Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics

Abstract

This book queries from three different angles what it means to speak of Homeric poetry together with the word “text.” Scholarship from outside the discipline of classical studies on the relationship between orality and textuality motivates and undergirds the project. Part I uses work in linguistic anthropology on oral texts and oral intertextuality to illuminate both the verbal and oratorical landscapes our Homeric poets fashion in their epics and what the poets were striving to do when they performed. Looking to folkloristics, Part II examines modern instances of the textualization of an oral traditional work in order to reconstruct the creation of written versions of the Homeric poems through a process that began with a poet dictating to a scribe. Combining research into scribal activity in other cultures, especially in the fields of religious studies and medieval studies, with research into performance in the field of linguistic anthropology, Part III investigates some of the earliest extant texts of the Homeric epics, the so-called wild papyri. Written texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey achieved an unprecedented degree of standardization after 150 BCE. By looking at oral texts, dictated texts, and wild texts, this book traces the intricate history of Homeric texts from the Archaic to the Hellenistic period, long before the emergence of standardized written texts. Researchers in a number of disciplines will benefit from this comparative and interdisciplinary study.