Homer and the Written Word
A “Composition in Performance.”
In my previous essay (True Colors), I said I’d enlarge on the topic of Homer and writing, so here goes. Before I get to the writing about writing part, I thought I’d say a few words about composition in performance and multiformity, as these concepts are important to the Oralist perspective. If I’m misconstruing either of these concepts in my ignorance, and a person of that school should happen by, perhaps they can correct any misapprehensions I may have.
The first point I’d like to advance is that both these concepts are part and parcel of the creative process and its expression. When I attended a concert last summer, Neil Schon played some guitar riffs that he was composing as he performed them.1 He’d never performed those riffs before and he won’t again, nor did writing have anything to do with them – they emerged organically within the context of the song they were playing, their interaction with the audience and our reception of the music.
Musicians typically do this and they can compose whole pieces without the benefit of “writing” (musical notation); some don’t even read music (the most gifted composer/musician I know doesn’t). I might argue the difference between them and the preliterate guslari is more quantitative than qualitative (and maybe not by much: the musicians I know have a very extensive repertoire they can perform without resort to recorded notes). Both the guslari and the musicians compose and recompose in each performance; both are performing the same song and staying faithful to it, so their work can be described as multiform.
Now, let’s consider another case. When I was in my teens, my father, older brother and I were in the habit of listening to various performances of classical pieces, over and over and over.2 We debated the merits of these performances by many of the great conductors of the day: Leopold Stokowski, Eugene Ormandy, Herbert von Karajan, Zubin Mehta, Ernest Ansermet, and Lorin Maazel are the ones I recall.3 The debates were vigorous and tons of fun!4
I bring this up because while (I believe) these performances represent multiforms and certainly exemplify Casey Dué’s point that they “inform our appreciation” of the original (“the one we know”) and give us a “greatly expanded” musical universe that can “open our eyes to the world” of classical music with each new performance, they were all written.
Thus, where the guslari claimed “to reproduce the same song word for word every time” but never did, these musicians were actually playing the same notes as they were written, just not in quite the same way.5 So multiformity does not imply anything about whether a work was written down or not, or how it was composed. Multiformity and composition in performance are fundamental features of the performance of any creative work; they aren’t evidence of anything.
So where does that leave us, in regards to the composition of the Iliad, by whom, and whether or not it was written? As I suggested in my previous essay, Oralist theory doesn’t seem to be of much help here. Beethoven’s 9th no more emerged from the collective consciousness than the Cathedral of Notre Dame emerged from the ground like a tree. Trees are glorious; there are few things more magnificent than a great sequoia, and I should not like to choose which I prefer between a sequoia and a cathedral, but sequoias and cathedrals are not the same thing. We have to be able to tell the difference.
West and the Traditionalists assess the Iliad is a cathedral (which I also conclude); the Oralists feel it’s a tree. I believe the Oralist argument mixes sequoias (the Hindu Vedas are definitely sequoias) and cathedrals without sufficient attention to which is which.6 I’ll leave that debate aside for the moment to focus on the writing aspect. To do that, I’ll quote Dué again:
“It was only when Parry went to Yugoslavia to observe the still-flourishing South Slavic oral epic song tradition that he came to understand that Homeric poetry was not only traditional but oral—that is, composed anew every time in performance, by means of a sophisticated system of traditional phraseology and diction. For Parry, witnessing the workings of a living oral epic song tradition was a paradigm shift. Suddenly, by analogy with the South Slavic tradition, the workings of the Homeric system of composition became clear to him.”
First, I’ll say that how good an analogy the South Slavic tradition is to ancient Greece of the 8th century is questionable; I think there are problems with that idea, which I’ll get back to shortly. But let’s revisit what Lord said, since he is the ultimate source and foundation of the argument:
“The art of narrative song was perfected, and I use the word advisedly, long before the advent of writing. …Even its geniuses were not straining their bonds, longing to be freed from its captivity, eager for the liberation by writing. When writing was introduced, epic singers, again even the most brilliant among them, did not realize its “possibilities” and did not rush to avail themselves of it.” Chapter 6 of Singers of Tales, “Writing and Oral Tradition,” 124.
I quote this again because it represents Parry and Lord’s concept of how poets saw their craft, both ancient and the ones they personally interacted with. But asserting that when writing was introduced, epic singers, even the “most brilliant” of them, didn’t realize its potential is a bold statement (as I suggested in True Colors).
To expand on my point there, I’m going to suggest Lord, when he wrote that, neglected to consider half of the “geniuses” and to be fair, I feel it’s unsurprising he did, given his experiences. Genius takes different forms and one of those is innovation. The singers he and Parry studied can be said – without disparagement – not to be innovators.7 They were geniuses at “composition in performance,” as well as performance itself, but they were also heirs to a long tradition, and that tradition included not just the material they sang, but how they sang and transmitted it, both to their society and their proteges. They were what we might call traditional storytellers, conservative in their craft, which they saw as being their duty to conserve.
This calls into question the analogy above. While it may hold for ancient oral tradition before Homer’s day (accepting he existed) and likely does, would it hold for 8th century Greece? The nature of the times and that society were much different than the times and society of the guslari that Parry and Lord studied. So I believe Parry and Lord, and the Oralists who followed them, have a horizon that is too narrow. They may not fully appreciate the ramifications of living in the tumult of Greece in the 8th century.
It's true that, as a genre, folklore is by its nature traditional and conservative, so it encourages traditional forms of expression and discourages too much innovation. But artists are often innovators. So what about Homer? We know he was a literary genius; was he also an innovator? I see no reason to a priori rule that out.
Allow me, therefore, to stand Lord’s argument on its head. At the time writing was reintroduced into Greece, the people there had been conducting their affairs satisfactorily without it for hundreds of years. Who then would have most benefited from adopting it? Administrators and merchants were doing fine, and adopting new ways of doing things entails costs and risks (COBOL has been in use since the 1970s for good reasons). Why would they assume those costs and take those risks without first being assured of the benefits? We might guess they would be reluctant to.
In contrast, words are the poet’s business; they are the best placed to take advantages of the benefits writing afforded and they have the lowest costs and least risk. There’s no need for them to abandon their traditional ways; they can dabble in writing and if their “test” doesn’t go well, they simply stop. They don’t risk the potential dislocations merchants and administrators may face, or certainly not to the same degree. I’ll even suggest it was likely poets who “normalized” writing for Greek society, making it easier for others to adopt.
That the new Greek alphabet was first adopted to record poetry (contra Lord) is suggested by the fact that the earliest translatable examples we know of after the so-called “Dark Age” (740 and 735-720 BC) are verse, and not just that, but dactylic hexameter verse. One verse is inscribed on a wine jug and refers to a dancer, while the other is on a cup, declaring it to be the “cup of Nestor” (which appears in the Iliad, interestingly enough) and then goes on the say the drinker will be “seized” by Aphrodite. That these two early samples of Greek writing involve alcohol, dancing and being “seized” by the goddess of sexuality may say something about the ancient Greeks’ early priorities when it came to writing!8
The “Poetry First” hypothesis also addresses another issue I continue to see in recent works: that writing in early Archaic Greece was not “practical,” and this is a reason to doubt the Iliad would have been written down. It’s certainly true that writing was difficult and time consuming; the technology was rudimentary and the materials expensive.9 This would no doubt impede the use of writing for workaday purposes, but it could enhance the value of writing for poetry, which was highly esteemed. I submit that a written poem by a master poet – even a short excerpt – being difficult, expensive and rare, would’ve made a princely gift in those days, and be a cherished, even treasured, possession.10 This exalted status of written poetry would have encouraged writing, as something of unique value, and kept writing alive because of its lack of practicality, not despite it, until circumstances allowed its widespread adoption, which they soon did (in historical terms).11 This could be all the more reason for (rare!) written copies of the Iliad to exist early in the Archaic period.
That is a different issue than if writing would have aided in the epic’s composition (as West and I assert). Is there anything we can point to that might have inspired Greek poets of Homer’s era to explore writing? I think there is. But first, it’s worth reviewing the history of writing in ancient Greek culture.
As we know, the Mycenaeans had writing, but apparently did not use it for recording poetry and the like. They were probably aware others did, though. Scholars have long noted the influence of other Near-Eastern cultures on early Greek literature: Hittite, Hurrian, Akkadian, and Babylonian. Parallels to the Epic of Gilgamesh (originally Sumerian) are much noted: Homer was likely familiar with it in some form; the Odyssey poet certainly was. It has become suggested the Iliad owes much to the Hittite “Song of Release” and connections have also been noted between the Kumarbi poems, which are of Bronze Age Hurrian origin, and Hesiod’s Theogony. These are just three prominent examples.12
Of equal interest are the texts of the kingdom of Ugarit, which flourished during the Bronze Age on the coast of northern Syria. Here we find one of the earliest alphabetic scripts so far discovered.13 These texts cover royal correspondence, administrative matters, history, mythology, religion and literature – the full gamut we associate with literature today – all written in an alphabet.
In contrast, the Mycenaean Linear B script, which was adapted from the still undeciphered Minoan Linear A script, was a combined syllabic-ideographic writing system. The Mycenaeans imported it, along with Minoan scribes, who may have formed a “scribal” class. As far as we can tell, it was employed only at major palace centers to support administrative functions. Linear B made heavy use of ideograms to symbolize objects and commodities and was never in widespread use. This probably explains why it died out in Greece: when the palace system collapsed, there was no longer a need for it and, lacking a real foothold in society, it disappeared fairly quickly.
However, the Mycenaeans were in constant contact with these other civilizations that did use writing more extensively and exchanged correspondence with them. Within the palaces, there would have been scribes fluent in the languages of the day, such as Akkadian (the most commonly used diplomatic language, spoken in Bronze Age Mesopotamia), Hittite, likely Egyptian and quite likely Ugaritic. These palace scribes, along with the scribes of the diplomatic staffs in residence, would have been responsible for seeing to it that communications between the various royal courts were conveyed correctly (they may well have traveled between the capitals in pairs).
This was not the extent of the interchange, however. There was also cultural exchange; hence the Near Eastern influence on Greek literature. How was this carried out? There would have been a language barrier to overcome. It seems dubious an oral recitation of an epic could be translated “on the fly” – this can be done for simpler conversations, but for idiomatic and poetic language, it is extremely difficult.14 While it must be no more than conjecture, it seems this process would be made much easier with written texts in hand, that the scribes could try to interpret for the poet-performers in residence, to convey the proper sense of the material (as we do today). In such a case, while the Mycenaeans seem not to have used their own writing system to record poetry and epics, they would know how it was done.
This raises an interesting point. Taking this conjecture as true, would the Greek poets of the 8th century have preserved an awareness of literacy along with their oral tradition? The Iliad contains a single mention of writing. It is in Book 6, when a king who is up to no good sends Bellerophon off with a tablet containing “baneful” or “deadly” symbols. Caroline Alexander wonders if this indicates Homer’s complete ignorance of writing or if it’s a reference to some Bronze Age artifact, the significance of which was a hazy folk-memory. She then asks if it could be “a witty reference to the re-emergence of writing in the poet’s own time, after the Dark Age had ended?”15
These are good questions, because if those Greek poets did retain some memory of writing, how might that have affected the adoption of the Phoenician-based alphabet when it appeared? Could they have even retained some memory of the Ugaritic script, perhaps “paving the way” (to some degree) for the new script?
As a practical matter, while ideograms (which like numerals or emojis provide no phonetic information) have the useful property of not requiring translation to cross language barriers, hence their extensive use in signage, they are not as good as an alphabet for capturing speech. It then makes sense that an alphabet would be adopted first by poets, whose livelihood is words. That these earliest samples of Greek alphabetic writing date from when we believe Homer was active may not, therefore, be a coincidence.
I see Homer as an innovator who recognized the value of writing in composition specifically, not dissemination. Indeed, as I suggested, a written poem would be a closely guarded, treasured possession; Homer would not have let it out of his sight. He would have appreciated that writing provides the ability to modify works in ways that are not achievable in a purely oral tradition, especially in the case of a poem being worked on for a long period (as West suggests and I concur). Parts can be added, moved, shifted and combined in ways oral composition does not permit. It is possible to try out things in a freer way than oral composition allows and, as West describes, this happens in the Iliad repeatedly.16
We might then ask how was the Iliad written down (if it was)? A popular idea is that it was dictated to a scribe. There are plenty of historical examples of this: we have a poem to the god Baal that was dictated to a scribe around 1400 BC (there is an attached note naming both the reciter and the scribe), and also a Hittite incantation appears to have been dictated, [2] and dictation remains popular to this day (though we can use our phones, as I partly did to compose this.)17
Personally, I find the dictation hypothesis less likely, for a couple of reasons. First, I feel the main reason for it is that until literacy became sufficiently widespread in any given society, scribes formed a professional class.18 Trained scribes were certainly crucial for written communication in the ancient world.
The question would be then, had it been long enough in Homer’s day for such a class to reestablish itself wherever he was, so that he could employ them? If indeed he spent years, if not decades, on his work, he would have needed to regularly find a scribe to record his composition and if he wanted to make any changes, he’d need a scribe to read the poem and then implement his edits. Why not simply learn to write? Unlike the previous writing systems, which could have hundreds of symbols, the new alphabet (although there were local variants) would have only had 24 in the areas Homer is likely to have lived. Given what appears to have been Homer’s peripatetic life, learning to record his own work makes more sense than relying on a succession of helpers.19
Perhaps what I’m surmising is opposite of the painting above (that is, maybe I’m a blind kid being led by a sighted Homer) but the weight of evidence seems to me to indicate Homer was the author of the Iliad, he wrote it himself and he did so in the 8th century. He would have maintained a tight grip on his creation, sharing it orally but not (I suspect) flaunting the scroll on which it was written and periodically recopying it. In performance, he wouldn’t recite but perform whatever parts his audience wanted as oral poets had always done. He would improvise and “compose in performance” and so would other poet-performers who learned it from him.
But the written scroll would be his anchor to, which he could add, rearrange and revise, increasing the depth and complexity of his epic. It was a true literary work, but composed and presented in a form that was compatible with the traditions of his time.
So I’ll wrap up with Casey Dué’s comment about West contending that Homer “compose[d] much as a modern poet would,” while adding another remark I recall that we should not imagine Homer composing the Iliad the way Virgil wrote the Aeneid.
My response is: Yes and No. The difference between Homer and Virgil (and a modern poet) is that Virgil lived in a society that had raised written language to a high art; a society that had great libraries and where written correspondence was common and voluminous among the elites (of which he was one). Written language, as it evolves, allows for modes of expression that spoken language and oral poetic language do not support. Virgil was able to employ these (he had internalized them as a youngster) but Homer wasn’t; Homer had to conform to the modes of his era, which were predicated on oral transmission, as they had been in his culture since time immemorial. Even though Homer may have had access to written historical records (as I alluded to in an earlier essay), that would not have lessened the constraints on his expression, but only given him more material to work with.
So yes, Homer composed much as a modern poet (or Virgil) would, in terms of how he developed his epic. And no, because he did not have a highly evolved literary tradition behind him to give him the added freedom of expression that Virgil had, and modern poets have.
Homer was the starting point of our literary tradition; he set us on our path. Is this romantic?20 There is indeed something romantic about this kind of genius, but that is not incompatible with it being true.
I will close with a cogent observation from Caroline Alexander:
The Iliad, one must bear in mind, is not only informed by a long tradition, it is the last iteration of that long tradition. There is no other Iliad after the Iliad. Did centuries of tradition simply end because the performance of the last poet, Homer, was so exceptional as to deter all other competing bards and versions? Or had the tradition, as an oral process, already ended, allowing an individual poet – Homer – to address the inherited material with untraditional liberty?
…
Regardless of whether he sang, dictated, or wrote, did he see himself as doing something with the traditional material that had never been done before? [3]
Of this last sentence, she says, “This, it seems to me, is the fundamental Homeric Question.”
My suspicion is: yes, he did see himself as doing something with the traditional material that had never been done before. What was it?
That’s a question which must be left till later. But I will end (perhaps unfairly?) with a teaser – a cliffhanger, if you will: In composing the Iliad, did Homer flinch?
Works Cited
Bachvarova, Mary R. From Hittite to Homer: The Anatolian Background of Ancient Greek Epic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
Cline, Eric H. 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed: Revised and Updated. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2021.
Homer. The Iliad, A New Translation (translated by Caroline Alexander). New York: HarperCollins, 2015.
Homer. The Odyssey (translated by Emily Wilson). New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018.
Lord, Albert B. The Singer of Tales (edited by Stephen Mitchell and Gregory Nagy). Oxford; New 2nd ed. Online version. Harvard University Press, 2000.
http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_LordA.The_Singer_of_Tales.2000.
West, Martin. The Epic Cycle: A Commentary on the Lost Troy Epics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
West, Martin. The Making of the Iliad. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
West, Martin. The Making of the Odyssey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
References
[1] The Iliad. Homer; Caroline Alexander’s introduction, pp. xxiv.
[2] The Iliad. Homer; Caroline Alexander’s introduction, pp. xxix | Location 824-836.
[3] The Iliad. Homer; Caroline Alexander’s introduction, pp. xxix – xxxi.
Footnotes
And they were awesome! At his age, I hope I can still remember where the front door is and walk to it, and here’s this guy performing at this exceptional level!
It drove our mom a bit nuts, as her tastes lay elsewhere, but she endured it with great good humor.
Seiji Ozawa didn’t make the cut.
My brother is a precisionist; to him a note is a note is a note and you’re supposed to play it precisely. I prefer it when the musicians and the conductor color a little outside the lines. Dad observed our repartee joyfully, had a beer and laughed.
Casey Dué, Achilles Unbound. Multiformity and Tradition in the Homeric Epics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019.
I touch on this point before in Wrestling with Proteus; in its briefest form, it amounts to this: folklore and myth are trees – religious texts also tend to be trees – but history and literature are not. The Iliad contains folklore and myth, but it is more the latter than the former. The Cyclic poems and the Odyssey are almost entirely the former, with only smatterings of the latter. It behooves us to treat them accordingly.
In that regard, I’ll repeat what I said in my previous essay about Caroline Alexander’s experience at the University of Malawi in southeast Africa, and expand on it a bit. In her introduction to her translation of the Iliad, she explains that her colleagues and students, who were raised with a living oral tradition, felt the Iliad was a literary (written) work because it didn’t obey the conventions of oral tradition, although its oral roots were apparent. She notes that her Malawian associates found Homer’s characters are too individualized and “fully formed,” while purely oral poetry, being highly communal in nature, does not typically show this degree of personal characterization, which I can attest to from my own reading of traditional oral works, such as the Nart Sagas of the Caucasus and the Finnish Kalevala. She concludes: “Homer is celebrated by literary people in literary cultures, my associates maintained, because his compositions meet literary expectations.” (pp. xxx).
Emily Wilson, in her 2023 translation of the Iliad concurs, asserting that the Iliad is a work that was composed with the aid of writing.
I intend to develop this in more detail in a future essay.
Dué comments on this: “The paradox with a traditional system such as the South Slavic one that Parry and Lord studied—and, I believe, the system in which the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed—is that innovation occurs, without a doubt, but the singers composing within that system do not strive to innovate. They claim to reproduce the same song word for word every time, yet they never do. It is only outsiders to the tradition who can come and observe innovation happening. For those on the inside, the tradition remains constant.”
As I mentioned in my introductory essay, why this cup was found in the grave of a ten-year-old boy is a subject I’m not going to get near!
I’ve read the Egyptians, who controlled the supply of papyrus – the best thing to write on in that period – severely limited its exportation, so the Greeks would have had to resort to other less suitable or more costly materials, such as pared animal skins. I can’t recover the reference at the moment, but will add it when I do.
There is a tradition that a written text of the Iliad was given as a wedding present. Again, I’ll have to retrieve the reference.
It took nearly two millennia for steam-powered mechanisms to catch on (the first known example dates from around 30 BC).
See Bachvarova (2016) for more of her thoughts on the Hittite influence on the Iliad.
Cline states that “there were actually two alphabetic scripts in the texts, one with twenty-two signs like the Phoenician alphabet and the other with an additional eight signs.” (Cline 2021, 99.)
I once had lunch with a translator at an international conference, who was there to provide real-time translation of the presentations. When asked how he managed it, he told us a story of the time he was translating the movie Good Will Hunting to a group of friends (their nationality escapes me). He said he was doing okay until the scene where Will says “How d’ya like them apples?” That brought him to a dead stop. Translated literally, it made no sense and there was no similar idiom that his friends would know. How he resolved it, I forget, but it is an illustrative example of the difficulties inherent in translation.
Caroline Alexander’s introduction to the Iliad, pp xxix. My own theory is this represents a memory of Hittite cuneiform. I recall a reference to a historian also floating this idea.
As documented in his indispensable 2011 book, The Making of the Iliad. Oxford University Press.
Among prominent Homeric scholars, the most extreme view of this hypothesis I know of is Barry Powell’s: he contends that the creation of the Greek alphabet was tied to a desire to record the Homeric epics, and puts the date as early as 800 BC. He has presented a detailed defense of this hypothesis, involving an individual whom he calls “the Redactor” (if I remember correctly) who worked with Homer in this effort, but most scholars have been reluctant to embrace it.
In my view, his lumping together both epics in this process is a serious flaw, given the amount of evidence they were composed a century part, or possibly more. Nonetheless, his discussion raises many good points and is worth reading. See his 2013 and 2014 translations of the Iliad and Odyssey, respectively, for more (both Oxford University Press).
In my lifetime, professional letter-writers were common in Indian bazaars, offering services in several languages, using manual typewriters. Whether they remain today, I cannot say.
We might postulate that Homer had a traveling companion who was literate while he wasn’t, but again, how long would he be in such a person’s company before picking up writing? It would seem to take a willful effort not to, and what reason could Homer have to avoid it?
Per the Oralist admonition.