Homeric scholarship
The hypothetical original text of the scholia, a manuscript of the 4th century CE, is therefore called, in German, the Viermännerkommentar (VMK), "four-man commentary", where the men are Aristonicus, Didymus, Herodian, and Nicanor.
The story implies that Peisistratos or Solon had some authority over a presumed master text of the Iliad, and yet Athens at the time had little political power over the Aegean region.
He said that the poetry of Homer was “preserved by memory ... and assembled ... later from the songs.”[17] The link missing from the evidence, apart from the circumstantial, is the connection between the texts produced by Peisistratus and the Alexandrine Vulgate.
What is lacking is either an “Athenian prototype,”,[18] or a conjectural “Wolfian vulgate,” or multi-text assembled from oral variants wrongly marked as spurious by the Alexandrines.
"[21] In the Republic, however, Plato denies that children can distinguish literal and allegorical truth and advocates censoring the myth-makers, including Homer.
The Republic expresses a concept of a society established according to the Platonic ideal, in which every aspect is monitored and controlled under the guidance of a philosopher-king drafted from ascetic poverty for the purpose.
He was subsequently hired by his boyhood companion, now Philip II of Macedon, to tutor the latter’s teen-age son, the future Alexander the Great, on whose behalf he built a school, the Nymphaeum, at Mieza.
Similarly, Homer does not play a role in any censorial evaluation of Aristotle as a critic, but appears in a professional study of poetry, the Poetics,[23] with regard to the difficulty with some of his language.
There is a long-standing, but somewhat old-fashioned, tradition in modern scholarship which holds that in the mid-6th century BCE the Athenian tyrant Peisistratus had the Homeric epics compiled in a definitive edition.
He developed Zenodotus' 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.).
The chief preoccupations of the Alexandrian scholars may be summarised as follows: To a modern eye it is evident that these principles should be applied at most on an ad hoc basis.
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.
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.
In this they followed in the steps of ancient scholars like Zoilus and the so-called "separatists" (χωρίζοντες chōrizontes, the best known of whom, Xenon and Hellanicus, are nonetheless very obscure figures).
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.
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 Der homerische Schiffskatalog als historische Quelle betrachtet ("The Homeric catalogue of ships studied as a historical source") stands out.
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.
Some of the most important work on textual criticism and papyrology was done by Analyst scholars such as Reinhold Merkelbach and Denys L. Page (whose 1955 The Homeric Odyssey is a merciless but sometimes hilariously witty polemic against Unitarians).
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 Gregory Nagy); and "Neoanalysis".
In the 1930s and 1950s he and Lord recorded thousands of hours of oral performance of epic poetry (Bosniak, Serbian, and Albanian) in the former Yugoslavia (primarily in Bosnia-Herzegovina) and northern Albania.
More recently, books such as Nagy's influential 1979 book about epic heroes, The Best of the Achaeans, and Egbert 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.
Ioannis 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 M. L. West in Classical Quarterly and in Jonathan 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, including a translation by West for the Loeb Classical Library series.
[29] Probably the most frequently cited and characteristic topic raised in Neoanalysis is the so-called "Memnon theory" outlined by Wolfgang Schadewaldt in a 1951 paper.
Steve Reece, for example, has proposed that anomalies of structure and detail in our surviving version of the Odyssey point to earlier versions of the tale in which Telemachus went in search of news of his father not to Menelaus in Sparta but to Idomeneus in Crete, in which Telemachus met up with his father in Crete and conspired with him to return to Ithaca disguised as the soothsayer Theoclymenus, and in which Penelope recognized Odysseus much earlier in the narrative and conspired with him in the destruction of the suitors.
[31] There is no shortage of alternative datings, however, based on other kinds of evidence (literary, philological, archaeological, and artistic), ranging from the 9th century to as late as 550 BCE (Nagy suggests in a 1992 paper that the text's "formative" period lasted until 550).
Post-structuralist semiotic approaches have been represented in the work of Pietro Pucci (Odysseus Polytropos, 1987) and Marylin Katz (Penelope's Renown, 1991), for example.
Irene de Jong's 1987 Narrators and Focalizers: The Presentation of the Story in the Iliad draws on the work of the theorist Mieke 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 Elizabeth 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 Roger Schank and Robert Abelson.
