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Prof. Vico: "Homer, are you aware of school
The questions are: How many “Homers”
were there? Is there at least one whom we might call a
great poet? Or is it all a collection of folk tales
passed on—perhaps through repetitive, formulaic
song—from generation to generation until someone learned
how to write? If that is the case, isn’t that just
glorified stenography? These are not easy questions,
which is fine, since I have no answers. Although the ancients used to wonder
how Homer did it, they were pretty sure that there was a Homer (maybe
two). Then, along came Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico (1688-1744)
and said bluntly (in “The Discovery of the True Homer,”
a section of The New
Science): “We must suppose that the two poems
were composed and compiled by various hands through
successive ages...” and “The first age invented the
fables to serve as true narratives...the second altered
and corrupted them. The third and last, that of Homer,
received them thus corrupted.” Says Vico, “...the Greek
people were themselves Homer.” Independently of Vico and
somewhat later, German scholar, Friedrich August Wolf (1759-1824)
voiced pretty much the same opinion; thus, the entire
19th century was divided between "analysts" and
"unitarians". The former were nit-pickers of language
who pointed out all the anachronisms and inconsistencies
in style (thus, one person could not have written both
works); the latter worshiped the Romantic ideal of the
single great mind and were simply offended that our
greatest epic literature was a collection of tales
handed down by countless anonymous folk-singers and
poets until someone wrote it all down. The battle lines between the two
camps were fairly evenly drawn for a while until Homeric
scholarship was revolutionized in the early 20th century
by Milman Parry
(1902-1935). He showed that Homeric style
made extensive use of fixed expressions, or 'formulas.'
This formulaic structure was, itself, composition—oral
composition, very different from written composition,
which came later. Parry and others showed that it was
entirely plausible to suppose that the two poems were,
indeed, composed and compiled by various hand—or voices,
if you will, and passed on by the power of mnemonic
formulas. If it is helpful, you may wish to think of
this as "Old MacHomer had a farm...and on this farm he
had some Laestrygonians." In any event, most Homeric
scholars today have bought into Parry's idea to varying
degrees. In his introduction to Robert Fagles
translation of The
Odyssey, Bernard Knox sums up the controversy
nicely in a way that does not necessarily make you
choose between the 'oral' or 'literary' camps or even
between one or many Homers. He says that while some of
Parry's claims are extravagant and need revision,* it is
certain that "Homer's unique style does show clearly
that he was heir to a long tradition of oral poetry."
Citing Geoffrey Kirk (The
Songs of Homer, Cambridge, England, 1962), Knox
says that the "epics were the work of
an oral 'monumental composer' whose version imposed
itself on bards and audiences...[but that]...writing
[starting in the last half of the eighth century] did
indeed play a role in the creation of these
extraordinary poems [and that] the phenomena
characteristic of oral epic...are balanced by qualities
peculiar to literary composition." *[note: Among the "extravagant
claims" is one that says that as much as 90% of The Odyssey and The Iliad is
formulaic. That is simply much too high. Also, the
idea that an 'oral poet' cannot also be literate,
while it may be true in the area of Parry's research
in the Balkans, is demonstrably not true in at least
some other folk traditions. Thus, goes the
counter-claim, it is plausible that the Homeric epics
are the result of both traditions, whether you mean
one Homer or many. In any event, in the words of Ruth
Finnegan, "The basic point...is the continuity of oral
and written literature. There is no deep gulf between
the two: they shade into each other both in the
present and over many centuries of historical
development, and there are innumerable cases of poetry
which has both 'oral' and 'written' elements.
(Finnegan, p. 24).] If you go back a bit
to the pre-Parry period, you find some strange
scholarship that not many people took seriously even at
the time. Samuel
Butler (best remembered today as the author of
the utopian novel Erewhon
(an anagram of "nowhere") proposed in the 1890s in The Authoress of the
Odyssey that there were, indeed two authors:
the man who wrote The
Iliad and sometime later the woman who wrote
the Odyssey.
What's more, the latter was a Greek woman living near
Trapani on Sicily in the year 1000 b.c., and all of the
marvelous wanderings of Ulysses after the Trojan War and
back home to Ithaca involved nothing more than a trip
from Trapani around the island of Sicily and nearby
small islands and back to Trapani. Even more, she wrote
all this while using a copy of the Iliad "before her
much as we have it now" for reference. Butler says:
I don't know if the origins of Greek
writing were controversial in the 1890s, and Butler
doesn't expand on "untenable." Today, there is no
controversy; Greek writing did not exist before the year
800 b.c. Thus the idea of the lone Greek/Sicilian
poetess writing the Odyssey
in the year 1000 b.c. and even using a copy of the Iliad written before that time
is—well, untenable. Butler frequented and loved
the town of Trapani, and his arguments are largely based
on geographical similarities between rivers and
mountains near Trapani and the descriptions of places in
the Odyssey.
Also, he says, the Iliad
was clearly written for men by a man since it is full of
men practicing male violence and deceit. The Odyssey, on the
other hand, was clearly written for women by a woman
since it is full of women doing womanly things.
(Practicing female
violence and deceit?) The London Times said in its obituary for
Butler that he was always up for a good hoax and enjoyed
them immensely. It adds, however, that he may have wound
up believing this one. It is worth noting, however, that
Butler had at least one solid supporter—Robert Graves,
who says in The Greek
Myths [170.1]: "Apollodorus records (Epitome, vii. 29)
that 'some have taken the Odyssey to be an account of a
voyage around Sicily'." Graves summarizes Butler's views
and then says, "It is difficult to disagree with
Butler." (But knowing what we do today about the history
of Greek writing, it is not at all difficult.) So, who was Homer? Possibly the
editor in Alexandria in the second century b.c. who
finally gathered up and put together all the scraps of
fables finally committed to writing after long centuries
of oral history. Maybe he also ur-googled all the folk singers in the
area who could still recite from memory and said, "Start
singing, guys. Go slowly, please, because I have to get
it all down. This 'writing' stuff can be tricky." Finally, Vico does point out that at least one plausible etymology for the name "Homer" is homou, meaning "together" plus eirein, meaning "to link." Thus, he says, it is "natural and proper...[to apply]...the name to a putter together of fables." Nevertheless, when you give Homer his
final grade this term, be kind.
sources: Butler, Samuel. The Authoress of the Odyssey, Where and When She Wrote, Who She Was, the Use She Made of the Iliad and How the Poem Grew Under her Hands. London: A.C. Fifield, 1898. Finnegan, Ruth. Oral Poetry: its Nature,
Significance, and Social Context. Cambridge,
England. 1977. Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths,
170.1. Moyer Bell Limited, Mt. Kisco, New York, 1988. Haddock, B.A. "Vico's
'Discovery of the True Homer': A Case-Study in
Historical Reconstruction." Journal of the History of Ideas,
Vol. 40, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 1979), pp. 583-602.
University of Pennsylvania Press. Homer. The Odyssey.
Translated by Robert Fagles; introduction and notes by
Bernard Knox. Penguin Classics. New York, London,
1996. Parry, Milman. The Making of Homeric
Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry,
edited by Adam Parry. Oxford University Press, 1971. Vico, Giambattista. "Discovery
of the true Homer" is Book
III of La
Scienza nuova seconda (Naples, 1744).
The section was not in Vico's earlier edition
from 1725. A convenient Italian version is Giambattista
Vico, Opere, ed. Fausto Nicolini
(Milan and Naples, 1953); an English
translation is The New Science of Giambattista
Vico, trans. Max Harold Fisch and
Thomas Goddard Bergin (Ithaca, N.Y., 1968). Wolf, Friedrich August: Prolegomena zu Homer.
1795. Reclam,
Leipzig, 1908. (German edition). An English version is
Prolegomena to
Homer. 1795. Princeton Univ. Press,
Princeton, N.J. 1985.
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I
don't think there are many people—not just scholars, but
real people—left in the world who think that a single
poet named Homer ever sat down and cranked out both the