A New Companion to Homer 9004099891, 9789004099890

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A NEW COMPANION TO HOMER

MNEMOSYNE BIBLIOTHECA CLASSICA BATAVA COLLEGERUNT ]. M. BREMER . L. F. JANSSEN. H. PINKSTER H. W. PLEKET • C .]. RUIJGH • P. H. SCHRlJVERS BIBUOTHECAE FASCICULOS EDENDOS CURAVIT C.]. RUIJGH, KIASSIEK SEMINARIUM, OUDE TURFMARKT 129, AMSTERDAM

SUPPLEMENTUM CENTESIMUM SEXAGESIMUM TERTIUM

IAN MORRIS & BARRY POWELL

A NEW COMPANION TO HOMER

A NEW COMPANION TO HOMER EDITED BY

IAN MORRIS

AND

BARRY POWELL

BRILL LEIDEN . NEW YORK' KOLN 1997

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A new companion to Homer / edited by Ian Morris and Barry Powell. p. cm. - (Mnemosyne, bibliotheca classica Batava. Supplementum, ISSN 0169-8958 ; 163) Updated ed. of: A companion to Homer. 1962. Includes index. ISBN 9004099891 (alk. paper) 1. Homer-Criticism and interpretation. 2. Epic poetry, Greek-History and criticism. 3. Epic poetry, Greek-Criticism, Textual. 4. Oral tradition--Greece. 5. Civilization, Homeric. I. Morris, Ian, 1960II. Powell, Barry B. III. Companion to Homer. IV. Series. PA4037.N42 1996 883'.01-dc20 96-38925 CIP

Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufnahme [Mnemosyne I Supplementum] Mnemosyne : bibliotheca classica Batava. Supplementum. Leiden ; New York; Keln : Brill. Friiher Schriftenreihe Reihe Supplementum zu: Mnemosyne 163. A new companion to Homer. - 1996

A new companion to Homer / ed. by Ian Morris and Barry Powell. - Leiden ; New York; Keln : Brill, 1996 (Mnemosyne : Supplementum ; 163) ISBN 90-04---09989-1 NE: Morris, Ian [Hrsg.]

ISSN 0169-8958 ISBN 90 04 09989 1 © Copyright 1997 by Koninklijk

Bril~

Leiden, The Netherlands

All rights reserved. No part qf this publication mq)l be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval Vlstem, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission.from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijk Brill prouided that the appropriate fees are paid directlY to The Copyiil,ht Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910 Danvers.MA 01923, USA. Fees are suiject to change. PRINTED IN THE NETHERLANDS

In memory

cif Arthur Adkins

CONTENTS

List of Contributors ............... ....................... ................ ....... .... ... Editors' Introduction IAN MORRIS and BARRY POWELL ......... ... ................... ............

Xl

Xlli

PART ONE TRANSMISSION AND HISTORY OF INTERPRETATION

1. Homer and Writing BARRY POWELL .................................................. ........... ....

3

2. Homer in Antiquity ROBERT LAMBERTON ........... ..............................................

33

3. Homeric Papyri and Transmission of the Text MICHAEL HASLAM .............................................................

55

4. Homeric Scholia GREGORY NAGY ................................................................

101

5. The Homeric Question FRANK TURNER .................................................................

123

6. Oral Tradition and its Implications JOHN FOLEY ....................................................................... 7. Neoanalysis MALCOLM WILLCOCK ........ ................................................

146 174

PART Two HOMER'S LANGUAGE

8. Homer's Dialect GEOFFREY HORROCKS 193 9. Homer's Meter MARTIN WEST 218 10. The Formula JOSEPH Russo .................................................................... 238 11. Homeric Style and 'Oral Poetics'

MARK EDWARDS .••••••.••....... •.••.•.•••. •. .••••••••••.•.••••••..•........... 261 12. The Study of Homeric Discourse EGBERT BAKKER ................................................................ 284

CONTENTS

Vlll

13. Homer and Narratology IRENE DE JONG

.................................................................

305

14. QuantifYing Epic AllUVIA KAHANE ............................................................... 326 PART THREE

HOMER AS LITERATURE

15. The Iliad: Structure and Interpretation SETH SCHEIN

•..............................................••...............•....

345

16. The Structures of the Otfyssey STEPHEN TRACY

.................. . .......................... ........... .. ... .. .

360

17. Modern Theoretical Approaches to Homer ..... .........................................................

380

..................................................................

396

LOWELL EDMUNDS .............................................................

415

JOHN PERADOTTO

18. Epic as Genre ANDREW FORD

19. Myth in Homer 20. Homer and the Folktale WILLIAM HANSEN ..............................................................

442

21. Homer and Hesiod RALPH ROSEN

........................................................ ...........

463

22. The Homeric Hymns JENNY STRAUSS

CLAy........................................................ 489 PART FOUR

HOMER'S WORLDS

23. Homer and the Bronze Age JOHN BENNET ........................ .............................. ...............

511

24. Homer and the Iron Age IAN

MORRIS ............... ..................... . .................. .. .. ........ ....

535

25. Homer and Greek Art ANTHONY SNODGRASS

........... ............... ..............................

560

26. Homer and the Near East SARAH MORRIS ....... .............. . ....... ...... ..... ............... .......... . 599 27. Homeric Society KURT RAAFLAUB ............................................................... 624 28. The Homeric Economy WALTER DONLAN

..............................................................

649

CONTENTS

IX

29. Homeric Warfare HANS VAN WEES

668

30. Homeric Ethics ARTHUR ADKINS

694

Select Bibliography ........... ........................ ................ .................. 715 Index ............................................................................................ 747

CONTRIBUTORS

ARTffiJR ADKINS was Edward Olson Professor of Greek and Professor of Philosophy and Early Christian Literature at the University of Chicago. EGBERT BAKKER is Assistant Professor of Classics at the Universite de Montreal. JOHN BENNET is Associate Professor of Classical Archaeology and Chair of the Department of Classics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. -IRENE DEJONG is Professor of Classics at the University of Amsterdam. WALTER DONLAN is Professor of Classics at the University of California at Irvine. LoWELL EDMUNDS is Professor of Classics at Rutgers University. MARK EDWARDS is Professor Emeritus of Classics at Stanford University. JOHN FOLEY is Byler Professor of English and Classical Studies and Director of the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition at the University of Missouri at Columbia. ANDREW -FORD is Associate Professor of Classics at Princeton University. WILLIAM HANSEN is Professor of Classics at Indiana University. MICHAEL HASLAM is Professor of Classics at the University of California at Los Angeles. GEOFFREY HORROCKS is Lecturer in Classics at Cambridge University and Fellow of St. John's College. AmNIA KAHANE is Assistant Professor of Classics at Northwestern University. ROBERT LAMBERTON is Associate Professor of Classics at Washington University. IAN MORRIS is Professor of Classics and History and Chair of the Department of Classics at Stanford University. SARAH MORRIS is Professor of Classics at the University of California at Los Angeles. GREGORY NAGY is Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature, Professor of Comparative Literature, and Chair of the Department of the Classics at Harvard University.

XlI

CONTRIBUTORS

JOHN PERADO'ITO is Andrew V. V. Raymond Professor of Classics and SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo. BARRY POWELL is Halls-Bascom Professor of Classics at the University of Wisconsin- Madison. KURT RAAFLAUB is Professor of Classics at Brown University and Co-Director of the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, DC. RALPH ROSEN is Associate Professor of Classics and Chair of the Classics Department at the University of Pennsylvania. JOSEPH Russo is Professor of Classics at Haverford College. SETH SCHEIN is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California at Davis. ANTHONY SNODGRASS is Lawrence Professor of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge University, and Fellow of Clare College. JENNY STRAUSS CLAY is Professor of Classics at the University of Virginia. STEPHEN TRACY is Professor of Classics at the Ohio State University. FRANK TURNER is John Hay Whitney Professor of History at Yale University. HANS VAN WEES is Lecturer in Ancient History at University College, London. MARTIN WEST is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. MALCOLM WILLCOCK is Professor Emeritus of Classics at University College, London.

IAN MORRIS and BARRY B. POWELL EDITORS' INTRODUCTION

A generation has passed since the publication of Wace and Stubbings' original Companion to Homer in 1962. Yet this remains the only other English-language volume which claims to offer a broad survey of Homeric scholarship. A third of a century is a long time in the humanities; as in any field of classical scholarship, new interpretations and questions have emerged, and new archaeological finds have accumulated. But our New Companion to Homer is not simply an updated version of Wace and Stubbings. The years since the original Companion took shape have seen profound shifts in our notions of what Homeric studies should be. When Heinrich Schliemann began digging at Troy and Mycenae in the 1870s, there was general agreement among classicists that Homeric society and the Trojan war were to all intents and purposes fictions of the eighth century B.C., helpful for understanding Greek values at the dawn of the Archaic age, but nothing more than that. Schliemann's discoveries shattered this orthodoxy, and by the time Wace began collecting contributions for the original Companion in the late 1930s, a new attitude dominated scholarship: the Iliad and Orfyssry were basically Bronze Age poems, transmitted more or less intact across the Dark Age, accurately reflecting the realities of the Mycenaean world. The main aim of the original Companion was to give expression to this vision, explicating the poems' historical setting by means of the material record. Its first five chapters surveyed meter, style, composition, language, and Homer's relationship to other epic poetry; the next two introduced issues of textual transmission and the Homeric Question; but the final sixteen chapters-well over half the book-were devoted to archaeology and history. The publication of the original Companion was long delayed by the Second World War and then by the deaths of the editor and his original assistant. By the time it finally appeared, in 1962, there had been a revolution in Homeric scholarship. Milman Parry had formulated his theories of oral composition-and had himself met an untimely death-in the days when Wace was still planning the Companion;

XlV

EDITORS' INTRODUCTION IAN MORRIS AND BARRY B. POWELL

xv

of how we have fallen short in ofthe this 1950s. goal, of those fully conscious but his ideas only reallyfarbegan to gain ground Further, we Michael have notVentris been able to review, and those scholars whose topics of Linear B, in 1952 announced his decipherment not able to archaeologists include. Inevitably, were forced to voices and inwe justwere the same years, began we imposing order on hard decisions, concentrating certain at the expense make Iron areas Age Greece. Taken the previously confusing material on from of others. A truly comprehensive survey, leaving nothing unsaid, together, these developments undermined the older orthodoxy ofisa as much a fantasy as aworld, comprehensive but we between believe Mycenaean Homeric suggesting commentary, that the differences that for society all its flaws, a book the New has an important and that of thelike Bronze AgeCompanion palaces were much greater heroic role play in Homeric at thespecialists century's argued end. that the thantohad previously beenscholarship realized. Some The most obvious between the New Companion and itsofprein contrast the poems accurately reflected the world the society described is the B.C.; reversal of the between archaeological and decessor in the eighth century; tenth century others, thatbalance it belonged literary discussion. reflects what we perceive to havea others still, that it This was areversal poetic conflation of memories spanning been a major in prehistory. scholarly interests last generation (or of shift Greek Some ofinthethechapters in the Commillennium of the historical and and toward two), from the traditional forms of panionaway reflected new attitudes 1950s,analysis but mostthe more cultural issues. As focus such, Homeric scholarship is merely overallbroadly archaeological-historical of the book-remained rooted following in trends which have the humanities of the 1930s. In affected fact, weallmight almost say and that social it has in the debates archaeological analysis remain important, sciences. generationsand since anyone has tried to put together a combeen two Historical but in the 1990s no longer provide an Homeric over-arching framework for scholarship. prehensive English-language survey of Homeric We canstudies. hardly claim to be the first people to have noticed this and.University the .origiA second major contrast the New 1993,Companion Cambridge peculiar situation. Betweenbetween 1985 and the expected readership. ([1962a] vi) nal between PressCompanion publishedis ainsix-volume commentary on Stubbings the Iliad, and explained that 'This Companion is intended primarily for those who 1988 and 1990, Oxford University Press published a three-volume Greek,(originally especially published those who,ininItalian). school or uniare reading Homer on theinOtfySSf!)' And in commentary versity, are reading him for thecollections first time.' of Weessays expect audience onthe Homer ap1995, three English-language of the New Companion to include readers, also lookand to peared-].-P. Crielaard's Homericsuch Questions andbut0.weAnderson Homer in translation, who will be able to read most those who read M. Dickie's Homer's World developing out of conferences, and]. Carter of ourS. contributions withifprofit. too, will be ableoftoEmily use and P. Morris' Ages Homer Specialists, being a volume in honor the New Companion findCompanion out Iwhatis the latest from questions and advances New different any of these books. Vermeule. But the to are topics Homeric scholarship which fall outsidecoverage their own We inmake no of attempt to compete with the exhaustive of professional focus: the art-historian can learn where work on the forthe Cambridge and Oxford commentaries. There are no line-by-line and the expert on the papyri howhere. the latest mulae stands, of knowledge But onfinds the from other analyses or encyclopedic displays the poems.than Thethe first Companion the Bronze AgeCompanion affect ourisreading far moreofsystematic other recent hand, the New appeared in an era when and than wrotethe withoriginal equal articles (and many indeedscholars more taught systematic volumes of 1 authority on Homeric philology and archaeology, but such polymaths Companion). areUnfettered now rare indeed. linguistic, by the Literary, constraints imposedarchaeological, by the genresand of historiconferthe cal methodologies have become increasingly sophisticated, or Festschrift, we have reached for the chimera and of comence-volume sheer quantity of archaeological finds has increased Wecurrent hope of the major questions which rapidly. dominate prehensive coverage that the New CompanionYet willdespite make the it easier forthis specialists volume, to wetranscend are painHomeric scholarship. size of the forces of fragmentation which seriously threaten older ideals of the unity of classical scholarship. The New Companion provides a sense I J. Latacz's excellent Zweihundert Jahre Homer-Forschung (ed., 1991a) falls someof the between most important new work being done across theNew whole rangein Companion where the English-language conference volumes and this of Homeric studies. of comprehensiveness, but most of the chapters are written in German. terms

EDITORS' INTRODUCTION

xv

fully conscious of how far we have fallen short of this goal, of those topics we have not been able to review, and those scholars whose voices we were not able to include. Inevitably, we were forced to make hard decisions, concentrating on certain areas at the expense of others. A truly comprehensive survey, leaving nothing unsaid, is as much a fantasy as a comprehensive commentary, but we believe that for all its flaws, a book like the New Companion has an important role to play in Homeric scholarship at the century's end. The most obvious contrast between the New Companion and its predecessor is the reversal of the balance between archaeological and literary discussion. This reversal reflects what we perceive to have been a major shift in scholarly interests in the last generation (or two), away from traditional forms of historical analysis and toward more broadly cultural issues. As such, Homeric scholarship is merely following in trends which have affected all the humanities and social sciences. Historical and archaeological analysis remain important, but in the 1990s no longer provide an over-arching framework for Homeric studies. A second major contrast between the New Companion and. the .original Companion is in the expected readership. Stubbings ([1962a] vi) explained that 'This Companion is intended primarily for those who are reading Homer in Greek, especially those who, in school or university, are reading him for the first time.' We expect the audience of the New Companion to include such readers, but we also look to those who read Homer in translation, who will be able to read most of our contributions with profit. Specialists, too, will be able to use the New Companion to find out Iwhat the latest questions and advances are in topics of Homeric scholarship which fall outside their own professional focus: the art-historian can learn where work on the formulae stands, and the expert on the papyri how the latest finds from the Bronze Age affect our reading of the poems. The first Companion appeared in an era when many scholars taught and wrote with equal authority on Homeric philology and archaeology, but such polymaths are now rare indeed. Literary, linguistic, archaeological, and historical methodologies have become increasingly sophisticated, and the sheer quantity of archaeological finds has increased rapidly. We hope that the New Companion will make it easier for specialists to transcend the forces of fragmentation which seriously threaten older ideals of the unity of classical scholarship. The New Companion provides a sense of the most important new work being done across the whole range of Homeric studies.

XVI

IAN MORRIS AND BARRY B. POWELL

We have divided the thirty contributions into four groups. The first seven essays examine 'Transmission and History of Interpretation.' In the first chapter, Barry Powell treats the role of writing in the formation of the text, arguing in favor of the oral-dictation model. In Ch. 2, Robert Lamberton traces the reception of the texts across the next thousand years, through the Classical Athenian philosophers and poets to the schoolmasters and Neoplatonists of the Roman empire. Chs. 3 and 4 form a pair, dealing in different ways with the vast wealth of information contained in the scholia on Homer. In 'Homeric Papyri and the Transmission of the Text,' Michael Haslam provides a magisterial survey of the Egyptian evidence for the analysis and editing of texts of Homer from the third century B.C. through the tenth century A.D.; and in 'Homeric Scholia,' Gregory Nagy explores the implications of these documents for any attempt to reconstruct 'the original' text of Homer. In Ch. 5, Frank Turner follows 'The Homeric Question' from its inception in late eighteenth-century Germany through to the early twentieth century and the eve of Milman Parry's breakthrough. In Ch. 6, John M. Foley takes up the story where Turner leaves off, with Parry and Lord's work with Serbo-Croatian oral poets, and its revolutionary (if delayed) effect on the entire field of Homeric studies. Finally, in Ch. 7, Malcolm Willcock sets out the agendas and achievements of Neoanalysis, a school of thought which has still had relatively little impact in the English-speaking world. The seven chapters of Part Two, 'Homer's Language,' cover both long-standing scholarly debates and fields which scarcely existed when the original Companion appeared. In Ch. 8, Geoffrey Horrocks explains recent advances in one of the longest-standing of all Homeric problems, the nature and historical formation of Homer's dialect; and in Ch. 9 Martin West does the same for Homer's meter. Chs. 10 and 11, by contrast, take up themes raised in Ch. 6, exploring the nature of Homeric formulae, which were so important for Milman Parry's theory of o"ral composition. In 'The Formula,' Joseph Russo surveys sixty years of modifications of Parry's initial definition of the formula, and what these have meant for theories of orality; and in 'Homeric Style and "Oral Poetics,'" Mark Edwards explores Parry's problematic claim that the formulas were nothing more than metrical space-fillers, devoid of meaningful content. The last three chapters in this section take up new areas of scholarship. In Ch. 12, Egbert Bakker discusses the implications of pragmatic theories in linguistics

EDITORS' INfRODUCTION

XVII

and the relationships between oral poetry and everyday speech; and in Ch. 13, Irene De Jong presents the contributions of narratology. In Ch. 14, Ahuvia Kahane describes some of the main ways in which quantitative techniques have changed our understanding of Homer's language in the last generation. Part Three, 'Homer as Literature,' presented the toughest editorial problems. Homer's poetry survived because of its emotional power, and there are more people alive today who have read Homer for sheer literary pleasure than at any other time in history. Choosing just eight topics was very difficult, and doubtless every reader of the New Companion will feel that we have left out subjects which we should have brought in. Chs. 15 and 16 form another pair: Seth Schein examines the structure of the Iliad, and Stephen Tracy that of the Otfyssry. Then in Ch. 17, John Peradotto goes on to review the contributions of 'Modern Theoretical Approaches to Homer,' ranging from Marxism and feminism through intertextuality and deconstruction. In Ch. 18, Andrew Ford examines the coherence of heroic epic as a genre and the poet's relationship to the Muses. In Ch. 19, Lowell Edmunds explores the relevance of modern concepts of 'myth' to Homer, and the relationships between myth and epic poetry. In Ch. 20 William Hansen looks at Homer's use (particularly in the Otfyssry) of folktales which are found in the oral traditions of other cultures often far-removed in time and space from early Archaic Greece, and the ways in which Homer accommodated these traditions to the requirements of heroic epic. Chs. 21 and 22 set Homer into the context of related literature from Archaic Greece. In 'Homer and Hesiod,' Ralph Rosen reviews traditional questions about the chronological order and direction of influences between the two poets, and also newer concerns over subtle allusions in Hesiod to heroic poetry as a competing genre. In 'The Homeric Hymns,' Jenny Strauss Clay takes a similar approach to this relatively neglected corpus. Part Four, 'Homer's Worlds,' brings us back to the archaeological and historical topics which so dominated the original Companion, but also shows the great changes which have overtaken Homeric scholarship in the intervening years. Whereas Stubbings ([1962a] vii) had nothing but scorn for Moses Finley's judgment, first published in 1957, that 'Homer is not only not a reliable guide to the Mycenaean tablets; he is no guide at all,' John Bennet is happy to close Ch. 24, on 'Homer and the Bronze Age,' by quoting these words. Bennet argues that Bronze Age archaeology is most valuable for providing the

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IAN MORRIS AND BARRY B. POWELL

background to the early stages of the epic tradition, not as an external check on the reality of Homer's world. Ian Morris develops similar ideas in 'Homer and the Iron Age,' reviewing the variety of the material record and suggesting that we should see Homer and the monuments as two complimentary ways in which eighth-century Greeks talked about their world and its relationships to the past. In Ch. 25, 'Homer and Greek Art,' Anthony Snodgrass also argues against treating Homer and the material record as passive reflections of one another. Archaic vase painters, he suggests, had agendas every bit as complex as those of oral poets, and both groups drew on, and in the process transformed, a widely shared fascination with the heroic past. Sarah Morris, in 'Homer and the Near East,' tackles a theme entirely absent in the original Companion, but which fascinates many modern readers. She locates Homer's stories within a broader east Mediterranean mythological tradition. In Ch. 27, Kurt Raaflaub summarizes the emerging orthodoxy of the 1990s that the heroic society of the poems is based largely on Homer's own world of the eighth century B.C., rather than on the Mycenaean world, the earlier Dark Age, or an unhistorical conflation. Walter Donlan takes a similar approach in Ch. 28, showing the internal consistency of economic institutions in Homer and arguing that their most plausible context is in the real world of the eighth century. In Ch. 29, Hans van Wees takes up the Iliad's central theme of heroic warfare, relating this to developments in the eighth and seventh centuries and the recent debates over whether Homer shows a\\(areness of hoplite tactics. Finally, in Ch. 30, the last paper he wrote before his death in February 1996, Arthur Adkins takes up another theme missing from the original Companion: 'Homeric Ethics.' He argues that the individualistic values of the heroes were fundamentally at odds with larger goals of their society, creating ethical problems that were to remain central to Greek thought for the next three hundred years. This volume is dedicated to Arthur's memory. We hope that it will stand as a monument to his love of Homer and his inspiring teaching, scholarship, and friendship; if not for all time, then at least until we are ready for another new companion to Homer. IAN

MORRIS

Boulder Creek, California BARRY POWELL

Madison, Wisconsin

PART ONE

TRANSMISSION AND HISTORY OF INTERPRETATION

BARRY

B.

POWELL

HOMER AND WRITING

Central to the genesis of the Homeric poems is the question of writing. The poems exist in writing, but they emerge from an illiterate age and were generated through a technique of composition which does not require writing, which is even hostile to it. The Iliad and the Otfyssey appear to date to the 8th century B.C., though precision is impossible, while most classicists place the invention of the alphabet around 800 B.C. Here, then, is the paradox: immensely long oral poems recorded in writing near the time when writing, for historical Greece, begins, virtually the same writing which supports the words on this page. The paradox is as real today as in 1795 when F. A. Wolf complained that 'if our forefathers had heard that serious doubts were raised as to whether Homer, the greatest of writers, used the art of writing, they would have cried out that the lovers of paradoxes no longer had any shame.'l Since Wolf's day scholars have pursued two lines of argument to ease the paradox. One pushes the poet-the author of the poems as we have them, who we agree did exist-into the 'fully literate' period of the sixth century, when the massive effort and expense of recording such long works would seem a priori more likely. The other argument pushes back the introduction of writing to an earlier time. But pushing Homer down into the 7th or 6th centuries B.C., to get some distance between him and the beginning of writing in Greece, generates recalcitrant problems of its own. No object or social practice in either poem, which contain rich descriptions of everyday life, can be securely placed later than 700 B.C. (see K. Raaflaub in this volume). It is idle to believe that circa 700 B.C., for unknown reasons, the mise en scene of the poems was frozen without the aid of writing. Furthermore, R. Janko's study of the evolution of certain linguistic features within early epic places the Iliad and the Otfyssey somewhat before Hesiod and more before the Hymns, in a relative chronology

I

Wolf (1985 [1795]) 71.

4

BARRY B. POWELL

that agrees well with an 8th century date. 2 Only a written version can explain such linguistic fixity (cf. M. Haslam in this volume). Nor is it true that writing was better able to record long poems in the 7th or 6th centuries than in the 8th. It was a monumental task whenever performed, and Greeks of the 8th century as able to do it as any living later. Arguments for an earlier date for the introduction of the alphabet are equally unfounded, but not so easily settled, because they are based on misapprehensions about the history of writing and about the nature of writing itsel( We must now discuss these issues in some detail, if we wish to understand the paradoxical relation between writing and Homer.

The Nature and History qf Writing3 We bring prejudgments to the study of writing and badly need a theory of the history of writing to sort out the complex data. Historical systems of writing come to us rife with the mistakes, confusions, and inventions of ancient peoples, for whom writing was never a scientific device, but a tool designed for practical ends by practical people, whose conditions of life were utterly different from our own. We are likely to think of writing as visible speech, according to de Saussure's dictum that 'the spoken language is primary and writing is essentially a means of representing speech in another medium.'4 Only for a moment, however, in Archaic Greece, did writing come close to fulfilling de Saussure's misleading claim. In its obsession with phonetic accuracy, the Greek alphabet was a great anomaly in the history of writing, and many of its successors have gladly returned to earlier practices. In modern English, for example, not the sound attached to the signs, but the shape of the written word may determine which word is meant: hiccough, rough, dough, cough, plough, or through. If we define writing as 'any system of human intercommunication by means of a set of visible marks with a conventional reference,'5 Janko (1982). Best general theoretical study remains Gelb (1963); for a historical description of Aegean scripts, Heubeck (1979). 4 Cf. F. de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, tr. J . Culler (New York, 1959) 23-32. 5 Bennett (1963) 99-100. 2

3

HOMER AND WRITING

5

we realize how unsatisfactory is the notion that writing is frozen speech. Mathematical and musical notations and computer languages are also writing, as are wiring diagrams and the leaping deer on a roadside sign, but such forms of writing, called semasiography ('sign-writing'), do not require the intervention of speech to know what is meant. Semasiographic signs can be understood by speakers of any language, and modern international commerce encourages their proliferation in airports, in panels on photocopying machines, and in bewildering variety on computer screens. The disadvantage of semasiography is that many forms of thought, and the best part of poetic expression, are closely wedded to speech. Historically, semasiography is older than lexigraphy, visible marks that do have a conventional reference to speech, though it is probably not possible to disentangle the historical transition from semasiography to lexigraphy in the Ancient Near East in response to the economic needs of early agricultural society. Early lexigraphic signs in the Near East seem to evolve from a neolithic system of keeping accounts by means of clay tokens, according to D. Schmandt-Besserat. 6 The varied shapes of clay tokens-circles, tetrahedrons, lozenges-at first represented commodities, one original token for one commodity. Later, impressed in clay envelopes, the mere shape of the token came to represent the category of commodity, e.g. EB = sheep, beside which strokes were inscribed and other counting marks. From this usage the shape came to stand for an actual word, e.g. EB = the word 'sheep.' Many think that 'writing' began with pictures, but the actual evidence suggests that in the Near East, whence our own writing descends, writing began with abstract designs. 7 This earliest stage of lexigraphic writing is logography, 'word-writing.' 'Semasiography' and 'lexigraphy' are the two categories of writing, and logography is one type of lexigraphy; Chinese writing is mostly logographic. Logography led to the discovery of phonography, the graphic representation of the sounds of speech, or rebus, in which a graphic shape ceases to have semantic value and stands for sound alone. Discovered evidently in order to record proper names, phonography made possible another category of lexigraphic writing,

6 Schmandt-Besserat (1992). Summary of the argument in E. L. Bennett,jr., 'Minos and Minyas,' in Proceedings r!f the 10th International Colloquium r!f Mycenaean Studies, Salzburg, 1996 (forthcoming). 7 Writing in the Far East is another topic. Though many take Chinese writing as dependent on Near Eastern writing, the issue is unresolved.

6

BARRY B. POWELL

syllabograpf!y, in which a sign represents a syllable. If 0 represents 'the sun' as a logogram, it may also stand for the sound 'sun' as in my 'son,' now a syllabogram, or, in conjunction with some other sign, 'sun'dae. The sign 0 as a syllabogram has the sound [sun], but as a logogram could stand for 'sun' in English, 'Sonne' in German, 'soleil' in French, and t1A.1O~ in Greek. Thus it is possible to detect the meaning of logographic writing when you know nothing about an underlying language, as in the signs' I, 2, 3,' universally recognized. The more phonographic writing becomes, the more closely tied it is to the special speech of a certain group of human beings. Apologists for Chinese writing, whose signs are not phonographic (though containing phonetic hints), always bring forth its independence from local mutually unintelligible dialects, and no doubt this very feature of Chinese writing has made possible the extraordinary stability of a polyglot Chinese civilization for millennia over vast territories. 8 In history, syllabography combined with logography in two majestic logosyllabic systems, Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphic. Logosyllabic writing also makes use of semasiographic elements, especially semantic complements ('determinatives'), which categorize a word but are neither phonographic nor logographic. Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphic are highly abstract and far removed from subtle but transitory speech. A reader never . knows from the signs how to pronounce a given word, but rather is reminded of a word in his native language through a web of suggestions, some semantic and some phonographic and some semasiographic. Scribes acquire a high facility for recognition of signs-that is, they read and write them easily-but the code they are using does not actually give them the approximate sound of the words in the language they are speaking. We cannot pronounce Sumerian or Akkadian, because Sumerian and Akkadian speakers are extinct. Such facts should not surprise us, when we consider the complexities of representing human speech by means of graphic signs within a traditional system with roots in the faraway past. But the effect of the distance between script and speech in historical logographic writings is that human thought communicated by such systems is simpler than thought common in speech, though with the obvious advantage of 8 There is much debate how Chinese writing actually works, but a useful description in F. Coulmas, The Writing Systems if the World (Oxford, 1989) 91-136.

HOMER AND WRITING

7

outlasting the speaker. Novelty of thought in logosyllabic writing, tout court, brings unintelligibility. Nonetheless such writings functioned vigorously for more than three thousand years and were still used in the early centuries of the Christian era. Never did scribal classes show any interest to remove logographic elements in favor of phonographic ones, any more than we would want to throwaway '1, 2, 3.' Egyptian and Mesopotamian writing was far more advanced than the writing used in China today, where one fourth of all humans live, if one equates the ability to communicate phonetic information with advancement in the history of writing, as many do. The first wholly phonographic writings appeared at the fringes of the great Bronze Age centers of power in the first half of the second millennium. Parallel experiments in the Aegean and Levant rejected, by and large, the use of logograms and reduced writing to pure syllabaries, to phonetic representation alone. The emergence of mostly phonographic systems among formerly illiterate peoples exemplifies an important principle in the history of lexigraphic writing: structural change in the way the writing works occurs only when a writing is passed from one culture and its supporting language to another culture and language. Structural change within a system of 'graphic marks with a conventional reference' is avoided at all costs and unknown within the history of writing, for change of an arbitrary system introduces obscurity when clarity, not simplicity, is the supreme desideratum. When writing crosses cultural lines, underlying principles can be reassessed, if unconsciously, and new structures made. Of the Aegean experiments, Linear B is the most familiar, with 87 separate signs to represent five vowels and a full range of consonant + vowel clusters, and many special signs, really logograms, for commodities. Initially designed for a Minoan language of unknown affinity, the system was applied to Greek by 1400 at the very latest. Hellenists sometimes decry how unsuited this writing was to recording Greek, noting that Linear B preserves only lists and accounts while alphabetic writing took down Homer. Such comparisons are unhistorical; in truth the Aegean syllabaries recorded with surprising accuracy the phonology of Greek speech. The later Cypriote syllabary, which belongs to the same tradition as Linear B, was even used side by side with the Greek alphabet on Cyprus from c. 800 down into the Hellenistic Period. The Aegean syllabic scripts were a major innovation over earlier logosyllabic systems, and one wonders why

8

BARRY B. POWELL

SO advanced a writing should be found in the provincial Aegean: ~ good example of how outlying peoples are better positioned to mak( structural changes to a system of writing than those living in th( great centers of power and influence. By 1500 there appeared in the Levant another wholly phonographic family of writings, the West Semitic scripts, directly antecedent t() Greek alphabetic writing. The idea of fashioning a wholly phono· graphic script may have come to the Levant from the Aegean, whell one considers the archaeologically attested precedence in time of Cretan Linear A (18th century B.C.), presumably a syllabary like its descendant Linear B; persistent traditions report that the Philistines, visible in Gaza by the Late Bronze Age, were Minoans. 9 The actual model for the West Semitic scripts, however, must have been Egyptian logosyllabic hieroglyphic, because in both writings, uniquely, the only phonetic information provided is consonantal, while ill Mesopotamian logosyllabic cuneiform, and in the Aegean syllabaries, vowels are always associated with consonants (so in Linear B M·'j ti· n-po = 'tpi1tou~). Speakers of Canaanite West Semitic lived of course in cultural and geographical proximity with the Egyptians. Phonograms in Egyptian are of three kinds, representing three consonants, two consonants, or one consonant. Being an outsider, the inventor of West Semitic writing lO appears to have seen how an entirely different kind of writing, a purely phonographic script, could be fashioned from the 24 or so uniconsonantal phonograms in the Egyptian logosyllabic writing of around 700 signs. Because of the structural similarity between the Mro-Asiatic ('Hamitic') Egyptian language and Semitic languages, the inventor had at his disposal in the 24 Egyptian uniconsonantals, preformed, something close to the consonantal phonemic repertory of West Semitic speech. The invention of the astonishingly simple and logical West Semitic linear writing by some unknown genius was an event of extraordi· nary importance in the history of culture. Modern Arabic script is essentially the same, and dozens of other scripts, including the lndic and the Greek alphabet, descend directly from it. Other revolutionary features of the West Semitic scripts, in addition to their small

9 Recent overview in T . Dothan and M. Dothan, People qf the Sea: The Search for the Philistines (New York, 1992). 10 For writing systems as the inventions of single individuals, cf. Powell (1991) 10-12.

10

BARRYAND B. POWELL HOMER WRITING

9

hieroglyphic signs was concerned,12 the order very repertory isolated by number of pure phonograms, are a fixed of the signs and the of theofsigns a rhythmical as a mnemonic to naming WestinSemitic writing.series A common complaintdevice tells how the inventor as in always our ABC song. The encoding of the sound of enable learning,could of 750 the Egyptians have discarded their repertory the sign in its name was a major innovation, and in this functional signs any time they wanted and written their 'language' solely by the 'acrophonic the sense speak ofsigns. the meaningfully 24 uniconsonantal But if theprinciple,' 24 Egyptian meansoneofcan of the name of sense a sign remains is the sound of that rule that the firstwere sound'alphabetic,' uniconsonantals little to describing of as thislogosyllabic, mnemonic which systemfrom it was West sign.ll Because of learn view of the Egyptian writing the~_asier point to Semitic writing than _other writings. history of writing it surely was. It is hardly likely that truly 'alphabetic' signs (one sign = one phoneme) would appear in combination with logograms and syllabograms, a point made long ago by 1. J. JiIlhat the is anEgyptians Alphabet?never 'took advantage' of Gelb. 13 An important reason their 24 'alphabetic signs' is that these signs were not alphabetic; We writing a procession, within theyhave werebeen not discussing perceivedthe as history differentofin kind as from Egyptian syllabic lexigraphy, fromand logography, to logosyllabic triconsonantal signs. writing, to pure syllabaries. biconsonantal is universally calledSemitic 'the alphabet' by ButViewed West Semitic writing history of writing, West writing was within the and sometimes by others. The writing is so called acSemiticists, really an odd sort of syllabary in which an individual sign stood not sign stands for aplus phoneme, cording to thephoneme, notion that butanforalphabetic a consonantal phoneme an unfor a single sounds are significantly from other sounds aknown class of or which no vowel-a syllable indifferent short. What does the sign vowel, of a word). Because each (different enough to change the meaning beth represent phonetically? [bi] , [ba] , [bu] , or, at the end of some sign in [b]. the For Westexample, Semitic arepertory standsspeaker for a of single consonant, Arabic, a West words literate native obviously a phoneme, writing must be alphaKTB Semitic script, cannot West know Semitic how to pronounce thetherefore word written number ofskeleton 'historiesis of betic, the firstonly alphabet. carrythe anyconsonantal in isolation; contextLibraries reveals how to the are really histories of West Semitic writing, with so that according to very different vocalizations the be alphabet' vocalized, that an appendix on be the'writer,' Greek alphabet. if West Semitic writing was or meaning could 'he wrote,'But 'book,' 'books,' 'bookseller,' an alphabet, then ancient Egyptian have been by partly alphabetic 'writing.' AEME, by contrast, can must be pronounced someone who as theatfunctioning around 24, or so, too, as far anduniconsonantal who does not knows nothing all about of thetheGreek language understand what is being said. Similarities in form and letter-name between the Greek alphabet and West Semitic writing, and the shared II Unfortunately the phrase 'acrophonic principle' series is also applied to a theory of of learning through a mnemonic of names, are evisystem the originofofhistorical West Semitic signs in early pictograms, names describe what is relation, not of identitywhose of system. dence pictured. Hence the first sign 'alp = 'bull' is supposedly so called because

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