True Colors
Personal reflections or This ship is goin’ down… maybe?
I imagine most people know this, but for those who may not be aware, colors in my title refers to the flags flown by maritime vessels to proclaim their nationality (wherever their vessel is registered). Back in the Age of Sail, it was considered in wartime a legitimate stratagem for a warship to fly the flag of a different nation (such as a neutral) – false colors – to lure an unsuspecting enemy in range, as long as the proper flag – true colors – was hoisted before commencing hostilities.1 (Otherwise it was counter to the laws of war and amounted to piracy.) This behavior (I suspect) also gave rise to the term “false flag operation.”
I use true colors here in several ways:
First, to declare my allegiance in what I perceive to be the central debate in Homeric scholarship. I already have made brief mention of this in another essay, but I will develop my reasons here and people might as well know where I stand.
Second, because this essay will be true to the title of my Substack: it will no doubt meander and at times loop back upon itself. Be prepared!
Third, I’m writing more off the cuff than I sometimes do, without checking and rechecking my sources but instead relying on my (fallible!) memory. I figure that whatever cognitive deficiencies I have, they influence the conclusions I arrive at, regardless of how careful I try to be about the details. So writing this way might provide a useful gauge of the extent to which I know what I’m talking about (or don’t).2
With those points in mind, I’ll begin…
Introduction
My topic is the central debate I alluded to above, which anyone familiar with Homeric scholarship will be aware of. It concerns the origins and composition of the epic poems – the Homeric epics and especially the Iliad (which I will focus on) – and whether Homer was an individual or not, and how writing was involved in the composition of the poems. The history of this debate has been extensively written and talked about, so I will review it briefly, hitting the high notes as best I can. First, the background:
Back in 1933, Milman Parry, an American classicist, went to what was then Yugoslavia to research and record the traditional tales performed by South Slavic singers of epics (known as guslari) which at the time were part of an active and largely preliterate oral tradition. On his second trip, he was joined by Albert Lord, his student and protégée, and they worked together until Parry’s untimely death in 1935. After a hiatus caused by WWII, Lord continued their work in the 1950s, culminating in the publishing of his groundbreaking book, The Singer of Tales, in 1960.3
Their work has been extremely influential in Homeric studies, to say the least. They introduced the concept of “composition in performance” and showed that the Homeric epics had their roots in oral tradition, which had been previously proposed, but Parry and Lord established it beyond any doubt. They also introduced the concept of “multiformity” to describe the different versions of a particular song they encountered, and called into question Homer as the singular author of the epics attributed to him. They also questioned whether the epics were composed with the aid of writing, and more generally, how they came to be written down. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this caused a schism in the Homeric scholarship community, and it has been with us ever since.
On one side of the debate is the “Parry and Lord” camp, the Oralists, who argue that there was no single author/composer of the Iliad; that instead it was the product of long oral tradition, comparable to the epics of the guslari and other similar societies.4 For roughly the last 30 years, the preeminent figure among the Oralists has been Gregory Nagy of Harvard (now retired). Other prominent scholars in his camp are Casey Dué and Leonard Muellner, both of which I’ll mention later.
Nagy’s great contribution is that he expanded on the work of Parry and Lord, using his own research on how stories are composed, preserved and transmitted in other oral traditions, and developed from this his “evolutionary” model for the origin of oral epics.
In a nutshell, Nagy’s evolutionary model holds that in stories in preliterate societies spring from many sources and show a lot of variation early on, but as they are transmitted by poet-performers who continually recompose them in their performances, the variation diminishes. Nagy found that the more widespread a story became the less variation it showed until, after centuries, it assumed the character of a “fixed text.” The term “text” may be a bit misleading, because Nagy argues that writing (which “text” might imply) is not necessary for either the story’s composition or for it to eventually become fixed. While writing can aid in establishing a fixed text, Nagy points out that we should not allow our experience as a literate society of long standing to skew our perspective. To us, a written text – the “letter of the law” – is the authoritative form and written laws, contracts, and other agreements take precedence over oral ones. But in other societies this is not always the case, even if they are literate. The old saying “my word is my bond” reflects that, as does telling someone “I give you my word.” So a spoken version of a work can be considered more authoritative than a written version, diminishing the importance of written versions, and thus the motivation to create them early on.5
Nagy also argues “Homer” is a fiction created late in the game to explain the poems’ origin. Leonard Muellner expressed it this way: “Homer didn’t make the poems, the poems made Homer.”6
The opposing camp, the Traditionalists (for lack of a better name) was led (if that’s the word – it probably isn’t) by the late (and great, IMHO) Martin West, until his death in 2015. The Traditionalists accept and appreciate the work of Parry and Lord, but they contend that the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed by individual poets and (especially in the case of West) they were written, based on (or derived from) existing oral works. They also tend to separate the Iliad and Odyssey in time, space and authorship.
In response to the Oralist position, West wrote three monumental books: The Making of the Iliad (2011), The Epic Cycle (2013), and his last work The Making of the Odyssey (2014). They are expensive to obtain for non-specialists but they are (in my view) the best and most comprehensive analysis of the Trojan War poems to date. For whatever reason, they seem to have not gotten the attention they deserve; I rarely see them referenced in the many sources I’ve consulted.
I have not done a careful survey, but the impression I have is that, at least for the last 15 years, the Oralist camp predominates among classicists who focus on literary analysis while historians tend to favor the traditional view. The Iliad’s two most recent translators, Caroline Alexander and Emily Wilson, are also in the traditionalist camp. (Alexander gives cogent reasons for her position which I’ll cover below). So the current status of the debate is unclear to me; in the early 2000s, Nagy and West would occasionally go at it hammer and tongs. As late as 2011, West’s comments on the Oralists were rather pointed. He begins the preface of his 2011 book by saying:
“In this book I expound the view that I have formed over many years about the composition of the Iliad. My goal is to persuade everyone that something like this view, if not all the detail, is necessary and ought to be accepted. I have no expectation of easy or rapid success: a single individual’s efforts, however spirited, will hardly suffice to check the momentum of the bandwagon and redirect it onto a different path. But it may be that some of those who have let themselves be carried on by it for lack of alternative transport may now take the opportunity to dismount and reappraise the situation, and with their defection the vehicle’s inertial mass will diminish.”
In 2019, Casey Dué fired back at West in one of her books, despite her target having departed the field four years before. Her response is central to my argument and I’ll go into it below.
So those are the basics, and for the record, while I admire much of what Nagy has accomplished, I am Team West. Now, I’ll try to explain why. I hope nothing I say will be construed as opening hostilities, and apologize in advance if any infelicities of expression on my part make it seem so.
Where I Stand
My reasons for siding with West are partly personal, partly analytical, and perhaps partly do to ignorance. Because it’s easy, I’ll deal with the ignorance issue first.
The Oralist’s discourse is rather wooly and often opaque to me. It has its own vocabulary and theoretical structures, and has a focus on the meanings behind phrases and not just reading between the lines, but reading between the words. This is understandable: stories aren’t fully comprehensible outside their cultural context; if I’m an outsider to a culture, I’m unlikely to get their jokes or understand why particular characters draw the reaction they do, or what an allusion or the setting of a scene means. But the details of their analysis are often lost on me, and given the paucity of data we have – only a vanishingly small fraction of what once existed – I can’t help but feeling it’s being overanalyzed. I’m also often in the dark on how exactly their analysis shows that a Homer probably didn’t exist and why a Homer could not have employed writing. Perhaps if I was less ignorant of their methods, more familiar with the gory details of the texts in their original Greek, and could thus grasp their arguments better, that would be clearer to me. So I need to be cautious here.
On the other hand, West’s analysis appeals to me not only for its fine detail and comprehensiveness, but because I can follow it, despite my lack of Greek and near-total unfamiliarity with linguistic niceties. It simply makes sense, and it does so partly because of my personal experience, which had led me to the same basic conclusions, but on the level of a mere hunch, not a defensible position. I’ll describe that experience, as inapt as it might be.
Back around 1990, I had what I thought was a great idea: a sci/fi story about the adventures of a female fighter pilot with unusual abilities and a dark past; a quintessential outsider in the alien (to her) society into which she’s been thrust. I wrote a short novella that took place in the midst of a war that was not described in any detail: why it was being fought, how long it had been going on, or who was fighting it. The heroine’s background was briefly sketched but no more. The other main character and his relationship to the heroine was more suggested than developed. As with any short work of science fiction, a great deal was left to the reader to fill in from their general knowledge of the genre.
The story was not met with enthusiasm by those who read it (too dark). So I set about trying to fix it. I expanded some parts, added others. I created a detailed narrative about the war, its history and the actors involved, adding two subplots and greatly expanding the cast of characters, a few of which took on major roles with their own stories. I tried a new plot with a new backstory for my heroine, resulting in two versions of the story. I rearranged sections, and I kept adding and expanding. From the Oralist perspective, my story became multiform.7
By the late 1990s, I had a lot of words, but no story. I became discouraged; after years of effort the thing just wouldn’t gel. Life intervened and I pretty much dropped the project. In 2011, through a happy accident, I teamed up with a coauthor who could bring to the story all the things I was lacking. Between 2011 and 2017, we completed seven novels, a long short story and some subsidiary works. We still aren’t done, 35 years after I first had the idea.8
Imagine my surprise when, reading The Making of the Iliad for the first time, I discovered West concluded Homer (whom he dubs “P”) had followed a rather similar process of starting with a short poem about a conflict in the midst of an as yet undefined war, then expanded, added to and rearranged it over the course of decades. The correspondence between what West laid out and what I initially, then myself and my coauthor, went through were great enough that I felt a bit stunned. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been? This process may well be common to authors creating an extensive, multifaceted story. There may be something fundamental in the way we construct stories that imposes such a process. I can’t say, but I can say that for these reasons, West’s analysis resonated with me.
There is another reason I found his analysis convincing. I have been a writer for five decades, both in my profession and for leisure; I have been an occasional editor for three. Both writing, and especially editing (fiction and nonfiction across multiple genres) gives one an appreciation of the kinds of errors and inconsistencies authors introduce into their work (especially me). These proliferate as the work grows, particularly if it was created over an extended period of time with significant gaps between bouts of writing (as in my case). One of my main functions as an editor is finding and correcting these issues. During my first serious reading of the Iliad, I got a hint of these kinds of issues. At the time, I took it for granted (you might say) that this was natural in an ancient text – an ancient written text because such issues are created in the writing process, not the mental/oral process we authors go through prior to writing.
By the time I read The Making of the Iliad, I was aware of these controversies and saw my impressions in a new light. However, I could never have defended them with any confidence. But here was West, taking the same approach; he says his hypothesis on the Iliad’s composition “is founded on study of the poem and observation of numerous anomalies and discontinuities in the narrative.” He then articulates and defends it with a precision, depth, comprehensiveness and rigor that was breathtaking. Given I was already aligned with his conclusions, I open myself to a charge of confirmation bias. That charge must be taken seriously.
This leads to my consideration of the Oralist position on the analytic front. As I think about this, it occurs to me it’s a topic that deserves its own treatment, which could be unwieldy in this essay, so I’m going to try to summarize my thoughts and develop them more in another piece.
I’ll start by quoting Casey Dué, who I mentioned earlier as “firing back” at West. Here’s what she said, regarding a specific point he raised:
“Such a statement reflects West’s conception of a literate ‘Homer’ (whom he designates simply as P) who composes much as a modern poet would. I and my collaborators on the Homer Multitext find such a conception untenable in light of the fieldwork of Parry and Lord, decades of subsequent scholarship, and modern anthropological study of oral traditions.”9
First, I’m going to observe (and I’m not inclined to think it’s a mere quibble) that untenable is a strong word. It’s not an off-the-cuff remark; she published it in her book after due consideration. So I’m taking her seriously.
In that vein, regarding the “decades of subsequent scholarship,” I feel she may be overstating the case. As I pointed out above, Nagy argues that writing is not necessary for the story’s composition; not that the use of writing is ruled out. Lord made a similar point. In Chapter 6 of Singers of Tales, “Writing and Oral Tradition,” he says:
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. (Lord, 124.)10
Poets not being eager for “the liberation by writing” and thus not rushing to avail themselves of it is a long way from saying that one remarkable poet, composing at one time and place, could not have availed himself of the possibilities writing offered him.
Muellner, in his 2016 interview, strikes a similar tone. Those are only three examples (though I feel they’re important ones, given who they are), so I believe Dué’s comment may not track as closely with Oralist scholarship as she implies: saying something is unlikely, or another hypothesis seems more likely in comparison, is very different than saying that thing could not have happened, because the argument for it is indefensible or invalid, which is what Dué is asserting.
However, what I find more problematic is this part of her statement: “modern anthropological study of oral traditions.” Here, perhaps, is a serious flaw in her argument. First, we might question how relevant modern anthropological studies of [modern] oral traditions are to Homer’s society back in the 8th century. But even if they can be shown to be relevant, they don’t address the issue.
Anthropological studies, by their nature, are of communities and societies, not of individuals. They can suggest that in such-and-such a society, things are usually done in a particular way, but they cannot state that all individuals must have done things that way, if it’s possible for an individual to do them differently.
We know that when and where Homer existed (if he existed), writing was being used and it was being used for recording hexameter poetry. Archaeology has established that. Therefore, the possibility exists that a poet could have used it to compose a poem like the Iliad, just as West contends “P” did. I’ll further add that writing would be of very great use to composing a work like the Iliad, especially over a span of years or decades, as West asserts, and it’s not impossible a genius, early adopter, poet would recognize that.11
There’s also the point Caroline Alexander made about establishing a Classics department in Malawi. Her students and colleagues there were part of a society with a robust, living oral tradition. Regarding the Iliad, they thought it was not, in fact, an oral poem (even if it was derived from oral poems); its plot and style were inconsistent with a poem composed orally (it was too well developed and its characterizations were too “round”), so in their view, it was a literary poem. Who should we give more credence too? Anthropologists studying oral traditions or the people living those traditions? It’s a fair question.
Again, I’ll have much more to say about all this in the future, but for now, I’ll stick to my point that anthropological studies can’t render West’s hypothesis “untenable” – anthropology in this case is not applicable.12
So why would Dué say what she did? It may well be that the Oralists are right and West is wrong – actually more likely vs less likely (since right and wrong are far beyond our ken), but the three things she musters in defense of her characterization of West’s hypothesis either don’t support that or don’t apply.
Perhaps she did overstate, though with intention? After all, West (in his preface) might be said to have fired first. I’m willing to give her that, as she does seem to soften her comment a bit later when she writes:
Our two approaches are not entirely incompatible: in some respects these are merely two different ways of labeling and conceptualizing the same phenomenon. The distinction lies in what we do with the text that survives. While West, like Aristarchus, separates out the portions of the poem he believes are attributable to a master poet and distinguishes (via bracketing and in some cases omission) others as not Homeric, the editors of the Homer Multitext have made the decision to treat each historical instantiation of the Iliad as just that: a whole unto itself, worthy of study for its own sake as well as for what it teaches us about the larger Homeric tradition.13
Well and good, but I’m still left wondering why she didn’t make a better defense in her first statement. She does enlarge on her thoughts, but they don’t seem to me to address the central issue: analyzing what a collective tends to do vs what an individual could do. It seem to me there’s something up here. What?
At the risk of possibly seeming impolite, I’m going to explore what I think it might be. I don’t intend any unfortunate personal reflection on Casey Dué or anyone else, and again I apologize if what I say seems to. My thoughts touch on the methodological basis of the Oralist paradigm, however, so I feel it’s worth stating them here.
Leonard Muellner made a comment in his interview, that combined with what Casey Dué said, may put its finger on the heart of the matter. He said we had to give up the “romantic” idea of a monumental master poet, and he allowed this was hard to do.
I found this statement puzzling. What is “romantic” about the idea of Homer, the monumental master poet? Our history has gifted us with a number of monumental poets and writers: Sappho, Virgil, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton and Tolstoy, to name just a few. Except for Sappho, whom I would nominate as the most romantic figure of our past, they’re not typically seen as romantic and no one suggests we should give them up (they are historical figures, after all), if only in the sense of not considering them monumental, even if they were.
Why is Homer – the idea of Homer – as a monumental master poet romantic and why should we give him up because of that? Along with Muellner, Dué explicitly wants us to do this. I will take the liberty of quoting her at some length:
If we fully embrace the fieldwork that Parry and Lord and those who have followed in their footsteps have conducted, and evaluate each instance of multiformity that is attested in our ancient sources for what it teaches us about composition in performance and the poetics of an oral tradition, we will no longer draw sharp distinctions between “Homer,” or “the poet,” or “P,” and the “rhapsodes,” who have so often been seen as mere reproducers of another’s creative work. Rather we will see all singers in this tradition, from the Bronze Age down through the Hellenistic period, as operating within a system that evolved and changed over time and eventually, under the influence of a variety of pressures (regulated performance, Panhellenism, increasing literacy, among others), crystallized.
…
By approaching the Iliad this way, we lose “Homer,” the individual genius, and we lose a fixed and monolithic entity that we can analyze as a self-contained unit. But we gain infinitely more Iliads to inform our appreciation of the one we know, and a greatly expanded poetic universe. We may lose “intertextuality,” but we gain “resonance” (Lord 1960:65; Graziosi and Haubold 2005), “traditional referentiality” (Foley 1999), “interformularity” (Bakker 2013:157–169), and “interaction” among speech and musical genres both past and present (Martin, forthcoming). These methodologies, all of which are grounded in an understanding of oral poetics and Homeric poetry as a system, open our eyes to the world of epic song in which each new performance was composed and received by its audience.
Two things are apparent here: 1) the idea of a monumental poet is not okay; all singers are on the same plane and subject to inexorable, impersonal “pressures” that “crystallized” their work into something we have cherished ever since. No individual greatness here; all part of a “system.” 2) Our “loss” of Homer is presented as a tradeoff: we lose him but gain “resonance”, “traditional referentiality”, “interformularity”, and “interaction.” (I’m not even sure what those terms mean, but again I’m ignorant here.) We also gain “infinitely more Iliads” and a “greatly expanded poetic universe” – which consists of “infinite” variations on the “one we know.” Is the one we know insufficient? How do all these fragments and minor variations “expand” our appreciation of the Iliad and why do we not insist on this for any other poet in our history or consider them nothing more than a faceless, nameless part of a system?
Obviously, great and influential works have been created by exactly this organic process the Oralists describe, the Old Testament of the Bible and the Hindu Vedas among them. That seems to me beside the point. The nature of these other great works is well known and uncontested; they are of a different type altogether. The greatest of them are religious texts; the Iliad stands among the works of the other poets and writers I just mentioned.
Yet, maybe that point is a distraction. What is more salient is that the question of Homer is presented as a tradeoff at all. We did not “give up” the idea the sun orbits the Earth to “gain” a heliocentric solar system; a heliocentric solar system conformed to reality, the other didn’t so we abandoned it, because we were interested in reality, not a tradeoff; not gaining “interformularity” etc.
Looking again at Muellner’s comment, he’s changed (I suppose unwittingly) the whole nature of the debate. Faced with two hypotheses, A and B, the question should be: which hypothesis does the data better support? But Muellner (and Dué, in different terms) are asking something else: to give up the “romantic” idea of a master poet, which means giving up Homer (Hypothesis A), not because the data don’t support Hypothesis A, but because romance is blinding us to the truth of Hypothesis B.
This is not analysis. Might it explain how Dué’s chose to defend her stance, though? If we reject individual greatness as the prime mover of the Iliad’s creation, what do we have left? Parry and Lord, the scholarship derived from Parry and Lord, and anthropological field studies. However, since none of those things can deny individual greatness, individual greatness needs to be rejected first. Basically, she’s putting the cart before the horse.
Putting it another way, the idea of Homer, as a poetic genius, doesn’t seem to fit into the Oralists’ theoretical framework. He upsets their apple cart.14
There has long been a tension among historians between those who favor some variant of the “great men (and women) of history” theory and those who believe in the march of history impelled by widespread, impersonal, inexorable forces or “pressures.”15 This tension is also present in the Classics. In the ebb and flow of scholastic opinion, the “inexorable forces” faction seems ascendant these days, individual greatness being rather out of fashion (academia is subject to fashion, as we all are). Martin West may have been the last lion of the “individual greatness” camp, but I’m not sure.
Where do I stand? In the crossfire, I suspect. But to attempt a real answer, it seems to me the reality is both. History does march under the influence of broad, impersonal forces, but on occasion these forces interact to create a metastable state and when this happens a woman or man can extend their finger and shift the axis of the world. These are the inflection points of history.
Homer, the monumental master poet, lived at one such point and launched Western literature. Themistocles and Artemisia clashed at Salamis and changed the course of Western Civilization. An itinerate carpenter and charismatic prophet in Judea was executed by the authorities, giving birth to a religion that shaped much of the course of world history for the next 2000 years. A Byzantine emperor made an innovative strategic decision that backfired on him spectacularly, and brought about the rise of Islam. The dowager empress of China prevented her country from following the path blazed by the Meiji Emperor of Japan, causing the collapse of the Ching dynasty, followed by the warlords who enabled the rise of Mao. Other examples might come to mind.
I see no point in trying to explain these things one way or another, or being doctrinaire about them. I do think it is important to be careful not to put the apple cart before the horse, lest we upset it.
How d’ya like them apples?! 😉😊
Footnotes (I know I promised, but…)
I’m not aware of this being done by modern navies – pirates are another matter.
And spare you a blizzard of footnotes to distract you… like this! 😉
Lord’s book is available online at: nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_LordA.The_Singer_of_Tales.2000.
The Oralists often seem to lump the Iliad and Odyssey together in their analysis, although it has become more accepted that the two epics were composed in different places at different times; this does not greatly affect their main arguments. However, I’m less familiar with their opinions regarding the Odyssey, so I will neglect that as my interest is in the Iliad, and the Odyssey only to the extend it muddies the waters.
Nagy’s seminal book on this topic, Homeric Questions (1996), is available online at: nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Nagy.Homeric_Questions.1996.
Here is a 2016 interview with Muellner on YouTube that explains the Oralist position.
Despite the comment I quoted, to his credit, he is not doctrinaire. (By the way, the video now says “1 year ago,” so it must have been reposted. I first watched it in September 2022.)
And since I mentally composed chapters over and over for days, weeks or months – even reciting them aloud while I walked – before “dictating” them to myself at the keyboard, perhaps I also “composed them in performance.”
There are a couple of novels half-written. In total, this comes to about a million words.
Casey Dué, Achilles Unbound. Multiformity and Tradition in the Homeric Epics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019.
I’ll have more to say about this in a future essay.
More on this in the future.
Alright, not quite stick to my point. I’ll accept Oralist theory might also be able to account for the artefacts West’s describes in the Iliad using Nagy’s evolutionary model, but I have my doubts. One rub I see are the linguistic layers in the Iliad, which would have to be preserved throughout the evolutionary process, involving centuries of “composition in performance” over a broad area. I’m dubious about that. I suspect those layers would be more likely to be preserved if the Iliad was composed by a single poet using writing much earlier to fix those layers in the poem from then on.
Also, we have what may be a test case: the Cypria was handed down through “composition in performance” according to what the evolutionary model describes until it was finally recorded in writing. The Cypria is known for its cluttered, disunified and (in the view of many) esthetically inferior nature – what I’d expect for a poem cobbled together in a jackdaw manner from many disparate oral parts. That is, it’s not like the Iliad, which appears to have a single guiding genius behind it.
Finally, there’s another test I can think of: has anyone taken the records of the guslar’s epics and compared them with the Iliad to see if they show similar artifacts to the ones West analyzed? If not, might this be evidence that West is correct?
That’s it for now. Another essay in the works…
Note this doesn’t rule out West’s hypothesis as I’ll explain elsewhere.
Yes, I had to bring in apples again!
My impression is that the person who originally proposed the “Great Men” theory (I believe a Scottish individual whose name escapes me) has been in bad odor with the academic community for a long time, due to some unpleasant opinions of his. Last I checked, he and his ideas were keeping company with Turner’s “Manifest Destiny” in the midden of academia.