The Composition and Transmission of the Homeric Poems: A Summary

Jerome Moran

doi:10.1017/s2058631021000416

Abstract

If the modern oral hypothesis, beginning in the 1920s (see 17 below), about the composition of early Greek epic poetry is correct (a ‘paradigm shift’ in Homeric studies according to Casey Dué), there were many poets who over centuries, beginning perhaps in the middle-to-late Bronze Age, composed in performance many different versions of epic poems, including poems about the Trojan War, and including the subject matter of the Iliad and the Odyssey, vestiges of which survive on papyrus fragments and in the manuscripts of later authors. But the versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey that we have were not the work of many poets but, for the most part, of a single poet. The overall unity of the poems cannot be explained, or explained away, by any theory that posits multiple, successive authorship spanning many years.

Highlights

If the modern oral hypothesis, beginning in the 1920s, about the composition of early Greek epic poetry is correct (a ‘paradigm shift’ in Homeric studies according to Casey Dué), there were many poets who over centuries, beginning perhaps in the middle-to-late Bronze Age, composed in performance many different versions of epic poems, including poems about the Trojan War, and including the subject matter of the Iliad and the Odyssey, vestiges of which survive on papyrus fragments and in the manuscripts of later authors
No firm dates can be given except for 12–18, but the first written versions of the Homeric poems must have been made within the poet’s lifetime(s), especially if they were dictated in some way by the poet, in the early Archaic Age, if that is when the poet(s) lived
As time went on and the Homeric poems became better known, fewer and fewer variants of them were composed by other poets

Summary

Introduction

If the modern oral hypothesis, beginning in the 1920s (see 17 below), about the composition of early Greek epic poetry is correct (a ‘paradigm shift’ in Homeric studies according to Casey Dué), there were many poets who over centuries, beginning perhaps in the middle-to-late Bronze Age, composed in performance many different versions of epic poems, including poems about the Trojan War, and including the subject matter of the Iliad and the Odyssey, vestiges of which survive on papyrus fragments and in the manuscripts of later authors. I take ‘Homeric’ poems to be the poems that from their earliest forms have come down to us in their various instantiations as the Iliad and the Odyssey. All the poems he composed would have died with him (before him, : see 2 and 5 below), unless committed to writing. 1 In the early Archaic Age (we assume), two series of oral epic poems about the Trojan War were composed, each by a single poet, probably not the same poet for both.

Results

Conclusion