A different scenario for the transition from oral performance to written text was developed by Geoffrey Kirk. The epics were the work of an oral “monumental composer,” whose version imposed itself on bards and audiences as the definitive version. They “then passed through at least a couple of generations of transmission by decadent and quasi-literate singers and rhapsodes” (Kirk, Commentary, I, 1985, p. xxv)—that is, performers who were not themselves poets. Lord’s objection to this, that memorization plays no part in the living oral tradition, was based on Yugoslav experience, but elsewhere—in Somalia, for example—very long poems are recited from memory by professional reciters who are themselves, in many cases, poets.
What neither of these theories explains, however, is the immense length of the poem. Why should an oral, illiterate poet, whose poetry exists only in its performance before an audience, create a poem so long that it would take several days to perform? For that matter, if his poetry existed only in performance, how could he create a poem of such length? If, on the other hand, he delivered different sections of it at different times and places, how could he have elaborated the variations on theme and formula and the inner structural correspondences that distinguish the Homeric epics so sharply from the Yugoslav texts collected by Parry and Lord?
It is not surprising that many recent scholars in the field have come to the conclusion that writing did indeed play a role in the creation of these extraordinary poems, that the phenomena characteristic of oral epic demonstrated by Parry and Lord are balanced by qualities peculiar to literary composition. They envisage a highly creative oral poet, master of the repertoire of inherited material and technique, who used the new instrument of writing to build, probably over the course of a lifetime, an epic poem on a scale beyond the imagination of his predecessors.
The last half of the eighth century was the time in which writing was coming into use all over the Greek world. Homer must have known of its existence, but the traditional nature of his material naturally forbade its appearance in the relentlessly archaic world of his heroes, who belonged to the time when men were stronger, braver and greater than men are now, a world in which men and gods spoke face-to-face. Even so, Homer does show, in one particular instance, that he was conscious of the new technique. In Book 6 Glaucus tells the story of his grandfather Bellerophon. Proetus, king of Argos, sent him off with a message to the king of Lycia, Proetus’ father-in-law; it instructed the king to kill the bearer. “[He] gave him tokens, / murderous signs, scratched in a folded tablet ... ” (6.198-99). There has been much discussion about the nature of these signs but the word Homer uses—grapsas, literally “scratching”—is later the normal word used for “writing,” and pinax —“tablet”—is the word used by later Greeks to describe the wooden boards coated with wax that were used for short notes.
If Homer could write, what did he write on? Obviously “tablets” would not be adequate. We do not know when papyrus, the paper of the ancient world, was first available in Greece, though we do know that it came at first not from its almost exclusive source, Egypt—which was not opened to Greek merchants until the sixth century B.C.—but from the Phoenician port the Greeks called Byblos (the Greek word for book was biblion—our “Bible”). Archaeological evidence for Phoenician imports into Greece dates from the ninth century B.C. and Phoenician traders are mentioned in the Iliad (23.828) and their operations described with a wealth of detail in the Odyssey. But even if papyrus was not available in quantity, there were other materials, such as animal skins. Herodotus, writing in the fifth century B.C., says that in his time the Ionian Greeks still used the word diphthera—“skin”—when they meant “book.”
The crudity of the script in the eighth century meant that writing was a laborious business. If Homer did use writing in the composition of the poem, it is likely that the process extended over many years. Episodes from the tale of Achilles’ rage and its consequences would be brought to near perfection in oral performance and then written down; gradually a complete text would be assembled, to be refined in detail and extended by insertions. The text contains in fact one example of such second thoughts, the inclusion of Phoenix in the embassy to Achilles in Book 9.
Nestor chooses three ambassadors to go to Achilles’ tent and urge him to rejoin the Achaean ranks: they are Phoenix, Ajax and Odysseus. Phoenix, we learn later in the poem, was not only commander of one of Achilles’ five regiments of Myrmidons but also the older man who brought him up from boyhood. What is he doing in the Achaean camp? Why is he not with Achilles and the Myrmidons, preparing to leave Troy? No explanation is offered and as the ambassadors leave on their mission more puzzles emerge. For the whole extent of the passage describing their journey and Achilles’ greeting when they reach his tent, the verbal and adjectival forms applied to them are not, as we would expect, plural; they are dual, a special Greek termination system that indicates firmly that two and no more than two people are concerned. It looks as if an original version had only two ambassadors and that Phoenix was added later—to make the longest, most affecting and most effective of the three appeals to Achilles. Homer added Phoenix to an original version but forgot not only to explain his presence in Agamemnon’s council but also to amend the dual forms.
The surprising thing is that they stayed in the text. If Homer, as in Lord’s model, had dictated his poem to a scribe, he could hardly have failed to notice the discrepancy and correct it. In fact Lord records such corrections in the course of dictation in Yugoslavia. In this case correction would have been easy; any oral bard could rework the lines to substitute plural forms for dual (so, for that matter, can any modem scholar familiar with Homeric diction). And it seems hard to imagine the lines going uncorrected in Kirk’s scenario of a monumental poem preserved by recitation for a generation or two before being written down. Any rhapsode (and in the earlier generation they would have been oral poets themselves) could have corrected the lines without effort and would have seen no reason not to do so. There seems to be only one possible explanation of the survival of these dual forms in the text: that the text was regarded as authentic, the exact words of Homer himself. And that can only mean that there was a written copy.
This is of course pure speculation, but so are all other attempts to explain the origin of the text that has come down to us. We shall never be able to answer the questions it raises with any certainty and must rest content with the fact that a great poet marshaled the resources of an age-old traditional art to create something new—the epic of Achilles’ rage and Hector’s death, which has been a model for epic poetry ever since.
THE TROJAN WAR
The background of the rage of Achilles is a war between the assembled armies of the Achaean cities and Troy, a rich, fortified city on the coast of Asia Minor near the Hellespont, the narrow western outlet of the long passage from the Black Sea to the Aegean. For the Greeks of later ages, the Iliad was history. Even Thucydides, who cast a critical eye on accounts of past ages, accepted the Pan-Achaean expedition against Troy, though he thought that Homer exaggerated its size and importance. It was not until the nineteenth century that the historicity of Homer’s war was seriously questioned; Grote, for one, dismissed any “history” of events before 776 B.C. (the foundation date of the Olympic Games and of the calendar based on its recurrence every fourth year) as mere legend. But Schliemann’s excavations at Troy and Mycenae, as well as other sites mentioned in Homer, revealed a previously unsuspected Bronze Age civilization; its bronze armor, its weapons and many particular objects—a cup like Nestor‘s, for example—seemed to correspond to Homer’s descriptions, and its approximate date (determined by archaeological evidence) seemed to coincide with the date assigned by ancient Greek scholars to the Trojan War. When in the 1950s the inscriptions on clay tablets found on the Mycenaean site at Pylos, as well as on the Minoan site of Cnossos in Crete, were deciphered as Greek, a very archaic stage of the language that had some close correspondences with Homeric Greek, the historicity of Homer’s Iliad seemed to be something only a hard-line skeptic could deny.