It is the fate of most new and valuable insights to be enthusiastically developed beyond the limits of certainty, or even of probability, and Parry’s demonstration that Homeric poetry had an oral base has not escaped that fate. Phrases, even whole lines, that are repeated often enough to qualify as formulaic are indeed characteristic of the poet’s diction, but they do not account for more than a part of it—about one third of the whole. In an attempt to raise the formulaic element to a higher level, Parry counted as formulas expressions whose metrical pattern and position in the line were identical and which contained one word in common: for example, tuch thk; lg‘ thk; kds thk—he “put” the arms, the sorrows, the glory on. Not content with this, Parry went on to suggest, hesitantly, the inclusion in the system of similar expressions which, however, did not contain one word in common: dkn htir, for example, and tuch knssn—“he gave to his comrade,” “he made [him prey] for the dogs.” Some of Parry’s followers have been less hesitant, and by this and other extensions of the meaning of “formula” have boosted the inherited content of Homer’s verse to ninety percent. This of course leaves very little room for Homer as an individual creative poet. It seems in fact to be a return to the idea of Giambattista Vico: the poems are the creation of a people, of a tradition, of generations of nameless bards.
But the argument for full formularity has feet of clay. A poet composing in a strict, demanding meter is bound to repeat syntactical combinations in identical positions and the stricter the meter, the higher the incidence of such repeated patterns. English has no meters as precisely demanding as Homer‘s, but Alexander Pope, to take an example, is rich in lines that by strict Parryite standards would qualify him as an illiterate bard. For example:
The Smiles of Harlots, and the Tears of Heirs
The Fate of Louis and the Fall of Rome
Proclaim their Motions, and provoke the War
Maintain thy Honours, and enlarge thy Fame
The shining Helmet, and the pointed Spears
The silver Token, and the circled Green
Weak was his Pace, but dauntless was his Heart
Lame are their Feet, and wrinkled is their Face
Samuel Johnson, in fact, wrote a description of Pope’s technique that has more than a little resemblance to Parry’s conception of the oral poet. “By perpetual practice, language had in his mind a systematical arrangement; having always the same use for words, he had words so selected and combined as to be ready at his call.”
Extravagant claims for the predominance of formula in Homeric poetry have now been generally discounted, and even Parry’s basic theses have been shown to need modification in the light of later examination. There are many cases, for example, where a truly formulaic epithet does in fact seem to be poetically functional in its context. There are cases where verbal repetition is so poetically effective that it must be the result of poetic design rather than the working of a quasi-mechanical system. Careful investigation of the type-scenes—the ceremony of sacrifice, the arming of the warrior, and so on—has revealed that although sometimes whole verses are repeated from one scene to another, no two scenes are exactly similar. “Each occurrence,” to quote a recent evaluation (Edwards, p. 72), “is unique, and often specifically adapted to its context.” Even the basic concept of economy, the strict limitation of the epithets for one god or hero to those needed in different cases and positions, has been questioned: a recent study shows that in his analysis of the epithets for Achilles, Parry considered only the phrases containing the hero’s name, ignoring other ways of identifying Achilles, such as “Peleus’ son” (Shive, passim). All this, together with the monumental scale and the magnificent architecture of the Iliad, makes the image of Homer as an illiterate bard, totally dependent on ready-made formulas and stock scenes for improvised performance, hard to accept.
There is nevertheless fairly general agreement that Parry was right in one thing: Homer’s unique style does show clearly that he was heir to a long tradition of oral poetry. But there is one problem that Parry raised but did not solve: Homer may or may not have been as illiterate as his forerunners, but at some time the Iliad and Odyssey were written down. When, by whom, for what purpose and in what circumstances was this done?
The most likely date for the composition of the Iliad is the fifty years running from 725 to 675 B.C. That is also the time to which the earliest examples of Greek alphabetic writing can be dated. Did Homer take advantage of the new technique to record for future singers the huge poem he had composed without the aid of writing? Did writing perhaps play a role in its composition? To both these questions Parry’s collaborator and successor, Albert Lord, gave an emphatically negative answer. “The two techniques are ... mutually exclusive ... It is conceivable that a man might be an oral poet in his younger years and a written poet later in life, but it is not possible that he be both an oral and a written poet at any given time in his career” (p. 129). Lord based this assertion on his experience with Yugoslav oral poets who, when they came into contact with literate urban societies, lost their gift for improvised recitation. He envisaged a Homer, an oral bard at the height of his powers, who dictated his poem to a scribe, one who had mastered the new art of writing. This was of course how the songs of the illiterate Yugoslav bards had been written down (sometimes with the aid of recording equipment sophisticated for its time) by Parry and Lord.
This scenario did not satisfy everyone. The analogy with modem Yugoslavia, for example, was flawed. When the bards there learned to read and write, they were immediately exposed to the corrupting influence of newspapers, magazines and cheap fiction, but if Homer learned to write in the late eighth century, there was little or nothing for him to read. Lord’s generalization about the incompatibility of the two techniques has been questioned by students of oral poetry; in other parts of the world (particularly in Africa), they find no such dichotomy. “The basic point ... is the continuity of oral and written literature. There is no deep gulf between the two: they shade into each other both in the present and over many centuries of historical development, and there are innumerable cases of poetry which has both ‘oral’ and ’written’ elements” (Finnegan, p. 24). Furthermore, the extant specimens of alphabetic writing of the eighth and early seventh centuries B.C. make it hard to believe in a scribe of the period who could take dictation at or, for that matter, anywhere near performance speed: the letters are freestanding capitals, crudely and laboriously formed, written from right to left or from right to left and left to right on alternate lines. One critic, in fact, irreverently conjured up a picture of Homer dictating the first line (or rather the first half-line) of the Iliad: “Mnin aeide thea ... You got that?”