Homeric Question

The main subtopics of the Homeric Question are: To these questions the possibilities of modern textual criticism and archaeological answers have added a few more: On the Greek side: On the Trojan side: The very forefathers of text criticism, including Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614), Richard Bentley (1662–1742) and Friedrich August Wolf (1759–1824) already emphasized the fluid-like, oral nature of the Homeric canon.

Now most classicists agree that, whether or not there was ever such a composer as Homer, the poems attributed to him are to some degree dependent on oral tradition, a generations-old technique that was the collective inheritance of many singer-poets (or ἀοιδοί, aoidoi).

Thus according to the theory, the Iliad and Odyssey may have been products of oral-formulaic composition, composed on the spot by the poet using a collection of memorized traditional verses and phrases.

[10][11] Shortly afterwards, Eric A. Havelock's 1963 book Preface to Plato revolutionized how scholars looked at Homeric epic by arguing not only that it was the product of an oral tradition but that the oral-formulas contained therein served as a way for ancient Greeks to preserve cultural knowledge across many different generations.

[12] In his 1966 work Have we Homer's Iliad?, Adam Parry theorized the existence of the most fully developed oral poet up to his time, a person who could (at his discretion) creatively and intellectually form nuanced characters in the context of the accepted, traditional story; in fact, Parry altogether discounted the Serbian tradition to an "unfortunate" extent, choosing to elevate the Greek model of oral-tradition above all others.

[8] More radical Homerists, such as Gregory Nagy, contend that a canonical text of the Homeric poems did not exist until established by Alexandrian editors in the Hellenistic period (3rd to 1st century BC).

Having satisfied himself that writing was unknown to Homer, Wolf considers the real mode of transmission, which he purports to find in the Rhapsodists, of whom the Homeridae were an hereditary school.

This conclusion Wolf supports by the character attributed to the Cyclic poems (whose want of unity showed that the structure of the Iliad and Odyssey must be the work of a later time), by one or two indications of imperfect connection, and by the doubts of ancient critics as to the authenticity of certain parts.

[19][20] Wolf's speculations were in harmony with the ideas and sentiment of the time, and his historical arguments, especially his long array of testimonies to the work of Peisistratus, were hardly challenged.

The effect of Wolf's Prolegomena was so overwhelming, and its determination so decisive, that, although a few protests were made at the time, the true Homeric controversy did not begin until after his death in 1824.

In the earlier part of his Metetemata (1830), Nitzsch took up the question of written or unwritten literature, on which Wolf's entire argument turned, and showed that the art of writing must be anterior to Peisistratus.

In the later part of the same series of discussions (1837), and in his chief work (Die Sagenpoesie der Griechen, 1852), he investigated the structure of the Homeric poems, and their relation to the other epics of the Trojan cycle.

The confusion which previous scholars had made between the ancient post-Homeric poets (such as Arctinus of Miletus and Lesches) and the learned mythological writers (like the scriptor cyclicus of Horace) was first cleared up by Welcker.

Feeling the difficulty of supposing that all ancient minstrels sang of the wrath of Achilles or the return of Odysseus (leaving out even the capture of Troy itself), he was led to assume that two poems of no great compass, dealing with these two themes, became so famous at an early period as to throw other parts of the Trojan story into the background and were then enlarged by successive generations of rhapsodists.

[8] The conjectures of Hermann, in which the Wolfian theory found a modified and tentative application, were presently thrown into the shade by the more trenchant method of Karl Lachmann, who (in two papers read to the Berlin Academy in 1837 and 1841) sought to show that the Iliad was made up of sixteen independent lays, with various enlargements and interpolations, all finally reduced to order by Peisistratus.

Taking into account the repetition of the letters, a recent study of Stephan Vonfelt[23] highlights the unity of the works of Homer compared to Hesiod.

[29][30][27] Martin Litchfield West has argued that the Iliad echoes the poetry of Hesiod, and that it must have been composed around 660-650 BC at the earliest, with the Odyssey up to a generation later.