,
00:05:35the next person gets the people muddled up
00:05:39and gets it the wrong way around.
00:05:42By the time it's got back to the original person,
00:05:44it's completely unrecognizable.
00:05:46And you wouldn't want to say that A or B or C
00:05:49or D compose this.
00:05:52It would be the work of the whole village collectively,
00:05:54gradually developing this.
00:05:57Now an oral poem could, in principle, be like that.
00:06:00Was the Iliad like that?
00:06:04I'm among many people now who think that it can't be
00:06:08and that we can suppose now, with fair confidence,
00:06:13that the Iliad is essentially the work of one great poet
00:06:19using traditional language, whole lines maybe,
00:06:25or patterns of story, ways of putting forward
00:06:30different scenes, and certainly traditional language.
00:06:35But being the one mind that forms essentially the
00:06:40Iliad as we know it.
00:06:43And there are two principal reasons for this.
00:06:45One is a general reason, which is
00:06:48that no one has been able to give
00:06:50a convincing account of how a poem of such vast length
00:06:52could have been transmitted by purely oral means.
00:06:57I mean, how could it have happened?
00:07:00Does – Could the poet in some way
00:07:02have persuaded lots of other poets
00:07:11to come and sit at his feet, as he recited his poem to them
00:07:13over, and over, and over again?
00:07:16Alternatively, if the poem is constantly
00:07:19changing all the time, each time it's sung, then by definition,
00:07:21the last person to sing it in contact with writing
00:07:25is going to be the author.
00:07:28The second reason for thinking it's essentially
00:07:31the work of one poet is much more particular.
00:07:34English and most languages with which we are familiar
00:07:37has grammatically two numbers, singular and plural.
00:07:40So we say he is but they are, mouse is mice in the plural,
00:07:45cat is cats in the plural.
00:07:51But Greek has a third number when you're
00:07:54talking about two people.
00:07:56Now in Book 9, Agamemnon sends an embassy to Achilles.
00:07:58And sometimes there are two ambassadors,
00:08:05and sometimes there are three.
00:08:07It goes back and forth.
00:08:09And there's only one plausible explanation of this, I think,
00:08:11which is that the poet originally had
00:08:14the idea of two ambassadors,
00:08:18then he saw he could add a third,
00:08:21and he didn't trouble to change what he had already written.
00:08:24After all, if you're an oral poet,
00:08:28you have no conception of erasure.
00:08:30You can't say, ‘Hey, stop let me go back twenty lines
00:08:33and change what I said.’
00:08:36You just go forward all the time.
00:08:37And if the poem was purely oral, then the next time it was sung,
00:08:40the anomaly would have been removed.
00:08:45You would have just three ambassadors all the time.
00:08:51I mean, that's the way that orality works.
00:08:54It would correct something like this.
00:08:56So there is this particular reason too,
00:08:59for thinking that the poem is composed
00:09:02in contact with writing.
00:09:05Does it matter?
00:09:09Well, it matters at least in this respect,
00:09:11that if the poem were purely oral,
00:09:13there would not be even in principle an ideal text
00:09:16because the poet never sang his song exactly the same twice.
00:09:20If a poem is composed in contact with writing, whether it's
00:09:27the Iliad, or the Aeneid, or Hamlet,
00:09:31that is in principle, an ideal text, exactly what the author
00:09:34wrote down or dictated.
00:09:40Now we shall never have that.
00:09:43All ancient texts and most modern texts
00:09:46suffer some degree of distortion in transmission.
00:09:49But in principle, it would be like a written
00:09:54text in that respect.
00:09:59Well, that's laying the groundwork.
00:10:02The next thing is to look at the poem itself
00:10:05and to see how it expresses itself as a work of literature.
00:10:08
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Jenkyns, R. (2018, August 15). Homer: Iliad - The Homeric Question [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/homer-iliad/book-9-the-embassy-to-achilles
MLA style
Jenkyns, R. "Homer: Iliad – The Homeric Question." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 15 Aug 2018, https://massolit.io/courses/homer-iliad/book-9-the-embassy-to-achilles