Guest-Gifts and Nobodies in "Odyssey 9"

Abstract

MILMAN PARRY'S remarkable studies have driven the two opposing parties in the Homeric controversy closer together. Not that the Analysts have given ground; but Unitarians have felt it necessary to go so far towards the enemy camp as to admit that depended largely on materials which were traditional, or formulaic, as Parry termed them. According to the Neo-Unitarian position, the man we call came late in a tradition of oral composition. What he did was merely to draw heavily, even exclusively, on pre-fabricated elementsnot only phrases and lines, but entire episodes-and give final shape to the two poems as we know them. Homer turns up as the Bearbeiter in disguise.' Parry's careful analysis of Homeric diction and his investigations into the technique of modern oral composition have made it impossible to deny that Homer depended on his predecessors. What still remains in dispute, however, is the extent of this dependence; how far can we trace an individual shaping hand in the Homeric poems? Unitarianism casts its net wide, but some who call themselves by that title are perhaps too quick to yield before the Analysts' onslaught. They seem quite ready to agree that Homer's contribution was slight: not merely that he used bricks of epic phrasing which he found ready-made and lying at his feet; whole walls had been built by earlier craftsmen, they admit, and Homer