The Homeric Question: An Issue for the Ancients?

Abstract

What is oral tradition in ancient Greece? In ancient Greece, the question of oral tradition is closely related to the famous Homeric Question. Even if many problems remain without answer, it is today a well recognized fact that the Homeric poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, derive from an oral tradition. However, it remains very remarkable how long it took to discover and prove that derivation. How can we explain this difficulty in recognizing an oral dimension in the Homeric poems? We could still argue that Occidental civilization is what Derrida calls a “civilization of the Book” and that for centuries a great poet has had to be a writer. This explanation is, however, insufficient. Greece itself bears major responsibility for the longstanding misapprehension. Until the fourth century BCE, Greek civilization was une civilisation de la parole. In every activity and in every field, people were trained to repeat or reproduce speeches by others. Writers such as Herodotus or Plato exemplified these procedures of transmission, in which one remembered the words of another who himself quoted a speech originally made by someone else. Indeed, the symposium furnished a cultural occasion to perpetuate this activity of transmission and reproduction of speech. Furthermore, Greeks were perfectly conscious of the advantage of versification to aid memory. Aristotle even undertook to show how metrical poetry adapted itself progressively to the different genres of poetry. But in spite of all of this, Greece seemed to pay no attention to the enigma of Homeric poetry. Amazingly enough, they never recognized the Iliad or the Odyssey as the result of an oral tradition going back to a distant past and transforming previous mythological stories. Homer was for them a composer of fixed poems who lived after the Trojan war (Herodotus proposed to situate him four centuries before himself), and it was clear to everyone that rhapsodes perpetuated his poems with total fidelity. In effect, there was no Homeric Question in ancient Greece. This may not directly help us to answer the question posed above, but it does suggest that our inquiry must also consider how the Greeks themselves conceptualized orality and speech transmission