Oral Intertextuality and Mediational Routines in the Homeric Epics

Abstract

Building on Chapter 1, this chapter works with a more precise model of oral intertextuality than Homerists have used heretofore. Returning to episodes involving messengers in the epics, it touches on the anticipatory intertextuality evident in such episodes and then explores the messenger’s performance. It focuses on how, as mediators, messengers negotiate the intertextual gap between the speech they are tasked with relaying and their own speech. This investigation illuminates the portrayal of oral texts in the world depicted in the epics, especially what can happen to oral texts in that world, and sheds light on the representation of mediators in the poems. One can then make some inferences about the Iliad poet and the Odyssey poet. The poet characterizes himself as a mediator, but as one who performs in his capacity as a mediator, and the poet seeks to craft an oral text that engages in particular ways with past and future presentations of the same story.