Homeric scholarship is the study of Homeric epic, especially the two large surviving epics the Iliad and Odyssey. It is currently part of the academic discipline of classical studies, but the subject is one of the very oldest topics in all scholarship or science, and goes back to antiquity. Purely in terms of quantity it is one of the largest of all literary sub-disciplines: the annual publication output rivals that on Shakespeare. Bust of Homer in the British Museum For other uses, see Homer (disambiguation). ... The epic is a broadly defined genre of poetry, and one of the major forms of narrative literature. ... The Iliad (Ancient Greek: Ιλιάς, Iliás) tells part of the story of the siege of the city of Ilium, i. ... Odysseus and Nausicaä - by Charles Gleyre The Odyssey (Greek: Οδύσσεια, Odússeia) is the second of the two great Greek epic poems ascribed to Homer, the first of which is the Iliad. ... Wikipedia does not yet have an article with this exact name. ... William Shakespeare—born April 1564; baptised April 26, 1564; died April 23, 1616 (O.S.), May 3, 1616 (N.S.)—has a reputation as the greatest of all writers in English. ...

For the purpose of the present article, Homeric scholarship is divided into three main phases: antiquity; the 18th and 19th centuries; and the 20th century and later.

Ancient scholarship

Scholia

Main article: Scholia

Not many monographs by ancient scholars survive. The most valuable source for our knowledge of ancient scholarship is the scholia on Homer. These are ancient commentaries, usually preserved in the margins of manuscripts of Homer; and they are very copious, far more substantial than for any other ancient work. The Iliad scholia fill two volumes of Dindorf's 1875 edition, complemented by seven volumes of Erbse's 1969-1988 edition. Different commentaries survive in many different manuscripts: so, for example, the most important ancient commentary is known as the A scholia. Different branches of scholia replicate material from other branches. The scholia are compilations, and material in them probably ranges from the 3rd century BCE to as late as the 7th or even 8th century CE. Some branches of scholia are known by the initial of their first modern publisher, e.g. the T "Townleian" scholia, which are largely exegetical. Scholia that can be traced back to the work of the 1st century BCE scholar Didymos) are known as the D scholia (recently published separately by van Thiel). Scholium (tr~bXtoe), the name given to a grammatical, critical and explanatory note, extracted from existing commentaries and inserted on the margin of the manuscript of an ancient author. ... Scholium (tr~bXtoe), the name given to a grammatical, critical and explanatory note, extracted from existing commentaries and inserted on the margin of the manuscript of an ancient author. ... Karl Wilhelm Dindorf (January 2, 1802 - August 1, 1883), German classical scholar, was born at Leipzig. ... 1875 was a common year starting on Friday (see link for calendar). ... 1969 (MCMLXIX) was a common year starting on Wednesday For other uses, see Number 1969. ... 1988 (MCMLXXXVIII) was a leap year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Didymus Chalcenterus (c. ...

The A scholia are our most important source. They are found in a 10th century CE manuscript known as Venetus A (cod. Marc. Gr. 454), so they are also sometimes called the "Venetian scholia". Venetus A contains the best text of the Iliad and the critical marks of the Alexandrian scholar Aristarchos of Samothrake, as well as scholia in the margins of the text. The scholia in turn consist mainly of extracts from four scholarly works: that of Didymos, on Aristarchos' recension of Homer; Aristonikos (fl. 24 BCE) on Aristarchos' critical marks; Herodian (fl. 160 CE) on accents; and Nikanor (fl. 127 CE) on punctuation. Among the A scholia, one series is written in the usual way, on a margin reserved for the purpose; another consists of brief scholia written in very small characters (but of the same period) on the narrow space left vacant round the text. Occasionally a scholion of this kind gives the substance of one of the longer extracts, but as a rule they are distinct. It therefore seems that after the manuscript was finished the marginal scholia were discovered to be extremely defective, and a new series of extracts was added in a form which interfered as little as possible with the appearance of the book. The existence of two groups of the Venetian Scholia was first noticed by Jacob La Roche, and they were first distinguished in Dindorf's edition. Antiquity and modernity stand cheek-by-jowl in Egypts chief Mediterranean seaport Located on the Mediterranean Sea coast, Alexandria Αλεξάνδρεια (in Arabic, الإسكندرية, transliterated al-ʼIskandariyyah) is the chief seaport in Egypt, and that countrys second largest city, and the capital of the Al Iskandariyah governate. ... Didymus Chalcenterus (c. ... Aelius Herodianus (c. ... Karl Wilhelm Dindorf (January 2, 1802 - August 1, 1883), German classical scholar, was born at Leipzig. ...

Hellenistic scholars and their aims

Many ancient Greek writers discussed topics and problems in the Homeric epics, but the development of scholarship per se revolved around three goals:

1. analysing internal inconsistencies within the epics;
2. producing editions of the epics' authentic text, free of interpolations and errors;
3. interpretation: both explaining archaic words, and exegetical interpretation of the epics as literature.

The first philosopher to focus intensively on the intellectual problems surrounding the Homeric epics was Zoilos of Amphipolis in the early 4th century BCE. His work Homeric Questions does not survive, but it seems that Zoilos enumerated and discussed inconsistencies of plot in Homer. Examples of this are numerous: for example, in Iliad 5.576-9 Menelaos kills a minor character, Pylaimenes, in combat; but later, at 13.643-59, he is still alive to witness the death of his son. These have been humourously described as points where Homer "nodded off", from which comes the proverbial phrase "Homeric nod". Aristotle's Homeric Problems, which does not survive, was probably a response to Zoilos. This article is about Menelaus the king of Sparta. ... Aristotle (Ancient Greek: Aristotelēs 384 BC – March 7, 322 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher, who studied with Plato and taught Alexander the Great. ...

For ancient critical editions of Homer there are three moments to pay particular attention to. First is the hypothetical "Peisistratean recension". Some modern scholars suspect that in the mid-sixth century BCE the Athenian tyrant Peisistratos had the Homeric epics compiled in a definitive edition. It is known that under Peisistratos, and later, rhapsodes competed in performing Homer at the Panathenaic festival; and a scholion on Iliad 10.1 accuses Peisistratos of inserting book 10 into the Iliad.^[1] But there is little evidence for a Peisistratean recension, and most present-day scholars doubt its existence; at the very least it is disputed what is to be understood by the term "recension".^[2] The second and third key moments are the critical editions made by the third and second century BCE Alexandrian scholars Zenodotos of Ephesos and Aristarchos; both of these scholars also published numerous other works on Homer and other poets, none of which survive. Zenodotos' edition may well have been the first to divide the Iliad and Odyssey into 24 books. Athens (Greek: Αθήνα Athína IPA ) is the capital of Greece and one of the most famous cities in the world. ... A tyrant (from Greek τύραννος týrannos) is a usurper of rightful power, possessing absolute power and ruling by tyranny. ... In Greek mythology, Pisistratus (also transliterated as Peisístratos) was a friend of Telemachus and a son of Nestor. ... The Panathenaic Games were a set of games held every four years in Athens in Ancient Greece. ... Antiquity and modernity stand cheek-by-jowl in Egypts chief Mediterranean seaport Located on the Mediterranean Sea coast, Alexandria Αλεξάνδρεια (in Arabic, الإسكندرية, transliterated al-ʼIskandariyyah) is the chief seaport in Egypt, and that countrys second largest city, and the capital of the Al Iskandariyah governate. ...

Aristarchos' edition is probably the single most important moment in the whole history of Homeric scholarship. His text was more conservative than Zenodotos', but it became the standard edition of Homer for the ancient world, and almost everything in modern editions of Homer passed through Aristarchos' hands. Like Zenodotos, Aristarchos did not delete passages that he rejected, but (fortunately for us) preserved them with an annotation indicating his rejection. He developed Zenodotos' already sophisticated system of critical symbols to indicate specific kinds of issues with particular lines, and a significant proportion of the terminology is still in use today (obelus, athetising, etc.). From the scholia a great deal is known about his guiding principles, and those of other editors and commentators such as Zenodotos and Aristophanes of Byzantium. The chief preoccupations of the Alexandrian scholars may be summarised as follows: Aristophanes of Byzantium, Gr. ...

1. Consistency of content: the reasoning is that internal inconsistencies imply that the text has been ineptly changed. This principle apparently follows up on the work of Zoilos.
2. Consistency of style: anything that appears only once in Homer — an unusual poetic image, an unusual word (a hapax legomenon), or an unusual epithet (e.g. the epithet "Kyllenian Hermes" in Odyssey 24.1) — tends to be rejected.
3. No repetitions: if a line or passage is repeated word-for-word, one of the exemplars is often rejected. This principle is in tension with that of "consistency of style" above.
4. Quality: Homer was regarded as the greatest of poets, so anything perceived to be poor poetry was rejected.
5. Logic: something that makes no sense (such as Achilleus nodding at his comrades as he goes running after Hektor) was not regarded as the product of the original artist.
6. Morality: Plato's insistence that a poet should be moral was taken to heart by Alexandrian scholars, and scholia accuse many passage and phrases of being "unsuitable" (οὐ πρέπον ou prepon); the real Homer, goes the reasoning, being a paragon of perfection, would never have written anything immoral himself.
7. Explaining Homer from Homer (Ὅμηρον ἐξ Ὁμήρου σαφηνίζειν): this motto is Aristarchos', and means simply that it is better to solve a problem in Homer using evidence from within Homer, rather than external evidence.

To a modern eye it is evident that these principles should be applied at most on an ad hoc basis. When they are applied across the board the results are frequently bizarre, especially as no account whatsoever is taken of poetic licence. However, it should be remembered that the reasoning seems persuasive when built up gradually, and then it is a very difficult mindset to escape: 19th century Analyst scholars (see below) adopted most of these criteria, and applied them even more stringently than the Alexandrians did. It is also sometimes difficult to know what exactly the Alexandrians meant when they rejected a passage: the scholia on Odyssey 23.296 tell us that Aristarchos and Aristophanes regarded that line as the end of the epic, but we are also told that Aristarchos separately rejected several passages after that point. A hapax legomenon (pl. ... Plato Plato (Greek: Πλάτων, Plátōn) (c. ...

Allegorical readings

Exegesis is also represented in the scholia. When the scholiasts turn to interpretation they tend to be most interested in explaining background material, e.g. reporting an obscure myth to which Homer alludes; but there was also a fashion for allegory, especially among the Stoics. The most notable passage is a scholion on Iliad 20.67, which gives an extended allegorical interpretation of the battle of the gods, explaining each god as symbolic of various elements and principles in conflict with one another, e.g. Apollo is opposed to Poseidon because fire is opposed to water. Allegory is also represented in some surviving ancient monographs: the Homeric Allegories by an otherwise unknown 1st century BCE writer Herakleitos, the 2nd century CE Plutarch's On the Life and Poetry of Homer, and the works of the 3rd century CE Neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry, particularly his On the Cave of the Nymphs in the Odyssey and Homeric Questions. Allegorical interpretation continued to be influential on Byzantine scholars such as Tzetzes and Eustathios. But allegorising non-allegorical literature has not been a fashionable activity since the middle ages, so these texts are now rarely read. Stoicism is a school of philosophy commonly associated with such Greek philosophers as Zeno of Citium, Cleanthes, or Chrysippus and with such later Romans as Cicero, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus. ... Plutarch Mestrius Plutarchus (c. ... For other meanings of Porphyry, see Porphyry Porphyry (c. ... The Byzantine Empire is the term conventionally used to describe the Roman Empire during the Middle Ages, centered at its capital in Constantinople. ... John Tzetzes, was a Byzantine poet and grammarian, known to have lived at Constantinople during the 12th century. ...

The 18th and 19th centuries

Main article: Homeric question

The 18th century saw major developments in Homeric scholarship, and also saw the opening phase of the discussion which was to dominate the 19th century (and, for some scholars, the 20th): the so-called "Homeric question". For other uses, see Homer (disambiguation). ... For other uses, see Homer (disambiguation). ...

One major development was the enormous growth of linguistic study on Homer and the Homeric dialect. In 1732 Bentley published his discovery of the traces left in the text of Homer by the digamma, an archaic Greek consonant that was omitted in later, classical, Greek orthography. Bentley showed conclusively that the vast majority of metrical anomalies in Homeric verse could be attributed to the presence of digamma (though the idea was not well received at the time: Alexander Pope, for one, satirised Bentley). Important linguistic studies continued throughout the next two centuries alongside the endless arguments over the Homeric question, and the work by figures such as Buttmann and Monro is still worth reading today; and it was the linguistic work of Parry that set in motion a major paradigm shift in the mid-20th century. Another major 18th century development was Villoison's 1788 publication of the A and B scholia on the Iliad. Events February 23 - First performance of Handels Orlando, in London June 9 - James Oglethorpe is granted a royal charter for the colony of Georgia. ... Richard Bentley (January 27, 1662 – July 14, 1742) was an English theologian, scholar and critic. ...      This article is about the Greek letter; for the mathematical function, see digamma function. ... The orthography of a language is the set of symbols (glyphs and diacritics) used to write a language, as well as the set of rules describing how to write these glyphs correctly, including spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. ... Alexander Pope, an English poet best known for his Essay on Criticism and Rape of the Lock Pope, circa 1727. ... Philipp Karl Buttmann (1764-1829), German philologist, was born at Frankfort-on-Main. ... David Binning Monro (November 16, 1836 – August 22, 1905) was an Scottish Homeric scholar. ... Milman Parry was born in 1902 and died in a gun accident on December 3, 1935. ... Jean-Baptiste Gaspard dAnsse (or Dannse) de Villoison (March 5, 1750 (or 1753) – April 25, 1805) was a classical scholar born at Corbeil-sur-Seine, France. ...

The Homeric question is essentially the question of the identity of the poet(s) of the Homeric epics, and the nature of the relationship between "Homer" and the epics. In the 19th century it came to be the fulcrum between two opposed schools of thought, the Analysts and the Unitarians. The issue came about in the context of 18th-century Romantic interest in popular lays and folktale, and the growing recognition that the Homeric epics must have been transmitted orally before being written down, possibly much later than "Homer" himself. The Italian philosopher Vico argued that the epics were the products not of an individual genius poet but rather the cultural products of an entire people; and Wood’s 1769 Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer argued emphatically that Homer had been illiterate and the epics had been transmitted orally. (Less fortunately, Wood drew parallels between Homer and the poetry of the supposed Scottish oral poet Ossian, published by James Macpherson in 1765; Ossian turned out later to have been wholly invented by Macpherson.) Giambattista Vico or Giovanni Battista Vico (June 23, 1668—January 23, 1744) was a Neapolitan philosopher, historian, and jurist. ... There are have been several people named Robert Wood: Robert E. Wood, Brigadier General and chairman of Sears Robert Coldwell Wood, U.S. administrator Robert Wood, Canadian politician Robert Wood, physicist Robert Wood, Englishman who made engravings of the Baalbek ruins in 1757 This is a disambiguation page — a navigational... 1769 was a common year starting on Sunday (see link for calendar). ... Ossians dream, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, 1813 Ossian is the anglicised form of the Gaelic name Oisín, son of Fionn mac Cumhail, a poet and warrior of the fianna in the Fenian Cycle of Gaelic literature. ... James Macpherson (October 27, 1736–February 17, 1796), was a Scottish poet, known as the translator of the Ossian cycle of poems (also known as the Oisín cycle). ... 1765 was a common year starting on Tuesday (see link for calendar). ...

Friedrich August Wolf was the scholar who brought matters to a head. His review of Villoison's edition of the scholia acknowledged that they proved conclusively the oral transmission of the poems; and in 1795 he published his Prolegomena ad Homerum, in which he argued that the poems were composed in the mid-10th century BCE, that they were transmitted orally, that they changed considerably after that time in the hands of bards performing them orally and editors adapting written versions to contemporary tastes, that the poems' apparent artistic unity came about after their transcription, and he posed the perplexing question of what it would mean to restore the poems to their original, pristine, form. Friedrich August Wolf (February 15, 1750 - August 8, 1824) was a German philologist and critic. ... 1795 was a common year starting on Thursday (see link for calendar). ...

In the wake of Wolf, two schools of thought coalesced to oppose one another: Analysts and Unitarians.

Analysts

19th-century Analysts argued that the epics were composed by many hands, a hodge-podge of interpolations and incompetent editing that concealed the original genius of Homer, or at the very least that the Iliad and Odyssey were composed by different poets. In this they followed in the steps of ancient scholars like Zoilos and the so-called "separatists" (χωρίζοντες chōrizontes, the best known of whom, Xenon and Hellanikos, are nonetheless very obscure figures).

Among Analysts, Hermann's 1823 De interpolationibus Homeri ("On interpolations in Homer") and 1840 De iteratis Homeri ("On repetitions in Homer") argued that the epics, as they now stood, were encrustations of second-rate later material around a pristine kernel: a hypothetical "Ur-Iliad". Conversely, Lachmann's 1847 Betrachtungen über Homers Ilias ("Studies on Homer's Iliad") argued that the Iliad was a compilation of 18 independent folk-lays, rather as the Finnish Kalevala actually was, compiled in the 1820s and 1830s by Lönnrot: so, he argued, Iliad book 1 consists of a lay on Achilleus' anger (lines 1-347), and two continuations, the return of Chryseis (430-492) and the scenes in Olympos (348-429, 493-611); book 2 is a separate lay, but containing several interpolations such as Odysseus' speech (278-332); and so on. (Lachmann also tried to apply Analyst principles to the mediaeval German Nibelungenlied.) Kirchhoff's 1859 edition of the Odyssey argued that the Ur-Odyssey had comprised just books 1, 5-9, and parts of 10-12, that a later phase had added most of books 13-23, and a third phase had added the bits about Telemachos, and book 24. 1823 was a common year starting on Wednesday (see link for calendar). ... 1840 is a leap year starting on Wednesday (link will take you to calendar). ... Karl Konrad Friedrich Wilhelm Lachmann (March 4, 1793 - March 13, 1851), was a German philologist and critic. ... 1847 was a common year starting on Friday (see link for calendar). ... The Kalevala is an epic poem which Elias Lönnrot in the 19th century said that he had compiled from Finnish folk sources. ... Elias Lönnrot Elias Lönnrot (April 9, 1802 - March 19, 1884) was a Finnish philologist and collector of traditional Finnish oral poetry. ... First page from Manuscript C of the Nibelungenlied (ca. ... Johann Wilhelm Adolf Kirchhoff (January 6, 1826 - February 26, 1908), German classical scholar and epigraphist, was born in Berlin. ... 1859 is a common year starting on Saturday. ...

The climax of Analysis came with Wilamowitz, who published Homerische Untersuchungen ("Homeric studies") in 1884 and Die Heimkehr von Odysseus ("The homecoming of Odysseus") in 1927. The Odyssey, he argued, was compiled about 650 BCE or later from three separate poems by a Bearbeiter (editor). Subsequent Analysts often referred to the hypothesised Bearbeiter as the "B-poet" (and the original genius, Homer himself, was sometimes the "A-poet"). Wilamowitz' examination of the relationship between these three layers of the Odyssey, further complicated by later, minor, interpolations, is enormously detailed and complex. One of the three poems, the "old Odyssey" (most of books 5-14 and 17-19) had in turn been compiled by a Redaktor from three even earlier poems, two of which had originally been parts of longer poems. Like most other scholars caught up in the opposition between Analysis and Unitarianism, Wilamowitz equated poetry that he thought poor with late interpolations. But Wilamowitz set such a high standard in the sophistication of his analysis that 20th century Analysts seem to have found difficulty in moving forward from where Wilamowitz left off; and over the course of the following decades attention drifted away, particularly in the English-speaking world. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (22 December 1848 - 25 September 1931) was a German classical philologist. ...

Unitarians

Nitzsch was the earliest scholar to oppose Wolf and argue that the two Homeric epics showed an artistic unity and intention that was the work of a single mind. Nitzsch's writings cover the years 1828-1862. In his Metetemata (1830) he took up the question of written versus unwritten literature, on which Wolf's whole argument had turned; and in his 1852 Die Sagenpoesie der Griechen ("The oral poetry of the Greeks") he investigated the structure of the Homeric poems and their relation to other, non-extant, epics which narrated the story of the Trojan War, the so-called Epic Cycle. In mathematics, see epic morphism. ...

However, most Unitarian scholarship tended to be driven by literary interpretation and was therefore often more ephemeral. Even so, many scholars who examined the archaeology and social history of Homeric Greece did so from a Unitarian perspective, perhaps out of a wish to avoid the complexities of Analysis and Analysts' tendency to re-write each other's work indefinitely. Niese's 1873 Die homerische Schiffskatalog als historische Quelle betrachtet ("The Homeric catalogue of ships studied as a historical source") stands out. Schliemann, who began excavating Hisarlik in the 1870s, treated Homer as a historical source from an essentially Unitarian viewpoint. 1873 was a common year starting on Wednesday (see link for calaber). ... Portrait of Heinrich Schliemann. ... Looking over the mound of Hisarlik to the plain of Troy. ...

Common ground between Analysts and Unitarians

Broadly speaking, Analysts tended to study the epics philologically, bringing to bear criteria, linguistic and otherwise, that were little different from those of the ancient Alexandrians. Unitarians tended to be literary critics who were more interested in appreciating the artistry of the poems than in analysing them.

But artistic merit was the unspoken motivation behind both schools of thought. In both cases, "Homer" must at all costs be hallowed as the great, original, genius; everything good in the epics was to be attributed to him; the Romantic image of the great artist who never makes errors was to be preserved. So Analysts hunted for "errors" (as Zoilos had done), and blamed them on incompetent editors; Unitarians tried to explain errors away, sometimes even claiming they were really the best bits.

In both cases, therefore, there came to be a very strong tendency to equate "good" with "authentic", and "shoddy" with "interpolated". This, too, was a mindset inherited from the Alexandrians.

The 20th century

20th century Homeric scholarship had the shadow of Analysis and Unitarianism hanging over it, and much important work was done by old-style Analysts and Unitarians even up to the end of the century. Perhaps the most important Unitarian in the first half of the century was Bassett; and, as in the 19th century, some interpretive work argued for Unitarianism (e.g. Dimock's 1989 The Unity of the Odyssey), while other literary criticism merely took a Unitarian perspective for granted. Some of the most important work on textual criticism and papyrology was done by Analyst scholars such as Merkelbach and Page (whose 1955 The Homeric Odyssey is a merciless but sometimes hilariously witty polemic against Unitarians). The biggest commentary on the Odyssey, published in the 1980s under the general editorship of Heubeck, is largely Analyst in tone, especially the commentary on books 21-22 by Fernández-Galiano. Some monographs from a strongly Analyst perspective continue to come out, primarily from the German-speaking world. Papyrology is the study of ancient literature as preserved in manuscripts written on papyrus, the most common form of paper in the Egyptian, Greek and Roman worlds. ... 1955 (MCMLV in Roman) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

However, the most important new work on Homer done in the 20th century was dominated by two new schools of thought, most frequently referred to as '"Oral Theory" (the term is resisted by some Oralists, especially Nagy) and "Neoanalysis". Unlike in the 19th century, however, these schools of thought are not opposed to one another; and in the last few decades they have been drawing on each another more and more in very constructive ways. Gregory Nagy (pronounced Nahjj) is a professor of Classics at Harvard, specializing in Homer and archaic Greek poetry. ...

Oral Theory

Oral Theory, or Oralism, is a loosely-used term for the study of the mechanisms of how the Homeric epics were orally transmitted, in terms of linguistics, cultural conditions, and literary genre. It therefore embraces philological analysis and literary criticism simultaneously. It has its origins in linguistics, but it was foreshadowed in some respects by Vico in the 18th century, and more immediately by Gilbert Murray. Murray was an Analyst, but his 1907 book The Rise of the Greek Epic contained some of the core ideas of Oralism: particularly the idea that the epics were the end result of a protracted process of evolution, and that the idea that an individual poet named Homer had relatively little importance in their history. Giambattista Vico or Giovanni Battista Vico (June 23, 1668—January 23, 1744) was a Neapolitan philosopher, historian, and jurist. ... Gilbert Murray (or George Gilbert Aime) (January 2, 1866 - 1957) was a British classical scholar and diplomat. ... 1907 (MCMVII) was a common year starting on Tuesday (see link for calendar) of the Gregorian calendar (or a common year starting on Wednesday of the 13-day-slower Julian calendar). ...

The two figures at the head of Oralism are Milman Parry and his student Albert Lord who continued his work after Parry's premature death. Parry was a structuralist linguist (he studied under Meillet, who in turn studied under Saussure) who set out to compare Homeric epic with a living oral tradition of epic poetry. In the 1930s and 1950s he and Lord recorded thousands of hours of oral performance of epic poetry in the former Yugoslavia, primarily in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Lord's later work (his 1960 book The Singer of Tales is the most pertinent to Homer) kick-started oral poetics as an entire new sub-discipline in anthropology. For Homeric scholarship the most important results of their work, and that of later Oralists, have been to demonstrate that: Milman Parry was born in 1902 and died in a gun accident on December 3, 1935. ... Albert Bates Lord was a Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Harvard who, after the untimely death of Milman Parry, carried on that scholars research into epic literature. ... See also structural analysis and structural functionalism. ... Antoine Meillet (Paul-Jules-Antoine Meillet, November 11, 1866 - September 21, 1936), was one of the most important French linguists of the early 20th century. ... Saussure Ferdinand de Saussure (November 26, 1857 - February 22, 1913) was a Swiss linguist, considered by many to be the father of structuralism. ... Yugoslavia (Jugoslavija in all south Slavic languages, in Macedonian and Serbian Cyrillic Југославија) is a term used for three separate but successive political entities that existed during most of the 20th century on the Balkan Peninsula in Europe. ... Bosnia and Herzegovina (also variously written Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bosnia and Hercegovina, Bosnia-Hercegovina) is a mountainous country in the western Balkans. ... 1960 (MCMLX) was a leap year starting on Friday (link will take you to calendar). ...

1. Homeric epic shares many stylistic characteristics with known oral traditions;
2. thanks to the sophistication and mnemonic power of the formulaic system in Homeric poetry, it is entirely possible for epics as large as the Iliad and Odyssey to have been transmitted orally;
3. many curious features that offended the ancient Alexandrians and the Analysts are most probably symptomatic of the poems' evolution through oral transmission and, within limits, poets re-inventing them in performance (some have compared this to improvisation, rather as jazz musicians improvise upon a theme).

The biggest complete commentary on the Iliad, that published under the general editorship of G.S. Kirk, is Oralist in its approach, with emphasis on issues related to live performance such as rhythm; and the pedagogical commentaries by Peter Jones are heavily Oralist.

Some Oralists do not go so far as to claim that the Homeric epics actually are products of an oral epic tradition: many limit themselves to claiming that the Homeric epics merely draw on earlier oral epic. For much of the mid-20th century much of the resistance to Oral Theory came from scholars who could not see how to preserve the 19th century Romantic image of Homer as the great original poet: they could not see how there was any room for artistry and creativity in a formulaic system where set-piece episodes (Arend's "type scenes") were as formulaic as Parry's metrical epithet-noun combinations. Some scholars divided Oralists into "hard Parryists", who believed that all aspects of Homeric epic were predetermined by formulaic systems, and "soft Parryists", who believed that Homer had the system at his command rather than the other way round. More recently, books such as Nagy's influential 1979 book about epic heroes, The Best of the Achaeans, and Bakker's 1997 linguistic study Poetry as Speech, work on the principle that the radical cross-fertilisation and resonances between different traditions, genres, plot lines, episodes, and type scenes, are actually the driving force behind much of the artistic innovation in Homeric epic. Gregory Nagy (pronounced Nahjj) is a professor of Classics at Harvard, specializing in Homer and archaic Greek poetry. ... This page refers to the year 1979. ... 1997 (MCMXCVII in Roman) is a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

Where the joke about 19th century Analysts had it that the epics "were not composed by Homer but by someone else of the same name", now the joke is that Oral Theorists claim the epics are poems without an author. Many Oralists would happily agree with this.

Neoanalysis

Neoanalysis is quite separate from 19th century Analysis. It is the study of the relationship between the two Homeric epics and the Epic Cycle: the extent to which Homer made use of earlier poetic material about the Trojan War, and the extent to which other epic poets made use of Homer. The main obstacle to this line of research — and, simultaneously, the main impetus for it — is the fact that the Cyclic epics do not survive except in summaries and isolated fragments. Ioannes Kakridis is usually regarded as the founding figure of this school of thought, with his 1949 book Homeric Researches, but Wolfgang Kullmann's 1960 Die Quellen der Ilias ("The sources of the Iliad") is even more influential. Neoanalytic topics have become much more prominent in English-language scholarship since 1990, notably in a series of articles by West in Classical Quarterly and in Burgess' 2001 book The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle. The recent upsurge is due in no small part to the publication of three new editions of the fragmentary Greek epics,^[3] including a translation by West for the Loeb Classical Library series. The Trojan War cycle, also widely known as the Epic Cycle, was a collection of eight Ancient Greek epic poems that related the history of the Trojan War. ... 1949 (MCMXLIX) is a common year starting on Saturday. ... 1960 (MCMLX) was a leap year starting on Friday (link will take you to calendar). ... 2001: A Space Odyssey. ... The Loeb Classical Library is a series of books, today published by the Harvard University Press, which present important works of ancient Greek and Latin Literature in a way designed to make the text accessible to the broadest possible audience, by presenting the original Greek or Latin text on each...

Probably the most frequently cited and characteristic topic raised in Neoanalysis is the so-called "Memnon theory" outlined by Schadewaldt in a 1952 paper. This is the hypothesis that one major plot-line in the Iliad is based on a similar one in one of the Cyclic epics, the Aithiopis of Arktinos. The parallels run as follows: 1952 (MCMLII) was a Leap year starting on Tuesday (link will take you to calendar). ... The Aithiopis (Greek: Αἰθιοπίς; Latin: Aethiopis) is a lost epic of ancient Greek literature. ... Arctinus of Miletus was one of the earliest poets of Greece and contributors to the epic cycle. ...

What is debated in the Memnon theory is the implications of these similarities. The most immediate implication is that the poet of the Iliad borrowed material from the Aithiopis. The debatable points are the poet's reasons for doing so; the status and condition of the Aithiopis story when this borrowing took place, that is to say whether it was Arktinos' epic that Homer borrowed from, or something less concrete, like a traditional legend; and the extent to which the Aithiopis and Iliad played off one another in their subsequent development. For other uses, see Achilles (disambiguation). ... In Greek mythology, Antilochus (also transliterated as Antílokhos) was the son of Nestor and a good friend of Achilles. ... In Greek mythology, Patroclus, or Pátroklos (gr. ... In Greek mythology, Memnon was an Ethiopian king and son of Tithonus and Eos. ... In Greek mythology, Hector (holding fast), or Hektor, was a Trojan prince and one of the greatest fighters in the Trojan War, equal to Ajax and surpassed only by Achilles. ... The Eiffel Tower has become a symbol of Paris throughout the world. ...

Recent developments

Since the 1970s literary theory has been gradually creeping into Homeric studies, especially in literary readings of the Odyssey. Post-structuralist semiotic approaches have been represented in the work of Pucci (Odysseus Polytropos, 1987) and Katz (Penelope's Renown, 1991), for example. Literary theory is the theory (or the philosophy) of the interpretation of literature and literary criticism. ... Post-structuralism is a term coined in the United States in the mid- to late 1960s to describe mostly French language scholarship that challenged the primacy of structuralism in the humanities. ... Semiotics, or semiology, is the study of signs, both individually and grouped in sign systems. ...

Perhaps the most significant developments have been in narratology, the study of how storytelling works, since this is closely tied to the linguistic study of Homer. De Jong's 1987 Narrators and Focalizers: The Presentation of the Story in the Iliad draws on the work of the theorist Bal, and de Jong followed this up in 2001 with her Narratological Commentary on the Odyssey; Bakker has published several linguistic-narratological studies, especially his 1997 Poetry as Speech; and Minchin's 2001 Homer and the Resources of Memory draws on several forms of narratology and cognitive science, such as the script theory developed in the 1970s by Schank and Abelson. Narratology is the theory and study of narrative and narrative structure and ([1]) the way they affect our perception. ... 1987 (MCMLXXXVII) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... 2001: A Space Odyssey. ... 1997 (MCMXCVII in Roman) is a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... 2001: A Space Odyssey. ... Roger Schank is president and CEO of Socratic Arts, and a leading visionary in artificial intelligence. ...

References

This article incorporates text from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, a publication in the public domain. Encyclopædia Britannica, the 11th edition The 11th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1910–1911) is perhaps the most famous edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. ... The public domain comprises the body of all creative works and other knowledge—writing, artwork, music, science, inventions, and others—in which no person or organization has any proprietary interest. ...

See also

• Epic Cycle
• Homer
• Homeric question

In mathematics, see epic morphism. ... Bust of Homer in the British Museum For other uses, see Homer (disambiguation). ... For other uses, see Homer (disambiguation). ...

Notes

^  Schol. T on Il. 10.1: "They say that this episode was composed by Homer privately, and not to be part of the Iliad; but that it was inserted into the poem by Peisistratos." Book 10, often known as the Doloneia, is still the most widely rejected part of the Homeric epics.

^  See e.g. G. Nagy (1996), Poetry as Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 115-27 on the meaning of the Greek words for "edition", ἔκδοσις and διόρθωσις.

^  A. Bernabé (1987), Poeticae Epici Graeci Testimonia et Fragmenta (vol. 1) (Leipzig: Teubner); M. Davies(1988), Epicorum Graecorum Fragmenta (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht); M.L. West (2003), Greek Epic Fragments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard).

Further reading

• Clark, M.E. (1986), "Neoanalysis: a bibliographical review", Classical World 79.6: 379-94.
• Lord, A.B. (1960), The Singer of Tales, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard). ISBN 0674002830
• Pfeiffer, R. (1968), History of Classical Scholarship from the Beginnings to the End of the Hellenistic Age (Oxford: Clarendon). ISBN 0198143427
• Reynolds, L.D., and N.G. Wilson (1991), Scribes & Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek & Latin Literature, 3rd edition (Oxford: Clarendon). ISBN 0198721463
• Wolf, F.A. (1985), Prolegomena to Homer, = English translation of (1795) Prolegomena ad Homerum by A. Grafton, G.W. Most, and J.E.G. Zetzel (Princeton: Princeton). ISBN 0691066396