Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An Interdisciplinary Study of Oral Texts, Dictated Texts, and Wild Texts 019883506X, 9780198835066

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Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An Interdisciplinary Study of Oral Texts, Dictated Texts, and Wild Texts Jonathan L. Ready

Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9780198835066 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198835066.001.0001

Title Pages Jonathan L. Ready

(p.i) Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics (p.ii) (p.iii) Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics (p.iv) Copyright Page

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of

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Title Pages Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Jonathan L. Ready 2019 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2019 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2019930207 ISBN 978–0–19–883506–6 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Dedication

Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An Interdisciplinary Study of Oral Texts, Dictated Texts, and Wild Texts Jonathan L. Ready

Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9780198835066 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198835066.001.0001

(p.v) Dedication Jonathan L. Ready

For Ruthie That ain’t no storm, Captain. That’s just my hammer in the air, Lord, Lord. That’s just my hammer in the air. (Ballad of John Henry, traditional) (p.vi)

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Preface

Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An Interdisciplinary Study of Oral Texts, Dictated Texts, and Wild Texts Jonathan L. Ready

Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9780198835066 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198835066.001.0001

(p.vii) Preface Jonathan L. Ready

The heroic world depicted in the Iliad and the Odyssey is one of constant competition, and my first book, Character, Narrator, and Simile in the Iliad (Ready 2011), places similes in that agonistic setting. The book engages extensively with similes spoken by characters but also shows how similes presented by the Iliad’s narrator evince competitive dynamics. On occasion, I refer in that book to similes in modern oral traditions. My second book, The Homeric Simile in Comparative Perspectives: Oral Traditions from Saudi Arabia to Indonesia (Ready 2018a), takes up that challenge, investigating the Homeric simile from neglected comparative perspectives. In the first part of that volume, I consider similes in five modern oral poetries—Rajasthani epic, South Sumatran epic, Kyrgyz epic, Bosniac epic, and Najdi lyric poems from Saudi Arabia—and I review folkloristic scholarship on successful performances by other verbal artists, such as Egyptian singers of epic and African American singers of blues. By applying the results of those inquiries to the Homeric epics in the second part, I put forward a new take on how our Homeric poets crafted their similes, and I alter our understanding of how they displayed their competence as performers of verbal art. Reading all those textualized versions of oral traditional works led me to explore what goes into making a written version of an oral performer’s presentation. Deep down in the history of folklore collecting, it occurred to me that I could use my findings to address the vexed matter of how the Iliad and the Odyssey came to be, and I published “The Textualization of Homeric Epic by Means of Dictation” in the journal TAPA (Ready 2015). This book’s Part II (Chapter 3) is a revised, expanded, and more accessible version of that article. Looking into the history of the textualization of oral traditional works and seeing the roles played by scribes in those events prompted me to think more about scribal activity. I Page 1 of 3

 

Preface found illuminating work on scribal activity in the fields of medieval studies and religious studies: those scholars speak of the scribe as a performer. Tasked with learning about performance, I turned to linguistic anthropology. Parts I and III of this book represent the outcome of that research. Part I (Chapters 1 and 2) applies linguistic anthropology’s concepts of oral textuality and oral intertextuality to the Homeric epics. Chapter 1 offers a revised and expanded presentation of some of the issues I broach in “Performance, Oral Texts, and Entextualization in Homeric Epic” (Ready 2018b), a chapter in a volume I coedited with Christos Tsagalis (Ready and Tsagalis 2018a). Part III (Chapters 4 and 5) argues for understanding as performers the scribes responsible for the texts in the so-called wild papyri of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Early on in The Homeric Simile in Comparative Perspectives, I establish a nomenclature that I adhere to in this book as well (Ready 2018a: 6–8). I do not use the proper noun “Homer” except when quoting or paraphrasing scholars who do use that name. Instead I refer to the Iliad poet or the Odyssey poet (or the poet of the Iliad or the poet (p.viii) of the Odyssey). Both these poets are to be labeled Homeric poets: I call them “our Homeric poets.” They represent the tradition of the oral performance of Homeric poetry. Countless Homeric poets perpetuated that tradition of Homeric poetry, performing the Iliad and the Odyssey orally many, many times before the emergence of written texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey and continuing to perform the Iliad and the Odyssey orally afterward. I imagine that the Iliad poet dictated his version of the Iliad to a scribe and that the Odyssey poet dictated his version of the Odyssey to a scribe. Those dictated poems—that Iliad and that Odyssey—served as the archetypes for the subsequent written textual tradition of the Iliad and of the Odyssey. The Iliad and the Odyssey are “the Homeric epics (or poems).” The Iliad is not the Iliad; the Odyssey is not the Odyssey. Rather, the roman font—the Iliad, the Odyssey— signals that one is dealing with a tradition in which performers present what they think of as the same story, not with specific written texts. When John D. Smith speaks of “the epic of Pābūjī” (1991), or Lauri Honko of “the Siri epic” (1998), or Aditya Malik of “the oral narrative of Devnārāyaṇ” (2005), or Nienke van der Heide of “the Manas epic” (2015), none uses italics. Homerists address this phenomenon in their own way. Andrew Ford refers to poets “who handed over their Iliads and Odysseys to alphabets” (1992: 137). Jim Marks speaks of the “‘Odyssey-tradition’” as “the notional, though irrecoverable, sequence of compositions-in-performance through which the Homeric text evolved” and “‘the Odyssey’” as “the text as we have it” (2008: 12–13). José González speaks of “recognizable Iliadic and Odyssean traditions” (2013: 418). Ultimately, the term “Homeric poetry” embraces the Iliad and the Odyssey (which, to be precise, really means the ancient and medieval written copies of the Iliad and the Odyssey) as well as all those performances of the Iliad and the Odyssey (or sections thereof) that were not written down.

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Preface In some ways, what follows in this book represents an attempt to continue this project of definition. In this case I want to look into the various agents and entities involved in and relevant to the oral performance of the Iliad and the Odyssey, to the creation of written versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey via a process of dictation, and to the written textual transmission of the Iliad and the Odyssey.

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Acknowledgments

Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An Interdisciplinary Study of Oral Texts, Dictated Texts, and Wild Texts Jonathan L. Ready

Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9780198835066 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198835066.001.0001

(p.ix) Acknowledgments Jonathan L. Ready

I am grateful to Richard Bauman and Raymond Person for reading a draft of this book; to Karin Barber, Richard Martin, and Christos Tsagalis for reviewing early attempts at some of the arguments presented in Part I; and to Francesca Schironi for critiquing section 5.1. Audiences at conferences in Atlanta, Bloomington, Chicago, and New Orleans helped with Part III, and the Orality and Literacy group helped with Part I at the 2016 meeting in Lausanne. I thank Indiana University’s College Arts and Humanities Institute and Harvard University’s Loeb Classical Library Foundation for their support of this project in its later stages. In a remarkable act of intellectual generosity, one of the anonymous readers for Oxford University Press returned ten single-spaced pages of comments, saving me from numerous errors and infelicities. The other reader was more laconic but just as helpful. Once again it has been a privilege to work with Charlotte Loveridge and Georgie Leighton at the Press. As always, I owe my greatest debt to Margaret Foster for her encouragement and assistance. I thank the University of Texas Press for permission to reuse in Chapter 1 material from the following book chapter: Ready, J. L. 2018b. “Performance, Oral Texts, and Entextualization in Homeric Epic,” in J. L. Ready and C. C. Tsagalis (eds), Homer in Performance: Rhapsodes, Narrators, and Characters. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 320–50. © University of Texas Press, 2018. (p.x)

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Introduction

Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An Interdisciplinary Study of Oral Texts, Dictated Texts, and Wild Texts Jonathan L. Ready

Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9780198835066 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198835066.001.0001

Introduction Jonathan L. Ready

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198835066.003.0001

Abstract and Keywords This chapter first situates this project in the context of current discussions about the definitions of the terms “orality” and “textuality,” both of which have medial and conceptional senses. It then lays out three lessons from work on orality and textuality from outside the field of classical studies—from linguistic anthropology to folkloristics to medieval studies to religious studies—and reviews how the subsequent chapters apply these lessons to the study of Homeric poetry. It concludes by positioning this study in relation to previous work in Homeric studies and by suggesting which parts of the book readers from outside classical studies will find most valuable. Keywords:   orality, textuality, linguistic anthropology, folkloristics, medieval studies, religious studies, Homeric studies

Scholars use the phrase “the Homeric text” all the time. Yet one could not find this Homeric text (singular) in the library stacks or in digital form: rather one would come upon several Homeric texts (plural) (cf. Gurd 2005: 9). Helmut van Thiel’s text of the Iliad (2010) differs from, for instance, Martin L. West’s (1998a, 2000a). Thomas Allen’s text of the Odyssey (1917, 1919) differs from, for instance, Peter von der Mühll’s (1946). I merely scratch the surface in citing those four. Alex Lee surveys thirty-three printed Greek texts of poems attributed to Homer (2013), from Demetrius Chalcondylas’s 1488 Ἡ τοῦ Ὁμήρου ποίησις ἅπασα to Eduard Schwartz’s 1923 edition of the Iliad and 1924 edition of the Odyssey. Even if each edition aims to be definitive, the existence of competing editions reveals the protean nature of the modern Homeric text. That the Homeric text remains a dynamic entity finds a neat parallel in the renewed Page 1 of 12

 

Introduction production of distinct English translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey (McCrorie 2012; B. Powell 2014; P. Green 2015; E. Wilson 2018; cf. P. Young 2003: 84–158; Moser 2013: 99–206). I leave it to others to critique the modern printed editions (Apthorp 1980: pp. xviii–xix; Nagy 2004: 15–17; Graziosi and Haubold 2015: 5–6) but will continue to take apart the phrase “the Homeric text.” This book’s five chapters query from three different angles—hence the book’s division into three parts—what it means to speak of Homeric poetry together with the word “text.” Scholarship from outside the discipline of classical studies motivates and undergirds the project. This research has deepened our understanding of the word “text”— above all, of what the fashioning of a text can involve—by exploring the relationship between orality and textuality. Let me first contemplate these two words. Investigators from various fields define or employ these words—orality and textuality—in various ways. Egbert Bakker reminds the Homerist of two meanings scholars give to the words “oral” and “orality.” One often uses them “in a medial sense, meaning simply that something is spoken and as such is a matter of sound and the voice of the speaker” (1997a: 7, emphasis in original). Seeing a title like Oral Epics from Africa: Vibrant Voices from a Vast Continent (Johnson et al. 1997), one thinks of oral performance, of oral in the medial sense. The medievalist and expert in Turkic oral epic Karl Reichl has medial orality in mind when he states flatly, “A poem is oral…simply because it is oral.…A poem is oral because of the way it has been composed, transmitted and/or performed” (2003: 255). In a book on the oral performance (p.2) in North India of poetry attributed to Kabir, Linda Hess writes, “I use the term ‘oral’…only for live, embodied performance”; “the orality I speak of requires the presence together of physical bodies, and the production and communication of sound” (2015: 78, 232; cf. 211; Niles 1999: 53; Finnegan 2015: 25, 81–2). For the Africanist Harold Scheub, an oral poem “loses its identity”—it can no longer be said to be oral—“when it is frozen in memory or writing” (2002: 83). At the same time, these words “may also be a matter of conception” (Bakker 1997a: 8, emphasis in original). The linguist Wulf Oesterreicher defines orality as a matter of “style” and of “conception,” not medium: he chooses “the term language of immediacy (Sprache der Nähe) to designate the informal/oral type of linguistic conception” (1997: 191, 193–4; cf. Bakker 1997b: 287). Additional complexities emerge if one wishes to distinguish between the style evident in an oral traditional work, be it an epic poem or a folktale, and the style evident in everyday talk (DuBois 2012: 206; cf. Saussy 2016: 47). Once one stops thinking in terms of medium one finds that “a discourse that is conceptionally oral (such as a conversational narrative) is often medially oral as well, but it is also possible for such a discourse to be written” (Bakker 1997a: 8, emphasis in original; cf. Shuman 1986: 95–6, 112–13, 117, 176; Andersen 1991: 49–50; Assmann 2006: Page 2 of 12

 

Introduction 111). Oesterreicher can offer “a typology of orality in written texts” (1997: 190), and the folklorist Lauri Honko can state, “It is not the medium as such but the oral style and written style which are at stake. Both media can accommodate both styles,…” (2002a: 20; cf. Alexander 2006: 17; Schellenberg 2015: 293; S. Miller 2017: 95). Another illustrative effort to get away from a focus on medium comes from the comparatist Haun Saussy. He defines “oral tradition as a poetic technology marked by collective composition, modularity, iterability, and virtuality” (2016: 72). That it can be voiced is “incidental”: “indeed many of the same features can be found in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary avantgardes” (73). This twofold understanding of orality goes some way toward mitigating the desire to toss out the term tout court (e.g. Scollon and Scollon 1995; cf. Finnegan 2015: 81–3). To this nuanced understanding of orality can be added a nuanced understanding of textuality. Consider the titles of three collections of essays and their editors’ introductory comments. The editors of Transmitting Jewish Traditions: Orality, Textuality, and Cultural Diffusion note, “The larger part of this volume will focus on the ways in which oral and written transmission of these cultural elements interact within a context in which written transmission is more or less readily available” (Elman and Gershoni 2000b: 1). The editors of Listening up, Writing down, and Looking beyond: Interfaces of the Oral, Written, and Visual refer to “the process of moving from embodied performance to a textual form, be it manuscript, print…” and identify as “text” “what is produced when orature is lifted out of the discursive environment where it lived” (Gingell with Roy 2012: 13–14).1 The editor of Orality and Textuality (p.3) in the Iranian World: Patterns of Interaction across the Centuries speaks of “orality and its patterns of intersection and interaction with the written word” and writes, “Each of the contributions provides important evidence of textual culture’s intimate, extensive, and ongoing interaction with the realm of orality” (Rubanovich 2015b: 3–4, 13). In these volumes, textuality refers to written texts and what goes on in written texts. Others use text and textuality differently. A text can be “a species of social action” (Barber and Moraes Farias 1989: 3), and one can treat “social action as text” (Becker and Mannheim 1995: 239; cf. Titon 2003: 80; Assmann 2006: 123) or “any humanly constructed object” as text (Titon 2003: 76). I remain in the realm of language use. Textuality can indicate the presence of attributes that render an instance of language use a text irrespective of medium. One can speak of, for instance, oral or written or inscribed or printed texts. The anthropologist Karin Barber, who focuses on African praise poetry, stresses the continuities between the textuality evident in oral and written texts: “writing is not what confers textuality. Rather, what does [confer textuality] is the quality of being joined together and given a recognisable existence as a form”; “text…is utterance (oral or written) that is woven together in order to attract attention and to outlast the moment” (2007: 1–2). Carol Pasternack, who studies Old Page 3 of 12

 

Introduction English poetry, distinguishes the textuality of texts in various media. The textuality of the Old English texts preserved in manuscripts differs from the textuality “of both oral and printed compositions” as well as “written” texts (1995: 2). She uses the term “inscribed” to label the textuality of the poetry in the corpus she investigates “since they inherit significant elements of vocality from their oral forebears and yet address the reader from the pages of manuscripts” (2). The folklorist Amy Shuman would distinguish between “written and spoken texts” by looking to the “relationships between texts and contexts” (1986: 184). I toggle back and forth between these various positions over the course of this book. So, with these distinctions in mind, I pick out three lessons from work on orality and textuality from outside the field of classical studies. First, one learns what goes into the production of oral texts, utterances capable of outlasting the moment, and how oral texts engage intertextually with other oral texts. Second, one learns what textualization entails—the creation of a written version of an oral traditional work via a process that starts either with a scribe’s writing down a performer’s words or a collector’s using a recording device to a capture a performer’s words. Third, one learns what happens when scribes, living in a world in which the oral performance of traditional works thrives, copy written texts of those and/or related works. By applying these findings to the study of Homeric poetry, this book brings out the complexities involved in speaking about Homeric poetry and text in the same breath. This interdisciplinary and comparative approach enables an investigation into Homeric texts from the Archaic through the Hellenistic periods. Written texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey achieved an unprecedented degree of standardization after 150 BCE (Haslam 1997: 56, 63–4; Lamberton 1997: 44; Jensen 2011: 218; Schironi 2018: 42–3). Although not identical, our medieval manuscripts of the Homeric epics reflect that development. This book examines the Homeric tradition before that process of (p.4) standardization. By looking at oral texts, dictated texts, and wild texts, it illuminates the intricate history of Homeric texts long before the emergence of standardized written texts. Part I, made up of Chapters 1 and 2, explores the oral composition in performance of Homeric poetry. To say that Homeric poets composed in oral performance is to say that they worked with a toolkit of formulae, type-scenes, middle-range structures, and plots to fashion their poem in the act of performing before an audience (e.g. Edwards 1992; Louden 1999, 2006; Minchin 2001; M. Clark 2004; W. Hansen 2011; Kahane 2018). Memorization might have played a part when it came to certain segments of the poem, but the poets did not engage in wholesale prior composition, as other oral poets do (Ready 2018a: 22), only presenting the poem after they had memorized the whole thing. Similarly, some Homeric poets might have made use of written texts before or even during a performance, but the usual depiction of Homeric poets composing in Page 4 of 12

 

Introduction performance does not portray them as dependent upon written texts. As for a timeframe, when talking about the oral composition in performance of Homeric poetry, the majority of Homerists have in mind the Homeric poets of, at the very least, the early Archaic period. I stand with those who have in mind the poets of the entire Archaic period as well as the Classical and Hellenistic periods. Whatever one’s stance on this matter, one looks especially to the Iliad and the Odyssey themselves to reconstruct what those poets did in oral performance. Part I argues that one should think about texts and textuality when considering the oral composition in performance of Homeric poetry—that is, irrespective of the presence of written texts. Linguistic anthropology teaches that oral performers generate oral texts through processes of entextualization—the “art” (Barber 2007: 93) of shaping utterances capable of outlasting the moment. Moreover, oral texts engage intertextually with other oral texts. They look backward and forward as they interact with past and future texts, and performers negotiate an intertextual gap, meaning the relationship their own text has to other texts. Starting from that research, Chapters 1 and 2 consider how these two phenomena pertain to the Homeric epics. Chapter 1 delves into a range of material, from the speeches Zeus entrusts to messengers to public laments over fallen warriors, from the narrator’s catalogues to moments in which the text engages in its own exegesis. I thereby explore the ways in which the Homeric characters talk about and craft oral texts and consider how the narrator text and the poem as a whole deploy mechanisms of entextualization. I conclude that our Homeric poets fashioned an utterance capable of outlasting the moment each time they performed, and that conclusion prompts revisions to how Homerists talk about texts. Chapter 2 returns to episodes involving messengers in the epics. I touch on the anticipatory intertextuality evident in such episodes and then launch a detailed exploration of the messenger’s performance. I focus on how, as mediators, messengers negotiate the intertextual gap between the speech they are tasked with relaying and their own speech. This investigation reveals still more about the portrayal of oral texts in the world depicted in the epics, especially what can happen to oral texts in that (p.5) world, and sheds light on the representation of mediators in the poems. As I do in Chapter 1, I conclude with some inferences about the Iliad poet and the Odyssey poet. The poet characterizes himself as a mediator, but critically, as one who performs in his capacity as a mediator, and the poet seeks to craft an oral text that engages in particular ways with past and future presentations of the same story. By introducing the concept of oral textuality to Homeric studies and by working with a more precise model of oral intertextuality than Homerists have used heretofore, Part I illuminates both the verbal and oratorical landscape our Homeric poets fashion in their epics and what the poets were actually doing when they performed.

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Introduction Part II comprises Chapter 3. Scholars argue over how written texts of the work of Homeric poets, oral traditional poets, came into existence and, to be more specific, they argue over how and when written texts emerged that provided exemplars for the written textual traditions of the Iliad and the Odyssey that one reads today. One theory, customarily termed the “dictation model,” envisions a poet, customarily placed in the Archaic period, dictating to a scribe. Another theory, Gregory Nagy’s evolutionary model, also involves poets dictating to scribes, starting around 550 BCE. These two models—the dictation model and the evolutionary model—differ from a third model, best articulated by M. L. West: Archaic-era poets wrote the poems down themselves. Dictation plays a part in two out of the three explanations, however much the two strive to distinguish themselves from one another, for how written texts came into existence. One should query what it would have meant for a poet to dictate to a scribe. To do so, I focus on the numerous modern instances of the textualization of an oral traditional work. My investigation relies especially on the testimony of folklorists and ethnographers who engage in and study textualization. It emerges that the textualization of a modern oral traditional work by a collector results in a text that is the co-creation of the performer, collector, and scribe (if a discrete third party). I conclude that a written text resulting from a process that began when a collector had a poet dictate his version of the Iliad or the Odyssey to a scribe was likely such a co-creation (see the preface for the use of roman font). An excursus on the collector of oral traditional works as depicted in Herodotus’s Histories and on Herodotus’s own practices as a textualizer bolsters this conclusion. Previous investigations of the creation of written versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey by way of dictation have obscured the contributions of other parties involved in the textualization event beside the poet. Finally, the Iliad and the Odyssey emerged, be it through the collaborative process of textualization by way of dictation or from the hand of a writing oral poet. The question becomes, what did the people who made copies of those written texts do when they copied? Part III (Chapters 4 and 5) considers some of those copies as preserved in the so-called wild papyri of the Homeric epics from the Ptolemaic period. As an example of one of the texts I investigate, I quote from papyrus 5 (TM 61226), dating from between 299 and 200 BCE and preserving what we label Il. 11.788–848 and 12.1–9. In this selection, which corresponds to what we label Il. 11.794–808, Nestor urges Patroclus to enter the battle wearing Achilles’s armor (S. West 1967: 108–9). (p.6) Stephanie West, whose edition of the papyrus fragment I reproduce here, uses “the Oxford Classical Text” to supplement lacunae (1967: 10), which I take to mean T. Allen’s 1931 edition. [εἰ δέ τινα φρεσὶν ἧισι θεοπροπίην] ἀλείνει Page 6 of 12

 

Introduction [καί τινά οἱ πὰρ Ζηνὸσ ἐπέφ]ρ̣α̣δε πότνια μήτηρ [ἀργυρόπεζα Θέτισ θυγάτηρ ἁλί]ο̣ιο γέροντοσ [ ἐν] ἀ̣γ̣ῶνι θοάω̣ν̣ [ἀλλὰ σέ περ προέτω, λ]αὸν ἀνώχθω [Μυρμιδόνων, αἴ κέν τι φόωσ Δα]ν̣α̣[ο]ῖ̣σ̣ι γένηαι. [ θ]ω̣ρ̣ηχθῆναι [αἴ κέ σε τῶι εἴσκοντεσ ἀπόσχωντ]α̣ι̣ π̣ο̣λ̣έμοιο [Τρῶεσ, ἀναπνεύσωσι δ’ ἀρήιοι υἷεσ Ἀχ]α̣ιῶν [τειρόμενοι· ὀλίγη δέ τ’ ἀνάπνευσισ π]ο̣λέμοιο. [ῥεῖα δέ κ’ ἀκμῆτεσ κεκμηότασ ἄν]δρασ ἀϋτῆ[ι [ὤσαισθε προτὶ ἄστυ νεῶν ἄπο καὶ κλισ]ιάων.” [ὣσ φάτο, τῶι δ’ ἄρα θυμὸν ἐνὶ στήθ]εσσιν ὄρινε· [τεῖρε γὰρ αἰνὸν ἄχοσ κραδίην, ἀ]κ̣άχησε δὲ θυμ[ὸν· [βῆ δὲ θέειν παρὰ νῆασ ἐπ’ Αἰακίδη]ν̣ Ἀχιλῆια. [ ]νο̣.τ̣αι̣αχ̣α̣[ [ἀλλ’ ὅτε δὴ κατὰ νῆασ Ὀδυσσῆ]οσ θείοιο [ἷξε θέων Πάτροκλοσ, ἵνά σφ’ ἀ]γ̣[ο]ρ̣ή̣ τε θέμισ τε [ προπάροιθε νεῶν ὀρθοκρ]αιράων [ἤην, τῆι δὴ καί σφι θεῶν ἐτετ]εύχατο βωμοί, But if in his mind he is trying to avoid some oracle and his queenly mother declared to him something from Zeus, silver-footed Thetis, daughter of the old man of the sea, …in the gathering place of the swift but let him send you out,…and urge the host of Myrmidons, to see if you prove a light of deliverance to the Danaans. …to put on, to see if the Trojans take you for him and hold off from war and the warlike sons of the Achaeans catch their breath because they are worn out; for scant is the space to breathe in war. And easily might you, being unwearied, drive men that are wearied with battle back toward the city from the ships and the huts.” So he spoke and roused the heart in his breast: for a terrible pain wore at his heart, and he was vexed in his mind; and he went running along the ships to Aeacus’s grandson, Achilles. … But when to the ships of godlike Odysseus in his running Patroclus came, where their place of assembly and place of judgment (p.7) …in front of the ships with tall sterns was, where also had been built their altars of the gods,2

The verses followed by a letter, known as plus verses, do not appear in the standard critical editions of the Iliad and provide the clearest evidence for how the texts in the wild papyri come in and out of contact with those standard editions. Compare van Thiel’s version of these lines: εἰ δέ τινα φρεσὶν ᾗσι θεοπροπίην ἀλεείνει Page 7 of 12

 

Introduction καί τινά οἱ πὰρ Ζηνὸς ἐπέφραδε πότνια μήτηρ, ἀλλὰ σέ περ προέτω, ἅμα δ’ ἄλλος λαὸς ἑπέσθω Μυρμιδόνων, αἴ κέν τι φόως Δαναοῖσι γένηαι· καί τοι τεύχεα καλὰ δότω πόλεμόνδε φέρεσθαι, αἴ κέ σε τῷ ἴσκοντες ἀπόσχωνται πολέμοιο Τρῶες, ἀναπνεύσωσι δ’ ἀρήιοι υἷες Ἀχαιῶν τειρόμενοι· ὀλίγη δέ τ’ ἀνάπνευσις πολέμοιο. ῥεῖα δέ κ’ ἀκμῆτες κεκμηότας ἄνδρας ἀυτῇ ὤσαισθε προτὶ ἄστυ νεῶν ἄπο καὶ κλισιάων.” ὣς φάτο, τῷ δ’ ἄρα θυμὸν ἐνὶ στήθεσσιν ὄρινε· βῆ δὲ θέειν παρὰ νῆας ἐπ’ Αἰακίδην Ἀχιλῆα. ἀλλ’ ὅτε δὴ κατὰ νῆας Ὀδυσσῆος θείοιο ἷξε θέων Πάτροκλος, ἵνά σφ’ ἀγορή τε θέμις τε ἤην, τῇ δὴ καί σφι θεῶν ἐτετεύχατο βωμοί, But if in his mind he is trying to avoid some oracle and his queenly mother declared to him something from Zeus, well, let him send you out, and with you let the rest of the army of Myrmidons follow, to see if you prove a light of deliverance to the Danaans; and let him give you his fair armor to wear into the war, to see if the Trojans take you for him and hold off from war and the warlike sons of the Achaeans catch their breath because they are worn out; for scant is the space to breathe in war. And easily might you, being unwearied, drive men that are wearied with battle back toward the city from the ships and the huts.” So he spoke and roused the heart in his breast; (p.8) and he went running along the ships to Aeacus’s grandson, Achilles. But when to the ships of godlike Odysseus in his running Patroclus came, where their place of assembly and place of judgment was, where also had been built their altars of the gods,3

Much previous scholarship uses these papyri to establish the putatively original written texts of the Homeric epics. I encourage researchers to think about these papyri in their own right because they reveal the sorts of written texts that many people in the Classical and Hellenistic periods likely used. To think about these papyri in their own right requires not mischaracterizing the copyists’ work or unproductively disparaging it. In order to provide a new way to think about the scribal activity that produced the texts one sees in the wild papyri, I seek guidance, as I do in Parts I and II, from outside classical studies. After reviewing previous research in Homeric studies on these texts, Chapter 4 introduces the model of the scribe as performer put to work by students of several literatures, such as Anglo-Saxon and Israelite texts. Per this model, the scribe performs in the act of copying, due in large part to the fact that he operates in a time when performers orally perform the work Page 8 of 12

 

Introduction he copies, or orally perform using other related written texts, or orally perform related oral traditional works. I demonstrate the model’s relevance to the study of the wild Homeric papyri and consider at what point in time people capable of generating the texts one finds in the papyri would most likely have been around —much rests on the extent of the oral performance of Homeric poetry in the Classical and Hellenistic periods—and who these capable people might have been. Deploying scholarship on performance, especially that of linguistic anthropologists and folklorists, Chapter 5 fleshes out what it meant for the scribe behind the text of a wild papyrus to perform as he copied. Offering close readings of a number of the wild papyri, the chapter first applies the model of entextualization, familiar from Part I, to the papyri and then applies work on how oral performers show their competence by aiming for a maximalist presentation and one that evinces “affecting power.” Next, it considers three other components of the scribe’s performance: it touches on the scribe as an agent of tradition, introduces and applies the concept of traditionalization—the linking of one’s performance to other performances of the same tale—and goes back to the phenomenon of the intertextual gap broached in Chapter 2. Switching gears, the chapter then explores how the production of a bookroll becomes a performance. The penultimate section rehearses the benefits of understanding the scribe as a performer for students of scribal activity, and the concluding section juxtaposes the model of (p.9) scribal performance with the alternative accounts surveyed in Chapter 4 for the distinct features of the wild Homeric papyri. In brief, the book’s three parts argue that considering together the phenomena of orality and textuality clarifies the history of Homeric texts before the standardization of the written textual tradition after 150 BCE and the contributions of various agents to that history. In summarizing my project design and the contours of my argument and findings, I have pointed out some of the ways in which each part differs from previous scholarship in Homeric studies. I hasten to add that Homerists have investigated the interactions between orality and textuality before, although one could think otherwise upon reading M. L. West’s admonishment “to shake the oralists off our backs” (2003a: 14). For instance, as we will see in Chapter 2, Homerists consider the phenomenon of oral intertextuality. By contrast, I set aside at the outset two other queries common in Homeric studies. To begin with, students of oral traditions continue to explore how oral performers interact with written texts (Jensen 2011: 187–94, 2017; Fox 2016: 368; cf. Broude 2011), and Homerists often focus on that question when they examine the interactions between orality and textuality. For example, Nagy envisions written texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey appearing after 550 BCE (e.g. 2014). At first, they served as transcripts that could be used as aids for an Page 9 of 12

 

Introduction oral performance. Beginning in the later part of the fourth century BCE, written texts began to function as scripts that were mandatory for a successful performance. Investigating this shift from transcript to script, José González argues that “the cultural pressures that brought about the growing dependence of orators on the memorization of written speeches were also at work among rhapsodes” (2013: 7). Minna Skafte Jensen wonders how oral performers of the epics would have made use of written texts (2011: 216): If we hypothesize that written texts were accessible to the rhapsodes and gave rise to new versions when they integrated them into their oral repertoires, this situation leads to the next question: How could these new versions make their way back into written texts as they must have done if their influence is found in the transmitted text of the two epics? Did the rhapsodes own manuscripts that they revised whenever they had a new good idea? That would have been a cumbersome and expensive process demanding frequent erasure and rewriting. In the case of a papyrus manuscript the relatively fragile material would allow for only a limited amount of changes. If, instead, the rhapsodes preferred waxed tablets, any number of changes would have been physically possible; but in that case the piles of tablets necessary for containing the two poems would pose other problems. Jensen makes plain her doubts that performers of the Iliad and the Odyssey ever memorized written texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey: “The Iliad and the Odyssey had no further life in oral tradition, I submit. They were not memorised by their two poets or by others and not reperformed in full or in part” (2011: 246; cf. 164–5; 2017). I will give my own thoughts on this matter when my presentation requires it (introduction to Chapter 3 (pp. 103–4); section 4.3 (p. 202)), but I will not mount a systematic inquiry. (p.10) I also stay out of the following. Like students of Rabbinic literature (Elman 1999: 58; Jaffee 1999: 12), Homerists ask, granted that Homeric poets orally performed, do our poems exhibit features that only the use of writing can explain? Do they reflect in whole or in part what linguists call conceptional literacy (Oesterreicher 1997: 194–5; Schroeder 2016: 82–3)? Take the discussion of ring composition among scholars of the Homeric epics. After an exhaustive investigation of the structure of the Iliad, especially its use of ring composition, Keith Stanley concludes that, although the Iliad was orally performed (1993: 265, 280), it cannot be attributed “to an oral poet dependent solely on oral technique” (282). Rather, it evinces “recursive structures of a complexity foreign to extemporized poetry,” and “a more relevant model for Homeric artistry can be found in the conscious literary parataxis of archaic and classical lyric and in fifth-century drama and historiography” (268). Others disagree and assert that one need not attribute even the most elaborate ring structures in the Homeric epics to conceptional literacy (cf. Arft 2017: 9–12). Starting from the premise Page 10 of 12

 

Introduction that the Homeric epics “reflect the compositional practices of oral poetry the world over” and endorsing the view that ring composition can operate at “any scale of narrative” (2014: 75, 81), Erwin Cook argues that the Odyssey is constructed via a series of rings. The subtext of his article is that this pronounced narrative pattern would have allowed a trained singer to learn the story of the Odyssey quite easily. Both these subjects merit continued study, but the story of the interactions between orality and textuality in the case of Homeric poetry involves much more than if or how rhapsodes used written texts and involves much more than if the poems we have, be they the product of an oral performance or intended for oral performance or both, contain features attributable solely to conceptional literacy. This book tells three parts of that story. At the same time, Homerists will find themselves on some recognizable terrain. They will be comfortable with one of the book’s main topics: the nature of oral performance. Richard Martin’s The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the Iliad (1989) and John Miles Foley’s The Singer of Tales in Performance (1995a) showed the value of applying research on oral performance to archaic Greek epic poetry. Parts I and III of this book renew that endeavor. Above all, they apply to the Homeric tradition work in linguistic anthropology on how oral performers display their skill through, for instance, entextualizing, offering a maximalist presentation, moving their audiences, traditionalizing, and negotiating an intertextual gap. The application of this research to the scribes behind the wild Homeric papyri is a first, as is the application of research on scribal activity in other traditions to the wild papyri. But in general this book’s comparative and interdisciplinary orientation will feel familiar. In Part I, I join those who adopt comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives to illuminate the oral performances of the Homeric characters (e.g. Martin 1989; Lardinois 1997) or the oral performances of the Homeric bards (e.g. Bakker 1997a; Minchin 2001; Scodel 2002; Ready 2018a). In Part II, I join Jensen (2011) in taking a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to the question of the creation of written versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey by way of dictation. (p.11) I have written this book from my perch in classical studies and have framed it so as to address issues of concern to Homerists and their fellow travelers in classical studies. Researchers in other disciplines will find the book useful too. Linguistic anthropologists will benefit from Part I’s discussions of entextualization and oral intertextuality. Folklorists and other scholars of modern oral traditions will benefit from Part II’s exploration of modern instances of the textualization of oral traditional works. Finally, students of scribal activity in other cultures will benefit from Part III’s systematic application of research in performance to the work of scribes. (p.12)

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Introduction Notes:

(1) The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms defines orature as follows (Baldick 2008): “a portmanteau term coined by the Kenyan novelist and playwright Ngugi wa Thiong’o to denote imaginative works of the oral tradition usually referred to as ‘oral literature’. The point of the coinage is to avoid suggesting that oral compositions belong to a lesser or derivative category.” (2) My translations of passages from the Homeric papyri look for the most part to Lattimore 1951 and 1965, Wyatt 1999, M. L. West 2003b, and Most 2007b. I aim to Latinize all proper nouns in all my translations. Some authority has assigned each papyrus a number (Bird 2010: 62). The numbers used for the papyri discussed in this book are those recognized by these authorities. For the most part, I can refer to a papyrus by its Allen-Sutton or Allen-Sutton-West or West number. On the two occasions when such a number does not exist, I use the Mertens-Pack3 number (MP3) (http:// cipl93.philo.ulg.ac.be/Cedopal/MP3/dbsearch%5Fen.aspx). I also give the Trismegistos number (TM) in parentheses (cf. Depauw and Gheldof 2014): that online database provides the papyrus’s location and its inventory number as well as a link to the papyrus’s entry in the Leuven Database of Ancient Books that lists scholarly work on the papyrus. (3) Throughout this book I use van Thiel’s editions of the Iliad (2010) and the Odyssey (1991), although I do not reproduce his lunate sigmas. For the most part, translations of passages from the Iliad look to Wyatt 1999, with frequent glances at Lattimore 1951, and translations of passages from the Odyssey look to Lattimore 1965. When I do not make such specifications in regard to other texts, the translations are my own.

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Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics

Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An Interdisciplinary Study of Oral Texts, Dictated Texts, and Wild Texts Jonathan L. Ready

Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9780198835066 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198835066.001.0001

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics Jonathan L. Ready

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198835066.003.0002

Abstract and Keywords This chapter introduces to Homeric studies the concepts of oral texts— utterances capable of spiting the power of time—and entextualization—the process of making an oral text. It delves into a range of material, from the speeches Zeus entrusts to messengers to public laments over fallen warriors, from the narrator’s catalogues to moments in which the text engages in its own exegesis. It thereby explores the ways in which the Homeric characters talk about and craft oral texts and considers how the narrator text and the poem as a whole deploy mechanisms of entextualization. It concludes that our Homeric poets fashioned an utterance capable of outlasting the moment each time they performed, and that conclusion prompts revisions to how Homerists talk about texts. Keywords:   oral texts, entextualization, speeches, character text, Homeric poets, text, oral performance

Introduction Most discussions of writing in the Homeric epics point to two verses as the sole reference to the phenomenon: Proteus sent Bellerephon to Lycia, “and he gave him baneful signs, / having inscribed (sēmata lugra / grapsas) many lifedestroying things in a folded tablet” (Il. 6.168–9) (Scodel 1992: 58; Bassi 1997: 325; Aloni 1998: 78; Jensen 2011: 197 n. 49; B. Powell 2011). Haun Saussy casts a wider net. In order to find writing in the Homeric epics, he “rework[s]” the concept and applies it to, for example, moments of scratching—Polydamas’s spear scratches (grapsen) Peneleos (Il. 17.599)—and incising—each Achaean Page 1 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics champion puts a mark (esēmēnanto) on his token for the lottery to determine who will fight Hector (Il. 7.175) (1996: 300–6, cf. 2016: 84). From this perspective, one can also “give the name of writing…to Odysseus’ identifying scar” (1996: 305). When a search of over 28,000 lines of poetry yields two verses or when scratching and incising become writing, one discerns how hard scholars work to detect writing in the poems. That one must strain to see these instances of writing does not imply that the world depicted in the epics lacks texts or a concept of textuality. Rather, one comes across an abundance of texts in the poems if one follows the lead of linguistic anthropologists who investigate “the constitution of oral texts” (Barber 2007: 67) through processes of entextualization. This chapter explores the Homeric poems’ representation of these kinds of texts and what that representation suggests about our Homeric poets’ vision of their projects. Section 1.1 surveys scholarship on mechanisms of entextualization—what performers do when they create an utterance capable of outliving the moment— in modern oral traditions and scholarship that, although it does not use the word entextualization, nevertheless sheds light on the subject. Endorsing Karin Barber’s statement that when it comes to entextualization “the questions that arise—the things to look for—can…be profitably drawn from one body of material and applied to another” (2007: 74), section 1.2 applies to the Homeric poems the findings on entextualization in modern oral traditions covered in section 1.1. The section unfolds in four subsections. (p.16) Subsection 1.2.1 observes that songs and tales seem to have an independent preexistence in the world constructed in the Homeric poems and circulate from presenter to presenter. What is more, these and other utterances possess an object-like status. These two phenomena suggest that our Homeric poets depict a world in which oral pronouncements endure and prompt an investigation into the creation of oral texts in the poems and the strategies of entextualization represented therein. Speeches meant to be repeated showcase the production of oral texts and bring out the importance of boundaries, cohesion, and coherence in entextualization (subsection 1.2.2). Other speeches by characters exhibit additional means of entextualization (subsection 1.2.3). I investigate the attaching of utterances to objects, the phenomenon of evaluating and explicating (paradigmatic) stories, and the practices of quoting previous utterances and of introducing generically distinct segments. Finally, the rendering of personal laments in the Iliad reveals non-discursive ways to place boundaries around and provide coherence to an utterance. Subsection 1.2.4 begins by noting that stretches of verse in the narrator text (the portions between the characters’ speeches, themselves designated the “character text”) achieve entextualization in part due to their shifting to another generic mode distinct from that of the surrounding text and that the glossing of Page 2 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics difficult words in both the narrator text and the character text makes the poetry an object of commentary, another entextualizing move. Setting aside the distinction between character text and narrator text, one observes the positioning of the poetry as existing prior to its presentation and the objectification of the poetry: both argue for its endurance. Fittingly, the poet’s use of formal devices, such as parallelism and ring composition, across the entirety of his poem and his representing himself as one who quotes the Muse(s) reveal how he goes about the process of entextualization. The constitution of oral texts within the poem and references to the constitution of oral texts within the poem, the efforts to endow the entire poem with textuality—these moves encourage one to picture our Homeric poets as performers who entextualize, who fashion an oral text, as they perform. Building on the previous sections’ results, the concluding section 1.3 critiques how Homerists talk about texts.

1.1. Performance, Oral Texts, and Entextualization The study of oral performance made great strides in the 1970s. First, Richard Bauman offered what would prove to be an enduring definition of performance: “performance as a mode of spoken verbal communication consists in the assumption of responsibility to an audience for a display of communicative competence” (1977: 11, cf. 2004: 9).1 (p.17) I will rely on this definition throughout this book. Second, scholars reacted against the excision of an oral performer’s words from the real-world context of their utterance. It would no longer do merely to study a written transcript of what a performer had said. As Richard Martin reviews, these scholars argued that “meaning emerges only through performance,” that “it is the performance, not the text, which counts” (1989: 7; cf. Scheub 1977: 349; A.-L. Siikala 1990: 9; Bakker 2005: 55; Finnegan 2007: 192, 2015: 92; Tangherlini 2013b: 218, 220; Edmunds 2016a: 33). Not ready to dispose of text, other students of oral performance have sought to clarify this second point, dubbed the “performance is king” model by Lauri Honko (2000b: 13; cf. Finnegan 2007: 192). One may conceive of performance as an interpretable event and so as a text (Titon 2003: 79–80). I attend to another response—the oft-quoted manifesto (Finnegan 2007: 193; Jensen 2011: 119–20) penned by the anthropologist Karin Barber (2005: 265–6, emphasis in original ≈ 2003: 325): In oral traditions, the co-presence of performance and text is of course more difficult to see, because there is no visible, tangible document to contrast with the evanescent utterance. Nonetheless, it is clear that what happens in most oral performances is not pure instantaneity, pure evanescence, pure emergence and disappearance into the vanishing moment. The exact contrary is usually the case. There is a performance— but it is a performance of something. Something identifiable is understood to have pre-existed the moment of utterance. Or, alternatively, something is Page 3 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics understood to be constituted in utterance that can be abstracted or detached from the immediate context and re-embodied in a future performance. Even if the only place this “something” can be held to exist is in people’s minds or memories, still it is surely distinguishable from immediate, and immediately-disappearing, actual utterance. It can be referred to. People may speak of “the story of Sunjata” or “the praises of Dingaan” rather than speaking of a particular narrator’s or praise-singer’s performance on a particular occasion. And this capacity to be abstracted, to transcend the moment, and to be identified independently of particular instantiations, is the whole point of oral traditions. They are “traditions” because they are known to be shared and to have been handed down; they can be shared and handed down because they have been constituted precisely in order to be detachable from the immediate context, and capable of being transmitted in time and disseminated in space. Creators and transmitters of oral genres use every resource at their disposal to consolidate utterance into quasi-autonomous texts. Two points stand out. First, a tale is felt to exist independently of any one enunciation (cf. Finnegan 2011: 162, 2015: 102–3; Frog 2011b: 10–11). This formulation updates Peter Bogatyrëv and Roman Jakobson’s assertion in their classic 1929 article “Folklore as a Special Form of Creativity”: “From the folklore-performer’s standpoint, the work is a fact of langue, i.e., an extrapersonal, given fact, independent of this performer” (1982: 38). We do not hereby return to the discredited superorganic theory of folklore, which “misinterpreted tradition as a static, superorganic entity that has a stable life of its own and is able to survive outside the minds of the people who create and perpetuate it” (Tangherlini 2013a: 4; cf. Shuman 1986: 139–40). Instead, and this is the second point, this phenomenon—the perception that a tale exists independently of any one enunciation—arises when oral performers craft something “that is woven together in (p.18) order to attract attention and outlast the moment” (Barber 2007: 2). Barber joins scholars from a range of disciplines in calling that something “an oral text” (2007: 1–2; cf. Doane 1991: 78; Sears and Flueckiger 1991: 1–2; Elman 1999: 76–7, 92–3; Ramanujan 1999: 535; Joubert 2004: 6 n. 5, 89–90; Blackburn 2005; Assmann 2006: 42, 121; Horsley 2010: 96; Thatcher 2011: 38–41; Müller 2012: 298 n. 8; Reichl 2015: 28, 34–5; pace Ong 1990: 7, 10). One need not speak, as Pietro Pucci does (1987: 27, 30; cf. Tsagalis 2004: 11), of oral performers “writing” in Jacques Derrida’s sense or, as Haun Saussy does (1996: e.g. 307), of “oral writing” to be able to say that oral performers produce texts. “Writing,” Barber avers, “is not what confers textuality” (2007: 1; cf. 101; Tsagalis 2011: 211). Oral performers produce oral texts.2 Observe that this use of the term “oral text” differs from the use of the term to refer to a written document that results from the textualization of an oral performance (Finnegan 2007: 10 with n. 9; Niles 2013b). Page 4 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics So performers make an oral text: they impart textuality, the attributes of an utterance capable of outliving the moment, to a verbal act. They make this oral text, they endow an utterance with textuality, through strategies of what linguistic anthropologists call “entextualization.” Entextualization is “the process of rendering a given instance of discourse a text, detachable from its local context” (Urban 1996: 21; cf. Bauman and Briggs 1990: 73; Wilce 2009a: 32–3). Entextualization is what performers engage in when they give an utterance the ability to endure. Entextualization differs from textualization: the latter refers to the recording of the verbal component of an oral text in written form (see Chapter 3). Although, as Barber observes (2005: 267), some scholars conflate the terms (e.g. A.-L. Siikala 2000b; McCall 2011: 23), the production of an oral text merits its own label.3 From among the numerous and varied strategies of entextualization (cf. Bauman and Briggs 1990: 74; Barber 2005: 268), I highlight a select few. In Bauman’s succinct formulation, entextualization requires fashioning an utterance that is “bounded off to a degree from its discursive surround (its cotext), internally cohesive (tied together by various formal devices), and coherent (semantically intelligible)” (2004: 4). In this case, to put boundaries around an utterance means to demarcate its beginning and ending. The famous keys to performance—special codes; figurative language; parallelism; special paralinguistic features; special formulas; appeal to tradition; and disclaimer of performance (Bauman 1977: 16)—are perhaps the most obvious ways to signal a beginning because they by definition herald the beginning of a performance. Falling silent is an obvious way to signal the end (cf. Bauman 2004: 148), but performers can do so with any number of verbal cues: Packy Jim McGrath, a northern Irish storyteller, signs off with “Aye” (Cashman 2016: 170, 177); we have all signed off with “happily ever after” (cf. Zipes 2017: 8–9). (p.19) For heuristic purposes, I take cohesion to mean that the utterance holds together and has a discrete identity (cf. Scheub 2002: 95) and I take coherence to mean that the utterance is understandable. This distinction between cohesion and coherence is useful even if cohesion, that which holds an utterance together and gives it a distinct identity, helps provide coherence—in other words, helps make an utterance understandable—and even if formal devices, the mechanisms of cohesion, help provide coherence (cf. Bauman 1986: 68).

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Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics Investigating cohesion “from a formal perspective,” as Bauman and Charles Briggs note, “takes us into familiar territory”: they point, for instance, to parallelism as one frequently used device (1990: 74; cf. Wilce 2009a: 34; Tarkka 2017). As an example of how formal devices enable cohesion and so entextualization, consider a portion of a tale told by Howard Bush whom Bauman recorded in Nova Scotia (Bauman 2004: 121, suspension points in original): He went hóme, he went to béd, and he had nó rést the whóle níght. He coúldn’t gét asléep, he sáid. He was pláying cárds with the dévil all níght. He had nó rést at áll, he sáid. He was…like it séemed he wás in a bláze of fíre. “That séttled the cárd playing thére,” he sáid. It séttled hím and it séttled it thére.

Bauman comments, The passage is marked, first of all, by parallel syntactic constructions in the first six lines and the last two lines of the above excerpt, making for two parallel sets. This is not the hesitant, repetitive, insecure parallelism of the earlier examples; beginning with “He went home,” Bush’s voice becomes louder, more forceful, and higher in pitch, and in the seventh line the quoted speech of the uncle’s statement takes on a shift in voice, reenacting his emphatic delivery. Moreover, the lines display perceptible patterns of rhythmic stress, with a single beat in the first two lines and four in each of the remaining lines (in the sixth line, the four beats occur after the false start):…This is a breakthrough into performance, signaled, or keyed, by this confidently rendered, mutually reinforcing set of formal devices: syntactic, prosodic, and paralinguistic. Bush breaks through into performance and moves to entextualize: “full performance seems to be associated with the most marked entextualization” (Bauman and Briggs 1990: 74). In Bush’s telling, formal devices give shape to the utterance and endow it with textuality. Although he does not speak of entextualization, David Rubin’s work on how “patterns of sound” aid the recall of oral traditional material offers a useful analogue here (1995: 70). He attends to rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and rhythm (72–88), stressing the last one above the others (177), but arguing that these factors best enable recall when they work in tandem: he notes the need for “multiple constraints” (176). Viewing them through the lens of entextualization theory, one would say that the (p.20) formal features Rubin analyzes provide cohesion to an utterance. Rubin’s book remains popular (cf. Eve 2014: 100–2; Page 6 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics Fabb 2015: 186), and Saussy’s application of his findings enhances an appreciation of the formal devices that contribute to cohesion. Saussy defends the claim that “oral tradition is an inscription on human minds” (2016: 159, cf. 59). He asks, “How have humans performed acts of inscription on the minds of their fellows?” (157). By way of illustration, he follows Rubin in reviewing the formal components of a children’s ditty—“rhythmic pattern…alliteration… rhyme” (157–8)—as well as the physical movements that accompany the utterance “to reinforce the patterning of the words” (158). “A highly organized whole” results (158). Saussy concludes, “The more densely the text is packed with pattern, the more securely it takes up residence in the prepared mind” (158). He restates this point in a slightly more expansive form a moment later (160): Meaningful text with a maximal organization of linguistic and thematic features keyed to the habits of the audience (patterning of phonemes, syllabic regularities, melody, rhymes, stanzas, formulae, topoi, analogies, antitheses, coherence of action, and the like) should then have a much higher rate of retention,… Saussy enumerates the formal features that impart cohesion to an utterance. His discussion intersects with Jan-Dirk Müller’s consideration in an article on medieval German literature of how verse structure, rhyme, assonance, and the use of formulas make “oral texts more permanent” (2012: 298–301, quotation from 300; cf. Assmann 2002: 241; Fabb 2015: 185–7). Harold Scheub’s analysis of oral performers in South Africa also abounds in observations of this sort: for example, “a certain sound will dominate in a line, then give way to another that will dominate in a succeeding line, with a suggestion of this imbedded in the preceding line. This also provides internal linkages” (2002: 13, cf. 62).4 At the same time, Scheub adds another factor to the list of mechanisms for generating cohesion: “thematic parallelism is a major device, unifying the poem” (75, cf. 77). Oral performers entextualize by making their utterance coherent as well. At bottom, coherence means clarity, as Bauman’s gloss of “intelligible” illustrates. An article on oral textuality by Peter Seitel is useful for thinking about one specific way a performer achieves clarity. Seitel begins by alluding to reader response criticism’s argument that a printed literary text is “dependent on a reader’s interpretion to achieve coherent meaning” (2012: 75; see e.g. Iser 1974; Eco 1979). With that model in mind, Seitel turns to oral texts and discusses “coherence that is created through understandings shared by performer and audience. These shared understandings consist of, among other things, indexical grounding, or references to the local cultural universe, and intertextuality, or references to Page 7 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics related texts in that universe” (2012: 83). He illustrates these two (p.21) principles in an analysis of a story, “Crested Crane and Dove,” told among the Haya in northwestern Tanzania. A Haya audience member would know that women were not supposed to eat the edible grasshoppers that descended on Hayaland during the rainy season (78–80). When Crested Crane, one of the tale’s two co-wives, eats grasshoppers, she violates that prohibition. This knowledge is “crucial” to making sense of the story (80). A Haya audience member would also evaluate Crested Crane intertextually: they would recognize in her depiction “a familiar character in the canon of Haya stories—the gluttonous bride” (81) and as a result believe that her “behavior makes sense because it has a familiar feel to it.” Because coherence plays an important part in entextualization, Seitel’s discussion of coherence can, with one minor alteration, aid an understanding of entextualization. For Seitel, the audience establishes a text’s coherence by filling in gaps. They provide the “references to the local cultural universe” and intertextual “references to related texts.” He argues that “non-autonomy” marks oral texts: they depend on their audience. I shift to the perspective of the performers. Performers make an utterance coherent by only offering gaps that they assume their audience can fill in (cf. Shuman 1986: 52, 72–3, 153, 170–2) or will not be bothered by if they remain (cf. Scheub 2002: 18; Scodel 2002: 64). Otherwise they flesh out their utterance as needed (cf. Azuonye 1994: 156–8; subsection 3.4.1 (pp. 133–4)). Writers work in the same way (cf. Shuman 1986: 115, 120). For instance, Persian dāstāns—“fictional prose narratives with branching plots, which relate the heroic-romantic adventures of their eponymous heroes”—“appear perfectly coherent to the insider steeped in tradition” (Rubanovich 2012: 653, 675). For these insiders are capable of “filling up lacunae and deciphering allusions” on account of their knowledge of the “traditional reservoir of epic themes” and “acquaintance with the epic tradition” (672–3, emphasis in original). In her own discussions of entextualization, Barber begins by finding evidence for the desire to fix words in the practice of attaching oral texts to objects (2007: 75–6): Oral texts in Africa are often actually attached to or secreted in material objects. The Luba lukasa board, Zulu bead messages, Dahomeyan récades or message-staffs, Asante adinkra symbols, gold weights and umbrella finials, and a host of other material repositories and memory-prompts operate in different ways to transcend time, to fix or trap text in a material form. More than just additional witnesses to the practice of linking oral texts to objects (e.g. Cruikshank 1999: 109), such efforts are “the most vivid indication

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Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics of the desire to consolidate fleeting speech” (Barber 2005: 268), to make an enduring oral text. From here, Barber draws attention to two other steps performers take when entextualizing beyond the sort Bauman and Briggs study: quotation and exegesis. She focuses on how speakers frame and interact with their utterances so as to highlight how they have endured through time and/or to position them as capable of doing so in the future. Speakers can cast a verbal act as a quotation. For instance, they may introduce a statement with “As the elders say” or “Listen/how this hero must be lamented,” (Barber 2007: 77). One can introduce a proverb in this fashion, but “new texts are not excluded” (p.22) (1999: 19; cf. 2007: 77–8). Barber illuminates the impact of this framing. One has to reckon simultaneously with a spatial dimension and a temporal dimension. To approach it in spatial terms: “presenting text as a quotation means insisting that it has an independent identity outside the context of utterance…Quotation implies that what is quoted was already there before the present speaker used it” (1999: 19, my emphasis). Quotation portrays the utterance as existing in some space other than that occupied by the present speaker but also as portable, as able to be introduced into any number of settings. To approach it in temporal terms: quotation “foreground[s] the perception that these words pre-existed their present moment of utterance and could also continue to exist after it” (Barber 2005: 268). Quotation affirms the utterance’s existence in the past and presages its survival into the future. By assigning these spatial and temporal attributes to the utterance, the speaker depicts it as capable of outlasting the moment. I add that presenting the utterance as capable of enduring is one way to make it capable of enduring: claiming something is so is one way to make it so. Barber also places in the category of quotation moments in which performers use preexisting material from different genres in their texts (cf. Tarkka 2016: 184). She thus builds on scholarship on one type of generic dialogue: how a text belonging to one genre can include material belonging to another genre or other genres (Tarkka 2013: 93–100). Barber writes (2007: 78–9, emphasis in original): Quotation also takes place between genres, when one genre incorporates chunks of other genres and subsumes them to its own project—but in such a way that they retain recognisable features. In this way the performer highlights them as a resource that already existed and was available for use when he/she undertook the performance. Yoruba praise poetry—oríkì— incorporates divination verses, riddles and proverbs, in each case displaying them as recognisable genres while using them to redound to the honour of the person being praised. Strongly marked, immediately recognisable genre characteristics are retained.…The open weave of oríkì allows great chunks of other genres to be incorporated with their genre Page 9 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics markers intact.…These strategies underline and consolidate the “textness” of the materials incorporated. By being recontextualised within another genre, their characteristic features are thrown into relief and their pre-existence as text is affirmed. The incorporated utterance keeps the generic features it had prior to its incorporation, and the generic shift from the surrounding co-text highlights those features. This retention brings out the preexistence of the incorporated material. In such cases, the speaker points up the utterance’s endurance and anticipates its continued existence. Barber delves into the impact of exegesis as well. Exegesis can take place within the space of a given utterance, as happens in Asante (Ghana) praise poetry (2007: 97): For example, Okoro-man-so-fone (“The one who goes to a town and causes everyone to [become] emaciate[d]”) is elaborated with A wo ne no twe manso wofon (“If you have a legal battle with him, you [become] emaciate[d]”). The second line explains the context—litigation—in which the subject’s devastating impact on other people is felt; without this elaboration, the praise epithet would be completely baffling. (p.23) Exegesis can also take the form of explaining a previous statement and doing so in a different genre. For instance (80): The most common form of obscurity, however, and the hallmark of African praise poetry, is the laconic formulation that can only be interpreted in the light of a narrative or a highly specific circumstance that is not implicit in the words themselves, but has to be supplied by an interpreter drawing on a separate parallel tradition.…The performer has to learn two repertoires, two genres, not one. By subjecting a brief utterance or stretch of discourse to scrutiny—by making it “the focus of sustained attention and discussion” (77)—the exegete “reinforces its consolidation as text” (Barber 2005: 272).5 Like quotation, exegesis suggests that the utterance persists on its own out in the world as an object for contemplation and analysis (cf. Barber 2007: 100), and I add that, as is the case with quotation, the implication of that characterization—that the utterance is capable of enduring—has an effect: it helps make the utterance capable of enduring. Quotation and exegesis, then, contribute to the project of entextualization, of making an oral text, an utterance capable of outlasting the moment. Finally, one can go beyond words proper. After linking his analysis of lament to Bauman and Briggs’s 1990 discussion of entextualization, James Wilce turns to “non-discursive forms of textuality” (2009a: 35, emphasis in original) evident in Page 10 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics lament: melody and embodied features (“uses of the voice, throat, face, limbs, etc.” (36)). Both items are themselves extractable and repeatable: “melodies are also textual insofar as they too are a coherent and repeatable set of musical signs” (35, emphasis in original); “embodied features…are conventionalized and salient enough to ‘quote’” (40). At the same time, both aid the entextualization, and so the portability, of a lament: “laments are rendered singable across contexts by virtue of their memorable and repeatable melodic structures.… Melody as well as lyrics can make laments memorable” (35–6); “a series of gestures” can bolster “the coherence of a performance” (40). Even if not explicitly deploying the paradigm of entextualization, the work of two other scholars on the body in performance affirms the connection between bodily movement and entextualization because, like Wilce’s study, they return us to boundaries, coherence, and cohesion. Anna-Leena Siikala observes of singers of Kalevala-meter poetry that “the use of body language keyed the performance” (2000a: 275).6 She quotes Elias Lönnrot’s (subsection 3.3.1 (p. 115)) description of singers of epic (270): two singers…will sit either facing each other or beside each other, clasp each other’s hands either with one or both hands and commence their song. For the duration of the song, the (p.24) body rocks back and forth, so that it appears that the two of them are taking turns pulling each other closer. From the perspective of entextualization theory, the singer’s bodily position and movement “for the duration of the song” sets a boundary around the performance that contributes to the boundedness of the utterance. Simultaneously, this traditional bodily activity signals in which sort of poetic activity the singer will engage and is engaging. By evoking the genre of epic, the bodily activity can be said to “unleash a set of expectations regarding narrative form and content” and thereby to help make the utterance understandable, that is, coherent (Briggs and Bauman 1992: 147; cf. Bauman 2004: 4). When one knows what sorts of things a speaker will say and why he says what he says, one processes the utterance with greater ease (cf. Fabb 2017: 366). The phenomenon that contributes to the bounded nature of the performer’s utterance contributes to its coherence as well. Scheub’s discussions of the embodied nature of storytelling in his work on South African, especially Xhosa, storytellers reveal how bodily movement enhances an utterance’s coherence and cohesion. Scheub investigates two kinds of gestures but hastens to add that “many movements fit into both categories” (1977: 357, cf. 2002: 66). The first category, “the mimed nonverbal gesture and body movement” (1977: 348), “include[s] movements which reflect somewhat directly…the verbally summoned images of a performance” (354). (Scheub labels these “complementary” gestures (2002: 66, 145).) The second category Page 11 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics comprises “the purely abstracted” (1977: 348), “the pure gestures and movement, those with no obvious ties on the level of meaning and image to the spoken word” (355). (Scheub labels these “supplementary” gestures (2002: 66, 145).) Irrespective of category, gestures contribute to the “breaking down of the narrative into its constituent parts” (1977: 348; cf. 349, 2002: 224). By clearly demarcating the parts of the tale, the teller helps the audience to see how the parts fit together and to understand the tale (cf. 349–50). One should expect performers of verbal art to turn gestures to their advantage in this way. For they put to work a practice found in everyday conversation. In a discussion of four gestures used in Southern Italian conversation, Adam Kendon notes of two of them that they help divide a stretch of discourse into units (1995: 264): They appear to serve as if they are labels for segments or units within a discourse, thereby indicating the part these units play within the discourse structure. Thus the first gesture discussed here serves to distinguish topic from comment in a discourse. The second specifies that a given piece of discourse has a particular kind of privileged status in respect to other pieces. Both kinds of gestures discussed by Scheub hold the narrative together and make it cohesive: they do the “work of ordering” (1977: 349) and so unifying. For their part, abstract gestures “provide the patterning of the narrative” (355): “the arms and hands shap[e] the narrative without direct reference to the spoken word” (356; cf. 2002: 94, 208). Scheub’s more detailed excurses also reveal how gestures help with cohesion (1977: 361, cf. 2002: 208–9): (p.25) The artist’s hands form a miming gesture; then, the hands still miming, the gesture-word union ends, but the hands remain in the gesturing position— and continue to gesticulate. Now they move about as abstract gestures, with no mimed narrative content (no content that is obvious, anyway). This may continue for a time; then the hands, still moving abstractly, revert to the complementary, to the direct miming that originated this complex interplay of gestures and body movements. The miming may have lost its verbal association for a time, as abstract gestures take over during the introduction of new verbal material. But the gestures do not at this stage complement the new material: they remain instead a vestige of the earlier complementary gesturing, still sculpturing the earlier pattern, abstracted to pure movement. These abstracted patterns are vital, because they retain echoes nonverbally of the verbally expressed materials now ended. Thus, one part of the narrative is solidly linked to the other through nonverbal gesture…

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Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics I unpack this description as follows. Gesturing keeps one in mind of what the teller said as the telling progresses. Scheub observes that the principle “what has come before is not forgotten” (1977: 361) applies to gestures: “when mimed gesture becomes abstracted (or vice versa), the earlier mimed gesture from which abstraction developed remains in the imaginations of the members of the audiences” (361). That the mimed gesture stays in the mind’s eye of an audience member should also help the verbal material linked with the mimed gesture stay in the audience member’s mind. Add, now, the possibility of continuity between the mimed and abstract gestures. Scheub constructs the following scenario (362, cf. 2002: 67): An artist picks up a stick as a complementary gesture (the villain is being beaten, for example). Then she keeps the stick when the verbal (mimed) image has passed, and her activities with the stick now evolve into an abstract gesture. When the weapon returns in the narrative, there may be a reversal, from the abstracted to a complementary use of the stick. But it is likely that the abstracted movement will be a movement related to beating, even though it does not now directly relate to the beating, the verbal images having dissolved. That the mimed movement and the abstract movement both relate to beating may keep the verbalization of the villain’s beating accessible to the audience. Again, Kendon’s examinations of gesture in everyday talk provide a point of comparison: “Gesture can be useful as a way of exhibiting overarching units of meaning, as a way of keeping visible an aspect of meaning throughout the course of a spoken utterance” (2000: 61).7 (p.26) I take stock of the material presented in this section. On the one hand, one can speak of an oral text when encountering a repeated stretch of discourse. To limit the phrase to this application would be to follow Albert Lord’s discussion of textuality. Lord turns to the topic in an examination of “Serbo Croatian women’s songs” from the nineteenth century found in Vuk Karadžić’s collections and in Živomir Mladenović and Vladan Nedić’s supplement to that collection (1995: 33–58). For Lord, only a stretch of verse repeated in different performances with more or less the same words possesses textuality. He writes of one song: “the stable part of the song is the beginning. A sense of textuality belongs to that part but not the rest of the song” (35). He writes of another, “There can be no doubt about a sense of textuality in these sections of the five variants” (39); “if the questions and answers display textuality, that cannot be said for the beginnings of the songs” (41); “this song has in the riddle section, as we saw, a more or less stable core, which exhibits a clear sense of textuality” (44); and, in sum, “We can speak here of the textuality of certain parts of the song” (44). Lord also finds songs “whose textuality embraces the whole song” (56). If a text requires textuality and textuality only emerges where one finds repetition or something close to repetition, only a repeated utterance Page 13 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics qualifies as an oral text. One can compare Jan Assmann’s linking “the quality of textuality to the act of retrieval” (2006: 105). For Assmann, text “is a retrieved communication, the recourse to a linguistic utterance through the hiatus of a temporal or a spatial distance” (106). What is usually retrieved is not a set of words but “the stored deep meaning that is reproduced and filled out through improvisation,” the “deep structure” (108). From this vantage point too, one can speak of an oral text when dealing with efforts to reproduce a previous utterance. On the other hand, the work of linguistic anthropologists suggests that the speaker’s ambition matters as well. One can also refer to an oral text when encountering a stretch of discourse that, whether it ends up repeated or not, is made to be the object of replication—to be “potentially decontextualizable” (Wilce 2009a: 34, my emphasis)—or the object of attention, reflection, or commentary (cf. Barber 2007: 33). The Homerist and comparatist Georg Danek gets it right in stating, “‘Authors’ generate ‘texts’, even if these texts change with every performance” (2016: 145). Either way, several strategies, both discursive and non-discursive, employed both before, during, and after the relevant stretch of discourse, entextualize it: they endow it with textuality. Research into entextualization provides concrete ways to think about how oral discourse is, to borrow Saussy’s words from his article on the Odyssey cited in this chapter’s introduction, “made to be remembered and repeated” (1996: 322). This research enables one to build on the investigations of earlier generations of (p.27) scholars, such as Eric Havelock and Walter Ong, into the features of oral narrative “that facilitate recall in performance,” such as “heroic larger-than-life characters that assist recollection; an episodic rather than a climactic plot that is easier to remember in performance; an additive and copious style that facilitates recitation; and the use of formulaic images through which story segments can easily be retrieved in performance” (Hofmeyr 1994: 106). In section 1.2, I use the model of entextualization to illuminate the representation of oral texts and textuality in the Homeric epics. I spend the bulk of my time investigating the existence and creation of oral texts in the world of the Homeric characters. I then bring the narrator text into the discussion before drawing some inferences about our poets’ desire to entextualize. I am encouraged in this endeavor by the observation that the scholars who have promulgated and applied the concept of entextualization work with a variety of genres. Many of Bauman’s essays look at storytellers. In his book on the oral literature, ranging from proverbs to praise poems to epic ballads, of the Haya in northwestern Tanzania, Seitel deploys the concept of entextualization, defining it as “the generic finalization of style” (1999: 18; cf. Tarkka 2017: 267). (By finalization, Seitel means “the sense of completion achieved in an artistic Page 14 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics work” (1999: 17), and by style, he means “concrete verbal patternings” (29).) Barber writes a lot on praise poetry but also uses the model of entextualization to think about African epic (2007: 147, 214). As we just saw, Wilce studies lament. Lotte Tarkka explores the presence of entextualized proverbs in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Kalevala-meter poetry, including some epic, from the Viena Karelian parish of Vuokkiniemi near the Finnish-Russian border (2016). In a book devoted to the Siri epic of the Tulu people of Karnataka (South India), Honko speaks like those who utilize the model of entextualization, even though he criticizes one of Bauman and Briggs’s discussions of entextualization (1990) for “burning the bridges to the very arena where the folkloric act is taking place and finding acclaim” (1998: 149–51, quotation from 150). Honko, for instance, observes, “Without boundaries there is no text, and without coherence there is no textuality” (141); points to “the source of textuality: the coherence which gives interpretability to the text” (143; cf. 146); and asks after “the textuality of the segments [in Gopala Naika’s performance of the Siri epic].…Are they cohesive entities within the epic…?” (318). He considers oral epics in general to be “clearly bounded even if flexibly used textual products…” (143). The performance paradigm has proven productive for scholars working with a host of genres and in a host of cultures, and Homerists have profited from it as well. So too has the model of entextualization, a refinement of our understanding of performance (Barber 2005: 268, 2007: 79, 86), proven useful for scholars investigating a range of genres, including epic, in a range of cultures, and the Homerist should benefit from it as well. That some colleagues in classical studies have begun to see the value of this concept further supports this application (cf. Thomas 2012: 230; Karanika 2014: 18–19, 179), and that one finds talk of “the temporally unique, impermanent performance” in a study devoted to the Boeotian poet Pindar suggests the work yet to be done (T. Phillips 2016: 13).

(p.28) 1.2. Application to the Homeric Epics In subsection 1.2.1, I begin applying to the Homeric epics the findings of the linguistic anthropological research presented in the previous section. I demonstrate that in the world constructed in the Homeric poems something preexists a performance and can be passed along to others who can themselves pass it along to others. I then show that utterances in that world can acquire an object-like status. That preparatory survey allows me, in subsections 1.2.2 and 1.2.3, to start querying the production of oral texts by the Homeric epics’ characters and the mechanisms of entextualization foregrounded therein. Subsection 1.2.4 broadens the scope of the inquiry, looking to the narrator text as well as the character text—and to the poet himself.

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Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics 1.2.1. The Preexistence of Tales and Songs and the Object-Like Status of Utterances in the Homeric Epics

In the Homeric poems, non-bardic tellers perform tales and bards and nonprofessional singers perform songs of varying lengths and genres (cf. Scodel 2002: 74, 77). Homeric characters think of these tales and songs as independently preexisting entities that performers and audience members know or know of and that can be re-presented as needed: tales and songs exist even when no one is telling or singing them. Whereas scholars have brought out the extent to which the Iliad poet and the Odyssey poet allude to other stories, be they real or imagined (Sammons 2010: 33–4, 68, 209; M. L. West 2011a: 28; Tsagalis 2014a: 240–4; Currie 2016: 140–3), and whereas the characters relay many stories about the past, often for paradigmatic purposes, I assemble here some passages that do not just refer to other stories but suggest a vision of the preexistence of tales and songs on specific subjects. What follows overlaps with Andrew Ford’s discussion of Homer and Hesiod’s sense that “behind the telling of each story exists one divinely superintended tale, one connected whole that never alters, though parts of it may be performed in this or that time and place” (1992: 41). It also overlaps with the idea that for Pindar and Bacchylides “a ὕμνος [song] is conceived of as something initially independent of and prior to the poet’s own creation” (Foster, forthcoming, building on Maslov 2015: 303–5). Achilles speaks of a tale that Thetis often (pollaki) told about how she saved Zeus from the gods’ attempt to bind him, and he urges her to tell it again to Zeus (Il. 1.396–407). Aeneas refers to any number of well-known stories—“famed words” (proklut’…epea)—about Achilles’s ancestors and his own as well (Il. 20.203–4). The phrase may even refer to “poetic words” (Nagy 1999: 271; cf. Kozak 2017: 189). Penelope claims that Phemius has a repertoire of enchanting songs from which he can pick and choose (cf. González 2013: 193, 269). She then asks him to stop singing that (tautēs) particular song that always (aiei) makes her upset (Od. 1.337–42). In his rejoinder, Telemachus cites that song by name: “the evil fate of the Danaans” (Od. 1.350; cf. Od. 1.326–7, 8.75 with S. Richardson 1990: 84 and Ford 1992: 20–1, 107). As Jukka (p.29) Siikala observes, “The names of narratives essentialise them as something, which can be lifted up from one context and replicated in another” (2003: 32). The disguised Athena expects Telemachus to have heard (aieis) the story about Orestes’s killing of Aegisthus (Od. 1.298–300), as does Nestor (akouete, Od. 3.193). When Nestor urges Telemachus to emulate Orestes, Telemachus states, “The Achaeans / will carry his glory far and wide and a song for those to come” (καὶ οἱ Ἀχαιοὶ / οἴσουσι κλέος εὐρὺ καὶ ἐσσομένοισιν ἀοιδήν, Od. 3.203–4).8 Tellers and singers alike know and audiences are able to request the tale or song about Orestes (cf. Ford 1992: 107; Spelman 2018: 167). Odysseus asks Demodocus to sing “the song (kosmon) of the wooden horse” (Od. 8.492, tr. González 2013: 198), and, in introducing himself to Polyphemus, Odysseus assumes the preexistence of a Page 16 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics story about Agamemnon’s sack of Troy and destruction of a great army (Od. 9.263–6: see kleos “renown” at 264). Odysseus even alludes to the preexistence of stories about his own stratagems and tricks (doloisin) when he identifies himself to the Phaeacians: “I am Odysseus the son of Laertes, known [or, an object of concern] to men / for all my stratagems (doloisin), and my fame goes up to heaven” (εἴμ’ Ὀδυσεὺς Λαερτιάδης, ὃς πᾶσι δόλοισιν / ἀνθρώποισι μέλω, καί μευ κλέος οὐρανὸν ἵκει, Od. 9.19–20). Calypso evokes the story of the Argonauts’ expedition when she speaks of the Argo as pasi melousa (Od. 12.70), which means something like “sung by all poets” or “taken up by everyone in stories” (see Dräger 1993: 14–18). Agamemnon foresees a famous song about Penelope’s virtue (aretēs) and an equally well-known song about Clytemnestra’s “evil deeds,” above all, his own murder (Od. 24.196–201). Characters point to the existence of familiar stories with the phrase “they say” (phasi) (cf. O’Maley forthcoming: section 1.2). Agamemnon positions his review of Tydeus’s victories over the Cadmeians in games and battle as a recollection of stories focused on Tydeus: “men say (phasi) that he was better than the others” (Il. 4.375; cf. Od. 4.201). Tlepolemus declares to Sarpedon, “They lie when they say (phasi) you are the offspring of Zeus…Of another sort (alloion), men say (phasi), mighty Heracles was, my father” (Il. 5.635–6, 638–9, following the editors (e.g. M. L. West 1998a) who read alloion not all’ hoion.). He signals the preexistence of an account relating Sarpedon’s birth and of stories about Heracles’s feats. Aeneas suggests the preexistence of a narrative about the birth of Achilles to Peleus and Thetis: “Men say (phasi) that you are the son of blameless Peleus / and that your mother is Thetis of the beautiful locks, a daughter of the sea” (Il. 20.206–7). Telemachus alludes to stories about Odysseus’s exceptional cunning (mētis): “for they say (phas’) your cunning (mētin) is unparalleled among men” (Od. 23.124–5). Beyond these explicit references to preexisting tales and songs, the characters’ presentations of “abbreviated narratives” also suggest the preexistence of stories: “The narrator leaves gaps and shortens stories so much that they are not fully comprehensible without prior knowledge. Such abbreviation implies that the story already exists and that the listener has heard it before” (Scodel 2002: 125). For instance, (p.30) the obscurities in Glaucus’s account of his ancestry (Il. 6.144–211) stem in part from the likelihood that his addressee, Diomedes, “knows the story of his grandfather’s guestfriend and his children” (131). S. Douglas Olson traces the “network of gossip, rumor and reputation” so prominent in the society envisioned by the Odyssey (1995: 1–23). Building on his discussion of the transmission of stories and information, I note that, as entities that ostensibly preexist independently, songs and tales can be passed around and down. The poet references non-heroic, occasional songs (Danielewicz 1990; N. Richardson 2011; cf. Karanika 2014: 22–3, 52–67, 117–32). Twenty or so Achaeans sing a paean (aeidontes paiēona) to propitiate Apollo (Il. 1.472–4). Page 17 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics Weddings take place in one of the cities depicted on Achilles’s shield, and “loud rose the bridal song (humenaios)” (Il. 18.493; cf. Hesiodic Shield of Heracles 274). Odysseus’s household puts on a fake wedding celebration, complete with singing (molpē) and dancing (Od. 23.133–6, 143–52 (with Grandolini 1996: 165; N. Richardson 2011: 15–16)). Wherever these songs fall on a spectrum ranging from “simply a matter of refrains or cries (such as ὑμὴν ὦ ὑμέναιε, ἰὴ παιῆον, etc.)” to “a more elaborate form of choral song” (N. Richardson 2011: 27), individuals will have learned these traditional standards from someone else. Just so, someone taught the Linus song to the boy (pais) singing it on Achilles’s shield (λίνον δ’ ὑπὸ καλὸν ἄειδε), and the harvesters, if they sing the song’s refrain (N. Richardson 2011: 28), learned it from others (Il. 18.569–72).9 Someone taught the sons of Autolycus the “incantation” or charm (epaoidēi) that they sing while tending to the wounded Odysseus (Od. 19.457). Achilles tells the Achaeans to sing a paean, “a processional song” (N. Richardson 2011: 25), to celebrate his slaying of Hector: “But come now, singing our song of victory (aeidontes paiēona), sons of the Achaeans, / let us return to the hollow ships and carry back this one” (Il. 22.391–2). Achilles may assume that the soldiers know what to sing—a scenario that again attests to a song’s transmission, however informal, through time and space—but the more tantalizing possibility is that he teaches them the song in the next two verses: “We won great glory; we slayed brilliant Hector, / to whom the Trojans prayed throughout their city as to a god” (22.393–4) (cf. N. Richardson 2011: 26). If so, these verses offer a precious example of the creation and diffusion of an occasional song. Odysseus passes on to (p.31) the Phaeacians a song (aoidēn) performed by the Sirens (Od. 12.183– 92), even if it is not the song they promise to sing, the one that traps their audience (Karanika 2014: 50; Schur 2014). Achilles sings “the glorious deeds of men” (klea andrōn, Il. 9.189), songs that he presumably picked up from listening to a bard, such as Demodocus, who sings klea andrōn (Od. 8.73). Patroclus perhaps waits to continue the singing once Achilles leaves off (Il. 9.190–1) (Nagy 2003: 43–4; González 2013: 371–7; differently, Hunter 2018: 220–1): he has learned what to sing too. To be sure, “not only do poets not learn from other poets, they do not learn from anyone except the gods” (Scodel 2002: 78; cf. Ford 1992: 90–2, 95). The epics mystify the process by which professional singers of heroic song master their craft. Yet when Phemius claims that he is autodidaktos (“self-taught”) (Od. 22.347), he contrasts himself with singers who learn from others (Ready and Tsagalis 2018b: 9). Two additional passages offer a peek behind the curtain as well, the second even more so than the first: Telemachus says that a song “circulates” (amphipelētai, Od. 1.352) and opines that men will carry the song of Orestes far and wide (oisousi…aoidēn, Od. 3.204). Both statements indicate a process of transmission from singer to singer.

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Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics As for tale telling, Odysseus complements Demodocus for singing “the Achaeans’ fate, / as many things as they did and experienced and as many things as the Achaeans suffered, / as if either you were there yourself or heard it from one who was” (Od. 8.489–91). With that final addition, he acknowledges that nonbardic tellers transmit stories to other tellers. Phoenix speaks of how “we learn the stories about men of old” (τῶν πρόσθεν ἐπευθόμεθα κλέα ἀνδρῶν, Il. 9.524) (cf. Scodel 1998: 174, 2002: 74–5). Telemachus speculates that Nestor or Menelaus may have heard an account (muthon akousas) from another traveler (Od. 3.94–5 = 4.324–5). In reporting to Telemachus on the returns of the Achaeans from Troy, Nestor points to a process of transmission: “As many things as I, sitting in my palace, / learn by inquiry (peuthomai), this you will know (daēseai)” (Od. 3.186–7) (cf. Ford 1992: 105–6; Olson 1995: 13). Mortals handle and hand over songs and tales. As represented in archaic Greek hexameter poetry, the gods provide a telling contrast. They simply know songs and never learn them. The Muses instruct the singer; one never hears of their being instructed. Similarly, having interacted, as far as one can tell, with neither man nor god, the baby Hermes can sing about Zeus and his mother Maia and about his mother’s fine home (Homeric Hymn to Hermes 54–61). The second part of my preparation for a study of the production of oral texts in the Homeric epics starts from anthropologists’ discussions of the alignment of utterance and object. In an essay on Gbaya taletellers in Cameroon, Philip Noss draws attention to a formulaic introduction, “Here it comes with a crash!,” and conclusion, “My tale is set right under the kolo tree gbat!” (1970: 42). The introductory phrase “Here it comes with a crash!” is expressed by two ideophones, rrrrr and kpingim. The first, or its full form hirrr, describes moving a heavy weight. The latter, kpingim, describes the thud of something heavy crashing to the ground. The tale is weighty, it is a burden, it is meaningful, and therefore at the end of the performance, the artist sets his burden under a kolo tree, … (p.32) Sophie McCall traces how “many First Nations [in the Americas] view their songs as cultural property that can be exchanged and traded as a form of wealth” (2011: 26). The idea common to these reports—an utterance can acquire an object-like status—crops up repeatedly in the Homeric poems. One can build on Nancy Worman’s comments on the Homeric epics’ interest in a “locution’s look, taste, or texture” (2002: 44–5, quotation from 44). The utterances of performers are objectified. The noun aoidē “is an action noun and therefore describes poetry not as something completed and stable, but as something in progress,…It consequently refers to something that is closer to activity and performance than to a text or an aesthetic object” (Tsagalis 2004: 4; Page 19 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics cf. Ford 1992: 15; Bakker 2013: 2; González 2013: 190). Yet one cannot help but translate the noun as “song,” not “singing” (Nagy 1999: 37–8; Ford 1992: 108; Tsagalis 2004: 3; Currie 2016: 19). This slippage occurs in part because the language used with the noun aoidē aligns it with objects. Penelope asks Phemius to cease from “this sad song” (aoidēs / lugrēs) (Od. 1.340–1). The adjective (lugros) sums up the list “wars and well-polished javelins and arrows” (Od. 14.225–6) and describes the clothes (heimata) with which Odysseus disguises himself as a beggar (e.g. Od. 16.457). The suitors turn to “dance and delightful song (himeroessan aoidēn)” (Od. 1.421 = 18.304): Celeus’s daughters “held up the folds of their lovely dresses (heanōn…himeroentōn)” (Homeric Hymn to Demeter 176).10 Agamemnon predicts, “The immortals will make a graceful song for prudent Penelope for earthly beings” (τεύξουσι δ’ ἐπιχθονίοισιν ἀοιδὴν / ἀθάνατοι χαρίεσσαν ἐχέφρονι Πηνελοπείῃ, Od. 24.197–8). The verb (teukhō) places the song in the realm of craft (Ford 1992: 38; Grandolini 1996: 167 at 197): Hephaestus makes (teuxe) armor for Achilles (e.g. Il. 18.609–13); Arete and her maids make (teuxe) clothes (Od. 7.235). The adjective (kharies) aligns the song with clothes (Il. 5.905, 6.90, 22.511; Od. 5.231, 10.544), temples (Il. 1.39), and gifts (dōra) (Il. 8.204, 9.599), as well as with the works of a smith (Od. 6.234 = 23.161) and a weaver (Od. 10.223). Demodocus “made his song to appear” (phaine d’ aiodēn, Od. 8.499). The verb (phainō) also comes up in the context of the revelation of actual things that one can see (cf. Nagy 2009: 318; Jensen 2011: 255): Odysseus’s strong limbs (Od. 18.67, 74), Penelope’s beauty (Od. 18.160), lightning (Il. 2.353, 9.236), the snake and birds omen at Aulis (Il. 2.308, 318, 324), and the eagle and goose omen in Sparta (Od. 15.168) (cf. González 2013: 224 n. 19). The mourners at Hector’s tomb sing a “sorrowful song” (stonoessan aoidēn, Il. 24.721). The adjective (stonoeis) also describes spears, arrows, and other missiles hurled in battle (Il. 8.159, 15.590, 17.374; Od. 21.12, 24.180); Penelope labels her bed “sorrowful” (eunēn…stonoessa, Od. 17.102 = 19.595). Going beyond aoidē, I cite other relevant passages. Alcinous wants Odysseus to “rejoice in the feast and in listening to the tale (humnon) of the song” (Od. 8.429) (or, more technically, the “‘weaving’” of the song (Nagy 2009: 231)). The Homeric use of humnos depicts “the performance of epic song…as a product manufactured by tying (p.33) or sewing” (González 2013: 397; cf. Nagy 2009: 322–3) or depicts “epic song…as something ‘bound’ or ‘linked’ together, fitting very well…with the metaphorical image of οἴμη” (Duffy and Short 2016: 66).11 Men transport tales and songs (oisousi kleos…aoidēn, Od. 3.204) just as they transport gold from a sacked city (oisei, Il. 2.229), a sacrificial animal (oisete… oisomen, Il. 3.103–4), or a lyre (oisetō, Od. 8.255) (cf. Olson 1995: 12 n. 25). Antenor recollects that Odysseus and Menelaus “wove speeches” (muthous… huphainon, Il. 3.212), and various characters “weave a spoken counsel,” such as Nestor (huphainein…mētin, Il. 7.324) and the suitors (mētin huphainon, Od. 4.678): Helen weaves a robe (huphaine, Il. 3.125) (cf. Scheid and Svenbro 1996: Page 20 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics 112–14; González 2013: 364–5; Karanika 2014: 40). According to Odysseus, one can “lead” a “speech” (muthon…agoito, Il. 14.91): Nestor brought (ēg’) a drinking cup from home (Il. 11.632); Meges wears a corselet his father brought (ēgagen) from Ephyre (Il. 15.531); Athena, disguised as Mentes, claims to be transporting (agō) iron (Od. 1.184). When Alcinous declares that Odysseus’s tale exhibits “a shapeliness” (morphē, Od. 11.367), he assigns it a degree of materiality, or at least “a visible quality” (Bassi 2016: 65, cf. 95). Alcinous also asks Odysseus to “tell me the wondrous deeds (theskela erga)” (Od. 11.374), and a bit later we hear of Heracles’s belt with its depictions of “wondrous deeds” (theskela erga, Od. 11.610): “The compositional ring…establishes an equivalence between Odysseus’s narration and the crafted artifact” (Elmer 2005: 24–5). Eumaeus speculates that the disguised Odysseus may “fashion a tale” (epos paratektēnaio) to get a cloak (Od. 14.131): Tecton “built” (tektēnato) ships for Paris (Il. 5.62) (cf. Worman 2002: 80). Aeneas describes reproaches (oneidea) as a cargo that would overwhelm a ship with one hundred benches (Il. 20.246–7) (cf. Martin 1989: 17). Lastly, epos and epea, both used by characters and narrators alike to label the speech of characters, “have a reference not shared by muthos, to speech as utterance, as thing heard and transmitted, as an item of exchange that is at the same time a physical object, like a weapon” (Martin 1989: 30). Speeches labeled with the more precise phrase pukinon epos, used by characters, are to be understood as “enduring through time, unassailable in the way of well-constructed, solid, or dense-packed objects in the poem that are called pukinon” (36, cf. 18). Andromache Karanika notes that in the Odyssey “female speech acts are voiced in the context of work,” such as textile making, and argues that this “careful emphasis on the female setting prepares the narrative to entextualize the speech act” (2014: 30, 41, cf. 75). I have traced in a more concrete fashion how our Homeric poets—“arguably the first materialist[s] in the West” (Porter 2010: 127) —depict many utterances as object-like, akin to Pindar’s aligning his poetry with objects (Svenbro 1976: 188–92; (p.34) Steiner 1994: 91–9; Scheid and Svenbro 1996: 117–18; Dougherty 2001: 41; Porter 2010: 462–3; T. Phillips 2016: 2). That an utterance can be like an object does not mean that it lasts forever—as Homeric characters are well aware, things decay (Il. 2.135, 23.326–33) or can be broken (Il. 13.507, 14.55–6, 15.469; Od. 12.409) (cf. Ford 1992: 144–5, 152, 171; Garcia 2013: 52–4, 115, 150)—but does suggest its durability: after all, characters give one another gifts as mementos of their interaction in the belief that the objects will last (Il. 23.615–19; Od. 15.123–8, 21.40). I connect the objectification of utterances with the fact that characters envision songs and tales as preexisting entities that can be passed around and down. Both phenomena suggest the Homeric characters live in a world of enduring oral texts.

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Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics As I will now show, the Homeric poems depict characters fashioning oral texts and using the mechanisms of entextualization reviewed in section 1.1 to do so. I should make clear that, whereas the depiction of poets and poetry has figured prominently in the analysis so far, in the next subsections I concentrate on the non-bardic characters’ performances (cf. Martin 1989). I find it helpful to quote Barber once again: “The process of entextualisation is ubiquitous in everyday life. It is not reserved for the production of monumental works of art” (2007: 209; cf. Karanika 2014: 114). 1.2.2. Entextualization in the Character Text I

My present task is to trace the representation of oral texts in the world of the characters. In that world, the most explicit flagging of the production of an oral text, an utterance capable of outlasting the moment, comes when one character tells another to pass along what he says to a third party. Irene de Jong lists twenty-two “repeated messenger-speeches” (2004: 180) in the Iliad (241–3); Antonio Aloni finds thirty “scene di annuncio” in the Iliad and one in the Odyssey (1998: 81–2); and Adrian Kelly discusses twenty-two “relay instructions” scenes in the Iliad (2007a: 325–9; cf. Eide 1999; Cesca 2017: 31 n. 2). Not all the scenes they catalogue have the explicit signal that draws attention to the first speaker’s wish that his utterance endure to be repeated. For instance, Hera urges Athena to stop the Achaeans from fleeing to their ships (Il. 2.156–65). Athena repeats to Odysseus most of what Hera had said (2.158–65 = 2.174–81, but 159 ≈ 175 and 163 ≈ 179). Yet Hera did not tell Athena to pass along her words, neither to Odysseus nor to anyone else. Just so, Paris formulates a plan to fight Menelaus in single combat and settle their dispute once and for all (Il. 3.68–75). Hector repeats to all the Trojan and Achaean soldiers much of what Paris proposed (3.86–94), even going so far as to position himself as a mediator passing on Paris’s muthos (3.87). But Paris did not task Hector with transmitting his words. Agamemnon sends Talthybius to summon Machaon (kalesson) (Il. 4.192–7), and Talthybius repeats three of the verses found in Agamemnon’s order (4.195–7 = 4.205–7), but Agamemnon did not tell him to pass on a specific message (cf. Il. 12.342–63; Od. 17.507–59). I look at speeches that begin with an explicit signal wherein the speaker tasks another with relaying his words. (p.35) To be fair, these speeches do not reveal any more of an effort to entextualize than one could find in other passages. Richard Martin considers “every speech within the poem a composition in its own right, a poem within epic” (1989: 197). Stylization marks all of Homeric discourse (Martin 1989: 45, 225; Bakker 1997a: 17; Minchin 2007: 8, 10, 12, 51, 84, 141; Karanika 2014: 24), and one could detect, for instance, cohesion and coherence in many stretches of verse from either the narrator text or the character text (cf. Friedrich 2000: 14; Minchin 2007: 61; Graziosi and Haubold 2015: 14). But in the world of the characters these speeches stand out as moments of entextualization because they foreground the goal of entextualization: “making words stick” (Barber 2007: 67). I propose to use these passages to explore how a Page 22 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics performer entextualizes by putting boundaries around the utterance and striving after cohesion and coherence. Scholarship labels the kind of event under investigation here a “mediational routine”: a source generates an oral text for a mediator to pass on to a target, be it an individual or a group (Bauman 2004: 132–3; cf. de Jong 2004: 180–1). Two contextually distinct texts result: the source utterance or text produced by the source in a source dialogue (involving the source and the mediator) and the target utterance or text produced by the mediator in a target dialogue (involving the mediator and the target). In this subsection (and in subsection 2.2.1), I analyze the source text. In subsection 2.2.2, my attention will shift to the target text. Konrad Ehlich finds the work of a messenger useful for thinking about what constitutes a text (2005; cf. Assmann 2006: 103, 106–7), but I take my inspiration for the following evaluations of Homeric mediational routines from Richard Bauman’s study of mediational routines in medieval Irish poetry, Fijian epic, and Akan chiefly discourse (Ghana) (2004: 128–58). In looking outside the field of classical studies for help with these passages, I stand on the shoulders of Johannes Th. Kakridis who juxtaposed the repetitions of messages in the Homeric epics with the same phenomenon in modern Greek folksongs (1971: 76–88; cf. M. L. West 1997: 190–3). In a mediational routine, the source makes his utterance ready for reproduction. To preface my study of source texts in the Homeric epics, I quote from Bauman’s description (2004: 147–8): By the conventionalization of the mediational structure of the routines, the source utterance anticipates repetition—detachment from the source dialogue, the source speaker, the context and circumstances of production, and recontextualization in the target dialogue. Moreover, the shaping of the source utterance prepares it for this decontextualization and recontextualization. One of the principal operations in this preconditioning process is the entextualization of the source utterance, endowing it with sufficient formal and functional boundedness and internal cohesion to allow it to be lifted out of its context of production and recontextualized in the target dialogue. In the examples we have surveyed, the entextualizing devices employed range from the minimal functional boundedness of a turn at talk to highly complex poetic structuring. In addition to entextualization, the repetition of the source text may be prepared for by such further devices as explicit directives to the mediator, such as “Tell X he is pardoned,”… (p.36) Homeric scholarship has not considered the source text in Homeric mediational routines from this perspective. Homeric characters who operate as the source in a mediational routine prepare in three ways for the reproduction of Page 23 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics the source text—that is, of the message proper. First—(B) in what follows—they announce that what they are about to say is what the mediator should pass on. This announcement also serves as an initial entextualizing move because it signals a clear starting point for their source text: the next verse. Correspondingly, they signal the end of their source text by falling silent. In these ways, they place boundaries around their text. Second—(C) in what follows —they entextualize their source text by making it coherent. I concentrate here on my earlier Seitel-inspired discussion of coherence. The source text not only does not clash with the target’s “underlying cultural knowledge” (Seitel 2012: 81) but in fact relies on the target’s ability to fill in implicit gaps. Third—(D) in what follows—they entextualize their source text by endowing it with “internal cohesion.” All three moves potentiate the reproduction of the source text in the target dialogue (Bauman 2004: 131). To be understood as speaking in hexameters because that is how they always talk (Nagy 1996b: 61), the characters create textual packages in hexameters. At the same time, the external narrator, and sometimes the source himself, points to the production of an entextualized oral utterance by marking the entire speech that includes the source text as a performance: (A) in what follows. For, as I stressed earlier, performers work to entextualize, and I cite again Bauman and Charles Briggs’s reminder that “performance as a frame intensifies entextualization” (1990: 74). As James Wilce explains, “The very act of performing entails making oneself accountable for the very sort of structuring, coherence, and memorability we have been calling entextualization” (2009a: 34). The sort of nuts and bolts close reading that follows has always been and remains a good starting point for analysis of the Homeric epics (cf. Martin 1989: e.g. 65, 101–2, 121–3, 135, 221–2; van Thiel 1991: p. vii; Tsagalis 2001), and in this case it gets at much of what entextualization involves (cf. Bauman 2004: 121). I aim to chart how these scenes reveal the crafting of an oral text, an utterance built to last. In order to interrogate a number of different speeches, I pass over perhaps the most well-known mediational routines in the epics, those in Iliad 9 in which Odysseus relays messages to and from Achilles (Bassi 1997: 330–2; Ready 2014: 35). I scrutinize six scenes in the Iliad and one scene in the Odyssey. Iliad 2

Zeus sends Dream to deliver a message to Agamemnon (2.7–16): καί μιν φωνήσας ἔπεα πτερόεντα προσηύδα· “βάσκ’ ἴθι, οὖλε Ὄνειρε, θοὰς ἐπὶ νῆας Ἀχαιῶν· ἐλθὼν ἐς κλισίην Ἀγαμέμνονος Ἀτρείδαο πάντα μάλ’ ἀτρεκέως ἀγορευέμεν, ὡς ἐπιτέλλω· θωρῆξαί ἑ κέλευε κάρη κομόωντας Ἀχαιοὺς (p.37) πανσυδίῃ· νῦν γάρ κεν ἕλοι πόλιν εὐρυάγυιαν Τρώων· οὐ γὰρ ἔτ’ ἀμφὶς Ὀλύμπια δώματ’ ἔχοντες Page 24 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics ἀθάνατοι φράζονται· ἐπέγναμψεν γὰρ ἅπαντας Ἥρη λισσομένη, Τρώεσσι δὲ κήδε’ ἐφῆπται.”12 ὣς φάτο· βῆ δ’ ἂρ Ὄνειρος, ἐπεὶ τὸν μῦθον ἄκουσε, And he spoke and addressed him with winged words: “Up, go, destructive Dream, to the swift ships of the Achaeans; when you get to the hut of Agamemnon, son of Atreus, tell him everything exactly as I charge you: order him to arm the long-haired Achaeans with all speed: for now he may take the city of the wide ways of the Trojans; for the immortals who have their homes on Olympus are no longer divided in counsel: for Hera has bent the minds of all with her entreating, and sorrows have been fastened on the Trojans.” So he spoke; and Dream set out, when he had heard the command,

(A) Verses 7 and 16 mark Zeus’s speech as a performance. Martin shows that the phrase epea pteroenta (“winged words”), as found in verse 7, is “a synonymous phrase for muthos” (1989: 30, cf. 69), and verse 16, wherein muthos looks back to epea pteroenta, reminds one of that fact. The term muthos labels a performance (Martin 1989: e.g. 12, 47, 54, 88–9, 231) in the sense outlined by Bauman, which I quote again for ease of reference: “performance as a mode of spoken verbal communication consists in the assumption of responsibility to an audience for a display of communicative competence” (1977: 11). The phrase “winged words” also alerts one to the nature of Zeus’s performance: he performs a directive (Martin 1989: 31–2, 46). The content of the speech from its beginning makes clear that the directive takes the form of a command (Martin 1989: 51; cf. Minchin 2007: 196–203, 211–15), as it always does when Zeus utters “winged words” (cf. Il. 4.69, 15.48, 15.157 (discussed later), 19.341). In turn, one observes that commands constitute one of the genres in which Homeric characters perform (Martin 1989: 47–66). So even if one disagrees with Martin’s interpretations of “winged words” (D. Beck 2005: 43, 57 n. 20), one can still understand Zeus to be performing a command. Zeus doubles down on performing commands insofar as his command to Dream includes a command that Dream is to pass on to Agamemnon (cf. D. Beck 2012: 15). (B) Verse 10 announces the coming of a source text intended for reproduction as does keleue (“order”) of verse 11, but the phrase bask’ ithi (“Up, go”) in verse 8 hints in that direction: five of the six appearances of this phrase initiate a mediational routine (Kelly 2007a: 61, 324–5). I discuss the other four relevant passages over the course of this subsection. Verse 10 signals that the source text begins in verse 11. Verse 16 indicates that Zeus has put an end to his text by falling silent. Dream’s immediate departure confirms the source text’s clear endpoint. (p.38) (C) Zeus crafts a coherent utterance by offering gaps that he assumes his target can fill in. He relies on his target’s knowledge that the gods are a Page 25 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics fractious lot—so it is significant that they “are no longer divided in counsel” (13– 14)—and that Hera detests the Trojans (14–15). (D) The repetition in sound engendered by the double consonant ξ followed by the palatals κ and χ holds verse 11 together: θωρῆξαί ἑ κέλευε κάρη κομόωντας Ἀχαιοὺς. The first component of a textual package emerges as a textual package. The threefold repetition of gar points up the textuality of Zeus’s source text (cf. Martin 1989: 51). Each sentence explains the previous one: Agamemnon should arm the Achaeans because he will now take Troy because the gods have settled their dispute over the city because they acceded to Hera’s supplication and suffering awaits the Trojans. As a result, deploying a technique common in the Homeric epics—that of epic regression wherein events are presented in the reverse of their actual chronological order (Krischer 1971: 136–40)—Zeus progresses ever backward in time: Agamemnon will in the (not-too-distant) future take the city because of the current arrangement among the gods that is due to what has recently transpired in the past (cf. Brügger et al. 2010: 14 at 11– 15). The final clause—Τρώεσσι δὲ κήδε’ ἐφῆπται (lit. “and on the Trojans sorrows have been and so are fastened”)—partially rehearses this sequence: that the Trojans will in the future suffer pains has been determined in the recent past. In recapitulating in shorter compass the temporal dynamic of verses 12 through the first half of 15, this final clause provides a suitable ending for this stretch of the text. Enjambment, as a means of connecting successive verses (cf. Baldick 2008 s.v. enjambment), becomes relevant too, but the topic requires a brief bibliographical digression. Egbert Bakker focuses on the intonation units evident in each verse of the Homeric epics (1997a: 44–53, 2005: 46–52; cf. M. W. Edwards 2002: 18–35), intonation units having become a popular way to approach Ancient Greek discourse (Scheppers 2011: 18–35, 38–42; de Kreij 2016: sections 16–20). One can define an intonation unit from a number of perspectives, looking to phonology, cognition, grammar, or pragmatics (Scheppers 2011: 21–35). I quote here Bakker’s succinct definition (1997a: 48– 9): The intonation unit is the linguistic equivalent of the focus of consciousness, the amount of information that is active at any one time in a speaker’s consciousness. The intonation unit is the largest linguistic unit that is still available in its entirety to consciousness, the typical sequence of speech sounds that is within the grasp of the speaker’s, and listener’s, echoic memory: any stretch of discourse that is longer will have to be processed as more than one of these basic chunks.…In terms of syntax, intonation units can be anything from complete clauses to all kinds of nonclausal elements: prepositional phrases…, phrases involving

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Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics participles…, or even separate noun phrases when they are the verbalization of the idea on which the speaker focuses. In short, “this kind of unit is usually four to seven words long” (Bakker 2005: 48). Applied to the Homeric epics, this model necessitates rejecting the sentence as a meaningful unit of organization in the epics (Bakker 1997a: 49, 103–8; 2005: 46–52), and that move prompts a critique of the concept of enjambment because scholars often speak of enjambment in reference to the unfolding of a sentence. (p.39) Bakker suggests reserving the term enjambment for those moments in which an intonation unit “straddles” the boundary between two verses—for instance, when one finds an intonation unit “running from the bucolic diaeresis into the next verse” (2005: 54; cf. 1997a: 152–5; Blankenborg 2017: 77). Critically, Bakker observes that this runover does not “conceal the beginning of the metrical cycle” (1997a: 154, cf. 2005: 55). As José González avers, each verse is “perceptible as an individual whole” (2013: 418–19, quotation from 418; cf. 145; M. W. Edwards 2002: 14). The audience hears both that the intonation unit “straddles” the boundary and that a new verse has begun. In other words, the audience knows when a line approaches its end for at least three reasons: they know how long it takes to speak a line; they perceive where the poet is in the line because they know where word breaks tend to occur; they have a feel for how many dactyls and spondees can constitute a line. When a poet makes an intonation unit straddle the boundary between one line and the next, they hear that happening. They hear in the sound of the poet’s voice that he moves from one line to the next within the span of one intonation unit. Bakker’s model makes exquisite sense because it explains how the audience could hear the poet enjambing and so connecting his verse (cf. Higbie 1990: 51; Blankenborg 2017: 85, 89, 92–3, 95). Even so, I find it helpful to retain alongside Bakker’s model the emphasis on syntactical connections in the classic models of enjambment (G. Kirk 1990; Higbie 1990; cf. Blankenborg 2017: 69–72) and when thinking about those syntactical connections to keep in mind Bakker’s point that the audience always perceives the “overarching metrical framework of the hexameter” (2005: 55), the beginning and ending of each verse. Even when verse end coincides with the end of an intonation unit and one cannot necessarily hear the enjambment in the poet’s voice, the audience perceives the syntactical ties between material in successive verses. Because the poet does not connect all his verses syntactically and because, when he does, he connects his verses in different ways, one should attend to how he connects them in each instance. When describing these connections, one is better off doing so in some detail than applying a label that supposedly speaks for itself, such as “adding internal” or “clausal external” (Higbie 1990). Whether one deploys Bakker’s model or focuses on syntax, one will not be linking enjambment with an emphasis on the word(s) at the end of one line or the start of the next (M. W. Page 27 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics Edwards 2002: 14), as Ronald Blankenborg warns against (2017). Instead one will be tracking the poet’s efforts to create cohesive stretches of verse (cf. Friedrich 2000: 19). In passages examined elsewhere in this subsection, I work with Bakker’s intonation-unit-model of enjambment. As for Zeus’s speech in Iliad 2, I note that each verse in his message connects syntactically to the previous one (M. Clark 1997: 162): the adverb pansudiēi (“with all speed”) at the start of verse 12 modifies the infinitive thōrēxai (“to arm”) of verse 11; the genitive Trōōn (“of the Trojans”) at the start of verse 13 depends on the accusative polin (“the city”) in verse 12; verse 14 provides a verb, phrazontai (“are…divided in counsel”), for the nominative ekhontes (“who have”) of verse 13; in verse 15, Hērē specifies the subject of verse 14’s epegnampsen (“has bent the minds”). Whether or not these connections render the verses “dramatic” (M. Clark 1997: 162), they knit Zeus’s utterance together. (p.40) Iliad 7

Paris rejects the Trojan elder Antenor’s suggestion that the Trojans return Helen and her possessions to the Achaeans (7.356, 361–6): ὅς μιν ἀμειβόμενος ἔπεα πτερόεντα προσηύδα· … αὐτὰρ ἐγὼ Τρώεσσι μεθ’ ἱπποδάμοις ἀγορεύσω· ἀντικρὺ δ’ ἀπόφημι· γυναῖκα μὲν οὐκ ἀποδώσω, κτήματα δ’ ὅσσ’ ἀγόμην ἐξ Ἄργεος ἡμέτερον δῶ, πάντ’ ἐθέλω δόμεναι καὶ ἔτ’ οἴκοθεν ἄλλ’ ἐπιθεῖναι.” ἤτοι ὅ γ’ ὣς εἰπὼν κατ’ ἂρ ἕζετο· τοῖσι δ’ ἀνέστη Δαρδανίδης Πρίαμος,… he answered him and spoke winged words: … But I will speak out in the assembly among the horse-taming Trojans; and I declare outright: the woman I will not give back, but the treasure, as much as I brought from Argos to our home, all this I am willing to give and to add still other things from my own goods.” When he had spoken thus, he sat down; and among them stood up Priam the son of Dardanus,…

Priam then sends Idaeus to deliver two messages to the Achaeans (7.367–79): ὅ σφιν ἐὺ φρονέων ἀγορήσατο καὶ μετέειπε· “κέκλυτέ μευ, Τρῶες καὶ Δάρδανοι ἠδ’ ἐπίκουροι, ὄφρ’ εἴπω, τά με θυμὸς ἐνὶ στήθεσσι κελεύει. νῦν μὲν δόρπον ἕλεσθε κατὰ πτόλιν, ὡς τὸ πάρος περ, καὶ φυλακῆς μνήσασθε καὶ ἐγρήγορθε ἕκαστος· ἠῶθεν δ’ Ἰδαῖος ἴτω κοίλας ἐπὶ νῆας, εἰπέμεν Ἀτρείδῃς Ἀγαμέμνονι καὶ Μενελάῳ μῦθον Ἀλεξάνδροιο, τοῦ εἵνεκα νεῖκος ὄρωρε. Page 28 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics καὶ δὲ τόδ’ εἰπέμεναι πυκινὸν ἔπος, αἴ κ’ ἐθέλωσι παύσασθαι πολέμοιο δυσηχέος, εἰς ὅ κε νεκροὺς κείομεν· ὕστερον αὖτε μαχησόμεθ’, εἰς ὅ κε δαίμων ἄμμε διακρίνῃ, δώῃ δ’ ἑτέροισί γε νίκην.” ὣς ἔφαθ’, οἳ δ’ ἄρα τοῦ μάλα μὲν κλύον ἠδ’ ἐπίθοντο. He with good intent addressed their assembly and spoke among them: “Hear me, Trojans and Dardanians and allies, while I say what the heart in my breast bids me. For now, take your evening meal throughout the city, just as before, and be mindful of your guard duty and be wakeful, every man; but at dawn let Idaeus go to the hollow ships, to state to Atreus’s sons, Agamemnon and Menelaus, the declaration of Alexander, for whose sake strife has arisen. And also let him state this shrewd word, to see if they are willing to cease from dolorous war until we have burned the dead; later we will fight again until a god judges between us and gives victory to one or the other.” So he spoke, and they all listened to him well and obeyed.

(p.41) (A) With its use of “winged words,” verse 356 figures Paris’s speech as a performance. Paris’s own choice of agoreusō (“I will speak out,” 361) (cf. Martin 1989: 37; D. Beck 2005: 39) and Priam’s labeling his speech a muthos (374) confirm its portrayal as a public performance. Verse 367 sets the stage for Priam’s public performance especially with its use of agoraomai (“to address”) (cf. D. Beck 2005: 39). His series of imperatives starting in 370 makes clear that he performs a command. As Martin reminds us, a speech act need not be labeled in order for us to recognize that it belongs to a particular genre of speech act (e.g. command, insult) and that it is a speech act suitable for performance (1989: e.g. 32, 68, 85, 101, 106, 125). (B) Verses 373 to 375 order the reproduction of the source texts. Only at this point does one learn that a portion of Paris’s speech serves as a source text. One can retroactively hear Paris’s verse 361 as commanding the reproduction of the source text. In verse 361, Paris signals the initiation of the source text in the following verse. The formulaic verse 365 (D. Beck 2005: 292) shows that by ending his turn at talk Paris ends his source text. By rising to speak, Priam confirms that Paris’s utterance is complete. In verse 375, Priam announces the beginning of the source text after the bucolic diaeresis. Priam brings closure to his source text by ceasing to speak, as the formulaic verse 379 (D. Beck 2005: 290) indicates. That the Trojans then move to do as he ordered corroborates his source text’s ending. (C) Paris’s and Priam’s texts achieve coherence in part by presenting gaps that their targets can easily fill in. Paris assumes his target knows that “the woman” in verse 362 is Helen; that he took Helen from Argos (= the Peloponnesus) and Page 29 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics treasure from Menelaus’s house (363); and that he has wealth to spare (364). Priam counts on his target’s knowing that funerals involve burning corpses (376–7) and that the gods intervene in mortal affairs (377–8). (D) The two hemistiches (half-lines) of Paris’s verse 362 have a finite verb at the end that starts with the prefix apo. Hyperbaton links verses 363 and 364 (ktēmata…pant’ “the treasure… all”), and verse 364 provides a subject and verbal phrase (ethelō domenai “I am willing to give”) for the accusative ktēmata of verse 363. Each hemistich of verse 364 concludes with an infinitive that ends in -nai (domenai…epitheinai “to give…to add”), and the repetitions of tau and theta also unify the verse (πάντ’ ἐθέλω δόμεναι καὶ ἔτ’ οἴκοθεν ἄλλ’ ἐπιθεῖναι). In verses 375 to 378, Priam offers an antithesis—a pause in the fighting, a return to battle—in which each element contains a temporal clause introduced by eis ho ke in its second half. Three times in a row, the final intonation unit of the verse continues into the next verse:

καὶ δὲ τόδ’ εἰπέμεναι

And also let him state

πυκινὸν ἔπος,

this shrewd word,

αἴ κ’ ἐθέλωσι || παύσασθαι

to see if they are willing || to cease

πολέμοιο δυσηχέος,

from dolorous war

εἰς ὅ κε νεκροὺς || κείομεν·

until the dead || we have burned;

ὕστερον αὖτε μαχησόμεθ’,

later we will fight again

εἰς ὅ κε δαίμων || ἄμμε διακρίνῃ,

until a god || judges between us

δώῃ δ’ ἑτέροισί γε νίκην. ||

and gives victory to one or the other. ||

(p.42) This audible necessary enjambment weaves the verses together (cf. M. Clark 1997: 157–8; Blankenborg 2017: 70). Finally, the last verse of his message (378) evinces a chiastic arrangement of object (amme “us”), verb (diakrinēi “decides between”), verb (dōēi “gives”), objects (heteroisi ge nikēn “victory to one or the other”). Iliad 8

Zeus sends Iris to deliver a message to Athena and Hera (8.398–409, 412). Ἶριν δ’ ὤτρυνε χρυσόπτερον ἀγγελέουσαν· “βάσκ’ ἴθι, Ἶρι ταχεῖα, πάλιν τρέπε μηδ’ ἔα ἄντην ἔρχεσθ’· οὐ γὰρ καλὰ συνοισόμεθα πτόλεμόνδε. ὧδε γὰρ ἐξερέω, τὸ δὲ καὶ τετελεσμένον ἔσται· γυιώσω μέν σφωιν ὑφ’ ἅρμασιν ὠκέας ἵππους, αὐτὰς δ’ ἐκ δίφρου βαλέω κατά θ’ ἅρματα ἄξω· οὐδέ κεν ἐς δεκάτους περιτελλομένους ἐνιαυτοὺς ἕλκε’ ἀπαλθήσεσθον, ἅ κεν μάρπτῃσι κεραυνός· Page 30 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics ὄφρ’ εἰδῇ γλαυκῶπις, ὅτ’ ἂν ᾧ πατρὶ μάχηται. Ἥρῃ δ’ οὔ τι τόσον νεμεσίζομαι οὐδὲ χολοῦμαι· αἰεὶ γάρ μοι ἔωθεν ἐνικλᾶν ὅττι νοήσω.” ὣς ἔφατ’· ὦρτο δὲ Ἶρις ἀελλόπος ἀγγελέουσα, … …Διὸς δέ σφ’ ἔννεπε μῦθον· and he urged golden-winged Iris to carry a message: “Up, go, swift Iris; turn them back and do not allow them to come face to face with me: for it will not be good if we join in combat. For thus I will speak, and it will even come to pass: I will maim their swift horses beneath their chariot, and themselves will I hurl from the chariot and will break the chariot in pieces; nor in the span of ten circling years will they be healed of the wounds that the thunderbolt inflicts; so that the gleaming eyed one may know when she fights against her own father. But at Hera I do not feel so much indignation nor am I angry: for she is always in the habit of thwarting me in whatever I devise.” So he spoke; and storm footed Iris rushed off to announce the message, … …and [Iris] declared to them the command of Zeus:

(A) For Martin, verse 412 holds the key: it refers to Zeus’s speech as a muthos and thereby characterizes it as a performance (1989: 51–4). I suggest that the earlier speech introduction in verse 398—Ἶριν δ’ ὤτρυνε χρυσόπτερον ἀγγελέουσαν (“and he urged golden-winged Iris to carry a message”)— anticipates verse 412 in characterizing Zeus’s speech as the performance of a command. To begin with, although the verb otrunō means “to urge” and not “to order” (cf. e.g. Od. 19.158–9), it readily partners with verbs meaning “to order”: “Nestor thus charged (epetelleto) them, / urging (otrunōn) them to the battle (p. 43) from the black ships” (Il. 17.382–3); “Telemachus then urged and ordered (epotrunas ekeleusen) his companions / to lay hold of the tackle; and they listened to his urging (otrunontos)” (Od. 2.422–3; cf. Il. 5.461–3; Od. 23.264). More important, when the verb appears in a verse introducing a speech, such as “he urged (ōtrunen) the old man with words, standing beside him” (Il. 3.249), the speech includes a command (see also Il. 10.158, 11.185, 15.560, 15.568, 24.143; Od. 6.254, 7.341, 10.546, 12.206; cf. Il. 5.461, 13.44). As we will see, Zeus twice elsewhere functions as the subject of such a verse (Il. 11.185, 24.143). Similarly, when the verb appears in a verse concluding a speech, such as “so the old man was urging (ōtrune) them on” (Il. 4.310), that speech includes a command (see also e.g. Il. 12.277, 16.210; Od. 8.15). Four of Zeus’s speeches conclude this way (Il. 4.73, 19.349, 22.186; Od. 24.487). Finally, on two other occasions, the poet couples otrunō and a word from the root aggel-: “urge (otrunai) the man along to the city / to take your message (aggeliēn) to Page 31 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics circumspect Penelope” (Od. 15.40–1); “or we are to urge along a messenger” (ē aggelon otrunōmen) (Od. 24.405). In both cases, the sense is “order the messenger to deliver a message.” These three factors would lead the traditionoriented audience member to anticipate a command from Zeus upon hearing 398. Again, Zeus’s performance of a command intended for Iris includes a command that Iris is to pass on to Athena and Hera (see 412). (B) Verse 401 orders the repetition of the source text. Zeus puts boundaries around his source text by signaling its start with the declaration “For thus I will speak” in verse 401 and by marking its ending by falling silent, as the formulaic verse 409 (D. Beck 2005: 291) shows. Iris’s immediate departure confirms that his text’s ending was obvious. (C) In the passages studied so far, coherence emerges in the target’s ability to fill in gaps from his or her own store of cultural knowledge. In this case, Zeus’s utterance gains coherence “because it has a familiar feel to it,” to reuse a phrase from Peter Seitel quoted earlier (2012: 81). Athena and Hera should have no trouble imagining a thunderbolt-hurling (keraunos) Zeus, a figure that appears throughout archaic Greek epic poetry (e.g. Il. 8.133, 14.417; Od. 23.330–1, 24.539; Hesiod Theogony 515, 690–2; Hesiodic Shield of Heracles 422; Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite 288). Nor should they have difficulty imagining Zeus attacking other gods: as Zeus reminds (memnēi) Hera in Iliad 15, he threw from Olympus anyone who tried to free Hera after he hung her from the clouds (Il. 15.18–24). (D) In commenting on the “verbal texture” of Zeus’s speech, Martin points to “the amplitude of his rhetoric, achieved by repetition and synonymity” (1989: 53). Additional features merit attention. Verses 402 to 408 fall into three segments: two verses, two verses, and three verses. That the final segment takes up one more verse than the others neatly rounds off the source text (cf. Faraone 2013 on the “superlative cap”). The initial segment of two verses (402–3) contains three finite verbs, each in a clause shorter than the previous one (a descending tricolon). The decreasing length of the three clauses matches Zeus’s plan to disable or destroy three entities one at a time: (1) I will lame (p.44) (a) the swift horses pulling (b) their (c) chariot; (2) hurl (b) them from (c) the chariot; and (3) destroy (c) the chariot. Verses 402 and 403 also have the same sequence of dactyls and spondees—two spondees, three dactyls, and a spondee —a rhythmic repetition that also unites the two verses. The second segment (404–5) offers a memorable image of what happens when Zeus strikes a god with his thunderbolt: the wounds take more than ten years to heal. These two verses present this information gradually and thereby gain in cohesion. Zeus moves from talking about a length of time, to talking about the length of time it takes to recover from wounds, to talking about the length of time it takes to recover from wounds inflicted by his thunderbolt. Zeus builds the final three-verse segment (406–8) around an antithesis between Athena and Hera. In addition, two Page 32 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics unexpected features likewise lodge the final segment in the hearer’s mind: glaukōpis (“the gleaming eyed one”) without an accompanying Athēnē occurs in oblique cases (Il. 8.373; Od. 13.389), but only here in both epics does one find glaukōpis in the nominative (406) without an accompanying Athēnē, a combination found seventy-nine times; the word eniklaō (“to thwart”) only appears here (408) in the Homeric epics and does not recur until Hellenistic-era poets revivify it. Iliad 11

Zeus sends Iris to deliver a message to Hector (11.185–95): Ἶριν δ’ ὤτρυνε χρυσόπτερον ἀγγελέουσαν· “βάσκ’ ἴθι, Ἶρι ταχεῖα, τὸν Ἕκτορι μῦθον ἐνίσπες· ὄφρ’ ἂν μέν κεν ὁρᾷ Ἀγαμέμνονα ποιμένα λαῶν θύνοντ’ ἐν προμάχοισιν, ἐναίροντα στίχας ἀνδρῶν, τόφρ’ ἀναχωρείτω, τὸν δ’ ἄλλον λαὸν ἀνώχθω μάρνασθαι δηίοισι κατὰ κρατερὴν ὑσμίνην. αὐτὰρ ἐπεί κ’ ἢ δουρὶ τυπεὶς ἢ βλήμενος ἰῷ εἰς ἵππους ἄλεται, τότε οἱ κράτος ἐγγυαλίξω κτείνειν, εἰς ὅ κε νῆας ἐυσσέλμους ἀφίκηται δύῃ τ’ ἠέλιος καὶ ἐπὶ κνέφας ἱερὸν ἔλθῃ.” ὣς ἔφατ’, οὐδ’ ἀπίθησε ποδήνεμος ὠκέα Ἶρις· And he urged golden-winged Iris to carry a message: “Up, go, swift Iris, and declare this command to Hector: as long as he sees Agamemnon, shepherd of men, raging among the foremost fighters and destroying the ranks of men, so long let him stay back and command the rest of the army to fight with the foe in the mighty combat. But when, either wounded by a spear-thrust or struck with an arrow, he [Agamemnon] leaps on his chariot, then I will grant might to him [Hector] to kill until he comes to the well-benched ships and the sun sets and holy darkness comes on.” So he spoke, and wind-footed, swift Iris did not disobey,

(p.45) (A) Verse 185 functions like Il. 8.398 (see the previous analysis (p. 42)), prompting the audience to anticipate a command from Zeus. Once more, Zeus’s performance of a command intended for Iris consists almost entirely of a command that he wants her to pass on to Hector (see muthos in 186). The amount of detail that Zeus offers points up his status and skill as a performer (Martin 1989: 41). (B) Verse 186 mandates the repetition of the source text and also presages the beginning of the text in the following verse. The formulaic verse 195 (D. Beck 2005: 290) shows that Zeus has ended his text by ceasing to speak, and once again Iris’s immediate departure indicates the clarity with which Zeus demarcates the conclusion of his source text. Page 33 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics (C) Hector can fill in the gaps in Zeus’s source text: warriors come to and leave battle on chariots, but they do not generally fight from them (191–2; cf. Fenik 1968: 13–14 (with Il. 15.386), 29); the Achaeans came to Troy in ships (193). (D) Zeus’s cohesive source text falls into two four-verse chunks (187–90 and 191–4). In the first, the ophra (“as long as”) component (187–8) takes up two verses, as does the tophra (“so long”) component (189–90). The second verse (188) of the ophra clause comprises two participial clauses; the first verse (189) of the tophra clause comprises two imperatival clauses, and both of its verbs sound alike: anakhōreitō and anōkhthō. An audible necessary enjambment connects verses 189 and 190 as the intonation unit anōkhthō || marnasthai dēioisi (“command || to fight with the foe”) crosses the boundary between the verses. The structure of this first chunk with its subordinate clause followed by the main clause—“as long as…so long”—matches the structure of the second chunk (191–4)—“when…then.” Additional features of the second chunk emerge. Verse 191 contains a chiasmus: a weapon in the dative (douri “by a spearthrust”), a verb of hitting (tupeis “wounded”), a verb of hitting (blēmenos “struck”), a weapon in the dative (iōi “with an arrow”). The temporal clause in verses 193 and 194 consists of a tricolon of three finite verbs. Zeus also structures verse 194 chiastically: finite verb (duēi “sets”), nominative subject (ēelios “the sun”), nominative subject (knephas hieron “holy darkness”), finite verb (elthēi “comes”). Iliad 15

Zeus sends Iris to deliver a message to Poseidon (15.157–68): Ἶριν δὲ προτέρην ἔπεα πτερόεντα προσηύδα· “βάσκ’ ἴθι, Ἶρι ταχεῖα, Ποσειδάωνι ἄνακτι πάντα τάδ’ ἀγγεῖλαι, μηδὲ ψευδάγγελος εἶναι. παυσάμενόν μιν ἄνωχθι μάχης ἠδὲ πτολέμοιο ἔρχεσθαι μετὰ φῦλα θεῶν ἢ εἰς ἅλα δῖαν. εἰ δέ μοι οὐκ ἐπέεσσ’ ἐπιπείσεται, ἀλλ’ ἀλογήσει, φραζέσθω δὴ ἔπειτα κατὰ φρένα καὶ κατὰ θυμόν, μή μ’ οὐδὲ κρατερός περ ἐὼν ἐπιόντα ταλάσσῃ (p.46) μεῖναι, ἐπεί ἑο φημὶ βίῃ πολὺ φέρτερος εἶναι καὶ γενεῇ πρότερος· τοῦ δ’ οὐκ ὄθεται φίλον ἦτορ ἶσον ἐμοὶ φάσθαι, τόν τε στυγέουσι καὶ ἄλλοι.” ὣς ἔφατ’, οὐδ’ ἀπίθησε ποδήνεμος ὠκέα Ἶρις· And to Iris first he spoke winged words: “Up, go, swift Iris, to the lord Poseidon announce all the following things and be not a false messenger. Command him to cease from war and battle and to go to the tribes of gods or into the bright sea. And if he will not obey my words but disregard them, let him consider then in mind and heart lest, although he is strong, he not endure, when I attack, to stand fast because I say I am far better than he in might Page 34 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics and the elder by birth; yet his heart does not hesitate to declare himself the equal of me whom even the other gods dread.” So he spoke, and wind-footed, swift Iris did not disobey,

(A) Verse 157 signals the advent of a performance with its reference to “winged words” (cf. Il. 2.7, 7.356, discussed earlier (p. 37)). As in previous examples, Zeus’s performance of a command to Iris for the most part comprises a command he wishes Iris to pass on to Poseidon. (B) Verse 159 calls for the repetition of the source text and announces the initiation of the source text in the following verse. Verse 168 is identical to and functions in the same manner as Il. 11.195 (see previous analysis (p. 45)). (C) Poseidon will understand that seniority demands respect as does superior strength (165–6) (cf. Janko 1992: 245 at 165–7). He will also know why the “other gods dread” Zeus (167): he is the chief of their pantheon. At the same time, one can understand Zeus’s utterance, like his source text in Iliad 8 analyzed earlier (p. 43), because it evokes a familiar tableau—Zeus’s engaging in physical combat with another god. (D) The infinitive erkhesthai (“to go”) in verse 161 provides an object infinitive for anōkhthi (“Command”) in verse 160. Verses 162 to 166 exhibit hypotaxis: the protasis of 162 leads to the apodosis of 163, which generates a fear clause in 164 to 165 that itself prompts a causal clause in 165 to 166. In fusing together verses 164 and 165 in audible necessary enjambment, the intonation unit epionta talassēi || meinai (“when I attack, he not endure || to stand fast”) reinforces this hypotactic cohesion. Finally, the object infinitive phasthai (“to declare”) in verse 167 fleshes out the verbal phrase ouk othetai (“does not hesitate”) in verse 166. The first four verses offer a series of pairings: battle and war (160); Olympus and sea (161); failure to yield and irrationality (162); heart and spirit (163). The phrazesthō (“let him consider”) and phrena (“mind”) of verse 163 perhaps evince an etymological play (Janko 1992: 245 at 160–7); they undeniably alliterate. The final four verses proceed through a series of three antitheses: Poseidon is strong, but not as strong as me (164–5); I am stronger and older than he (165–6); he boasts to be my equal, unlike the other gods (166– 7). The final reference to “other gods” (167) who accede to Zeus looks back to “the tribes (p.47) of gods” in verse 161 who, one should understand, do the same. This backward glance works to tie off the source text. Iliad 24

Zeus sends Iris to deliver a message to Priam (24.143–59): Ἶριν δ’ ὤτρυνε Κρονίδης εἰς Ἴλιον ἱρήν· “βάσκ’ ἴθι, Ἶρι ταχεῖα· λιποῦσ’ ἕδος Οὐλύμποιο ἄγγειλον Πριάμῳ μεγαλήτορι Ἴλιον εἴσω, λύσασθαι φίλον υἱὸν ἰόντ’ ἐπὶ νῆας Ἀχαιῶν,

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Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics δῶρα δ’ Ἀχιλλῆι φερέμεν τά κε θυμὸν ἰήνῃ, οἶον, μηδέ τις ἄλλος ἅμα Τρώων ἴτω ἀνήρ. κῆρύξ τίς οἱ ἕποιτο γεραίτερος, ὅς κ’ ἰθύνοι ἡμιόνους καὶ ἄμαξαν ἐύτροχον, ἠδὲ καὶ αὖτις νεκρὸν ἄγοι προτὶ ἄστυ, τὸν ἔκτανε δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς. μηδέ τί οἱ θάνατος μελέτω φρεσὶ μηδέ τι τάρβος· τοῖον γάρ οἱ πομπὸν ὀπάσσομεν Ἀργειφόντην, ὃς ἄξει εἵως κεν ἄγων Ἀχιλῆι πελάσσῃ. αὐτὰρ ἐπὴν ἀγάγῃσιν ἔσω κλισίην Ἀχιλῆος, οὔτ’ αὐτὸς κτενέει ἀπό τ’ ἄλλους πάντας ἐρύξει· οὔτε γάρ ἐστ’ ἄφρων οὔτ’ ἄσκοπος οὔτ’ ἀλιτήμων, ἀλλὰ μάλ’ ἐνδυκέως ἱκέτεω πεφιδήσεται ἀνδρός.” ὣς ἔφατ’, ὦρτο δὲ Ἶρις ἀελλόπος ἀγγελέουσα. But the son of Cronus urged Iris toward sacred Ilium: “Up, go, swift Iris; leave the seat of Olympus and announce in Ilium to great-hearted Priam that he is to go to the ships of the Achaeans to ransom his dear son and to bring gifts to Achilles that will warm his heart, alone, and let not any other man of the Trojans go with him. A herald may attend him, an older man, who could guide the mules and the light-running wagon and could carry back to the city the corpse, him whom brilliant Achilles killed. Let not death be of concern to him in his mind nor any fear: for such a guide will we give him, Argeïphontes, who will lead him until in his leading he brings him to Achilles. And after he leads him into Achilles’s hut, he [Achilles] himself not only will not kill him but will restrain all the others: for not without sense is he, nor without purpose, nor vicious, but with all kindliness will he spare a suppliant man.” So he spoke; and storm footed Iris rushed off to announce the message.

(A) Verse 143 prepares for Zeus’s performance of a command (cf. Il. 8.398, 11.185, discussed earlier (p. 42)). One finds yet another example of Zeus’s performing a command that contains a command. (p.48) (B) Verse 145 orders the replication of the source text and makes clear that the source text proper will begin in the following verse. Verse 159 is identical to and functions in the same manner as the previously discussed Il. 8.409 (p. 43). (C) Priam will know that Argeïphontes (153) is Hermes and that, because one of the god’s jobs is to escort people between distinct realms, he is a suitable guide to take Priam from the city of Troy to the tent of Achilles. He will also know that a supplicandus should respect a suppliant (156–8; cf. e.g. Od. 9.269–71).

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Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics (D) Zeus’s source text falls into four balanced segments. The first three comprise three verses each: ransom Hector alone (146–8); send a herald to retrieve the body (149–51); do not fear because we will send along Hermes as an escort (152–4). The final segment—Achilles will not kill you—comprises four verses (155–8): again, the addition of the extra verse in this last segment rounds off the utterance (cf. my earlier comments on Il. 8.406–8 (p. 43)). The chiastic structure of the first and second segments weaves them together: Segment 1: (a) Priam is to go to the Achaean camp to ransom Hector’s corpse from Achilles (146–7). (b) He should go alone without any martial escort (anēr) (148). Segment 2: (b′) But an elderly herald (kērux) should accompany him (149–50). (a′) so that the herald can bring back to Troy Hector’s corpse from Achilles (151). Segments 3 and 4 exhibit their own chiastic arrangement: Segment 3: (a) Priam should neither fear death nor be scared (152). (b) We will send Hermes to escort him (153–4). Segment 4: (b′) When Hermes escorts Priam to Achilles’s tent (155), (a′) Achilles will not kill him because he is mentally sound (156–8). Similarly, the use of agagēisin (“he leads”) in verse 155 at the start of the fourth segment continues the repetition of axei…agōn (“will lead…in his leading”) in verse 154 at the end of the third segment and thereby eases the transition between the two. The final segment exhibits additional formal features. Verse 156, οὔτ’ αὐτὸς κτενέει ἀπό τ’ ἄλλους πάντας ἐρύξει (“he [Achilles] himself not only will not kill him but will restrain all the others”), comprises two parallel hemistiches: oute parallels t’; autos parallels allous pantas; and kteneei parallels eruxei. Both 156 and 157 begin with oute, and 157 contains an alliterative tricolon, each colon made up of the same adverb (oute) and an adjective that starts with an alpha-privative (cf. N. Richardson 1993: 291 at 157–8). Verse 158 refers back to and clarifies the source text’s first two verses: Priam is to (p.49) ransom Hector’s corpse (146–7) by supplicating Achilles (158). This addition Page 37 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics operates as a clarification because elsewhere fathers who bring ransom to the Achaean camp do not supplicate (D. F. Wilson 2002: 29–30, 42, 80). Odyssey 5

The single messenger scene in the Odyssey begins when Zeus sends Hermes to deliver a message to Calypso (5.29–43). I leave it to others to explain why only one such scene occurs in the poem (e.g. Aloni 1998: 93, 101–3) and analyze it as I have those from the Iliad. “Ἑρμεία· σὺ γὰρ αὖτε τά τ’ ἄλλα περ ἄγγελός ἐσσι· νύμφῃ ἐυπλοκάμῳ εἰπεῖν νημερτέα βουλήν, νόστον Ὀδυσσῆος ταλασίφρονος, ὥς κε νέηται, οὔτε θεῶν πομπῇ οὔτε θνητῶν ἀνθρώπων· ἀλλ’ ὅ γ’ ἐπὶ σχεδίης πολυδέσμου πήματα πάσχων ἤματί κ’ εἰκοστῷ Σχερίην ἐρίβωλον ἵκοιτο, Φαιήκων ἐς γαῖαν, οἳ ἀγχίθεοι γεγάασιν· οἵ κέν μιν περὶ κῆρι θεὸν ὣς τιμήσουσι, πέμψουσιν δ’ ἐν νηὶ φίλην ἐς πατρίδα γαῖαν, χαλκόν τε χρυσόν τε ἅλις ἐσθῆτά τε δόντες, πόλλ’, ὅσ’ ἂν οὐδέ ποτε Τροίης ἐξήρατ’ Ὀδυσσεύς, εἴ περ ἀπήμων ἦλθε, λαχὼν ἀπὸ ληίδος αἶσαν. ὣς γάρ οἱ μοῖρ’ ἐστὶ φίλους τ’ ἰδέειν καὶ ἱκέσθαι οἶκον ἐς ὑψόροφον καὶ ἑὴν ἐς πατρίδα γαῖαν.” ὣς ἔφατ’, οὐδ’ ἀπίθησε διάκτορος Ἀργειφόντης. “Hermes, because in other matters also you are a messenger, state to the nymph with the lovely hair our certain plan, the homecoming of enduring Odysseus, that he will come back by the convoy neither of the gods nor of mortal people; but he on a jointed raft suffering woes on the twentieth day will land on fertile Scheria in the country of the Phaeacians who are near the gods in origin; they will honor him in their hearts like a god and send him back on a ship to the beloved land of his fathers, having provided bronze and gold in abundance and clothing, many things, as many as Odysseus would not ever have taken from Troy, if he had gone unharmed and taken his portion of the plunder. For so it is fated for him to see his people and come back to his house with a high roof and to his fatherland.” So he spoke, and the messenger Argeiphontes did not disobey.

(A) With its imperative, verse 30 signals the advent of a performance of a command. Zeus commands Hermes to command Calypso to let Odysseus go, but the more significant performative component of the source text comes in its virtuoso previewing of what will happen.

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Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics (p.50) (B) Verses 29 and 30 direct Hermes to reproduce the source text and signal the advent of that text in the next verse. Verse 43 functions in the same manner as Il. 11.195 and 15.168 (see p. 45): Zeus closes his source text by ending his turn at talk, and Hermes’s immediately turning to carry out his task indicates that Zeus made the end of his source text apparent. (C) Calypso will know that Odysseus helped sack Troy (39); that to speak of the workings of moira (“fated,” 41) is to speak of the inescapable and the inevitable (cf. Il. 6.488, 17.421, 18.120, 23.80; Od. 4.475, 19.592); and that it is appropriate to refer to “his house with a high roof (hupsorophon)” (42) because Odysseus was a wealthy basileus on Ithaca: that adjective describes the real estate of the powerful, either a bedroom (Il. 3.423; Od. 4.121) or a treasury (Il. 24.191–2, 24.317–18; Od. 2.337–8). (D) When Zeus speaks of “the homecoming of enduring Odysseus” (noston Odussēos talasiphronos, 31), he not only points to a well-known subject of song —the return of a hero from Troy (cf. M. L. West 2013: 247). He begins in the manner of an epic poet announcing the theme of his song. With noston Odussēos talasiphronos—an accusative plus noun-epithet combination in the genitive— compare the Iliad’s mēnin…Pēlēiadeō Akhilēos (“the wrath of Peleus’s son, Achilles,” 1.1); the Odyssey’s own andra…polutropon (“a man of many ways,” 1.1; cf. Harden and Kelly 2014: 4); and the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women’s Νῦν δὲ γυναικῶν [φῦλον ἀείσατε, ἡδυέπειαι (“sing now about the race of women, sweet-speaking,” frag. 1 line 1 Most).13 Compare as well the narrator’s description of Phemius’s song: ὃ δ’ Ἀχαιῶν νόστον ἄειδε / λυγρόν (“he sang of the Achaeans’ bitter homecoming,” Od. 1.326–7). Whether or not those two verses “suggest the form of the opening lines” of the Epic Cycle’s Nostoi (M. L. West 2013: 251), with the appearance of the verb aeidō familiar from countless invocations and with the accusative plus genitive sequence resembling the passages just mentioned (and with the enjambment of lugron resembling the enjambment of oulomenēn “destructive” in Il. 1.2) the verses do read as an indirect report of what Phemius might have said: “Muse, sing of the bitter homecoming of the Achaeans” vel sim (cf. Ford 1992: 21; Harden and Kelly 2014: 4, 12 (on Od. 8.492–3)). Zeus’s initial phrase evokes the start of an oral performer’s oral text. The twelve-line source text falls into two six-line parts: Odysseus will make it to Scheria and be treated well (31–6); the Phaeacians will send him home rich (37– 42). The concluding verses’ (41–2) insistence that Odysseus will make it back home looks back to the initial verse of the source text (31): Odysseus will gain his nostos. Its narrative progression holds Zeus’s text together. It moves from absence to abundance: (p.51) at first Odysseus is alone and penniless, as signaled by his sailing by himself on a raft (32–3); then he is rich on account of all the bronze, gold, and clothes the Phaeacians give him (34–40); and finally he is rich and surrounded by family back on Ithaca (41–2). Both initial absences are Page 39 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics remedied. Lastly, the repetition of a form of theos ties together the first six lines of this twelve-line text: theōn (32), agkhitheoi (35), theon (36). The progressive distancing from actual divinity makes for another ordered progression in this segment of Zeus’s utterance: gods; those demonstrably close to the gods; a man whom others treat like a god but who is manifestly not a god. In these seven scenes, the source, staking out a position as a performer, makes explicit that his utterance is to be repeated and he entextualizes the utterance to aid that repetition. The preparation of an oral text for subsequent reiteration becomes an essential concern of these passages. 1.2.3. Entextualization in the Character Text II

In analyzing the source texts in several of the Homeric epics’ mediational routines, the previous subsection concentrated on how a Homeric performer entextualizes by placing boundaries around the utterance and making it exhibit cohesion and coherence. This subsection continues to explore the connection between entextualization and performance by looking at strategies of entextualization manifested in a variety of other speeches in the epics. Inspired by Karin Barber, I discuss the practice of attaching a text to an object and examine exegesis and quotation. Inspired by James Wilce, Anna-Leena Siikala, and Harold Scheub, I analyze the embodied activity of lamenting. Regarding the linking of utterance and object, I concentrate not on the simple fact that stories attach to objects but on what a performer gains by linking an utterance to an object. Recall that Barber finds an “indication of the desire” to entextualize in this practice. I suggest that this practice can itself aid entextualization. An example of what happens at such moments comes when Odysseus rehearses Calchas’s prophecy during his performance (see muthon at Il. 2.282 and agorēsato at Il. 2.283) before the assembled Achaeans in Iliad 2 (cf. D. Beck 2012: 42–3). While mustering at Aulis, the Achaeans saw a serpent eat eight sparrows and the mother-bird too (Il. 2.317–30): αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ κατὰ τέκν’ ἔφαγε στρουθοῖο καὶ αὐτήν, τὸν μὲν ἀρίζηλον θῆκεν θεός ὅς περ ἔφηνε· λᾶαν γάρ μιν ἔθηκε Κρόνου παῖς ἀγκυλομήτεω.14 ἡμεῖς δ’ ἑσταότες θαυμάζομεν οἷον ἐτύχθη. ὡς οὖν δεινὰ πέλωρα θεῶν εἰσῆλθ’ ἑκατόμβας, (p.52) Κάλχας δ’ αὐτίκ’ ἔπειτα θεοπροπέων ἀγόρευε· “τίπτ’ ἄνεω ἐγένεσθε, κάρη κομόωντες Ἀχαιοί; ἡμῖν μὲν τόδ’ ἔφηνε τέρας μέγα μητίετα Ζεύς, ὄψιμον ὀψιτέλεστον, ὅου κλέος οὔ ποτ’ ὀλεῖται. ὡς οὗτος κατὰ τέκν’ ἔφαγε στρουθοῖο καὶ αὐτήν, ὀκτώ, ἀτὰρ μήτηρ ἐνάτη ἦν, ἣ τέκε τέκνα, ὣς ἡμεῖς τοσσαῦτ’ ἔτεα πτολεμίξομεν αὖθι, τῷ δεκάτῳ δὲ πόλιν αἱρήσομεν εὐρυάγυιαν.”

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Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics κεῖνος τὼς ἀγόρευε· τὰ δὴ νῦν πάντα τελεῖται. But after he devoured the sparrow’s little ones and the mother herself, the god who had brought him to the light made him conspicuous: for the son of crooked-counseling Cronus turned him to stone. Αnd we stood about and marveled at what had happened. So, when the terrible portent interrupted the hecatombs of the gods, then immediately Calchas prophesied and spoke in the assembly: “Why have you fallen silent, long-haired Achaeans? To us has Zeus the counselor showed this great sign, late in coming, late in fulfillment, the fame of which will never perish. As this serpent devoured the sparrow’s little ones and the mother herself, all eight, and the mother that bore them was the ninth, so shall we war there for so many years, but in the tenth we shall take the city of the wide ways.” That one [Calchas] spoke out in this way; and now all these things are being accomplished.

Odysseus attaches Calchas’s prophecy about the fate of the Achaean expedition to the peculiar stone (cf. Nagy 2003: 25–7, 29). When he links speech and object, Odysseus works to make the prophecy an oral text by asserting twice over its ability to persist through time. First, he suggests that Calchas’s utterance comes to mind when one looks at, or even just recalls, the stone. That sequence depicts the utterance as an item that independently preexists any one enunciation; it brings out the utterance’s “out-there-ness” (Barber 2007: 100). Second, he suggests that Calchas’s utterance will endure as long as the stone, or even just the memory of the stone, endures. Keeping this scene in view, I assemble some other relevant passages. Character and narrators alike make clear that speakers who perform recollections about the past (cf. Martin 1989: 77–88) regularly attach utterances to objects. Hector declares of the corpse of his foe (Il. 7.84–91), τὸν δὲ νέκυν ἐπὶ νῆας ἐυσσέλμους ἀποδώσω, ὄφρα ἑ ταρχύσωσι κάρη κομόωντες Ἀχαιοὶ σῆμά τέ οἱ χεύωσιν ἐπὶ πλατεῖ Ἑλλησπόντῳ. καί ποτέ τις εἴπῃσι καὶ ὀψιγόνων ἀνθρώπων, νηὶ πολυκλήιδι πλέων ἐπὶ οἴνοπα πόντον· “ἀνδρὸς μὲν τόδε σῆμα πάλαι κατατεθνηῶτος, ὅν ποτ’ ἀριστεύοντα κατέκτανε φαίδιμος Ἕκτωρ.” ὥς ποτέ τις ἐρέει· τὸ δ’ ἐμὸν κλέος οὔ ποτ’ ὀλεῖται. (p.53) but his corpse I will give back to the well-benched ships, so that the long-haired Achaeans may bury him and heap up for him a mound by the wide Hellespont. Page 41 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics And someone of men who are yet to be will one day say, as he sails in a many-benched ship over the wine-dark sea: “This is the mound of a man who died long ago, whom, at some point as he excelled in battle, glorious Hector killed.” So one day someone will speak; and my glory will never die.

One imagines a speaker detailing Hector’s triumph and connecting his utterance to the tomb (cf. Grethlein 2008: 30). Poseidon fears that men “will forget the one [the wall] that I and Phoebus Apollo / toiled over making for the warrior Laomedon” (τοῦ δ’ ἐπιλήσονται, ὅ τ’ ἐγὼ καὶ Φοῖβος Ἀπόλλων / ἥρῳ Λαομέδοντι πολίσσαμεν ἀθλήσαντε, Il. 7.452–3). Poseidon envisions speakers linking an utterance about his and Apollo’s service to Laomedon to the wall surrounding Troy (cf. Grethlein 2008: 33). Diomedes owns a cup to which a teller would attach an utterance about Oeneus and Bellerephon’s guest friendship (Il. 6.216– 21). A cup that Priam includes in the ransom for Hector’s corpse (Il. 24.234–5) “recalls a diplomatic exploit from Priam’s past” (Sammons 2010: 108–9, quotation from 109). On three occasions, an object merits the designation “a mnēma of X,” a token of the memory of/a mechanism for remembering X. Achilles labels the amphora he gives Nestor a mnēma of Patroclus’s funeral (Il. 23.619). Helen gives Telemachus a robe to be a mnēma “of the hands of Helen” (Od. 15.126). Odysseus’s bow functions as a mnēma “of his dear friend” Iphitos (Od. 21.40). In each case, one envisions a speaker linking his or her utterance to the object (cf. Scodel 2008: 34; Ready 2010: 138–9). These examples have to do with utterances that take the object as a jumping off point. The utterances are not about the object so much as they are about the actors who came into contact with the object. Another class of utterances attached to objects comprises those detailing the history of the object itself. I refer the reader to Jonas Grethlein’s list of the myriad objects in the Homeric poems that have a biography accompanying them, ranging from the tools of war to household items to horses and mules (2008: 36; cf. Higbie 1995: 195–203; Crielaard 2003: 53–7; Whitley 2013: 399–402). In this category of objects to which speakers attach an utterance about the object, I also include the shades of Minos, Orion, Tityus, Tantalus, Sisyphus, and Heracles that Odysseus sees in the underworld (Od. 11.568–626). Each character endlessly does or suffers the same thing (Sammons 2010: 97, 99). With his repeated actions or punishments running on a short but eternal loop, each shade achieves a nearly static and so objectified state. To these nearly objectified shades, speakers will attach utterances. Odysseus cites one—Tityus “had manhandled Leto, the honored consort of Zeus, / as she went through spacious Panopeus, toward Pytho” (Λητὼ γὰρ ἥλκησε, Διὸς κυδρὴν παράκοιτιν, / Πυθώδ’ ἐρχομένην διὰ καλλιχόρου Πανοπῆος, Od. 11.580–1)—and the external audience as well as the internal audience of Phaeacians can supply the remainder (Sammons 2010: 96–7).

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Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics (p.54) In the case of biographies of objects, a character or the narrator presents the entirety of the relevant utterance itself or a portion of it. Otherwise —as in the scenes mentioned two paragraphs earlier—a character or the narrator alludes to a performer attaching an utterance to an object. The distinction is irrelevant to this investigation. What matters is that performers repeatedly attach utterances to objects. In all the cases in which speakers pin an utterance to an object, they achieve what Odysseus achieves in Iliad 2. They portray the utterance as having an existence independent of any one presentation and imply that the utterance will endure as long as the object endures. In representing the utterance in this manner, they contribute to its entextualization: implying that an utterance has persisted and will continue to persist through time is one way to make it capable of doing do.15 Homeric characters also regularly subject utterances to an appraisal of some kind. When reviewing in section 1.1 Barber’s discussion of exegesis, I noted how exegesis helps impart to an utterance the ability to outlast the moment: it suggests that the utterance perdures on its own out in the world as an object for contemplation and analysis, and that suggestion has the very real effect of making the utterance capable of lasting. Homeric characters do not engage in intensive exegesis of the kind Barber investigates. They nevertheless interact with the recollections they themselves and others perform in a way that enhances their status as oral texts. Characters pass judgment on the content of tales that others perform. Alcinous deems Odysseus’s tales of his adventures true (Od. 11.363–7). Eumaeus says that although the disguised Odysseus moved him with his sad tale of suffering, the portion ostensibly about Odysseus strikes him as false (Od. 14.361–5). A bit later Odysseus claims Eumaeus roused his spirit with his own story of woe (Od. 15.486–7). Characters interpret tales performed by others. Diomedes understands Glaucus’s account of his genealogy to mean that the two apparent foes are in fact ancestral guest friends (Il. 6.215). Having listened to Phoenix’s tale, Achilles asserts that he will mimic Meleager, who waited to engage in battle until enemies were setting fire to his city (Il. 9.589), and wait to engage in battle until Hector brings fire to the Myrmidon ships (Il. 9.650–3) (D. F. Wilson 2002: 107; cf. Scodel 2002: 171). Eumaeus draws out the moral of the disguised Odysseus’s story about a cold night at Troy: he will give Odysseus whatever he needs to keep warm in his hut (Od. 14.508–11). Agamemnon claims that Amphimedon’s account of the suitors’ death reveals the greatness of Penelope (Od. 24.192–8). Most frequently, like the Asante praise poets who offer a noun phrase in one line and explain it in the next (section 1.1 (p. 22)), characters perform a story and then engage in their own interpretative efforts, commenting on the relevance of a tale to the present situation. As previous scholarship has made clear the paradigmatic purposes to which characters put stories (e.g. M. Alden 2000, Page 43 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics 2017; Sammons 2010: 23), I will give just two examples of this well-understood phenomenon. Diomedes uses the tale of Lycurgus’s (p.55) foolish assault on Dionysus and his nurses to assert that he will not fight with gods (Il. 6.141). Agamemnon finds that a story about how Atē once bested Zeus excuses his own folly (Il. 19.134–6). My point is that in these cases too characters aim at entextualization. By positioning the tale as a discrete entity subject to evaluation, they depict the tale as capable of enduring. This depiction, in turn, helps make the utterance capable of enduring. Having looked at how characters attach utterances to objects and make utterances the object of analysis, I can now explore passages in which characters quote an utterance. As I discussed in section 1.1, quoting an utterance invests it with spatial and temporal attributes that suggests its ability to persist through time: this suggestion helps endow the utterance with that ability. I return to Odysseus’s speech from Iliad 2 quoted earlier. There I said Odysseus rehearses Calchas’s prophecy. Now I specify that Odysseus quotes Calchas’s prophecy. Gregory Nagy writes, “The quoting itself is a demonstration of the unchangeability of these poetic words” (2003: 29): because they are unchangeable, they have to be quoted. I would say rather that quoting aims at entextualizing the utterance, at rendering it capable of being repeated unchanged, because it proposes the discrete existence and the portability of the utterance as well as its preexistence and subsequent survival. Moreover, having quoted the utterance, Odysseus explicitly makes it an object of analysis: “now all these things are being accomplished” (Il. 2.330). Calchas’s prophecy, he says, was correct. With this tactic too, Odysseus strives to make the utterance able to outlast the moment. I read the episode of Penelope’s dream in the same way. Beginning an exchange of muthoi (Od. 19.508) with the disguised Odysseus, Penelope asks the disguised Odysseus to interpret a dream she had in which an eagle killed her twenty pet geese and returned to explain the event (Od. 19.535, 544–51): ἀλλ’ ἄγε μοι τὸν ὄνειρον ὑπόκριναι καὶ ἄκουσον. … ἂψ δ’ ἐλθὼν κατ’ ἂρ ἕζετ’ ἐπὶ προὔχοντι μελάθρῳ, φωνῇ δὲ βροτέῃ κατερήτυε φώνησέν τε· “θάρσει, Ἰκαρίου κούρη τηλεκλειτοῖο· οὐκ ὄναρ, ἀλλ’ ὕπαρ ἐσθλόν, ὅ τοι τετελεσμένον ἔσται. χῆνες μὲν μνηστῆρες, ἐγὼ δέ τοι αἰετὸς ὄρνις ἦα πάρος, νῦν αὖτε τεὸς πόσις εἰλήλουθα, ὃς πᾶσι μνηστῆρσιν ἀεικέα πότμον ἐφήσω.” ὣς ἔφατ’,… But come, hear and interpret my dream for me.… But he came back again and perched on the jut of the gabled roof, and with a human voice he restrained me and spoke aloud: Page 44 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics “Fear not, daughter of far-famed Icarius. This is not a dream, but a real and good vision, which will come to pass for you. The geese are the suitors, and I, the eagle, was a bird before, and now in turn I am your own husband come home, and I shall inflict unseemly destruction on all the suitors.” So he spoke;…

(p.56) Odysseus responds (19.555–8): ὦ γύναι, οὔ πως ἔστιν ὑποκρίνασθαι ὄνειρον ἄλλῃ ἀποκλίναντ’, ἐπεὶ ἦ ῥά τοι αὐτὸς Ὀδυσσεὺς πέφραδ’, ὅπως τελέει· μνηστῆρσι δὲ φαίνετ’ ὄλεθρος πᾶσι μάλ’, οὐδέ κέ τις θάνατον καὶ κῆρας ἀλύξει. Lady, it is not in any way possible to interpret this dream by turning it another way because Odysseus himself has declared to you how he will bring it to pass. The suitors’ doom is manifest, for one and all, and not one will avoid his death and destruction.

Again, I start from Nagy’s interpretation of the passage (2003: 25): But there is in fact one way—and only one way—to respond, namely, by repeating the words already quoted by Penelope herself in verses 546–553. For the meaning to be clarified, the quoted words would have to be quoted again, that is, performed. We see at work here the poetic mentality of unchangeability: once the words of response have been performed as a speech-act, they are ready to be quoted again as a fixed and unchangeable saying. Nagy’s reading speaks to my interest in the connection between quotation and entextualization. Whereas he sees the eagle performing a speech act that becomes “fixed and unchangeable,” I see Penelope’s quoting the utterance of the eagle as an effort to augment its textuality. Moreover, Penelope makes another entextualizing move when she explicitly makes her quotation an object of analysis in verse 535. To conclude this segment by pushing a bit further, I look again to Nagy, this time to a footnote of his in which he refers to “the speech-act that is radiating from the dream or omen” (1990: 168 n. 95, cf. 2003: 24). Similarly, Donald Lateiner labels “‘visible speech’” the various signs gods send to men (1995: 48). One could say that, in explaining what an omen means, interpreters tell the audience what the omen says: they quote the omen. This act of quotation works to entextualize the speech act in the omen. Or one could stress that interpreters explain what an omen means through an act of intersemiotic translation (cf. Ready 2012: 79). Translation functions as a kind of quotation (Finnegan 2011: Page 45 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics 164). This act of quotation works to entextualize the text presented in the sign system used for omens. Either way, the act of quotation combats what Rebecca Bushnell sees as the fleeting, ephemeral nature of the omen itself (1982: 6). In Barber’s model, quotation also includes the incorporation of preexisting material that belongs to a different genre. To repeat, performers incorporate materials from other genres “with their genre markers intact”: “these strategies underline and consolidate the ‘text-ness’ of the materials incorporated. By being recontextualised within another genre, their characteristic features are thrown into relief and their pre-existence as text is affirmed” (Barber 2007: 78–9). I see two ways to apply this notion to the Homeric epics (cf. Jensen 2011: 265). Building on Barber’s model of quotation, one can gloss “quotation” as follows. The poet deploys material that is both generically distinct from its co-text and seems to come from outside the epic register, to be something that more than just Homeric poets would say. In addition, the poet can be said to quote a previous utterance even if he does not reproduce it verbatim (cf. Finnegan 2011: 161). From this perspective, audience members might have perceived certain verses as quotations. (p.57) For an example, I turn to André Lardinois’s work on the epics’ gnomic statements.16 He shows that using a toolkit of formulas and themes Homeric characters (re)composed such utterances (2001: 94, 105–7). These tools “constitute a distinct language that helps the speaker to create a gnomic saying extemporaneously and the listener to identify the expression as gnomic” (98). That is, “a number of these lexical and structural features…mark[s] the style of these expressions as gnomic” (100; cf. Tarkka 2016: 184). Homeric characters produce recognizably gnomic statements that stand out from the surrounding narrative: for instance, “acoustic elements…served to make the text of the gnomai stand out from their context. Expressions displaying such acoustic elements are, as [Joseph] Russo says, ‘the equivalent of complete little poems’ [1983: 123]” (Lardinois 2001: 102). Consider now that, while engaging in a flyting match and so performing (Martin 1989: 65–77, 141–3), both Menelaus and Achilles state, “what is done even a fool can understand after the fact” (ῥεχθὲν δέ τε νήπιος ἔγνω, Il. 17.32, 20.198), a variation on the idea that “learning brings suffering.” The sentiment appears variously expressed also in Aeschylus Agamemnon 177 Page (pathei mathos “with suffering comes learning”) and 250 (τοῖς μὲν παθοῦ- / σιν μαθεῖν “to those who suffer to learn”); Pindar Isthmian 1.40–40b Snell-Maehler (ὁ πονή- / σαις δὲ νόῳ καὶ προμάθειαν φέρει “And the one who suffers acquires in his mind foresight too”); and Hesiod Works and Days 218 (παθὼν δέ τε νήπιος ἔγνω “but even a fool, having suffered, can understand after the fact”) (Lardinois 2001: 95– 6; cf. Lada 1993: 118–19). The existence of these parallels suggests that audience members could have taken the Iliad poet’s gnome, “what is done even Page 46 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics a fool can understand after the fact,” as a quotation of preexisting material, provided that we understand quotation in the sense outlined two paragraphs previous. If our Homeric poets quote preexisting material in the character text, they not only, per Barber, affirm the text-ness of that quoted material but also find another way to introduce oral texts into the world of their characters as the characters make use of preexisting sayings. As for the second way to apply Barber’s findings on quotation and genre, I set aside the matter of quoting preexisting material but stick with the matter of incorporating generically distinct material. Barber reviews how in three different traditions of African epic the characters and the narrator present praise poems (2007: 55–8). Just so, starting from the explorations of the various genres of speech (Martin 1989) and the various speech types or formats (Minchin 2007) that Homeric characters put to work, I suggest that the characters depicted as performers in the Homeric epics work to entextualize (portions of) what they say by speaking in a generic mode that differs from their usual mode of speaking. This generic shift sets off and renders memorable or even extractable the utterance or the relevant portion of the utterance. To provide three examples of how the Homeric epics introduce discrete and distinctive generic modes in the (p.58) character text, I return to Lardinois’s work on gnomic statements and add David Elmer’s on epigrams (2005) and Benjamin Sammons’s on catalogues (2010). I look to the fact that each scholar stresses how the material he examines stands apart from the surrounding narrative. I reviewed Lardinois’s findings a moment ago: the epics’ gnomic statements constitute a discrete genre, distinct from the surrounding co-text. I build on these findings as follows, bringing in two additional points to arrive at a third. First, whether they are performing or not, characters do not speak solely in gnomic statements. Second, Homeric characters use these sayings when performing, but gnomic statements themselves constitute a genre of performance in their own right (Lardinois 1997; Yankah 2012: esp. 20–2; Tarkka 2017: 266–7; cf. Martin 1989: 77, 102–4, 108). Adding these facts to Lardinois’s contribution, I observe that in shifting to gnomic speech performers strengthen the textuality of either a portion or the entirety of their utterance; they bolster its capability to outlast the moment. Elmer discusses the five epigrammatic chunks in the Iliad: by the Trojan elders (3.156–8), by Helen (3.178–80, 3.200–2), and by Hector (6.460–1, 7.89–90). Each speaker performs. The Trojan elders “spoke out winged words” (epea pteroent’ agoreuon, Il. 3.155). Helen’s initial epigrammatic identification of Agamemnon during the teikhoskopia (Il. 3.178–80) comes in a response to Priam labeled muthoisin (Il. 3.171); one should transfer the implications of performance inherent in muthos to her next response, an epigrammatic identification of Odysseus (Il. 3.200–2). In Iliad 7, Hector speaks before the assembled Trojan and Page 47 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics Achaean forces (7.66) and by definition engages in a performance. In addition, Hector’s epigrams “are actually representations of what has already taken place” (Martin 1989: 136, emphasis in original): they are species of recollection, one of the genres in which heroes perform (77–88). When Hector speaks his epigram in book 6 in the midst of an intimate conversation (see Il. 6.405, 485 with Martin 1989: 19), he breaks through into performance (cf. Hymes 1975; Bauman 2004: 121). Now, of Helen’s epigrams, Elmer concludes, “Helen’s hexameters are quite far from oral epic song. They belong to an altogether different class of poetry, that of epigram; they furthermore distinguish themselves from other Iliadic epigrams in that they adopt the explicit form of the Beischrift or caption” (2005: 23). The generic features of Helen’s lines differentiate them from the surrounding epic narrative and from the poem’s three other epigrammatic statements. To back up a bit, one can say that the speakers of epigrams shift to a distinct, rarely used generic mode and that Helen does so twice over, as it were, with her use not simply of the epigram but of the epigrammatic Beischrift. I stress that when the Trojan elders (3.156–8), Helen (3.178–80), and Hector (6.460–1, 7.89–90) embed an epigrammatic statement in an utterance, they enhance the textuality of that portion of their speech and that when Helen uses a distinct epigrammatic mode for the entirety of her utterance at 3.200–2, she enhances the textuality of that utterance.17 (p.59) Sammons begins by elucidating the formal features of the genre of the catalogue, “a marked and peculiar manner of speech” (2010: 3). First, the catalogue is “a non-narrative form” (8; cf. Elmer 2005: 28). Second (Sammons 2010: 9, emphasis in original), a catalogue is a list of items which are specified in discrete entries; its entries are formally distinct and arranged in sequence by anaphora or by a simple connective, but are not subordinated to one another, and no explicit relation is made between the items except for their shared suitability to the catalogue’s specified rubric. Its distinct formal attributes mean that a catalogue “is a marked and unusual mode relative to ordinary narrative[;] it stands out from its surroundings” (21). Odysseus’s performance among the Phaeacians (e.g. Bakker 2009: esp. 131–5) includes a catalogue of women (Od. 11.235–327), for instance, that is “highly excerptable” (Sammons 2010: 76 n. 35). Beyond always standing apart for that reason from the surrounding co-text, a Homeric catalogue can evoke a specific genre, different from the poet’s usual mode. Zeus’s catalogue of women (Il. 14.315–28), labeled a muthos by Hera (14.330), resembles “a genealogical poem of the Hesiodic type” (Sammons 2010: 64). This notional poem, in offering “‘one action with many parts’”—or “a series Page 48 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics of episodes or disparate narrative threads”—“differs, structurally and paradigmatically, from the Iliad” (73). Resembling (74, 79) even if “fail[ing] to take the shape of a coherent genealogical history like” the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women (92), Odysseus’s catalogue of women departs from the poet’s concern with “heroes and heroic kleos” (84) (84, emphasis in original): The catalogue may represent the furthest remove from the kind of heroic tale Alcinous requests. This is because it has least to do with Odysseus qua hero of the Trojan War; because it reaches back to a time before Troy and says little about the war; because it focuses on women rather than heroes; and, perhaps, because it is non-narrative in form. Again, I ask what the performers accomplish with this generic shift. They do not make a habit of talking in catalogues even when performing. When characters generate these catalogues, the resulting generic shift from how they usually talk helps them entextualize portions of what they say. The entextualization of embedded, generically distinct material in the speech of Homeric characters emerges in another phenomenon as well. In this case, I start from Richard Bauman’s discussion of kraftaskáld legends in Iceland (2004: 15– 33). These tellings involve two genres: a saga (story) portion and a vísa (verse) portion (20). The story recounts how a poet, a kraftaskáld, responds to an adverse situation by fashioning verses that have a magical effect. Bauman asks, “How are genres brought into (p.60) dialogue?” (29, emphasis in original), and studies “for this one dialogic form how that generic contextualization gets done.” He observes that in these legends the verse portion can, one, be “formally impenetrable,” meaning “the narrative exercises no shaping influence at all in formal terms on the verse” (23), and can, two, exercise “a strong formative influence on the narrative discourse that follows it; it has the capacity to shape and permeate the narrative beyond its own formal boundaries” (22). Bauman’s analysis of the interaction between an embedded, generically distinct chunk and its surrounding co-text prompts consideration of what happens to the surrounding co-text when a Homeric character switches into a distinct generic mode. I suggest that the resulting interaction contributes to the entextualization of the generically distinct portion. By way of example, I investigate the catalogue of women that Zeus performs in his attempt to seduce Hera (Il. 14.313–28): Ἥρη, κεῖσε μέν ἐστι καὶ ὕστερον ὁρμηθῆναι· νῶι δ’ ἄγ’ ἐν φιλότητι τραπείομεν εὐνηθέντε. οὐ γάρ πώ ποτέ μ’ ὧδε θεᾶς ἔρος οὐδὲ γυναικὸς θυμὸν ἐνὶ στήθεσσι περιπροχυθεὶς ἐδάμασσεν, οὐδ’ ὁπότ’ ἠρασάμην Ἰξιονίης ἀλόχοιο, ἣ τέκε Πειρίθοον θεόφιν μήστωρ’ ἀτάλαντον· οὐδ’ ὅτε περ Δανάης καλλισφύρου Ἀκρισιώνης, ἣ τέκε Περσῆα πάντων ἀριδείκετον ἀνδρῶν· Page 49 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics οὐδ’ ὅτε Φοίνικος κούρης τηλεκλειτοῖο, ἣ τέκε μοι Μίνω τε καὶ ἀντίθεον Ῥαδάμανθυν· οὐδ’ ὅτε περ Σεμέλης οὐδ’ Ἀλκμήνης ἐνὶ Θήβῃ, ἥ ῥ’ Ἡρακλῆα κρατερόφρονα γείνατο παῖδα, ἣ δὲ Διώνυσον Σεμέλη τέκε χάρμα βροτοῖσιν· οὐδ’ ὅτε Δήμητρος καλλιπλοκάμοιο ἀνάσσης, οὐδ’ ὁπότε Λητοῦς ἐρικυδέος, οὐδὲ σεῦ αὐτῆς, ὡς σέο νῦν ἔραμαι καί με γλυκὺς ἵμερος αἱρεῖ. Hera, there is time later for you to go there too; but come, let the two of us go to bed and turn to love-making. For never yet did desire for goddess or mortal woman so shed itself about me and subdue the heart within my breast, not even when I was desirous of Ixion’s wife, who bore Peirithous, the peer of the gods in counsel; nor of Danaë of the fair ankles, Acrisius’s daughter, who bore Perseus, preeminent above all warriors; nor of the daughter of far-famed Phoenix, who bore me Minos and godlike Rhadamanthys; nor of Semele, nor of Alcmene in Thebes, and she bore Heracles, her son stout of heart, and Semele bore Dionysus, the joy of mortals; nor of Demeter, the fair-tressed queen; nor of glorious Leto; nor yet of you yourself, as now I desire you, and sweet desire takes me.

(p.61) Two additional passages help one discern the structure of this passage (cf. Hunter 2018: 156–7). Paris wishes to sleep with Helen (Il. 3.441–6): ἀλλ’ ἄγε δὴ φιλότητι τραπείομεν εὐνηθέντε· οὐ γάρ πώ ποτέ μ’ ὧδε ἔρως φρένας ἀμφεκάλυψεν, οὐδ’ ὅτε σε πρῶτον Λακεδαίμονος ἐξ ἐρατεινῆς ἔπλεον ἁρπάξας ἐν ποντοπόροισι νέεσσι, νήσῳ δ’ ἐν Κραναῇ ἐμίγην φιλότητι καὶ εὐνῇ, ὥς σεο νῦν ἔραμαι καί με γλυκὺς ἵμερος αἱρεῖ. But come now, let us go to bed and turn to love-making; for never yet did desire so encompass my mind, not even when I first snatched you from lovely Lacedaemon and sailed with you on my seafaring ships, and on the isle of Cranae slept with you on the bed of love, as now I desire you, and sweet desire takes me.

This passage has the following parts: 1. Proposal (441) 2. Unprecedented feeling of desire (442) 3. Exceeded precedent (443–5) 4. Present feeling of desire (446) Page 50 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics The other passage occurs a bit before Zeus’s speech in Iliad 14. The narrator reports Zeus’s reaction when he first sees Hera (14.294–6): ὡς δ’ ἴδεν, ὥς μιν ἔρως πυκινὰς φρένας ἀμφεκάλυψεν, οἷον ὅτε πρώτιστον ἐμισγέσθην φιλότητι εἰς εὐνὴν φοιτῶντε, φίλους λήθοντε τοκῆας. And when he saw her, then desire engulfed his shrewd mind, just as when they first had joined in love, going off to bed, escaping the notice of their dear parents.

This shorter passage follows a similar pattern: 2. Feeling of desire (294) 3. Precedent (295–6) Zeus’s speech in Iliad 14 segments as follows: 1. Proposal (313–14) 2. Unprecedented feeling of desire (315–16) 3. Exceeded precedents (317–27) 4. Present feeling of desire (328) This collation shows that, whereas parts 1 and 4 can be omitted from this topos, part 3 is the most variable of the parts and subject to expansion or contraction. In Zeus’s speech in Iliad 14, that part takes the distinct generic form of a catalogue. (p.62) I can now delve further into Zeus’s speech. Two peculiarities in its part 2 (verses 315 and 316) show that the subject matter of the catalogue (part 3) shapes part 2. The phrase “desire for goddess or mortal woman” (θεᾶς ἔρος οὐδὲ γυναικὸς) stands out. In archaic Greek epic, the noun eros (or erōs) in the nominative case takes an objective genitive once elsewhere—in a fragment attributed to Hesiod: δεινὸς γάρ μιν ἔτειρεν ἔρως Πανοπηΐδος Αἴγλης (“for a fearsome desire for Aegle, Panopeus’s daughter, was wearing him down,” frag. 235a Most). The noun himeros (“desire”), by contrast, appears several times in the nominative followed by an objective genitive: Il. 11.89 (sitou “food”) and Homeric Hymn to Apollo 461 (sitoio “food”); Od. 16.215 (gooio “lamentation”); Od. 22.500–1 (klauthmou kai stonakhēs “crying and groaning”); Hesiod Works and Days 618 (nautiliēs “sailing”). In addition, nowhere else does one feel desire (eros or erōs) for a generic individual. Far more frequently (twenty-eight times), the accusative form eron takes an objective genitive when it appears as the object of the verb hiēmi in the formulaic “to send away one’s desire for X” in the sense of “to have one’s fill of X.” X is usually food and/or drink (twenty-four times); twice it is Page 51 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics feasting (dais); once, lamentation. Menelaus presents a more elaborate instance: “Of all things is there satiety, of sleep, and love (philotētos), / and sweet song, and the incomparable dance, / of these things (tōn) surely a man hopes to have his fill (ex eron heinai) / rather than of war (polemou)” (Il. 13.636–9). I note as well how the syntactical equivalence of goddess and mortal woman—they are both objective genitives—mirrors their equivalence in Zeus’s mind: he has sex with females regardless of their ontological status. This equivalence contrasts with the conceptual opposition between the terms found elsewhere. Hecamede (Il. 11.638) and Briseis (Il. 19.286) can be like the goddesses (gunē eikuia theēisi[n]) because neither is a goddess (cf. Ready 2011: 14–15). Hera observes that a mortal woman (gunaika) nursed Hector whereas a goddess (theas) bore Achilles (Il. 24.58–9). The goddess (thea) Athena assumes the form of a mortal woman (gunaiki) when conversing with Odysseus (Od. 13.287–8).18 In sum, fashioning a phrase in Il. 14.315 that introduces the subject matter of the catalogue—Zeus’s sexual escapades—requires departures from the norm. Zeus speaks of desire (eros) subduing (edamassen) him, but eros subdues elsewhere only in Hesiod’s Theogony (Eros…damnatai, 120–2). The related entities himeros (Il. 14.198) and philotēs (Il. 14.353; Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite 17) subdue; eros “took” (heilen) Anchises (Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite 91) and, as I just noted, “was wearing down” (eteiren) Theseus (Hesiod frag. 235a Most). The subject matter of the following catalogue prompts this rarity. In archaic Greek epic, forms of the verb damazō primarily denote defeat on the battlefield (e.g. Il. 9.118, 11.98, Homeric Hymn to Apollo 542) or rape (Il. 3.301; Hesiod frag. 69 line 79 Most and frag. 123 line 1 Most). Zeus’s catalogue reviews a series of rapes, two of which resulted in the birth of male children who became renowned fighters: Perseus and Heracles. The verb’s appearance in verse 316 presages these themes. (p.63) Verses 315 and 316 are crafted with a view to the following catalogue. The same effect results from the use of the verb eramai (“I desire”) in verse 328 after the catalogue ends in verse 327. Even though verse 328 seems, and most likely is, formulaic (cf. Il. 3.446), its verb acts in this instance as a repetition inspired by the use of the verb at the start of the catalogue in verse 317 (ērasamēn “I was desirous”). Whereas Zeus’s catalogue is, to borrow Bauman’s metaphor, formally impenetrable, it shapes its co-text. This dynamic contributes to the entextualization of the catalogue. That the surrounding verses must accommodate the catalogue shows the catalogue to be a discrete, complete, unified, perhaps even ready-made, chunk—all attributes of an utterance capable of enduring through time.19

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Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics I next inquire into the spoken laments of the Iliad, another genre of performance (Martin 1989: 44, 86–8). Homeric characters who lament engage in threnoi and gooi. The former are “songs sung by singers who usually perform this task” (Tsagalis 2004: 3); the poet never provides the words of such a song in the character text (2, 6–8, 74). The latter, by contrast, “are personal lamentations uttered by the next of kin, and are delivered in speech (not sung) by both male and female mourners” (5, cf. 73–4); the poet often quotes a character’s goos (7). Scholarship attends to the distinctive dictional, structural, and thematic elements of these speeches (Derderian 2001: 45–8; Alexiou 2002: 131–3, 162, 165, 173, 178, 183, 237 n. 31; Dué 2002: 68–81; Tsagalis 2004; D. Beck 2005: 245–69; Gagliardi 2006; Perkell 2008), and, if one chose to focus on those elements, one would see in their repeated use the performers’ efforts to create bounded, cohesive, coherent, and memorable utterances. I focus here on the paralinguistic, prosodic, and embodied components of lament that previous scholarship discusses and how they help speakers of laments entextualize their utterance by placing boundaries around it and making it coherent. These components can signal the beginning and ending of a personal lament and enhance the lament’s separation from surrounding speech. Before she utters her lament over Patroclus, Briseis shrieks a distinctive “piercing…or high and modulated…repetitive sound” (Derderian 2001: 28 n. 56) and tears at her breast, throat, and face (Pucci 1998: 98; Tsagalis 2004: 60) (Il. 19.283–6): ὡς ἴδε Πάτροκλον δεδαϊγμένον ὀξέι χαλκῷ, ἀμφ’ αὐτῷ χυμένη λίγ’ ἐκώκυε, χερσὶ δ’ ἄμυσσε στήθεά τ’ ἠδ’ ἁπαλὴν δειρὴν ἰδὲ καλὰ πρόσωπα. εἶπε δ’ ἄρα κλαίουσα γυνὴ εἰκυῖα θεῇσι· when she saw Patroclus mangled with the sharp bronze, she flung herself about him and shrieked aloud, and with her hands she was tearing (p.64) her breast and tender neck and beautiful face. And, as expected (d’ ara), she spoke crying, the woman like the goddesses:

The particle combination d’ ara points to an event expected in light of what has come before (de Kreij 2016: section 57): her shriek and self-abuse signal that she will begin a lament (cf. Derderian 2001: 28 n. 56, 35, 53). Briseis ends her lament by ceasing to speak: “So she spoke crying, and the women groaned in answer” (ὣς ἔφατο κλαίουσ’, ἐπὶ δὲ στενάχοντο γυναῖκες, Il. 19.301). Just so, the poet returns to the narrator text after Priam’s lament over Hector: “So he spoke crying, and the townspeople groaned in answer” (ὣς ἔφατο κλαίων, ἐπὶ δὲ στενάχοντο πολῖται, Il. 22.429) (cf. Tsagalis 2004: 64–5). Christos Tsagalis judges the verb stenakhō to indicate “a groan of lament in answer to the preceding γόος” (2004: 66; cf. Derderian 2001: 37; D. Beck 2005: 247 n. 31). A

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Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics responsive groaning confirms the end of the spoken lament. Taken together, these cues help delineate the utterance and enable its entextualization. Briseis’s non-verbal activity brings me to what lamenters do not only before but also during their speech. Speaking lamenters have non-discursive ways to enhance the coherence of their utterance and endow it with textuality. Because the Homeric performers of gooi do not sing (pace Lateiner 1995: 34; Derderian 2001: 32; Dué 2002: e.g. 5–6, 2006: 43–4; González 2013: 387), one will not find melody as a mechanism of entextualization when it comes to personal lament. (Or, even if the poet and his audience thought it obvious that performers of gooi sing and that there was no need to state so explicitly and that the use of the verb form eipe (X “spoke,” e.g. Il. 19.286) to introduce a lament did not obscure that fact, nevertheless neither in the narrator text nor in the character text does one detect any reference to melody.) Although the characters who engage in gooi do not sing, the way they speak differs from how they usually do, just as “constricted airflow, audible breathing, and irregularity in pitch” distinguish the Kyrgyz lamenter’s performance (M. Pritchard 2011: 171, cf. 180) and “sobbing, voiced inhalation, cry breaks and creaky voice” distinguish the performance of lamenters in the Finnic lament tradition (Stepanova 2017: 487). Homeric lamenters “groan heavily” while they speak (baru stenakhōn, Il. 4.153, 18.323), the participle perhaps indicating “volume” (Derderian 2001: 26 n. 46) or, more precisely, “resonant sounds associated with the physical weight of grief” (28). Compare how, when Odysseus cries in lamentation (goaasken, Od. 8.92), Alcinous hears him groaning heavily (baru stenakhontos, Od. 8.95; cf. stenakhontes goōntes, Od. 9.467). They cry (klaiō) as they speak (Il. 19.286, 19.301, 19.338, 22.429, 22.437, 22.515, 24.746, 24.760, 24.776) (Derderian 2001: 27). Andromache speaks amblēdēn gooōsa (Il. 22.476). Tsagalis translates the adverb “with deep sobs” (2004: 57), and José González suggests, “she started wailing” or “lifting up [her voice] in wailing” (2013: 387). Finally, their goos is labeled adinos (Il. 18.316, 19.314, 22.430, 24.747; cf. Od. 4.721, 16.216). One usually takes the adjective to mean “vehement, loud,” but it may also suggest the rhythmic nature of the speech (cf. Pucci 1998: 99; Tsagalis 2004: 66): the heart (kēr) is labeled adinon (Il. 16.481; Od. 19.516); insects are (p.65) twice adināon (Il. 2.87, 2.469). All told, the lamenter’s speech exhibits a distinctive sound, as they groan, cry, and sob, and perhaps even a distinctive rhythm. At the same time, to lament in the Homeric epics is to engage with bodies, one’s own and that of the deceased (cf. Alexiou 2002: 6; Lateiner 1995: 34; Gagliardi 2006: 191). While speaking their laments, lamenters customarily do certain things to the bodies of the dead and to their own bodies.

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Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics Lamenters touch the dead as they speak (Derderian 2001: 35 n. 81; Tsagalis 2004: 59). Agamemnon holds the supposedly mortally wounded Menelaus’s hand (kheiros ekhōn, Il. 4.153–4; cf. Il. 11.488 and the several uses of kheiros with an aorist form of haireō to mean “took by the hand” (e.g. Il. 1.323, 4.542; Od. 12.33, 17.263)). Although the passage refers to non-verbal lament (cf. Derderian 2001: 16, 33; Tsagalis 2004: 171), compare how Odysseus’s men each hold him by the hands (ἔφυν τ’ ἐν χερσὶν; cf. Graziosi and Haubold 2010: 150 at 253) and cry in lamentation (goos) (Od. 10.397–8). Achilles puts (themenos) his hands on Patroclus’s chest (Il. 18.317) while he laments his dead companion. He does the same thing again later when he leads “the vehement lamentation (adinou… gooio)” for Patroclus (Il. 23.17–23) but does not offer a personal lament (Tsagalis 2004: 27 n. 101). His gentle gesture, to be linked with lament, differs from the violent movement with which Athena hits (ēlase) Aphrodite in the chest (Il. 21.424–5). Andromache holds Hector’s head in her hands (meta khersin ekhousa, Il. 24.724; cf. Il. 18.71). Priam’s statement suggests that a speaking lamenter might embrace the corpse: “Immediately may Achilles kill me, / as I embrace my son in my arms (ἀγκὰς ἑλόντ’ ἐμὸν υἱόν), and after I have fulfilled my desire for lamentation (goou)” (Il. 24.226–7). Several other passages point in the same direction (cf. Derderian 2001: 32 n. 67): Achilles wishes to embrace (amphibalonte) Patroclus’s shade and “take our fill of dire lamentation (gooio)” (Il. 23.97–8); Odysseus wishes to cry in lamentation (gooio) while he and his mother’s shade embrace (peri kheire balonte) (Od. 11.211–12); upon proving his identity to Penelope, Odysseus cries in lamentation (gooio· / klaie) while embracing (ekhōn) her (Od. 23.231–2). Lamenters attend to their own bodies too as they speak. Most obviously, they cry, and their shedding tears functions “as the necessary transformation and disfigurement of the mourner’s appearance” (Derderian 2001: 29). Priam “rolled about in the filth” (kulindomenos kata kopron, Il. 22.414) as he lamented Hector (cf. Il. 24.163–5, 24.639–40). Three moments of non-verbal lamentation in the Odyssey suggest that Priam performs actions typical for a lamenter who speaks. Lamenting for Agamemnon and for himself—see klaion and klaiōn (Derderian 2001: 16, 25, 30; Tsagalis 2004: 57 n. 174)—Menelaus rolls on the ground too: “and I cried (klaion), sitting in the sand, nor did my heart / wish to live any longer and to see the light of the sun. / But when I had glutted myself with crying (klaiōn) and rolling about (kulindomenos)…” (Od. 4.539–41). The same verses describe Odysseus’s reaction to Circe’s news that he is to travel to Hades (Od. 10.497–9). Thinking of the lost Odysseus, Laertes “took the black ashes / and poured them over his grey head, groaning vehemently (adina stenakhizōn)” (Od. 24.316–17). In response, Odysseus reveals himself and urges Laertes to “cease from your weeping and tearful lamentation (gooio)” (Od. 24.323). (p.66) When, after listing the names of the Nereids who surrounded Thetis, the narrator reports, “They all together / beat their breasts, and Thetis led the lamentation (gooio)” (Il. 18.50–1), one should understand Thetis to be Page 55 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics beating her breast too. When Odysseus’s men rend their garments and cry in lamentation upon learning that they must journey to Hades (γόων τίλλοντό τε χαίτας, Od. 10.567), their gestures presumably echo those available to lamenters who verbalize their sorrow. Similarly, Achilles refers to a woman wiping the tears from her cheeks with both hands as she groans in lamentation (Il. 18.122–4) (cf. Derderian 2001: 44). One can imagine a speaker of a lament doing the same. Our Homeric poets represent performers of personal laments using a distinct vocal presentation connected with lament and engaging in physical activities connected with lament. Lamenters sound as one expects them to sound, and lamenters do things to the bodies of the dead and to their own bodies that lamenters are expected to do. As a result, speaking lamenters impart coherence to their utterance. For such activity indicates which genre the speaker deploys: a family member who groans and cries or who holds the head of the dead man or who beats her chest or who rolls around in the dirt is presenting or will present a lament, not a boast or a triumphant insult. As Tsagalis shows, lament constitutes a discrete genre in the Homeric epics with its own “lexicogrammatical, discoursal, thematic and stylistic” features (2004: 18). I restate the point I made earlier when presenting Siikala’s discussion of the bodily activity of singers of Kalevala-meter epic (section 1.1). By invoking the genre of lament, the bodily activity can be said to “unleash a set of expectations regarding narrative form and content” (Briggs and Bauman 1992: 147) and thereby to help make the utterance understandable, that is, coherent. When one knows what sorts of things a speaker will say and why he says what he says, one processes the utterance with greater ease. Beyond creating a false dichotomy between epic and lament (see, by contrast, Dué 2006: 39–43; M. Pritchard 2011: 185; Levaniouk 2018), Katharine Derderian overlooks the factor of oral textuality when she speaks of lament as “ephemeral” (2001: 15, 63), labels it “the opposite of the durable and continually accessible material σῆμα and of the epic’s own project of preserving and transmitting heroic memory” (25, cf. 40 n. 102), and claims that “its own diachronic significance as an individual composition and as a performative genre are [sic] minimized” (39). Rather, the poet showcases his characters’ entextualized laments. 1.2.4. The Poet and Entextualization

I have explored the oral texts that populate the world constructed in the epics and the oral texts that the internal characters fashion before our eyes. The narrator text also contains what come across as discrete stretches of entextualized verse. Take, for instance, the catalogues that appear in the narrator text. I point again to Benjamin Sammons’s comments on the generic features unique to catalogues. David Elmer too seeks to “differentiate the Catalogue [in Iliad 2] and catalogic poetry from epic narrative proper” (p.67) Page 56 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics and suggests that when cataloguing “the poet speaks with the voice of inscription” (2005: 27), that one sees in the Iliad “the conceptualization of catalogue poetry as the captioning of an implied image” (28). One factor contributing to the textuality of, for example, the famous Catalogue of Ships in Iliad 2 is its status as a distinct generic chunk within the larger epic narrative. Another entextualizing tactic appears in both the narrator text and character text, but on a much smaller scale. Recall yet again the Asante praise poet who presents and then explains the meaning of an epithet. If one follows the ancient commentators, the scholiasts, on the Iliad, one can see the same entextualizing move in the poem. The scholiasts claim that the poet routinely explains a difficult word or phrase: one writes, “the poet customarily engages in exegesis and explains himself” (Erbse 1969: 87 at 279h; cf. Nünlist 2009: 202–4). For instance, Idomeneus states, “but he shifts from knee to knee and rests on either foot” (ἀλλὰ μετοκλάζει καὶ ἐπ’ ἀμφοτέρους πόδας ἵζει, Il. 13.281). The Geneva scholion at this point relates, “He explains ‘he shifts from knee to knee’ with ‘rests on either foot’” (ἐξηγεῖται τὸ “μετοκλάζει” διὰ τοῦ “ἐπ’ ἀμφοτέρους πόδας ἵζει”) (Nicole 1891: 162 at 281). At Il. 21.494–5, the narrator likens Artemis to a dove “that from before a falcon flies into a hollow rock, / a cleft” (ἥ ῥά θ’ ὑπ’ ἴρηκος κοίλην εἰσέπτατο πέτρην, / χηραμόν). An A scholion observes, “kēramon: the critical sign is because he himself [the poet] explains (exēgeitai) what kēramos is, that it is a hollow rock” (χηραμόν: ὅτι αὐτὸς ἐξηγεῖται, τί ἐστι χηραμός, ὅτι κοίλη πέτρα, Erbse 1977: 241 at 495b). Modern commentators continue in this vein. Commenting on Il. 13.135, Richard Janko sees memasan de makhesthai (“and they were eager to fight”) as explaining ithus phroneon (“their minds swerved not”) (1992: 62 at 134–5). Martin L. West finds seven “explanatory glosses” of at least one verse that “clarify an expression or a reference that might be unclear or ambiguous” (2001: 12) (although he claims that someone interpolated these verses). Il. 5.415, for instance, “mak[es] it explicit that Aigialeia is mentioned as Diomedes’ wife” (12 n. 27). Barbara Graziosi and Johannes Haubold point to the different internal glosses provided for the word daiphrōn (2015: 7–8). Pandarus addresses Diomedes: “Son of noble Tydeus, of mighty heart and battle-minded” (καρτερόθυμε δαΐφρον ἀγαυοῦ Τυδέος υἱέ, Il. 5.277). The narrator applies a different explanation when speaking of Odysseus: “Odysseus the wise and crafty-minded” (Ὀδυσῆα δαΐφρονα ποικιλομήτην, Il. 11.482). At these moments, the text directs its exegetical efforts inwards, making itself an object of its own commentary. Even at this smallest of scales, one detects the impetus to entextualize. One can look beyond stretches or bits of verse. In subsection 1.2.1, I traced how the characters live in a world stocked with preexisting oral texts and how these and other utterances can possess an object-like status. Each poem as a whole is characterized as existing prior to its performance and as having an object-like status. First, through his request at the start of the poem that the Muse present the tale, the poet positions his account as “an already available” (Scodel 2002: Page 57 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics 67), preexisting entity that endures to be re-presented as needed (contra Haywood and Mac Sweeney 2018: 36–7). Second, whereas “Homeric diction readily applies craft metaphors” to “the deceptiveness of self-interested telling” (González 2013: 360), neither poem uses metaphors from the (p.68) realm of manufacturing to describe a mortal bard singing an epic song (359; cf. Svenbro 1976: 193–206). This occlusion does not mean “Homer does not attribute any ‘materiality’ to his own discourse” (Svenbro 1976: 198, my translation). In Iliad 3’s depiction of Helen weaving, “the act of epic narration is figured metaphorically as an act of pattern-weaving” (Nagy 2010: 278; cf. Clader 1976: 8; Elmer 2005: 24; Karanika 2014: 25), and in the Odyssey “Penelope’s weaving…may be read metapoetically to refer to the narrative in action” (González 2013: 362–3; cf. Karanika 2014: 41–2). Gregory Nagy adds Andromache’s weaving (Il. 22.440–1) to this list (2010: 278, cf. 2009: 183), and, analysing Zeus’s petrification of the serpent that ate the mother bird and her nestlings at Aulis (Il. 2.308–19), he finds an “implicit” link (2009: 101) between “the unchangeability of the petrified serpent” and “the notional unchangeability of the verbal art that reports it” (91, cf. 99–100). Numerous other objects also align the poetry with objects because they “signify poetic creation” (Porter 2011: 18), such as Achilles’s shield in Iliad 18 (Hubbard 1992; Nagy 2009: 101; Porter 2011: 18–19; pace Ford 1992: 169), Odysseus’s raft in Odyssey 5 (Dougherty 2001: 28–37; cf. Rood 2008), and Odysseus’s brooch at Od. 19.226–31 (Porter 2011: 33). Its preexistence and its objectification suggest Homeric poetry’s ability to outlast the moment (cf. Karanika 2014: 28). As for the strategies of entextualization that make this persistence possible, I cite scholarship’s continued interest in the ring composition, parallelism, narrative (often anticipatory) doublets, and lack of breaks in the narrative—all evident not only in portions but also across the entirety of our Iliad and our Odyssey (Otterlo 1945 (Ritornellkomposition); Lohmann 1970; Thalmann 1984: 8–32; Stanley 1993; Louden 1999, 2006; Nimis 1999; Minchin 2001: 181–202; M. W. Edwards 2002: 19, 24, 38–61; Kelly 2007b; Cook 2014; Arft 2017; Sammons 2017: 102–4). Modern oral performers use some of these techniques. Isidore Okpewho charts the A-B-C-D-D′-C-′B-′A′ ring structure of lines 259 to 338 in a bard’s rendition of Sunjata (Republic of the Gambia) (1979: 196–7; cf. Mulokozi 2002: 120). Steven Reece demonstrates the Bosniac singer Avdo Međedović’s use of an A-B-C-X-C-′B-′A′ ring structure over 1053 lines in the initial assembly scene in his version of The Wedding of Smailagić Meho (1995: 218–19). Daniel Prior’s analysis of an 1862 line long Kyrgyz epic recorded in 1862 (Hatto 1990: 13–71, 602) reveals a trend toward organizing the plot’s thirteen “high scenes” in a chiastic ring-like format (2002: 97–114). Inspired by findings in the field of conversation analysis, Raymond Person argues that oral poets can generate “even the most complex forms of ring composition” and that “oral poets can have the cognitive-linguistic abilities to produce such structures without the aid of the technology of writing” (2016: 175–6). Page 58 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics “Macro-parallelism” between “larger blocks of discourse” marks performances of the origin myth of the Shokleng people in southern Brazil (Urban 1986, quotation from 15), and “higher order parallelism” appears in Kalevala-meter epic poetry both within and between episodes (Frog 2017: 463; cf. Frog and Tarkka 2017: 211). For example, the episode of “the hero’s dangerous journey” demarcated by verses 75 to 134 of the Kalevala-meter epic The Song of Lemminkäinen exhibits three parallel iterations of a theme in which the traveling hero encounters and overcomes a dangerous animal (p.69) (Frog 2017: 464–6). The epic begins with an episode in which a hero converses with his mother, the episode dividing into three parallel iterations of a theme in which the following transpires: “a) the hero demands his armor (or some equivalent thing); b) his mother forbids him from going to the feast and warns him of a danger; c) the hero rejects the threat’s validity, perhaps explaining how he will overcome it; and then a) the demand is repeated” (467–8, quotation from 467). Parallelism between episodes, “serv-[ing] to link the adventure sequences of the epic and reinforce cohesion between episodes” (470), appears in the overlaps between “the hero’s dialogue with his mother about dangers on his journey and narration of the journey itself” (468) and “between the hero’s dialogue with his mother and another later dialogue in the epic” (469). An examination of “the so-called Sampo Cycle of kalevalaic epic” brings out the parallels in the initial and final episodes of the cycle (“between the creation of the world from an egg at the beginning of this epic cycle and the events surrounding the destruction of the sampo in a conflict with a bird-formed adversary”) (470–1). Nenets epic poetry (Russian Arctic region) likewise contains runs of parallel lines “between an advice or prediction of an adult and the event following the advice or prediction” (Lukin 2014: 126). Long stretches of parallel lines appear in renditions of Hanvueng, a Zhuang epic tale from southern China (Holm 2017: 392–4). Finally, I cite the Besemah poet Cik Ait’s (South Sumatra) performance of the Guritan of Radin Suane over two nights for the anthropologist William Collins (W. A. Collins 1998). Repetitions yoke the two nights’ performances together at the level of the individual verse (Ready 2018a: 134–5) and at the level of the story. Each night the poet deployed the same seven-part A-B-C-D-E-FG structure (W. A. Collins 1998: 38–47). Especially striking is how the sections that Collins labels D (Tests and challenges; matching wits with two women) and E (Symbolic confrontation with the enemy) take very different forms each night but are manifestly parallel. Just as modern oral performers use these techniques to fashion a cohesive work, so too our Homeric poets use these and other techniques to create a cohesive work.20 (p.70) I highlight as well José González’s suggestion that the poet represents himself as quoting the Muse(s) (2013: 183–6, 201, 208, 358, 642; cf. Nagy 1990: 26–7, 1996b: 61; Aloni 1998: 36, 91). On the one hand, if one understands the poet to be quoting the Muse, one can set aside the idea that the poet functions as a mouthpiece of the Muse (cf. de Jong 2004: 46 on Lenz 1980: 27; Ford 1992: Page 59 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics 179). The Muse does not possess the poet. On the other hand, the quotation model, like the mouthpiece/possession model, fails to account for the several passages in which the narrating voice is that of a mortal: “at certain points he gives expression to his admiration for divine objects or apologizes for his human limitations” (de Jong 2004: 49). One struggles to imagine the Muse saying, “And different ones were fighting in battle around different gates. / And it would be hard for me, as though I were a god (theos hōs), to speak about all these things” (Il. 12.175–6) (cf. de Jong 2004: 47; Graziosi 2013: 12). Qualifying González’s argument, one can assert that the poet sometimes represents himself as quoting the Muse. Indeed, when the poet demands of the Muse, “Sing, goddess, the wrath of Peleus’s son, Achilles” (Il. 1.1), he seems to imply that he will pass on precisely what the Muse herself performs. By positioning his utterance as a quotation, the poet endows it with textuality. In the Homeric epics, texts and textuality come to the fore. James Porter suggests that the Homeric poet might have had little anxiety over “the ephemerality of utterance” and that his “sense of the contingency and fragility of song and memory may…turn out to be an integral part of his poetic vision” (2010: 479). For instance, by anticipating the post-war destruction of the wall the Achaeans built around their camp (Il. 12.10–33), the poet “brings out the impermanence of things, and by implication, of the song that celebrates those things” (519; cf. Garcia 2013: 106, 148, 235–7).21 I would take a different tack. Based on this chapter’s findings, I envision our Homeric poets fashioning oral texts capable of outlasting the moment through processes of entextualization each time they performed. Two other pieces of evidence support this proposal. First, the practitioner assigns a telling label to his craft (González 2013: 417): the performer of epic is one “sewing/stitching a song” (339); he is a rhapsode (416–31). Like the metaphor of weaving noted earlier, “the metaphor of stitching parts into a whole” (419) points up the object-like status of what the performer generates (cf. Barber 2007: 1). Second, (p.71) performers of Homeric poetry explained and commented on passages as they performed them (González 2013: 299–304, 319–20, 328–9; contra Jensen 2011: 162–3). When Ion of Ephesus “speaks about Homer” (legein peri Homērou, Plato Ion 530c9 Rijksbaron) or “adorns Homer” (e.g. kekosmēka ton Homēron, 530d7), he subjects the poetry to “exegetical scrutiny” and therefore “reinforces its consolidation as text” (Barber 2003: 329). These two practices held from the start: Homeric poets were always called rhapsodes (González 2013: 344–5; cf. Nagy 1996b: 113, 2004: 79); Homeric poets always engaged in what amounted to exegesis (González 2013: 302). A critique of a comment by Ruth Scodel in her 2002 monograph and of a 1997 article by Andrew Ford can clarify, if clarification is needed, what I mean by saying that our Homeric poets produced oral texts and can demonstrate what Page 60 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics one gains when one grants that our Homeric poets produced oral texts. Scodel constructs the following scenario: “In whatever circumstances an original performance may have taken place, these poems were composed with the intention that they would be transmitted. They were new songs, intended to be remembered” (2002: 57). Scodel rightly speaks of the desire to fashion an oral poem that persists but situates this desire in the context of the production of the entire poem at some notional first performance. This statement approaches what I am arguing but does not go far enough: I do not wish to restrict the understanding of when our poets sought to produce an oral text “to be remembered” to some notional first performance. Every time our poets performed some portion of the tale of Achilles’s wrath or Odysseus’s return home (some portion of the Iliad and the Odyssey) they entextualized their utterance. Ford sees a shift in what thinkers did with Homeric poetry between the Archaic and Classical periods. In the Archaic period they excerpted portions of the poetry and engaged in “purposeful distortions of small pieces of epics” (1997: 102). By contrast, Herodotus’s use of the Homeric epics indicates the beginning of a conception “of an epic text as a whole and not just as a long string of episodes or as a storehouse of wise sayings” (102). Written, “palpable texts that may be read and reread as wholes” (107) prompt this shift. Ford rightly asks after the impact of the emergence of written texts. I draw attention to the attributes Ford sees Classical-era readers assigning to the poems once they emerge in written form: “complete, self-contained, and unified” (85); “coherent and complete” (86); “aesthetically unified” (98); “distinct entities, assumed to be coherent and internally consistent” (103); “long, well-designed” (108). One can compare Eustathius’s take on the emergence of a written Iliad (Commentarii ad Homeri Iliadem 1.9.1–4 van der Valk): That the Iliad is a single, continuous, unified, and harmonious body (ἓν μέν τι σῶμα συνεχὲς διόλου καὶ εὐάρμοστον)—that is the work of the grammarians who, they say, in the service of the Athenian tyrant Peistratus put it together and the ones who corrected it in the manner they thought pleasing, chief among whom was Aristarchus and after him Zenodotus,… The problem is that if one only connects these words with written texts, one fails to appreciate what our orally performing Homeric poets did and what their audiences (p.72) expected them to do. For these very terms or their equivalents have appeared repeatedly in my discussion of oral textuality. If our Homeric performers did not aim to tell the “complete” story in a single go, they nevertheless sought to generate a coherent, consistent, self-contained, unified, and well-designed text, in this case an oral text.

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Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics 1.3. Homerists on Texts These results enable us to make two important adjustments to how we talk about texts at a time when our Homeric poets and their numerous peers composed their poetry in performance. I take a step back. When they talk about Homeric texts, Homerists often mean some kind of a written text. They often mean the definitive written text (see introduction to Chapter 3). For some, a poet dictated his version of the Iliad and/or the Odyssey to a scribe in the Archaic period, and that written text became the archetype of the textual tradition (e.g. Reece 2005, Jensen 2011). For others, two poets of the Archaic period, one for the Iliad and one for the Odyssey, wrote the poems themselves over an extended period of time, and these written texts became the archetypes for the textual tradition (M. L. West 2011a, 2014). For these scholars, to talk about a Homeric text is to talk about a definitive written text. Gregory Nagy’s evolutionary model troubles this straightforward equation between written text and definitive written text. According to this framework, the Homeric epics achieved a state of near-fixation over centuries of oral reperformance without the intervention of written texts (Nagy 2014). For Nagy, written texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey appear after 550 BCE and take one of three forms: at first, as transcripts that can be used as aids for oral performances; then, starting in the later part of the fourth century BCE, as scripts that are mandatory for a successful oral performance; and finally, starting in the mid-second century BCE, as scriptures that take the place of an oral performance. Perhaps because scholarship in Homeric studies often uses the word “text” to mean “written text,” Homerists who want to think about the poet of the Iliad and the poet of Odyssey as oral poets avoid the word. Egbert Bakker refers to “the textless performance of the singer of tales” (2005: 50) and is wary of using the term “intertextuality” when an “allusion takes place entirely within the system of epic formulaic diction” (2013: 168, cf. 158). Jonathan Burgess urges a “focus on pre-Homeric oral traditions, not texts” (2006: 154). He asks after “the possibility of an intertextuality of phraseology in circumstances where there were no texts” and hesitates over “referring to oral narratives as ‘texts’ because of the high potential for confusion” (2006: 162, cf. 2009: 56–7). He speaks of “the Iliad’s textless yet allusive intertextual engagement with the epic tradition from which it stems” (2012: 183). Citing Burgess, Lowell Edmunds speaks unhesitatingly of “intertextuality without texts” (2016b: 4). Elton Barker and Joel Christensen set aside the term “text” because it “is not entirely apt for the echoic context of oral epic poetry, where meaningful repetition is heard in the wider and deeper sounding chamber (p.73) of fluid, ever-evolving, competing forms of the ‘same’ stories” (2014: 250). Students of oral tradition in other disciplines exhibit a similar concern. In an article on Zoroastrian oral traditions, Prods Oktor Skjærvø writes, “Dissociating the oral traditions from the general notion of ‘text’ has the advantage of not imposing on them the requirements of modern writing” (2012: Page 62 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics 25). In a book on the Synoptic Gospels, Eric Eve speaks of “fixed oral ‘texts’” (2014: 6), the quotation marks around “text” indicating a discomfort with the term (cf. Ormand 2014: 12). At the same time, Nagy and others use the word “text” when referring not to a written text but to the ever more crystallized product of a tradition of oral reperformance (1996a: 69, 109, emphasis in original; cf. 1990: 53, 1998: 78–80, 2003: 9): the Homeric poems reveal a high degree of text-fixation or textualization, and again I am using the concept of text without the implication that writing is a prerequisite. So the question still remains: what use is there for a transcript of such a text? the fixation of Homeric poetry as a text can be viewed as a process, not necessarily an event. Text-fixation becomes an event only when the text finally gets written down. This text exists prior to its being written down. In this usage, the word “text” points to an “increasingly less fluid” tradition of oral performance, a “stable,” eventually even “static phase” (1996a: 109): most performances were like other performances, not identical (109 n. 167), but similar (cf. Tsagalis 2011: 211–12; Barker and Christensen 2014: 251 “fixed traditions (or ‘texts’)”). A third application of the word text merits attention: I have in mind Bruno Currie’s discussion of “fixed texts” in the Archaic period (2016: 12–22; cf. Dowden 1996). Currie questions Nagy’s model for the gradual crystallization of the poems without the use of written texts (2016: 16), but, although he posits the existence of written texts from early on (15, 18, 21), he does not explicitly endorse the dictation model or the model of a writing oral poet. Without committing to a hypothesis about how they could persist, Currie wants to grant textual status to “discrete and sufficiently stable poems” (16) in the Archaic period and to speak of “(relatively) fixed texts” (17), “something like an integral poem: something with a considerable degree of fixity, not a ‘song-tradition’, in the sense of a succession of songs freely recomposed on each occasion” (159). The agnostic Currie conceives of a text the way many Homerists conceive of a text, irrespective of their allegiance to the dictation model, the evolutionary model, or the writing-oral-poet model: a (relatively) fixed entity, a poem handed down from performer to performer merits the word “text.” On the one hand, the word “text” generally means written text, and that has prompted some Homerists interested in the workings of oral poetry to jettison the term. On the other hand, Homerists use the term “text” to point to a fixed entity—be it a dictated text, an autograph from the hand of the poet himself, or a relatively rigid tradition of Homeric performance.

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Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics In light of what this chapter has shown, I suggest that those of us who think that Homeric poetry is profitably (not to say, exclusively) studied as one would study modern oral poetry should reclaim the word “text” and should speak without (p. 74) reservation of “oral text” (cf. Danek 2002b: 16; Ercolani 2014: 14; Karanika 2014: e.g. 78). One may take comfort in the fact that Albert Lord himself speaks of an oral performer’s fashioning a text—“a text, in the words that tell the story, is ‘created’ each time that it [the story] is sung” (1994: 13, emphasis in original); “the oral traditional narrative genres transmit stories and story materials together with the art of creating a text, that is, of making verses, themes, and songs” (1995: 20)—and of an oral performer’s remembering “a number of ‘more or less fixed’ texts” (39). I suggest as well that discussion of Homeric (oral) texts cannot be limited to a time when the Homeric poems achieved fixity (with or without the advent of written texts). Each time a Homeric poet performed, he crafted an oral text by putting to use the mechanisms of entextualization. Notes:

(1) Bauman ventriloquizes a performer’s self-description in a 2011 publication: “‘This is performance. I’m on! I invite you to watch and listen closely and I will impress you, entertain you, move you. I invite you as well to judge just how skillful, effective, and moving a display I can accomplish’” (711). (2) Eve, a scholar of the Second Testament, declares, “If oral tradition is to be taken seriously as oral, it must not be treated as if it were a kind of writing” (2014: 14; cf. 27, 64). On using the label Second Testament, as I do throughout this book, instead of New Testament, see Sanders 1987. (3) Tendentiously quoting Bauman and Briggs, Morales further confuses matters by erroneously glossing Verschriftung, the writing down of an oral utterance, as entextualization (2017: 73). Entextualizing does not mean writing. On Verschriftung and Verschriftlichung, see section 3.2 (pp. 109–10). (4) In their 1968 book on folksongs, Abrahams and Foss discuss “formal conventional devices which, through their use in various songs, have contributed to the songs’ retention” (31–3) and those features that impart a sense of “extreme regularity and balance” and “ordering” (61). Lord notes how a portion of a lyric folksong “is also held together by its structure reinforced by such devices of sound as rhyme and alliteration” (1995: 58). (5) Compare Alexander’s discussion of how exegesis enhances the proposition that the Mishnah (section 3.8 (p. 165)) be treated as a fixed text (2006: esp. chap. 2).

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Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics (6) “Kalevala-metric oral poetry covered an exceptionally large variety of genres: epic, lyric, charms, ritual songs, mocking songs, lullabies, and proverbs all used the same poetic idiom. Most of the poetry was performed as songs, but some of it was also embedded in speech, and charms were often recited. The poetic form was used in most of the Finnic languages: Estonian, Finnish (including Ingrian dialects), Izhorian, Karelian, and Votic” (Kallio 2017: 333). I speak of Kalevalameter poetry, but see Kallio and Frog with Sarv 2016–17 on the various labels given to the poetry. (7) I have outlined how gestures render an utterance coherent and cohesive and thereby aid entextualization. Marcel Jousse (1886–1961) saw a more intimate connection between oral texts and gestures. As Saussy explains, Jousse argued that “the oral style…is rooted in gesture and mimicry” (2016: 35). One can take “poems and proverbs” as “verbal gestures” (37). An oral text comprises “component gestures each corresponding to a bodily cue: on the one hand, on the other hand; the first step, the second step, and so forth, in a regular rhythmic alternating cycle” (140, emphasis in original). It exhibits “a ‘raising’ of the Burden, whereby the student takes on the weight of the chant, and…‘balancings,’ whereby the weight of the burden is distributed in manageable packets. The raising of the Burden has the form of the body’s forward-backward axis, and the balancing, that of the left-right symmetry of arms and legs” (141). As “a wholly bodily language” (147), then, the oral style itself renders “information memorable and transmissible” (37); the oral style’s “motor schemata…made it so easy for the ancients to learn their oral texts” (141). One might also explore how the following scenario makes an utterance more understandable and thereby contributes to entextualization: a performer’s physical attributes can mirror those in his or her text and function as a visual aid to comprehension. Cavanaugh discusses the impact of seeing an Italian poet with his “specially fashioned shoes” and his “slow, painful shuffle” declaim a poem about his arthritic feet (2017: 80). (8) A variant reading, found in van Thiel’s manuscript Y, replaces aoidēn with puthesthai: in that case men “will carry his glory far and wide and for men in the future to learn about.” (9) Declaring, “there’s no Linos-song in our passage” (2016: 296), Silva Barris argues that in Il. 18.570 linon is the subject of the verb aeide and is to be translated “‘lyre-string’ or even ‘flax’.” This reading encounters trouble when (1) in verse 571 the subject of aeide is said to possess a “voice,” a phōnē (leptaleēi phōnēi), and (2) in verses 571 and 572 the harvesters “follow” (heponto). (1) In the extant archaic Greek hexameter poems, an object is one time said to have a phōnē: “clear as the trumpet’s voice (phōnē)” (Il. 18.219). Elsewhere, animate beings possess a phōnē—mortals (Il. 3.161), pigs (Od. 10.239), birds (Od. Page 65 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics 19.521), monsters (Hesiod Theogony 829) (cf. Ford 1992: 177)—and the verb phōneō designates their utterances—mortals (Od. 1.122), immortals (Il. 2.182). Apart from Il. 18.219, the farthest one gets from animate beings is the assertion in Hesiod’s Works and Days that Zeus took away the voices (phōnēn) from the sicknesses that stalk men (104). From this perspective, it is easier to take pais, as opposed to linon, as the subject of aeide at Il. 18.570. (2) The harvesters “follow” the child, obviously. Still, progression (a) is easier to process than progression (b): (a) the child played the lyre and sang, and the harvesters followed the boy; (b) the child played the lyre, the string sang out, and the harvesters followed the child (not the string). I use Most’s Greek texts of Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days (2007a). (10) I use M. L. West 2003b when quoting the Greek texts of the Homeric Hymns. Translations of the Hymns look to M. L. West 2003b as well. (11) The Muse prompts Demodocus to sing the story (oimēs) (or, more technically, the “‘band’, ‘cord’ or ‘thread of song’” (González 2013: 393; cf. Nagy 2009: 231, 322)) of the quarrel between Achilles and Odysseus (Od. 8.73–4). Odysseus praises singers whom the Muse taught stories (oimas) (Od. 8.479–81), and Phemius claims that the god implanted “all kinds of stories (oimas)” in his mind (Od. 22.347–8). The word oimē corresponds to what the narratologist identifies as the “story” (the fabula in de Jong’s terminology (2004)): oimē “constitutes a sequence of events to be followed” (Clay 2007: 249; cf. González 2013: 207 n. 121, 368, 395, 418). Duffy and Short see in the Homeric use of oimē “a metaphor of the epic tradition as a kind of physical (binding or linking) structure or again as a kind of building” (2016: 66; cf. González 2013: 392–6). (12) M. L. West opts for the second half of verse 15 as quoted by Aristotle (Poetics 1461a22 Kassel; Sophistical Refutations 166b7 Ross): δίδομεν δέ οἱ εὖχος ἀρέσθαι (“we grant him to win glory”) (1998a). See M. L. West 2001: 175 for discussion. (13) Other poems begin similarly to the extent that they have a noun-epithet phrase in the accusative: Ἄργος ἄειδε, θεά, πολυδίψιον, ἔνθεν ἄνακτες in the Thebaid (“Goddess, sing about exceedingly thirsty Argos, from where the lords,” frag. 1 Bernabé); Ἴλιον ἀείδω καὶ Δαρδανίην ἐύπωλον in the Ilias parva (“I sing about Ilium and Dardania abounding in horses,” frag. 28 Bernabé; cf. M. L. West 2013: 173); Δήμητρ’ ἠΰκομον σεμνὴν θεὸν ἄρχομ’ ἀείδειν in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (“I begin to sing about fair-haired Demeter, the reverend goddess,” 1); Ἑρμῆν ὕμνει, Μοῦσα, Διὸς καὶ Μαιάδος υἱόν in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes (“Sing, Muse, about Hermes, the son of Zeus and Maia,” 1); an alternative proem to the Iliad runs, Μούσας ἀείδω καὶ Ἀπόλλωνα κλυτότοξον (“I sing about the Muses and Apollo famed for his bow,” M. L. West 2003b: 454; cf. Tomasso 2016: 397–401).

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Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics (14) For ancient and modern scholarship’s responses to (and difficulties with) verses 318 and 319—including the proposition that there really was a stone snake at Aulis—see Hunter 2018: 141–5. (15) I have focused on what the speaker gains for his text by attaching it to an object. Here is a good place to remember something of the converse—that only while the relevant oral tradition lasts does an object’s significance last (Ford 1992: 144; Scodel 1992: 66; Porter 2010: 477–8). For Homeric characters’ awareness of the impermanence of objects, see subsection 1.2.1 (p. 34). (16) I acquiesce to the usual distinction between a proverb and a gnome or maxim: “both are general expressions applied to a particular situation” (Lardinois 2000: 642), but a proverb is fixed, with different speakers producing the same saying, and a gnome or maxim is flexible (Cavill 1999: 80–1; Lardinois 2001: 106). (But see Arora 1989: 283–7, who argues that audiences accept as proverbs statements that they have never heard before.) Extant evidence would seem to prevent one from detecting the quotation of preexisting proverbs in the Homeric poems. (17) Elmer draws attention to the juxtaposition of the teikhoskopia with the scene in which Iris finds Helen weaving a robe that depicts the battle around Troy (Il. 3.125–8) (2005: 25): When she mounts the Trojan walls, she hardly needs to look out in order to identify the figures; she can simply “read,” or pronounce, the captions she might have applied to her figural representation.…Priam’s questions are only superficially necessary as a dramatic prompt or cue for the activation in speech of epigrams with a prior, autonomous existence. If one buys this proposal, one can see Helen working to entextualize her statements not only by shifting generic modes but also by quoting. In reading or pronouncing the captions—the preexisting epigrams—Helen quotes them. By quoting the epigrams, Helen endows them with textuality. (18) In the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, the mingling of gods (theous) with mortal women (katathnētēisi gunaixin) and of goddesses (theas) with mortal men (katathnētois anthrōpois) (50–2) serves as the poem’s precipitating crisis (Clay 2006: 165–6). (19) I do not ask if Zeus’s catalogue had an existence independent of its appearance in the Iliad, as Austin conjectures it did (2009: 84; cf. Scodel 2002: 145). One interested in such questions should note Chadwick’s discussion of the catalogues in Turkic (Kyrgyz and Kazakh) oral texts: “These are so long, and figure so frequently, that they doubtless have an independent existence apart from the poems and sagas in which they actually occur. This is supported by the

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Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics fact that some catalogues, such as that of the heroes of Manas’ retinue, recur several times in different poems in almost identical form” (1969: 173). (20) So-called contract analysis may provide Homerists with another way to think about the formal components of the epics’ structures from an oralist perspective. Contract analysis charts how characters take on commitments and fulfill them: it reveals “the arcs of ‘arousal and satisfying of expectation’ that [Dell] Hymes identifies with narrative form [1994: 332]” (Prior 2002: 29). J. Smith developed the concept and applied it to the Epic of Pābūjī that he recorded in Rajasthan, India (1986). Following in Smith’s footsteps, Prior applies contract analysis to Kyrgyz epic poems textualized in the mid-nineteenth century (2002: e.g. 89–93; cf. Prior 2017: 231 n. 12). The model of contract analysis builds on Hatto’s theory of what he terms “epic moments” (cf. Prior 2017), examples of which Hatto sees in the Iliad’s portrayal of Patroclus’s aborted assault upon the walls of Troy and of Apollo’s subsequent disarming of Patroclus (1980: 4). Epic moments are “brief scenes of dramatic power enhanced by visual magnificence” (4), and they help the performer remember his tale: Epic moments are highly charged narrative ganglia, and it is suggested here as one of the fruits of comparative study that possession of them in memory confers power on the mature bard to build up an episode or even a string of episodes. In other words, it is suggested that epic moments, in addition to being great poetry are mnemonic elements of epic of an order altogether superior to that of ‘themes’ or ‘formulae’, now so welldiscussed: and that they will therefore mark or help to mark the structures of epics. Homerists could yoke this idea to their interest in how the pictureability of what one reads in the Homeric epics suggests one way the poet remembered what to say and when to say it: he visualized his scenes and episodes (Minchin 2001: 133–7, 2008; Bakker 2005: 56–70; Purves 2010: 32–8; Clay 2011: esp. 109–19; Tsagalis 2012: 276, 295, 334). Homerists should follow Hatto in thinking about the pictureability of select key moments in the Iliad and the Odyssey. (I register here that Grethlein and Huitink challenge the pictorialist understanding of Homeric poetry’s vividness (2017; cf. Caracciolo 2014: 100). They prefer applying an enactivist approach to cognition to such events as the chariot race in Iliad 23.) (21) Porter offers an alternative reading a year later: the Achaean wall “is not a symbol of the impermanence of things pure and simple, let alone of writing or song” (2011: 33). For Ford, the wall “may be taken as a figure for a written-down Iliad”: “its destruction demonstrates a certain vulnerability of any [written] text of the Iliad from an oral poet’s point of view” (1992: 150, 152, cf. 156). Page 68 of 69

 

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics

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Oral Intertextuality and Mediational Routines in the Homeric Epics

Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An Interdisciplinary Study of Oral Texts, Dictated Texts, and Wild Texts Jonathan L. Ready

Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9780198835066 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198835066.001.0001

Oral Intertextuality and Mediational Routines in the Homeric Epics Jonathan L. Ready

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198835066.003.0003

Abstract and Keywords Building on Chapter 1, this chapter works with a more precise model of oral intertextuality than Homerists have used heretofore. Returning to episodes involving messengers in the epics, it touches on the anticipatory intertextuality evident in such episodes and then explores the messenger’s performance. It focuses on how, as mediators, messengers negotiate the intertextual gap between the speech they are tasked with relaying and their own speech. This investigation illuminates the portrayal of oral texts in the world depicted in the epics, especially what can happen to oral texts in that world, and sheds light on the representation of mediators in the poems. One can then make some inferences about the Iliad poet and the Odyssey poet. The poet characterizes himself as a mediator, but as one who performs in his capacity as a mediator, and the poet seeks to craft an oral text that engages in particular ways with past and future presentations of the same story. Keywords:   oral intertextuality, mediational routines, anticipatory intertextuality, messengers, intertextual gap, mediators, Homeric poets

Introduction This chapter builds on Chapter 1. Section 2.1 looks at how a model from linguistic anthropology concerning oral intertextuality differs from that current among Homerists. It then reviews how Richard Bauman uses mediational routines, already encountered in subsection 1.2.2, to see the model in action. By returning in section 2.2 to the mediational routines enacted in the Homeric epics and expanding the discussion to include the target dialogues, I glean more Page 1 of 32

 

Oral Intertextuality and Mediational Routines in the Homeric Epics details about the representation of oral texts in the world depicted in the epics, especially about what happens to oral texts. Coming at the question from this angle also allows one to study the representation of the mediator who plays a vital role in determining the fate of an oral text. In section 2.3, I point to the metapoetic implications of our poets’ presentations of these scenes.

2.1. Oral Intertextuality and Mediational Routines In Chapter 1, I queried the phrase “oral text.” That preparation allows one to study “oral intertextuality.”1 I look here at Jonathan Burgess’s attempts to address Homerists’ unease with speaking of intertextuality when no written texts are involved (2006, 2009: 56–71, 2012; cf. Danek 2002b: 3; Currie 2006: 2; section 1.3 (p. 72)). One appreciates the several studies by students of archaic Greek epic on intertextuality in an oral environment from before Burgess’s three pieces appeared (Pucci 1987; Cook 1995; Bakker 2001), those contemporary with them (Tsagalis 2008; Cook 2012), and those subsequent to them (Bakker 2013; Ormand 2014; Stocking 2017). Nonetheless, I find Burgess’s work especially amenable to a meta-critical engagement. (p.76) One strand in Burgess’s research focuses on the Homeric poems’ propensity for “motif transference” (2006: 177, cf. 2009: 59): Motif transference can be understood as a type of intertextuality. The intertextuality is not between texts but between the Homeric poems and pre-Homeric oral traditions. These traditions cannot be identified or equated with particular poems, and it is not text that is transferred, in the sense of words and phrases, but rather notional motifs (consisting of narrative actions) that have traditionally been applied to specific heroes. For example, “motifs pertaining to Patroclus in the Iliad (e.g. his duel with a foreign defender of Troy [Sarpedon], a death brought about with Apollo’s assistance, an elaborate funeral with games) correspond to motifs we know were featured in the later life of Achilles” (2006: 160 ≈ 2009: 63). Another strand in Burgess’s research attends to specific phrases. Burgess postulates (2012: 168, cf. 2009: 61) a textless intertextuality in early Greek epic that would involve specific epic phraseology. By this I do not mean an oral poem reusing words that have been composed for a previous oral poem, but rather an oral epic reusing phraseology that has become associated with specific mythological situations as they were traditionally articulated in the oral epic tradition. He concludes (2012: 183): The source of the phraseology that I have explored is the general epic tradition, not specific poems. This has allowed me to propose the existence Page 2 of 32

 

Oral Intertextuality and Mediational Routines in the Homeric Epics of a textless intertextuality that involves not one text influencing another, but the traditional articulation of an episode being reflected by a secondary articulation of it. The passages considered ‘primary’ for the purposes of my investigation simply contain phraseology commonly used for the situations that they describe; they need not represent the only or best or earliest compositions of these scenes. Nonetheless these ‘primary’ passages provide testimony for the traditional employment of phraseology in specific circumstances. With this evidence in hand we have been able to uncover surprisingly detailed examples of the Iliad’s textless yet allusive intertextual engagement with the epic tradition from which it stems. Burgess’s findings illuminate the relationship between the Homeric epics, other stories, and the epic tradition writ large. Three components of Burgess’s model catch my eye. First, Burgess’s intertextuality finds an item in one story referring to an item in a different story. Burgess considers, for instance, how events or phrases in the Iliad refer to “extra-Iliadic myth” (2006: 175; cf. 162, 166, 169–70; 2009: 58, 66; 2012: 181). Similarly, other investigators have shown how “the Odyssey continually evokes alternative versions of its own story” (Danek 2002b: 16)—for example, the scenes involving the loyal slave Dolius evoke an alternative tale in which Odysseus returns to Ithaca with a band of men and drives out the suitors with the help of Laertes and Penelope (Haller 2013)—or how the Odyssey interacts in its scenes of epiphany “with the narrative traditions preserved in the [Homeric] Hymn to Demeter” (Cook 2012, quotation from 54). Second—and this feature does not surprise but is worth mentioning—Burgess’s intertextuality looks backward: the Homeric poems interact with predecessors, with previously performed (p.77) material. Other Homerists’ incisive explorations of a range of intertextual strategies proceed in the same two ways (Tsagalis 2008, 2011: 221– 3, 2014b; Rutherford 2012: 167; Bakker 2013: 168; Currie 2016). Third, Burgess stresses the need for the target to depart from the source: “modified iteration is the basic recipe for intertextuality, certainly for intertextuality that is potentially significant and allusive” (2012: 176); “the correspondence, coupled with variance, produces intertextuality” (179); “this is iteration with variation, resulting in significantly allusive intertextuality” (181). Likewise, Kirk Ormand demonstrates how for the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women intertextual engagements with the Iliad and the Odyssey are a matter of reworking material from the Iliad and the Odyssey (2014: 138–48, 173–6). As I will now show, the concept of intertextuality can also apply to reiterations of the same story; intertextuality can be anticipatory; and intertextuality can accommodate a range of relationships between intertexts. Heartened by Homerists’ productive use of the work of Mikhail Bakhtin (Peradotto 1990, 1993, 2002; Felson-Rubin 1993; Nagy 2002; Kahane 2005), I find that the Bakhtinian-inflected approach of linguistic anthropologists to oral Page 3 of 32

 

Oral Intertextuality and Mediational Routines in the Homeric Epics intertextuality can help the Homerist just as it has aided other classicists (cf. Nicholson 2013; Wells 2016). Per this approach, the oral text looks backward and forward as it interacts with previous oral texts and anticipates the subsequent emergence of related oral texts (Bauman 2004: 4). The relationship between these texts is to be labeled intertextual. I single out three ideas in this model for further commentary and explication by way of examples. (1) In a study of epinician’s interactions with local oral traditions during the Archaic and early Classical periods, Nigel Nicholson points out a “radical” feature of Bakhtinian intertextuality (2016: 47; cf. Rutherford 2012: 155): Each utterance is fundamentally “addressive,” taking shape in response not only to prior utterances but also to subsequent speech acts—possible responses or objections—so that it is constructed in anticipation of possible contemporary or future utterances. Texts can thus be in dialogue with other texts in the process of formation, or with texts that are possible in a given social formation but are not being actualized. For researchers in other fields too the oral text can look forward. I quote again from the passage presented in section 1.1 (Barber 2005: 266): Something is understood to be constituted in utterance that can be abstracted or detached from the immediate context and re-embodied in a future performance…They [oral traditions] have been constituted precisely in order to be detachable from the immediate context, and capable of being transmitted in time and disseminated in space. Karin Barber continues in this vein when she turns to African praise poetry (2005: 268): Text is consolidated and rendered detachable from its immediate context— but only so that it can be re-activated and re-embedded in a new context of utterance,…The techniques… under discussion involve a certain reflexivity —a consciousness of text as something created in order to be expounded, recontextualized and reflected upon. (p.78) Oral texts look forward both to their reperformance and to their exegesis: for example, epithets in Yorùbá praise poetry generate exegetical performances in another genre (Barber 2005: 270–1, cf. 1999: 32–3). Oral texts look forward as well to their reappearance or mention in still other kinds of oral texts: for example, “a shamanic performance of ritual exorcism…anticipates, perhaps, the patient’s narrative account to her family of her healing experience” (Bauman 2004: 6). In short, oral texts not only recall previous oral texts but also anticipate subsequent oral texts.

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Oral Intertextuality and Mediational Routines in the Homeric Epics (2) An oral text’s intertexts include both those that belong (2a) to its genre and (2b) to other presentations of the same tale. Regarding (2a), Richard Bauman speaks of “generic intertextuality” (2004: 5) and defines it as follows (4): When an utterance is assimilated to a given genre, the process by which it is produced and interpreted is mediated through its intertextual relationship with prior texts. The invocation of generic framing devices such as “Once upon a time”…carry with them sets of expectations concerning the further unfolding of the discourse, indexing other texts initiated by such opening formulae. That is, an oral text interacts with “the generic schema—or other instances of the generic class” (7). An intertextual relationship can obtain both between a given text and an abstract generic framework and between a given text and another text or other texts that adhere to the same generic framework (cf. 2012: 103; cf. Shuman 1986: 14, 187). Georg Danek touches on the former phenomenon in his analysis of how oral poems can evoke a generic model, although he concerns himself with those moments in which the poet points to the model only to deviate from it (2002b: esp. 8–12).2 Before turning to (2b), I add that one need not limit an oral text’s intertexts solely to those in the same genre. In her study of oral performance in the Chhattisgarh region of India, Joyce Flueckiger speaks of the “intertextual relationships” that obtain between performances in different genres in the same community (1996: 163). Of the performance in the Arab world of sīra (siyar in the plural), “a popular pseudo-historical heroic tale about the biography of the main protagonist” (2012: 637), Thomas Herzog observes, “they contain often intertextual references, not only to other popular maghāzī, futūḥ and siyar, but also to scholarly works, for instance in the field of historiography” (643). Timothy Tangherlini advocates studying “the intersections among genres—and the close connections among all the accounts in an informant’s repertoire” (2013b: 188; cf. 170, 227). One can agree with Christos Tsagalis when he says that listening to an oral epic performer prompts the audience to recollect “other epic songs performed under similar conditions” but can disagree when he states that this audience would not recollect “a lyric performance” (2011: 232, emphasis in original). (p.79) Regarding (2b), one can speak of “reiteration”: “saying again what has been said before, in what may be construed as ‘the same’ form. The reiterated text may be quoted or attributed to a prior speaker, that is, reported as having been said by another…, or it may simply be said again, without explicit attribution” (Bauman 2004: 5). Now, “the potential for texts to circulate, to be spoken again”—in other words, “the iterability of texts”—“constitutes one of the most powerful bases for the potentiation and production of intertextuality” (4, cf. 8). An oral text engages intertextually not only with presentations of stories Page 5 of 32

 

Oral Intertextuality and Mediational Routines in the Homeric Epics about other characters—again, think of the Iliad’s interactions with, for example, Theban epic (Tsagalis 2014a)—and not only with presentations of alternative accounts of what happened to a given character—again, think of the Odyssey’s interactions with other versions of Odysseus’s homecoming. An oral text also engages intertextually with iterations of the same story (cf. Bauman 2008: 31, 33). For instance, an intertextual analysis of the Karelian Luka Tarasov’s performance of the Sailing Expedition requires comparing it with two other singers’ presentations of the same song (DuBois 1995: 134–41, 148). (3) An intertextual gap emerges between these intertexts (Briggs and Bauman 1992: esp. 149–55; A.-L. Siikala 2000b: 360–2; Bauman 2004: 28, 147, 153, 157– 8; 2008: 31). Sometimes the gap is minimized, as performers strive to replicate previous presentations. Sometimes the gap is widened or even maximized, as performers strive to distance their presentation from previous presentations. A performer can also minimize and maximize the gap over the course of a single performance. For instance, Bauman investigates an Icelandic storyteller’s “linking of his own current performance to prior performances and his manipulation of the intertextual tension between replication and the purposeful construction of an intertextual gap” (2004: 11, cf. 127). To illuminate the components of this model of oral intertextuality, Bauman turns to mediational routines in medieval Irish poetry, Fijian epic, and Akan chiefly discourse (2004: 128–58). To pick up on what I reviewed in subsection 1.2.2, a mediational routine begins with a source generating an oral text for another, a performing mediator, to pass on to a target. With this formulation, I stress a central point in Bauman’s analysis—namely, that the mediator qualifies as a performer. Two contextually distinct oral texts emerge: the source utterance or text produced by the source in a source dialogue and the target utterance or text produced by the performing mediator in a target dialogue. These two texts become intertexts, and one can explore their intertextual relationship. In other words, these routines make explicit most of the workings of oral intertextuality in the model outlined earlier: they speak to point (1) because they provide a source text constructed in anticipation of a subsequent text (in this case, its own re-presentation); they speak to point (2b) because they provide a target text that serves as a reiteration of a specific source text; and they speak to point (3) because they provide a target text that can exhibit minimal and/or maximal differences from the source text. This model of oral intertextuality should prima facie interest the Homerist, as should the study of mediational routines in other cultures. The model reminds one that our Homeric poets, as oral traditional poets operating in a living oral tradition, by (p.80) definition produce oral texts that look backward to a range of previous oral texts and anticipate a range of subsequent oral texts and that adopt a range of positions regarding those texts. As I mentioned earlier, Homerists are comfortable investigating the Homeric poems’ relationship to the Page 6 of 32

 

Oral Intertextuality and Mediational Routines in the Homeric Epics already said. Yet we have focused to date on the epics’ interactions with other stories and rival versions, different from those we possess, and have neglected to consider the relationship between instantiations of the same tale. Furthermore, we have prioritized departures from the source in our investigations of intertextual relationships, but we should also explore intertextual connections when the target exhibits a minimal degree of difference from the source. Finally, we have paid less attention to an anticipatory intertextuality, to, for instance, how our poets might have prepared for subsequent accounts of their performances, for appropriation of their work by other performers, or for their own reperformances. Scholarship, though, is ready for such a move. Summarizing Derek Collins’s work on how one rhapsode might pick up where another left off (“hypoleptic delivery”), José González notes, “The dynamics of hypolepsis point backward and forward, i.e. they are inherently reactive and proactive. Song sequencing and seam-stitching necessarily regard how the performer who leaves off sets up the thread that his successor must pick up” (2013: 388–9, emphasis in original). Now, mediational routines make explicit several of the dynamics of any oral performer’s—including our Homeric poets’—intertextual engagements: remember (1), (2b), and (3) from the previous paragraph. The Homerist will benefit from studying such routines. Additionally, the hexameter poet sets himself up as a mediating performer (cf. Aloni 1998: 90; Laird 1999: 300–5, 2002: 130–1, 2003: 167; González 2013: 4, 202, 642, 664). The Muse(s) speak(s) to the poet, and the poet passes on what he hears to his audience. For instance, the Iliad’s narrator requests of the Muses, “Tell me now” (espete nun moi) which Achaeans came to Troy (Il. 2.484; cf. Il. 2.761, 11.218; Od. 1.1; Hesiod Theogony 114). Nine verses later, having heard or beginning to hear from the Muses, the narrator starts to relay to the audience what the Muses said: “Now (au) I will tell (ereō) the leaders of the ships and all the ships” (2.493). Scholars disagree about how closely the poet cleaves to what the Muse(s) say(s). As noted in subsection 1.2.4, González argues that the poet represents himself as quoting the Muse(s) (2013: 183–6, 201, 208, 358, 642). Speaking of the passage from Iliad 2, González finds that ereō “implies that the Muses are answering his request in 484–487 for this catalog” (2013: 358). Benjamin Sammons reads the verb differently: “the Muses’ assistance is left unclear, an ambiguity reinforced by the strong first-person verb [ereō]…His show of piety before the Muses perhaps conceals how his own skillful arrangement of data goes beyond what they have to offer” (2010: 154–5; cf. 180, 185). Even under Sammons’s more skeptical reading, the poet positions himself as a mediator. To the extent that our Homeric poets assume the position of performing mediator in a mediational routine, the Homerist will profit from examining such routines. But the Homerist need not go far in search of mediational routines. As noted in subsection 1.2.2, the Iliad poet and the Odyssey poet include mediational routines in their poems (cf. de Jong 2004: 180–5; Martin 1989: 51–4; Kelly Page 7 of 32

 

Oral Intertextuality and Mediational Routines in the Homeric Epics 2007a: 325–9) in which (p.81) they quote both the source text and target text in full. They need not do so (de Jong 2004: 181; D. Beck 2012: 125–7; cf. Létoublon 1987: 132–5; Laird 1999: 271). For instance, the narrator reports but does not quote Hector’s order to two heralds, one of whom is Idaeus, to summon Priam (Il. 3.116–17). Whereas the poet does not quote this source text, he does quote Idaeus’s target text presented to Priam (3.250–8, cf. Il. 18.165–86).3 The poet further distinguishes the complete mediational routines by segregating them from other, unmarked scenes of transmission. The poet makes clear that a source text is being positioned vis-à-vis a target text and that all the participating characters knowingly engage in a mediational routine (cf. Bauman 2004: 130). In the first place, as reviewed in subsection 1.2.2, the source in these scenes explicitly tasks the mediator with relaying his words. By contrast, in other scenes in which information moves from one individual to another, the first speaker does not enjoin the second to pass along his or her words. What is more, the mediator indicates a mediational routine is underway by stating that he or she brings a message from a specific source (cf. Cesca 2017: 34). By contrast, Helenus tells Hector to tell (eipe) Hecuba to offer a robe to Athena and to promise the goddess a sacrifice if she puts an end to Diomedes’s aristeia (Il. 6.86–101). Hector repeats Helenus’s order to Hecuba, but he does not tell her that he brings a message from Helenus (6.269–80; cf. Il. 24.292–5, 310–13). Ajax tells Menelaus to tell Antilochus to tell (eipein) Achilles that Patroclus is dead (Il. 17.652–5; see D. Beck 2012: 176–8). Both Menelaus and Antilochus claim they are bringing a “ghastly message” (lugrēs aggeliēs, Il. 17.686, 18.18–19), but neither states that they pass on a message from someone else. Rather, they imply that they provide information, or news, that unnamed others know already.4 The poet’s unabridged mediational routines should be useful sites for learning about the representation of oral intertextuality and of performing mediators in the Homeric epics and about the metapoetic implications of those representations.

2.2. Mediational Routines in the Homeric Epics I have one quick point to make about the source text (subsection 2.2.1). I will spend more time with the target text (subsection 2.2.2). (p.82) 2.2.1. The Source Text

In subsection 1.2.2, I analyzed what the source says in the source dialogue of a mediational routine. I reviewed how the source declares that he wants his utterance repeated—see under (B) in each analysis—and how he goes about entextualizing it so as to enable its recontextualization in a target dialogue—see under (B), (C), and (D) in each analysis. With the vocabulary of intertextuality to hand, I can now specify that the source dialogue evinces an anticipatory intertextuality, and an anticipatory intertextuality of a pointed sort. Source texts are not only crafted with a view to outlasting the moment, the point I emphasized in subsection 1.2.2. They are crafted with a view to a subsequent speech and with the intention of controlling that subsequent speech. These texts Page 8 of 32

 

Oral Intertextuality and Mediational Routines in the Homeric Epics do not suggest what someone say, nor do they seek to prompt a subsequent endorsement of what one says: one could find numerous examples of utterances in the Homeric epics that strive for these and similar ends (e.g. Il. 11.790–804, 18.457–60; Od. 6.148–85, 8.492–8). These texts explicitly aim to put a set of words in someone’s mouth. They highlight a critical dimension of the representation of oral texts in the Homeric poems: oral texts look ahead to the production of other texts and can seek to determine those other texts. 2.2.2. The Target Text

The target dialogues in the mediational routines make two important contributions. First, by raising the issue of the intertextual gap, they deepen one’s understanding of the representation of oral texts in the world constructed by our Homeric poets and show what happens to oral texts in that world. Second, they represent the mediator, the agent entrusted with the source’s oral text, as a performer. A target text falls somewhere on a spectrum of reproduction as the mediator minimizes or maximizes the intertextual gap (Bauman 2004: 152–8). The mediator can replicate the source text, making the intertextual gap as small as possible. In the passages examined in this subsection, the mediator either replicates for his entire turn or replicates for some portion of his turn. Let me pause here to offer a reminder about an oral poet’s ability to repeat passages verbatim or near verbatim when he sees fit to do so. The word-for-word repetition of a run of two or more lines is “one of the characteristic signs of oral style” (Lord 2000: 58). The Malay dalang (puppet master) deploys bilangan “runs in fixed form” (Sweeney 1980: 60), Avdo Avdić from Gacko in present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina uses runs in his poems (Goldman 1990: 43–8), and “in most of the Kannada oral narratives [in South India] we find large chunks of dialogue reproduced in the same narrative almost verbatim” (Ramachandran 2001: l). The sort of repetition evinced in several source and target texts—and elsewhere throughout the Homeric epics (M. Clark 1997: 221–30)—is something oral performers do. (p.83) In any case, at such moments two items require attention. First, Richard Bauman reviews the impact of strict replication (2004: 153, emphasis in original): The mediational routines we have examined play out the process of authorization insofar as they demonstrate by their very design the dominance of the temporally prior source utterance over the target utterance. The mediator’s replication of the source utterance, by preserving its integrity and displaying special care in its reproduction, amounts to an act of discursive submission, the subordination of present discourse to discourse that emanates from the past. Moreover, I would suggest, submission to the form of the source utterance has the Page 9 of 32

 

Oral Intertextuality and Mediational Routines in the Homeric Epics concomitant effect on the rhetorical power of the text: upholding the integrity of the form opens the way to acceptance of the validity of the message. In this way, the mediational routines we have examined are reflexive enactments of the process by which discourse is invested with authority. When a mediator in the Homeric epics replicates, one sees one way an oral text gains authority. Second, target texts that exhibit a small intertextual gap still exhibit a gap. For the reproduction of the source text “under new circumstances” means “it is inevitably grounded as well in the new context of the target dialogue” (Bauman 2004: 148). One speaks of the “double anchoring” or “grounding of the recontextualized text” (148–9). One can trace this double anchoring by noting the syntactical features of the target text. Critically, in their mediational routines our Homeric poets do not have the mediators represent their words as a direct quotation of the source—although they very well could as Agamemnon’s quotation of Dream’s words in direct discourse proves (Il. 2.60– 70) (cf. Kakridis 1971: 81–5; Bassi 1997: 332–7). Instead mediators reconfigure the source text so that it makes sense in the target dialogue as a report of an earlier speech. The double anchoring of the target text comes to the fore. Both the target text’s incarnation in the source dialogue and the changes required to make the target text operational in a new context stand out. These moments of replication reveal the durability and adaptability of oral texts in the world constructed in the epics. M. Eleanor Nevins’s summation of the characteristics of entextualized discourse—texts—applies to these Homeric texts: “Texts must be both full enough of specific meaning to be recognizable and distinctive, but empty and flexible enough to be amenable to new contextualizations” (2010: 1). Mediators can approach the matter of the intertextual gap in two other ways. In widening the intertextual gap, they can reentextualize the source text. To reentextualize means to “authorize the propositional content and illocutionary force of the message, not the discourse itself” (Bauman 2004: 154). In simple terms, reentextualization means saying what someone else has said but in one’s own words: a speaker makes his or her own efforts at entextualization. In moving toward a maximal intertextual gap, the mediator can challenge the source text and thereby generate “a challenge to the authoritative word” (158). These three positions that the mediator can adopt vis-à-vis the intertextual gap (replicating, reentextualizing, maximizing) demonstrate what can happen to an oral text in the world envisioned in the Homeric epics. In addition to tracking “the relative strength of the ties of the relayed text to source dialogue and target dialogue” (Bauman 2004: 148), one can also trace how the Homeric (p.84) mediator emerges as a performer. After highlighting how the source and/or the mediator define the mediator’s presentation as a performance, I chart the various forms their displays of performative competence take. Frequently, replication reveals skill: a competent presentation Page 10 of 32

 

Oral Intertextuality and Mediational Routines in the Homeric Epics becomes a matter of “replicating the author’s text correctly,…reproducing it well, marking it as worthy of special communicative care and effort” (Bauman 2004: 152). For its part, reentextualization produces an intertextual gap that draws attention to the mediator’s contribution. This contribution can display the mediator’s “virtuosity as a performer” (Bauman 2004: 154). Finally, when the mediators challenge the source text, one can see them declaring their independence as performers and seeking to introduce components of a successful performance into their presentation. The movement of oral texts seems always to be a matter of performance. I offer now close readings of the target texts in the mediational routines whose source texts I studied in subsection 1.2.2. I move from those target texts that exhibit a small intertextual gap to those that exhibit a large intertextual gap, and each explication considers the topics reviewed in the previous paragraphs in the order in which I reviewed them. (p.85) Iliad 11

Iris replicates the source text. Iris’s replication not only “affirms the loyalty and reliability of the messenger” (Barrett 2002: 24; cf. Aloni 1998: 80, 89); it not only “augments the authority of the presenting speaker” (D. Beck 2012: 165; cf. Laird 1999: 283). It also endows Zeus’s speech with authority.

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Oral Intertextuality and Mediational Routines in the Homeric Epics

Source text (11.186–94): βάσκ’ ἴθι, Ἶρι ταχεῖα, τὸν Ἕκτορι μῦθον ἐνίσπες· ὄφρ’ ἂν μέν κεν ὁρᾷ Ἀγαμέμνονα ποιμένα λαῶν θύνοντ’ ἐν προμάχοισιν, ἐναίροντα στίχας ἀνδρῶν, τόφρ’ ἀναχωρείτω, τὸν δ’ ἄλλον λαὸν ἀνώχθω μάρνασθαι δηίοισι κατὰ κρατερὴν ὑσμίνην. αὐτὰρ ἐπεί κ’ ἢ δουρὶ τυπεὶς ἢ βλήμενος ἰῷ εἰς ἵππους ἄλεται, τότε οἱ κράτος ἐγγυαλίξω κτείνειν, εἰς ὅ κε νῆας ἐυσσέλμους ἀφίκηται δύῃ τ’ ἠέλιος καὶ ἐπὶ κνέφας ἱερὸν ἔλθῃ. Up, go, swift Iris, and declare this command to Hector: as long as he sees Agamemnon, shepherd of men, raging among the foremost fighters and destroying the ranks of men, so long let him stay back and command the rest of the army to fight with the foe in the mighty combat. But when, either wounded by a spear-thrust or struck with an arrow, he [Agamemnon] leaps on his chariot, then I will grant might to him [Hector] to kill until he comes to the well-benched ships and the sun sets and holy darkness comes on.

Target text (11.200–9): Ἕκτορ, υἱὲ Πριάμοιο, Διὶ μῆτιν ἀτάλαντε, Ζεύς με πατὴρ προέηκε τεῒν τάδε μυθήσασθαι. ὄφρ’ ἂν μέν κεν ὁρᾷς Ἀγαμέμνονα ποιμένα λαῶν θύνοντ’ ἐν προμάχοισιν, ἐναίροντα στίχας ἀνδρῶν, τόφρ’ ὑπόεικε μάχης, τὸν δ’ ἄλλον λαὸν ἄνωχθι μάρνασθαι δηίοισι κατὰ κρατερὴν ὑσμίνην. αὐτὰρ ἐπεί κ’ ἢ δουρὶ τυπεὶς ἢ βλήμενος ἰῷ εἰς ἵππους ἄλεται, τότε τοι κράτος ἐγγυαλίξει κτείνειν, εἰς ὅ κε νῆας ἐυσσέλμους ἀφίκηαι δύῃ τ’ ἠέλιος καὶ ἐπὶ κνέφας ἱερὸν ἔλθῃ. Hector, son of Priam, equal of Zeus in counsel, Zeus the father has sent me to declare to you the following things. As long as you see Agamemnon, shepherd of men, raging among the foremost fighters and destroying the ranks of men, so long hold back from battle and command the rest of the army to fight with the foe in the mighty combat. But when, either wounded by a spear-thrust or struck with an arrow, he [Agamemnon] leaps on his chariot, then he [Zeus] will grant might to you to kill until you come to the well-benched ships and the sun sets and holy darkness comes on.

The intertextual gap between source and target text is minimal, but it is there. Used as a pronoun, tade (“the following things”) does not introduce direct discourse in the epics, neither in the narrator text nor in the character text. Iris’s tade (201) signals that she will not quote Zeus’s text but will redo it so as to make it fit this new context. The target text will both look back to the source text and be reconfigured so as to function in its new setting. This manner of recontextualizing Zeus’s speech materializes when Iris changes all of Zeus’s Page 12 of 32

 

Oral Intertextuality and Mediational Routines in the Homeric Epics third person verb forms to second person verb forms—compare, for example, 187’s horāi (“he sees”) with 202’s horāis (“you see”)—and his one first person verb form at 192, eggualixō (“I will grant”), to a third person verb form at 207, eggualixei (“he will grant”). To speak of these shifts as “normal epic convention” (Hainsworth 1993: 247 at 202–9; cf. Brügger et al. 2010: 19 at 28– 32) is to obscure the way the poet chooses to manage the recontextualization of the source text. And he chooses to manage it so that the source text persists but changes when reproduced in the target dialogue. Zeus tasks Iris with passing on his command to Hector—“declare this command to Hector” (τὸν Ἕκτορι μῦθον ἐνίσπες, 186)—and Iris makes explicit her role as the mediator in this mediational routine: “Hector, son of Priam, equal of Zeus in counsel, / Zeus the father has sent me to declare to you the following things (tade muthēsasthai)” (200–1). Iris does not author the muthos, but critically she is told to and then says that she will speak it. If to speak a muthos is to perform (Martin 1989: e.g. 12, 30, 40, 47), an individual tasked with speaking a muthos is also tasked with performing it. Even if one did not recognize the performative dimension of muthos, one could get to the same place. With these verses, Iris is told to and then does assume responsibility for the competent presentation of Zeus’s oral text. An assumption of responsibility for a display of communicative skill lies at the heart of performance. These verses not only signal Iris’s status as a performer but also urge one to evaluate her performance based on the degree to which she replicates Zeus’s speech. Iris excels in her task, carefully reproducing Zeus’s utterance. Describing her as a “mouthpiece” (de Jong 2004: 183; Barrett 2002: 57) overlooks this fact—“the messenger is never just a funnel through whom speeches are reproduced” (Laird 1999: 262 n. 7)—as does getting distracted by verse 201 with its denial of responsibility for the content of the order—one of the reasons why still today one uses reported speech (Holt 2009: 192, 200–1; Cesca 2017: 47).

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Oral Intertextuality and Mediational Routines in the Homeric Epics (p.86) Iliad 24

Source text (24.144–58): βάσκ’ ἴθι, Ἶρι ταχεῖα· λιποῦσ’ ἕδος Οὐλύμποιο ἄγγειλον Πριάμῳ μεγαλήτορι Ἴλιον εἴσω λύσασθαι φίλον υἱὸν ἰόντ’ ἐπὶ νῆας Ἀχαιῶν, δῶρα δ’ Ἀχιλλῆι φερέμεν τά κε θυμὸν ἰήνῃ, οἶον, μηδέ τις ἄλλος ἅμα Τρώων ἴτω ἀνήρ. κῆρύξ τίς οἱ ἕποιτο γεραίτερος, ὅς κ’ ἰθύνοι ἡμιόνους καὶ ἄμαξαν ἐύτροχον, ἠδὲ καὶ αὖτις νεκρὸν ἄγοι προτὶ ἄστυ, τὸν ἔκτανε δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς. μηδέ τί οἱ θάνατος μελέτω φρεσὶ μηδέ τι τάρβος· τοῖον γάρ οἱ πομπὸν ὀπάσσομεν Ἀργειφόντην, ὃς ἄξει εἵως κεν ἄγων Ἀχιλῆι πελάσσῃ. αὐτὰρ ἐπὴν ἀγάγῃσιν ἔσω κλισίην Ἀχιλῆος, οὔτ’ αὐτὸς κτενέει ἀπό τ’ ἄλλους πάντας ἐρύξει· οὔτε γάρ ἐστ’ ἄφρων οὔτ’ ἄσκοπος οὔτ’ ἀλιτήμων, ἀλλὰ μάλ’ ἐνδυκέως ἱκέτεω πεφιδήσεται ἀνδρός. Up, go, swift Iris; leave the seat of Olympus and announce in Ilium to great-hearted Priam that he is to go to the ships of the Achaeans to ransom his dear son and to bring gifts to Achilles that will warm his heart, alone, and let not any other man of the Trojans go with him. A herald may attend him, an older man, who could guide the mules and the lightrunning wagon and could carry back to the city the corpse, him whom brilliant Achilles killed. Let not death be of concern to him in his mind nor any fear: for such a guide will we give him, Argeïphontes,

Target text (24.171–87): θάρσει, Δαρδανίδη Πρίαμε, φρεσί, μηδέ τι τάρβει· οὐ μὲν γάρ τοι ἐγὼ κακὸν ὀσσομένη τόδ’ ἱκάνω, ἀλλ’ ἀγαθὰ φρονέουσα· Διὸς δέ τοι ἄγγελός εἰμι, ὅς σευ ἄνευθεν ἐὼν μέγα κήδεται ἠδ’ ἐλεαίρει. λύσασθαί σ’ ἐκέλευσεν Ὀλύμπιος Ἕκτορα δῖον, δῶρα δ’ Ἀχιλλῆι φερέμεν τά κε θυμὸν ἰήνῃ, οἶον, μηδέ τις ἄλλος ἅμα Τρώων ἴτω ἀνήρ. κῆρύξ τίς τοι ἕποιτο γεραίτερος, ὅς κ’ ἰθύνοι ἡμιόνους καὶ ἄμαξαν ἐύτροχον, ἠδὲ καὶ αὖτις νεκρὸν ἄγοι προτὶ ἄστυ, τὸν ἔκτανε δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς. μηδέ τί τοι θάνατος μελέτω φρεσὶ μηδέ τι τάρβος· τοῖος γάρ τοι πομπὸς ἅμ’ ἕψεται Ἀργειφόντης, ὅς σ’ ἄξει, εἵως κεν ἄγων Ἀχιλῆι πελάσσῃ. αὐτὰρ ἐπὴν ἀγάγῃσιν ἔσω κλισίην Ἀχιλῆος, οὔτ’ αὐτὸς κτενέει ἀπό τ’ ἄλλους πάντας ἐρύξει· οὔτε γάρ ἐστ’ ἄφρων οὔτ’ ἄσκοπος οὔτ’ ἀλιτήμων, ἀλλὰ μάλ’ ἐνδυκέως ἱκέτεω πεφιδήσεται ἀνδρός. Take heart, Priam, son of Dardanus, and fear not at all. Not to threaten any evil to you have I come here, but with good intent: for I am a messenger to you from Zeus, who, although he is far away, cares for you greatly and pities you. The Olympian ordered you to ransom brilliant Hector, and to bring gifts to Achilles that will warm his heart, alone, and let not any other man of the Trojans go with you. A herald may attend you, an older man, who could guide

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Oral Intertextuality and Mediational Routines in the Homeric Epics who will lead him until in his leading he brings him to Achilles. And after he leads him into Achilles’s hut, he [Achilles] himself not only will not kill him but will restrain all the others: for not without sense is he, nor without purpose, nor vicious, but with all kindliness will he spare a suppliant man.

the mules and the lightrunning wagon and could carry back to the city the corpse, him whom brilliant Achilles killed. Let not death be of concern to you in your mind nor any fear: for such a guide will go with you, Argeïphontes, who will lead you until in his leading he brings you to Achilles. And after he leads you into Achilles’s hut, he [Achilles] himself not only will not kill you but will restrain all the others: for not without sense is he, nor without purpose, nor vicious, but with all kindliness will he spare a suppliant man.

Iris closely replicates Zeus’s source text, one effect of which is to authorize Zeus’s utterance. Iris’s lusasthai s’ ekeleusen (“ordered you to ransom,” 175) straightaway positions her speech not as a quotation but a report of what Zeus said and anticipates the double grounding of the target text (cf. Létoublon 1987: 129; Brügger et al. 2010: 20 at 28). The existence of an intertextual gap, minimal as it is, appears in the shift from the third person pronoun (hoi “him”: 149, 152, 153) to the second person pronoun (toi “you”: 178, 181, 182). Furthermore, two instances of reententualization occur. Zeus identifies Hector as Priam’s “dear son” (philon huion, 146). Iris names him: “brilliant Hector” (Hektora dion, 175). Zeus said, “for such a guide will we give him, Argeïphontes” (τοῖον γάρ οἱ πομπὸν ὀπάσσομεν Ἀργειφόντην, 153). Iris uses a different verb and adds a (p.87) preposition, “for such a guide will go with you, Argeïphontes” (τοῖος γάρ τοι πομπὸς ἅμ’ ἕψεται Ἀργειφόντης, 182). Zeus tasks Iris with passing on the command (145) and thereby casts her as a performer. One can build on the previous discussion of Iliad 11 (p. 85): to speak a command (one of the genres included in the category of muthoi) is to perform in the Homeric epics. Iris herself states, “I am a messenger to you from Zeus” (173). Iris does more here than just assert to Priam that she “repeats a message verbatim” (Létoublon 1987: 131, my translation). Again, in assuming responsibility for the competent presentation of Zeus’s oral text, Iris declares herself a performer. Her competent presentation consists in part in a conscientious replication of Zeus’s text. At the same time, her choice to reentextualize in verse 182 highlights her skill. It would have been difficult to transfer Zeus’s opassomen (“we will give”) to the target text. Iris could not have said “they will give” Page 15 of 32

 

Oral Intertextuality and Mediational Routines in the Homeric Epics because it would not have been immediately clear who the “they” were. She opts for the elegant workaround of hepsetai (“will follow”) and thereby ensures that Priam understands what she is saying. Good performers aim for clarity (subsection 5.2.2). Iliad 15

Source text (15.158–67): βάσκ’ ἴθι, Ἶρι ταχεῖα, Ποσειδάωνι ἄνακτι πάντα τάδ’ ἀγγεῖλαι, μηδὲ ψευδάγγελος εἶναι. παυσάμενόν μιν ἄνωχθι μάχης ἠδὲ πτολέμοιο ἔρχεσθαι μετὰ φῦλα θεῶν ἢ εἰς ἅλα δῖαν. εἰ δέ μοι οὐκ ἐπέεσσ’ ἐπιπείσεται, ἀλλ’ ἀλογήσει, φραζέσθω δὴ ἔπειτα κατὰ φρένα καὶ κατὰ θυμόν, μή μ’ οὐδὲ κρατερός περ ἐὼν ἐπιόντα ταλάσσῃ μεῖναι, ἐπεί ἑο φημὶ βίῃ πολὺ φέρτερος εἶναι καὶ γενεῇ πρότερος· τοῦ δ’ οὐκ ὄθεται φίλον ἦτορ ἶσον ἐμοὶ φάσθαι, τόν τε στυγέουσι καὶ ἄλλοι. Up, go, swift Iris, to the lord Poseidon announce all the following things and be not a false messenger. Command him to cease from war and battle and to go to the tribes of gods or into the bright sea. And if he will not obey my words but disregard them, let him consider then in mind and heart lest, although he is strong, he not endure, when I attack, to stand fast because I say I am far better than he in might and the elder by birth; yet his heart does not hesitate to declare himself the equal of me whom even the other gods dread.

Target text (15.174–83): ἀγγελίην τινά τοι, γαιήοχε κυανοχαῖτα, ἦλθον δεῦρο φέρουσα παραὶ Διὸς αἰγιόχοιο. παυσάμενόν σ’ ἐκέλευσε μάχης ἠδὲ πτολέμοιο ἔρχεσθαι μετὰ φῦλα θεῶν ἢ εἰς ἅλα δῖαν. εἰ δέ οἱ οὐκ ἐπέεσσ’ ἐπιπείσεαι ἀλλ’ ἀλογήσεις, ἠπείλει καὶ κεῖνος ἐναντίβιον πολεμίξων ἐνθάδ’ ἐλεύσεσθαι. σὲ δ’ ὑπεξαλέασθαι ἀνώγει χεῖρας, ἐπεὶ σέο φησὶ βίῃ πολὺ φέρτερος εἶναι καὶ γενεῇ πρότερος· σὸν δ’ οὐκ ὄθεται φίλον ἦτορ ἶσόν οἱ φάσθαι, τόν τε στυγέουσι καὶ ἄλλοι. A certain message for you, earth-encircler, dark-haired one, I came here to bring from aegis-bearing Zeus. He ordered you to cease from war and battle and to go to the tribes of gods or into the bright sea. And if you will not obey his words but disregard them, he threatens that even he himself, intending to fight face to face, will come here. And he orders you to avoid his hands because he says he is far better than you in might and the elder by birth; yet your heart does not hesitate to declare yourself the equal of him whom even the other gods dread.

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Oral Intertextuality and Mediational Routines in the Homeric Epics Iris replicates six of the eight verses of Zeus’s initial text. Yet, as in the mediational routine in Iliad 24, her s’ ekeleuse (“He ordered you,” 176) signals that she will not be quoting Zeus and that the target text will forefront once again its double anchoring. The shifts in person testify to the reworking of the source text: compare, for example, (p.88) 162’s epipeisetai (“he will…obey”) with 178’s epipeiseai (“you will…obey”) and 167’s emoi (“of me”) with 183’s hoi (“of him”). Iris also alters two of Zeus’s verses. Zeus had said, “Let him consider then in mind and heart / lest, although he is strong, he not endure, when I attack, / to stand fast” (163–5). Iris reports, “he threatens (ēpeilei) that even he himself, intending to fight face to face, / will come (eleusesthai) here. And he commands you to avoid / his hands (σὲ δ’ ὑπεξαλέασθαι ἄνωγει / χεῖρας)” (179–81). Iris here reentextualizes as opposed to replicates. Her efforts at entextualization in this moment of reentextualization emerge in her linking verse 179 to 180 by way of hyperbaton between the verb ēpeilei and its object infinitive eleusesthai; her use of an intonation unit that continues from 180 to 181 (σὲ δ’ ὑπεξαλέασθαι ἄνωγει || χεῖρας) thereby creating an audible necessary enjambment; and her choice of the hapax legomenon hupexaleasthai: again (cf. p. 44 on Il. 8.408), rare words help make utterances endure. Zeus tasks Iris with passing on his command (159) and exhorts her to perform well: “be not a false messenger” (159). In turn, Iris points to her role as the performer of Zeus’s text: “A certain message for you, earth-encircler, dark-haired one, / I came here to bring from aegis-bearing Zeus” (174–5). Once again, her ability as a performer appears in the extent to which she replicates Zeus’s speech point for point. Her skill also emerges in her efforts at reentextualization. Zeus had said that he would attack Poseidon. At 179–81, Iris conjures a more precise scenario—Zeus will come here now (esp. enthad’)—and a more threatening, because more concrete and vivid, scenario (cf. Aloni 1998: 99): the phrase kai keinos (“even he himself”) suggests both that Zeus, who as a general rule does not come down to the battlefield, will make an exception in this case and that Poseidon will no longer be dealing with Iris but with Zeus himself (cf. Eide 1999: 119); the confrontation will be face to face (enantibion); but Poseidon has the chance now to avoid—literally, flee or escape out from under—Zeus’s hands (hupexaleasthai…kheiras).

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Oral Intertextuality and Mediational Routines in the Homeric Epics Iliad 8

Source text (8.399–408): βάσκ’ ἴθι, Ἶρι ταχεῖα, πάλιν τρέπε μηδ’ ἔα ἄντην ἔρχεσθ’· οὐ γὰρ καλὰ συνοισόμεθα πτόλεμόνδε. ὧδε γὰρ ἐξερέω, τὸ δὲ καὶ τετελεσμένον ἔσται· γυιώσω μέν σφωιν ὑφ’ ἅρμασιν ὠκέας ἵππους, αὐτὰς δ’ ἐκ δίφρου βαλέω κατά θ’ ἅρματα ἄξω· οὐδέ κεν ἐς δεκάτους περιτελλομένους ἐνιαυτοὺς ἕλκε’ ἀπαλθήσεσθον, ἅ κεν μάρπτῃσι κεραυνός· ὄφρα εἰδῇ γλαυκῶπις, ὅτ’ ἂν ᾧ πατρὶ μάχηται. Ἥρῃ δ’ οὔ τι τόσον νεμεσίζομαι οὐδὲ χολοῦμαι· αἰεὶ γάρ μοι ἔωθεν ἐνικλᾶν ὅττι νοήσω. Up, go, swift Iris; turn them back and do not allow them to come face to face with me: for it will not be good if we join in combat. For thus I will speak, and it will even come to pass: I will maim their swift horses beneath their chariot, and themselves will hurl from the chariot and will break their chariot in pieces; nor in the span of ten circling years will they be healed of the wounds that the thunderbolt inflicts; so that the gleaming eyed one may know when she fights against her own father. But at Hera I do not feel so much indignation nor am I angry: for she is always in the habit of thwarting me in whatever I have decreed.

Target text (8.411–24): πρώτῃσιν δὲ πύλῃσι πολυπτύχου Οὐλύμποιο ἀντομένη κατέρυκε, Διὸς δέ σφ’ ἔννεπε μῦθον· “πῇ μέματον; τί σφῶιν ἐνὶ φρεσὶ μαίνεται ἦτορ; οὐκ ἐάᾳ Κρονίδης ἐπαμυνέμεν Ἀργείοισιν. ὧδε γὰρ ἠπείλησε Κρόνου παῖς, ᾗ τελέει περ· γυιώσειν μὲν σφῶιν ὑφ’ ἅρμασιν ὠκέας ἵππους, αὐτὰς δ’ ἐκ δίφρου βαλέειν κατά θ’ ἅρματα ἄξειν· οὐδέ κεν ἐς δεκάτους περιτελλομένους ἐνιαυτοὺς ἕλκε’ ἀπαλθήσεσθον, ἅ κεν μάρπτῃσι κεραυνός· ὄφρα εἰδῇς, γλαυκῶπι, ὅτ’ ἂν σῷ πατρὶ μάχηαι. Ἥρῃ δ’ οὔ τι τόσον νεμεσίζεται οὐδὲ χολοῦται, αἰεὶ γάρ οἱ ἔωθεν ἐνικλᾶν ὅττι νοήσῃ ἀλλὰ σύ γ’ αἰνοτάτη, κύον ἀδδεές, εἰ ἐτεόν γε τολμήσεις Διὸς ἄντα πελώριον ἔγχος ἀεῖραι.” And at the first gates of many-folded Olympus she met them and stopped them, and she declared to them the command of Zeus: “To where are you two hurrying? Why do your hearts rage (with battle rage) within your breasts? The son of Cronus does not allow you to aid the Achaeans. For thus the child of Cronus threatened, in which way he will bring it to pass: he will maim your swift horses beneath the chariot, and yourselves will he hurl from the chariot and will break the chariot in pieces; nor in the span of ten circling years will you be healed of the wounds that the thunderbolt inflicts; so that you may know, gleaming eyed one, when you fight against your own father.

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Oral Intertextuality and Mediational Routines in the Homeric Epics But at Hera he does not feel so much indignation nor is he angry because she is always in the habit of thwarting him in whatever he has decreed; but you are most dreadful, shameless bitch, if truly you will dare to raise your huge spear against Zeus.”

(p.89) For the most part, Iris replicates Zeus’s speech. The degree to which her text looks back to the source text comes out in verses 421 and 422 when she speaks about Hera in the third person (Hērēi…hoi). As a result, 421 and 422 replicate 407 and 408 as much as they can while making sense. Even so, the simultaneous grounding of the recontextualized text in the target dialogue emerges in, for instance, the use of indirect discourse in verses 416 and 417 (cf. 402–3); in the changes to the number of the verbs—apalthēsesthon, third person, at 405 (“will they be healed”) becomes apalthēsesthon, second person, at 419 (“will you be healed”); eidēi, third person, at 406 (“[she] may know”) becomes eidēis, second person, at 420 (“you may know”)—and in the shift from 406’s third person relative pronoun (hōi “her”) to a second person possessive adjective (sōi “your”) in verse 420. At the end of the speech, Iris adds two verses (423–4), not to be deemed a later addition (interpolation) to the text (Kelly 2007a: 398–9). These verses do not alter the argument found in the source text, and, if anything, they strengthen it (cf. G. Kirk 1990: 331 at 423–4; de Jong 2004: 185; Kelly 2007a: 61, 331–2). Zeus claims that he is upset only with Athena for disobeying him but not with Hera. Iris specifies what it means for Athena to disobey her father: Athena so lacks shame that she is willing to rebel against Zeus’s rule (Kelly 2007a: 61, 331). Iris in these last two verses reentextualizes as opposed to replicating. Her efforts at entextualization appear in her setting up verse 424 to explain verse 423 (cf. Kelly 2007a: 332); in her use of the rare phrase “huge spear” (pelōrion egkhos) in verse 424, a combination that appears one other time in the Homeric epics (Il. 5.594); and in her bookending verse 424 with the finite verb tolmēseis (“you will dare”) at the start and its object infinitive aeirai (“to raise”) at the end, a mild hyperbaton found at Il. 13.395–6 and Od. 9.332–3 (wherein six and four words intervene, respectively, between this verb and its infinitive) but avoided at Il. 17.68–9 and Od. 24.261–2 (wherein one word intervenes). (p.90) Zeus assigns to Iris the responsibility of passing on his command that the goddesses turn back (399–400). The narrator reports that she “declared to them the muthos of Zeus” (412). For her part, Iris positions herself as competently passing on Zeus’s oral text when she says, “For thus (hōde) the

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Oral Intertextuality and Mediational Routines in the Homeric Epics child of Cronus threatened, in which way he will bring it to pass” (415). All these verses figure Iris as a performer. On the one hand, these verses prompt one to applaud her performance given the extent to which she mimics Zeus’s speech. On the other hand, her efforts at reentextualization also display her virtuosity as a performer. She introduces an insult, a discrete genre of performance in the Homeric epics (Martin 1989: 65– 77). The “shameless bitch”-insult is put to work elsewhere (Il. 21.481; Od. 19.91) and “suggests active misbehavior” (Blondell 2010: 15; cf. Kelly 2007a: 331–2). Iris also shifts to the genre of insult from that of command (414): as Richard Martin notes of Odysseus’s speech at Il. 2.284–332, “One could score the speech by noting the shifts in genres of muthos within it” (1989: 81).

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Oral Intertextuality and Mediational Routines in the Homeric Epics Iliad 2

Source text (2.8–15): βάσκ’ ἴθι, οὖλε Ὄνειρε, θοὰς ἐπὶ νῆας Ἀχαιῶν· ἐλθὼν ἐς κλισίην Ἀγαμέμνονος Ἀτρείδαο πάντα μάλ’ ἀτρεκέως ἀγορευέμεν ὡς ἐπιτέλλω· θωρῆξαί ἑ κέλευε κάρη κομόωντας Ἀχαιοὺς πανσυδίῃ· νῦν γάρ κεν ἕλοι πόλιν εὐρυάγυιαν Τρώων· οὐ γὰρ ἔτ’ ἀμφὶς Ὀλύμπια δώματ’ ἔχοντες ἀθάνατοι φράζονται· ἐπέγναμψεν γὰρ ἅπαντας Ἥρη λισσομένη, Τρώεσσι δὲ κήδε’ ἐφῆπται. Up, go, destructive Dream, to the swift ships of the Achaeans; when you get to the hut of Agamemnon, son of Atreus, tell him everything exactly as I charge you: order him to arm the long-haired Achaeans with all speed: for now he may take the city of the wide ways of the Trojans; for the immortals who have their homes on Olympus are no longer divided in counsel: for Hera has bent the minds of all with her entreating, and sorrows have been fastened on the Trojans.

Target text (2.23–34): εὕδεις, Ἀτρέος υἱὲ δαΐφρονος ἱπποδάμοιο; οὐ χρὴ παννύχιον εὕδειν βουληφόρον ἄνδρα, ᾧ λαοί τ’ ἐπιτετράφαται καὶ τόσσα μέμηλε. νῦν δ’ ἐμέθεν ξύνες ὦκα· Διὸς δέ τοι ἄγγελός εἰμι, ὃς σεῦ ἄνευθεν ἐὼν μέγα κήδεται ἠδ’ ἐλεαίρει. θωρῆξαί σ’ ἐκέλευε κάρη κομόωντας Ἀχαιοὺς πανσυδίῃ· νῦν γάρ κεν ἕλοις πόλιν εὐρυάγυιαν Τρώων. οὐ γὰρ ἔτ’ ἀμφὶς Ὀλύμπια δώματ’ ἔχοντες ἀθάνατοι φράζονται· ἐπέγναμψεν γὰρ ἅπαντας Ἥρη λισσομένη, Τρώεσσι δὲ κήδε’ ἐφῆπται ἐκ Διός. ἀλλὰ σὺ σῇσιν ἔχε φρεσί, μηδέ σε λήθη αἱρείτω, εὖτ’ ἄν σε μελίφρων ὕπνος ἀνήῃ. Do you sleep, son of battleminded Atreus, tamer of horses? A man that is a counselor must not sleep the whole night, one to whom an army has been entrusted and who has so many cares. But now, straightaway listen to me: for I am a messenger to you from Zeus, who, although he is far away, cares for you greatly and pities you. He ordered you to arm the long-haired Achaeans will all speed: for now you may take the city of the wide ways of the Trojans; for the immortals who have their homes on Olympus are no longer divided in counsel: for Hera has bent the minds of all with her entreating, and sorrows have been fastened on the Trojans by the will of Zeus. But keep this in your mind, and do not let forgetfulness

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Oral Intertextuality and Mediational Routines in the Homeric Epics take hold of you, whenever honey-hearted sleep lets you go.

(p.91) Like Iris in Iliad 8, Dream replicates Zeus’s speech and adds two verses at the end (33–4). Dream presents an original source text in a subsequent target dialogue but does not quote it. He reports to Agamemnon now what Zeus said then, producing a small intertextual gap: he changes the third person verb form heloi (“he may take,” 12) to the second person form helois (“you may take,” 29). In the final two verses, Dream specifies that the woes soon to afflict the Trojans are Zeus’s doing, and he enjoins Agamemnon not to forget what he has told him. Both additions qualify as reentextualizations. The phrase “from Zeus” fleshes out the statement that Hera has bent the gods to her will: she can only do so if Zeus consents to her doing so and if Zeus sees to the execution of her plan. The order to remember is another way to say that Agamemnon needs to do what Zeus orders (11, 28) him to do. Two features bring out the entextualization evident in this latter moment of reentextualization. First, the order works to tie the entire message off and create a neat textual package. Second, the two verses themselves form a textual package. The care evident in their creation emerges in the audible necessary enjambment that connects them (μηδέ σε λήθη || αἱρείτω “do not let forgetfulness || take hold of you”) (cf. M. Clark 1997: 162–3) as well as in two peculiarities: only here does one find the noun lēthē in the Homeric epics, and only here does one find the adjective meliphrōn (“honeyhearted”), applied without exception elsewhere in the epics to food or drink, used as an epithet of sleep. When Zeus enjoins Dream to “tell him everything exactly (atrekeōs agoreuemen) as I charge you” (10), he tasks him with performing his command to Agamemnon. Martin reviews the “good formulaic evidence…for the association between muthoi and agoreuein” (1989: 37): In the poet’s language, one can be said to begin speech-acts in an assembly muthōn ērkhe ([Il.] 2.433, 5.420), or to begin to speak, ērkh’ agoreuein (1.571, 7.347). In the Odyssey, I might add, similar phrases function as formulaic complements: ērkh’ agoreuein at line-end (2.15, 16.345) is interchangeable with ērkheto muthōn (1.367, 15.166). For his part, in declaring “I am a messenger to you from Zeus” (26), Dream signals his position as a performer as he takes responsibility for a competent presentation of Zeus’s message. Agamemnon ratifies Dream’s status as a performer in recounting the event to his counselors: “It took its stand above my head and spoke a muthos to me” (59).

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Oral Intertextuality and Mediational Routines in the Homeric Epics Here too one evaluates the mediating performer on the degree of overlap between the source and target texts. Simultaneously, Dream emerges as a performer of gnomic statements when he opens his speech (24) (cf. Martin 1989: 51; Lardinois 1997: 215; Bauman 2004: 154) and as a performer of commands when he ends his speech (33–4). As in Iliad 8, the switch in genre itself signals the performer’s ability.

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Oral Intertextuality and Mediational Routines in the Homeric Epics (p.92) Iliad 7

Source texts (7.361–4 and 372–8): αὐτὰρ ἐγὼ Τρώεσσι μεθ’ ἱπποδάμοις ἀγορεύσω· ἀντικρὺ δ’ ἀπόφημι· γυναῖκα μὲν οὐκ ἀποδώσω, κτήματα δ’ ὅσσ’ ἀγόμην ἐξ Ἄργεος ἡμέτερον δῶ, πάντ’ ἐθέλω δόμεναι καὶ ἔτ’ οἴκοθεν ἄλλ’ ἐπιθεῖναι. … ἠῶθεν δ’ Ἰδαῖος ἴτω κοίλας ἐπὶ νῆας, εἰπέμεν Ἀτρείδῃς Ἀγαμέμνονι καὶ Μενελάῳ μῦθον Ἀλεξάνδροιο, τοῦ εἵνεκα νεῖκος ὄρωρε. καὶ δὲ τόδ’ εἰπέμεναι πυκινὸν ἔπος, αἴ κ’ ἐθέλωσι παύσασθαι πολέμοιο δυσηχέος, εἰς ὅ κε νεκροὺς κείομεν· ὕστερον αὖτε μαχησόμεθ’, εἰς ὅ κε δαίμων ἄμμε διακρίνῃ, δώῃ δ’ ἑτέροισί γε νίκην. But I will speak out in the assembly among the horsetaming Trojans; and Ι declare outright: the woman I will not give back, but the treasure, as much as I brought from Argos to our home, all this I am willing to give and to add still other things from my own goods. … but at dawn let Idaeus go to the hollow ships, to state to Atreus’s sons, Agamemnon and Menelaus, the declaration of Alexander, for whose sake strife has arisen. And let him state this shrewd word also, to see if they are willing to cease from dolorous war until we have burned the dead; later we will fight again until a god

Target texts (7.385–97): Ἀτρείδη τε καὶ ἄλλοι ἀριστῆες Παναχαιῶν· ἠνώγει Πρίαμός τε καὶ ἄλλοι Τρῶες ἀγαυοὶ εἰπεῖν, αἴ κέ περ ὔμμι φίλον καὶ ἡδὺ γένοιτο, μῦθον Ἀλεξάνδροιο, τοῦ εἵνεκα νεῖκος ὄρωρε. κτήματα μέν, ὅσ’ Ἀλέξανδρος κοίλῃς ἐνὶ νηυσὶν ἠγάγετο Τροίηνδ’—ὡς πρὶν ὤφελλ’ ἀπολέσθαι—, πάντ’ ἐθέλει δόμεναι καὶ ἔτ’ οἴκοθεν ἄλλ’ ἐπιθεῖναι· κουριδίην δ’ ἄλοχον Μενελάου κυδαλίμοιο οὐ φησὶν δώσειν· ἦ μὴν Τρῶές γε κέλονται. καὶ δὲ τόδ’ ἠνώγεον εἰπεῖν ἔπος· αἴ κ’ ἐθέλητε παύσασθαι πολέμοιο δυσηχέος, εἰς ὅ κε νεκροὺς κείομεν· ὕστερον αὖτε μαχησόμεθ’, εἰς ὅ κε δαίμων ἄμμε διακρίνῃ, δώῃ δ’ ἑτέροισί γε νίκην. Son of Atreus, and you other chief men of the armies of Achaea, Priam and the other noble Trojans ordered me to state to you, to see if it might be your wish and your pleasure, the declaration of Alexander, for whose sake strife has arisen. The treasure, as much as Alexander brought in his hollow ships to Troy—would that he had perished first!— all this he is willing to give and to add still other things from his own goods; but the wedded wife of glorious Menelaus he says he will not give, though indeed the Trojans ask him to. And they ordered me to state this word also, to see if you are willing to cease from dolorous war until we have burned

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Oral Intertextuality and Mediational Routines in the Homeric Epics judges between us and gives victory to one or the other.

the dead; later we will fight again until a god judges between us and gives victory to one or the other.

Idaeus delivers two messages. In the case of Priam’s message about a pause in the fighting, he replicates the king’s source text. When Idaeus uses eipein epos (“to state this word”), one may expect him to quote Priam given that the sentence ἔπος δ’ ὀλοφυδνὸν ἔειπε (“and spoke a piteous word”) introduces direct speech in both epics (Il. 5.683, 23.102; Od. 19.362). Once again, however, replicating the source text in the target dialogue involves reworking it with the result that its double grounding becomes apparent: the change from the third person verb form ethelōsi (“they are willing,” 375) to the second person form ethelēte (“you are willing,” 394) reveals the small intertextual gap between source and target text. The replication of Priam’s speech highlights in retrospect the extent to which Idaeus widens the intertextual gap between source and target text when it comes to Paris’s message (cf. Kelly 2007a: 328–9; Kozak 2017: 79). Idaeus interrupts Paris’s text with his curse in verse 390. Next, he reentextualizes at three points (cf. de Jong 2004: 184). Paris called Helen “the woman” (gunaika) (362). Idaeus takes a whole verse to identify her: “the wedded wife of glorious Menelaus” (κουριδίην δ’ ἄλοχον Μενελάου κυδαλίμοιο, 392). Paris’s phrase “brought from Argos to our home” (363) becomes “brought in his hollow ships / to Troy” (389–90). Idaeus also reverses the (p.93) order of the two parts of Paris’s text. Paris spoke first of Helen, then of goods. Idaeus speaks first of goods, then of Helen. Yet Idaeus’s use of “the wedded wife of glorious Menelaus” (392) in lieu of Paris’s gunaika (362) may involve more than reentextualization. Idaeus may be rejecting an ambiguity implied in Paris’s word choice: Paris could be, slyly or not, declaring Helen his wife—gunē can mean woman or wife, an ambiguity in play in Odyssey 19 (Stanford 1996: 319 at 107)— whereas Idaeus declares that Helen is Menelaus’s wife. Indeed, Idaeus interjects his own voice into Paris’s text elsewhere: he not only declares, “Would that he had perished first!” (390); he also adds as a conclusion, “though indeed the Trojans ask him to” (393). The sole sustained moment of replication occurs in 391, which copies 364, but the change in person from the first person verb form ethelō (“I am willing,” 364) to the third person form ethelei (“he is willing,” 391) signals the reworking of the source text in the target text. When Priam tasks Idaeus with passing on the muthos of Paris (372–5) and his own message (375), he anticipates Idaeus’s turn as a performer. Idaeus reveals his status as a performer by claiming responsibility for the competent presentation of Paris’s muthos and Priam’s epos (386–8, 394).

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Oral Intertextuality and Mediational Routines in the Homeric Epics On the one hand, like Iris and Dream, Idaeus succeeds in his performance by replicating. On the other hand, Idaeus asserts himself emphatically as a performer. Priam had rendered Paris’s word authoritative when he ratified it, but Idaeus’s interruption, reentextualization, and interjection of and into Paris’s source text generate “a challenge to the authoritative word” (Bauman 2004: 158). Idaeus creates a noticeable intertextual gap and simultaneously “continues to display its [his text’s] derivation” (Bauman 2004: 158) from Paris’s text. The result is a challenge to Paris’s text and therefore Paris himself. Idaeus declares his independence as a performer, a move that contrasts with the act of discursive submission in which he engages when presenting Priam’s message. These departures themselves index an effort to succeed as a performer. Here one needs to understand performance “as a device to shape the audience’s perception of the performer” and “to create a mindset for the audience” (Minderhout 2006: 261). By wishing Paris dead and by exonerating the Trojans, Idaeus tries to get the Achaeans to look favorably upon himself and his people.

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Oral Intertextuality and Mediational Routines in the Homeric Epics Odyssey 5

Source text (5.29–42) Ἑρμεία· σὺ γὰρ αὖτε τά τ’ ἄλλα περ ἄγγελός ἐσσι· νύμφῃ ἐυπλοκάμῳ εἰπεῖν νημερτέα βουλήν, νόστον Ὀδυσσῆος ταλασίφρονος, ὥς κε νέηται, οὔτε θεῶν πομπῇ οὔτε θνητῶν ἀνθρώπων· ἀλλ’ ὅ γ’ ἐπὶ σχεδίης πολυδέσμου πήματα πάσχων ἤματί κ’ εἰκοστῷ Σχερίην ἐρίβωλον ἵκοιτο, Φαιήκων ἐς γαῖαν, οἳ ἀγχίθεοι γεγάασιν· οἵ κέν μιν περὶ κῆρι θεὸν ὣς τιμήσουσι, πέμψουσιν δ’ ἐν νηὶ φίλην ἐς πατρίδα γαῖαν, χαλκόν τε χρυσόν τε ἅλις ἐσθῆτά τε δόντες, πόλλ’, ὅσ’ ἂν οὐδέ ποτε Τροίης ἐξήρατ’ Ὀδυσσεύς, εἴ περ ἀπήμων ἦλθε, λαχὼν ἀπὸ ληίδος αἶσαν. ὣς γάρ οἱ μοῖρ’ ἐστὶ φίλους τ’ ἰδέειν καὶ ἱκέσθαι οἶκον ἐς ὑψόροφον καὶ ἑὴν ἐς πατρίδα γαῖαν. Hermes, because in other matters also you are a messenger, state to the nymph with the lovely hair our certain plan, the homecoming of enduring Odysseus, that he will come back by the convoy neither of the gods nor of mortal people; but he on a jointed raft suffering woes on the twentieth day will land on fertile Scheria in the country of the Phaeacians who are near the gods in origin; they will honor him in their hearts like a god and send him back on a ship to the beloved land of his fathers, having provided bronze and gold in abundance and clothing,

Target text (5.97–115): εἰρωτᾷς μ’ ἐλθόντα θεὰ θεόν· αὐτὰρ ἐγώ τοι νημερτέως τὸν μῦθον ἐνισπήσω· κέλεαι γάρ. Ζεὺς ἐμέ γ’ ἠνώγει δεῦρ’ ἐλθέμεν οὐκ ἐθέλοντα· τίς δ’ ἂν ἑκὼν τοσσόνδε διαδράμοι ἁλμυρὸν ὕδωρ ἄσπετον; οὐδέ τις ἄγχι βροτῶν πόλις, οἵ τε θεοῖσιν ἱερά τε ῥέζουσι καὶ ἐξαίτους ἑκατόμβας. ἀλλὰ μάλ’ οὔ πως ἔστι Διὸς νόον αἰγιόχοιο οὔτε παρεξελθεῖν ἄλλον θεὸν οὔθ’ ἁλιῶσαι. φησί τοι ἄνδρα παρεῖναι ὀιζυρώτατον ἄλλων, τῶν ἀνδρῶν, οἳ ἄστυ περὶ Πριάμοιο μάχοντο εἰνάετες, δεκάτῳ δὲ πόλιν πέρσαντες ἔβησαν οἴκαδ’· ἀτὰρ ἐν νόστῳ Ἀθηναίην ἀλίτοντο, ἥ σφιν ἐπῶρσ’ ἄνεμόν τε κακὸν καὶ κύματα μακρά. ἔνθ’ ἄλλοι μὲν πάντες ἀπέφθιθεν ἐσθλοὶ ἑταῖροι, τὸν δ’ ἄρα δεῦρ’ ἄνεμός τε φέρων καὶ κῦμα πέλασσε. τὸν νῦν σ’ ἠνώγει ἀποπεμπέμεν ὅττι τάχιστα· οὐ γάρ οἱ τῇδ’ αἶσα φίλων ἀπονόσφιν ὀλέσθαι, ἀλλ’ ἔτι οἱ μοῖρ’ ἐστὶ φίλους τ’ ἰδέειν καὶ ἱκέσθαι οἶκον ἐς ὑψόροφον καὶ ἑὴν ἐς πατρίδα γαῖαν. You, a goddess, ask me, a god, why I came and therefore I unerringly will give you the account: for you bid it. Zeus ordered me to come here despite my unwillingness. Who would willingly run across so much salt water, boundless as it is? And there is no city of men nearby, who offer sacrifices and choice hecatombs to the gods.

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Oral Intertextuality and Mediational Routines in the Homeric Epics many things, as many as Odysseus would not ever have taken from Troy, if he had gone unharmed and taken his portion of the plunder. For so it is fated for him to see his people and come back to his house with a high roof and to his fatherland.

But there is no way, when it comes to the purpose of aegis-bearing Zeus, for another god to transgress against it or bring it to nothing. He says you have with you a man, most wretched beyond all the other men of those who fought around the city of Priam for nine years, and in the tenth they sacked the city and set sail for home; but on their return they offended Athena, who roused an evil wind and tall waves against them. Then all the rest of his excellent companions perished, but the wind and the current carried him and drove him here. Now he [Zeus] ordered you to send him on his way as soon as possible: for it is not appointed for him to die here away from his people, but it is still fated for him to see his people and come back to his house with a high roof and to his fatherland.

(p.94) Hermes’s initial disquisition on the physical distance separating Olympus from Ogygia highlights the recontextualization of Zeus’s speech, as does his subsequent phēsi (“He says,” 105). At the end of his speech, Hermes replicates two verses of Zeus’s speech (41–2 ≈ 114–15; M. Clark 1997: 207). Prior to that, Hermes reentextualizes. Zeus referred to Odysseus as a Trojan war veteran who did not make it home with all his booty (39–40). Hermes dilates on this aspect of Odysseus’s past: Odysseus was one of those who sacked Troy (and therefore acquired spoils), but he and his compatriots fell victim to Athena’s wrath as they sailed home, and Odysseus was shipwrecked and lost all his companions (and all his stuff) (105–11). Hermes stitches together this stretch of his utterance through a series of progressive enjambments that link verses 105 to 109: verse 106’s tōn andrōn (“of the men”) stands in apposition to allōn (“the others”) at the end of verse 105; verse 107’s adverb einaetes (“for nine years”) specifies how long the fight referred to in verse 106 lasted; verse 108’s adverb oikad’ specifies where the Achaeans went Page 28 of 32

 

Oral Intertextuality and Mediational Routines in the Homeric Epics after they boarded their ships in verse 107 (ebēsan); and verse 109’s relative clause follows up on the introduction of Athena in verse 108. The antithesis between Odysseus’s companions (men) and Odysseus himself (de) in verses 110 and 111 helps those verses cohere. Hermes (p.95) continues to reentextualize in verse 112—in speaking of Odysseus’s nostos, Zeus implied that Calypso needs to send Odysseus on his way; Hermes makes that order plain—and in verse 113 wherein he introduces the two verses of Zeus’s speech that he replicates with a sentence that prepares for them: “for it is not appointed for him to die here away from his people” (113). At the same time, Hermes departs from the script provided by Zeus by omitting what Zeus had said about the Phaeacians. Zeus had urged Hermes to “state to (eipein) the nymph with the lovely hair our certain plan” (30). The verb does not clearly signal a performance (cf. Martin 1989: 17). Hermes, however, adopts the language of performance: “I / unerringly will give you the account (ton muthon enispēsō)” (97–8). Hermes operates as a skillful performer by positioning the target text vis-à-vis the source text in all three positions I have delineated in this chapter (replication, reentextualization, and maximizing the intertextual gap). In replicating, he competently passes on Zeus’s words. In reentextualizing, he draws attention to his own contribution. Summarizing the fabula of Odysseus’s journey to date (105–11), Hermes gives the distinct impression that Athena sent the storm that shipwrecked Odysseus on Calypso’s island (de Jong 2001: 132 at 108–11; Danek 2015: 358–9): I find it difficult to assume an ellipsis between, on the one hand, the storm Athena rouses in verse 109 and, on the other hand, the death of Odysseus’s companions in verse 110 and Odysseus’s arrival on Ogygia in verse 111; the enth’ (“then”) of verse 110 positions the death of the companions and Odysseus’s washing up on Ogygia as a consequence of the storm (cf. e.g. Il. 1.22; Od. 2.82, 4.285), not something that merely happened next or at some later point. Hermes thereby suggests an ability to tell an intriguing story that complicates the Odyssey’s dominant narrative of a copacetic relationship between Athena and Odysseus (cf. Clay 1983: 49–53). With the addition of verse 113, Hermes provides an antithetical counterpoint to the next two verses: Odysseus is not fated to die here; he is fated to return home. This counterpoint provides a fuller rendition of Zeus’s thought. A maximalist style can be the attribute of a good performer (Martin 1989: 226, 238; section 5.3). Finally, by purposefully neglecting to reproduce Zeus’s reference to the Phaeacians and thereby challenging the idea of adhering to the source text, Hermes stresses his independence as a performer. This departure also attests to his competence as a performer. Hermes lessens the blow of an order Calypso never wanted to hear. Although Hermes stresses that Zeus must be obeyed in all things (103–4), he gives Calypso the impression that she alone will determine the particulars of Odysseus’s departure and return to Ithaca.

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Oral Intertextuality and Mediational Routines in the Homeric Epics Hermes provides Calypso with some sense of control (cf. Ready 2014: 35). Good performers attend to their audiences (subsections 3.4.1, 3.4.2 (p. 139)).

2.3. Metapoetic Implications Scholars have read much into the messenger scenes in the Iliad. Françoise Létoublon deems them “a capital element in the text’s organization” (1987: 123, my translation). (p.96) Antonio Aloni finds that they “play a specific role—both at the aesthetic and structural level—in the construction and significance of the poem” (1998: 93, my translation): for instance, they highlight the poem’s depiction of a world marked by divisions between its inhabitants (93–5). For Andrew Laird, the scene in Iliad 2 in which Dream brings a false message to Agamemnon functions programmatically to suggest that “the truth status of epic discourse is bound to be unreliable” (2003: 159). Ombretta Cesca contends that the absence of scenes in which the source entrusts his message to a chain of mediators evinces “the poet’s concern regarding his distance from his source of poetic knowledge: the Muses” (2017: 52). I have come at these scenes from yet another angle. By studying the epics’ mediational routines through the lens of a linguistic anthropological model of oral intertextuality, one learns more about the representation of oral texts and textuality in the Homeric poems. To begin with, a source’s oral text looks ahead to the mediator’s reiteration of that text. Oral texts in the epics anticipate subsequent texts and can seek to determine the content of those subsequent texts. For their part, in generating a target text, mediators minimize or maximize the intertextual gap. Often the poet manages the recontextualization of the source text in the target dialogue such that it becomes a matter of replication. At such moments, one mechanism for authorizing an oral text comes to the fore as does the depiction of oral texts as durable and adaptable. At other times, the mediator reentextualizes or even challenges the source text. The range of positions the mediator can adopt vis-à-vis the source text indicates the range of possible fates that await an oral text in the world constructed in the epics. One has also seen the mediator operating as a performer in these passages. The strength of this equation explains the shift that takes place over the course of Thetis’s presentation of Zeus’s message to Achilles in Iliad 24. Grant that the verse introducing her words—χειρί τέ μιν κατέρεξεν ἔπος τ’ ἔφατ’ ἔκ τ’ ὀνόμαζε (“and stroked him with her hand and spoke and called him by name”) (24.127)— signals the advent of a private, intimate conversation and not a performance (Martin 1989: 19). Thetis soon breaks through into performance. She offers a gnomic statement—“It is a good to lie with a woman in love” (24.130–1)—a genre of performance in its own right. She deploys the same resonant phrase elsewhere used by Dream (Il. 2.26) and Iris (Il. 24.173)—Διὸς δέ τοι ἄγγελός εἰμι (“I am a messenger to you from Zeus”) (24.133)—and thereby takes on the job of faithfully and effectively passing on Zeus’s words. Messengers cannot help but perform. On the one hand, then, a speaker performs even when tasked with Page 30 of 32

 

Oral Intertextuality and Mediational Routines in the Homeric Epics passing on the words of another. On the other hand, oral texts do not simply circulate in more or less fixed versions. Instead, they come into the hands of performers who decide what to do with them. Both the initial presentation and the subsequent reiteration of an oral text see the speaker assuming responsibility for a display of competence. The various components of these Homeric scenes operate metapoetically. One should read the source texts metapoetically for two reasons. I reviewed the first reason in section 2.1: the source text in a mediational routine makes explicit one sort of intertextual engagement in which every oral performer participates— namely, crafting an oral text that anticipates subsequent oral texts. The second reason is that Zeus so (p.97) often plays the role of source in these scenes (cf. Kelly 2008: 326), and scholars have demonstrated the chief god’s alignment with the figure of the poet (Ready 2012: 74–83; Scodel 2017). I draw the following metapoetic lesson from the Homeric source texts. In his presentation of source texts with their particular brand of anticipatory intertextuality, the poet expresses his wish that subsequent performances of the same tale cleave to what he has presented. Yet, by having the characters who serve as mediators replicate, reentextualize, or challenge the source text, the poet acknowledges the various possible fates of his own oral text as subsequent presentations take it into account, both those of other tellers and his own. At the same time, section 2.1 went over how the poet casts himself as a mediator. The characterization of mediators as performers in the mediational routines hints at the poet’s vision of his own agency as a mediating performer. Not a “mere instrument” of the Muse (Clay 1983: 100), the mediating poet stakes a claim of his own: he performs. In addition, the mediator’s replicating, reentextualizing, or challenging the source text suggests the range of our poet’s own responses to previous performances of the same story—again, both those of other poets and his own. I highlight the implication that our Homeric poets strove not just to distinguish their texts from those of other singers of the Iliad and the Odyssey (cf. Loney 2014; Currie 2016) but also to follow suit and do what other singers of the Iliad and the Odyssey were doing (cf. Ready 2018a). Having considered in Part I the representation of oral textuality and of oral intertextuality in the Homeric epics and the implications of those representations, I shift in Part II to the textualization of oral renditions of the Iliad and the Odyssey. I want to consider what people had to do to get the poetry written down. (p.98) Notes:

(1) A critique of the Homerist’s application of hypertextual theory to the epics must wait for another occasion: see O’Maley 2014; Kahane 2018: 79 n. 3.

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Oral Intertextuality and Mediational Routines in the Homeric Epics (2) Martin suggests that in his speech to the emissaries in Iliad 9 Achilles plays off the generic model for “raiding boasts” (1989: 172–3, cf. 203–4). Barchiesi discusses how Virgil engages with the “genre model” provided by the Homeric epics (2015: 74). Scholarship has shown how the Odyssey interacts both with the “genre of myth” known as theoxeny (Louden 2011: 2)—a disguised god tests mortals and rewards or punishes them accordingly—and with one tale in particular that belongs to that genre—the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (Cook 2012). (3) Idaeus repeats material found in the earlier speeches of Iris (3.253–5 ≈ 3.136–8) and Paris (3.256–8 ≈ 3.73–5) (Eide 1999: 100–1), but the source text remains Hector’s as reported by the narrator. (4) The diction of messenging—the noun aggeliē (“message, announcement”) and the verb aggellō (“bring a message, announce”)—appears in mediational routines, but these words alone do not make a mediational routine. Hupnos brings the news (aggeliēn) to Poseidon that he has lulled Zeus to sleep (Il. 14.355). Hera brings to Zeus the message of Eurystheus’s birth (aggeleousa) (Il. 19.120). Medon reports on the plotting of the suitors to Penelope (aggeleōn) (Od. 4.679). Zeus asks “someone of the gods,” by which he means Iris, to summon (kaleseie) Thetis to Olympus (Il. 24.74–6), and Iris sets out to deliver the message (aggeleousa) (24.77). But Zeus does not author a message for Iris to pass on, and she simply tells Thetis, “Rise, Thetis; Zeus, whose counsels are imperishable, calls (kaleei) you” (24.88).

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Textualization

Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An Interdisciplinary Study of Oral Texts, Dictated Texts, and Wild Texts Jonathan L. Ready

Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9780198835066 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198835066.001.0001

Textualization Dictation and Written Versionsof the Iliad and the Odyssey Jonathan L. Ready

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198835066.003.0004

Abstract and Keywords Dictation plays a part in two out of the three explanations, however much the two strive to distinguish themselves from one another, for how written versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey came into existence. To illuminate this scenario, this chapter studies modern instances of the textualization of an oral traditional work. The investigation relies especially on the testimony of folklorists and ethnographers who engage in and study textualization. It emerges that the textualization of a modern oral traditional work by a collector results in a text that is the co-creation of the performer, collector, and scribe (if a discrete third party). A written text resulting from a process that began when a collector had a poet dictate his version of the Iliad or the Odyssey to a scribe was likely such a co-creation. An excursus on the collector of oral traditional works as depicted in Herodotus’s Histories and on Herodotus’s own practices as a textualizer bolsters this conclusion. Keywords:   textualization, dictation, folkloristics, Herodotus, oral traditional work

Introduction Wendy Doniger reports an anecdote Indians tell about how the Mahabharata came to be written down (2014: 513): They explain that when Vyasa, the author of the Mahabharata, was ready to fix it in writing, he summoned as his scribe the elephant-headed god Ganesha, patron of intellectuals and merchants…. Ganesha agreed to take Page 1 of 94

 

Textualization Vyasa’s dictation, but only on condition that Vyasa would not lag behind and keep Ganesha waiting for the next line; Vyasa in turn stipulated that Ganesha must not write down anything he did not understand. To judge from an account in the Herodotean Life of Homer, some Greeks likewise envisioned one of their culture heroes, Homer, working with a scribe (cf. Nagy 1990: 78; Jensen 2011: 155). The author of the Life claims that a certain Thestorides arranged to have Homer’s poetry written down from the mouth of the master himself: “And when Thestorides had the Phocais and all his [Homer’s] other things written down from Homer (para tou Homērou… egrapsato), he [Thestorides] made plans to depart from Phocaea” (207–8 Allen, tr. Nagy 2015: 70). Thestorides saw to it that a scribe captured the ipsissima verba of the great Homer. In 1953, Albert Lord surmised that a poet dictated his version of the Iliad to a scribe: “In my own mind there remains no doubt that Homer dictated the Iliad to someone else who wrote it down, because the Homeric poems have all the earmarks of dictated texts of oral epic songs” (1953a: 131, cf. 1991: 38–48 ≈ 1953a). Several Homerists—such as Barry Powell (1991: 220–31), Richard Janko (1990, 1992: 37–8, 1998), Bryan Hainsworth (1997), Steve Reece (2005), and Minna Skafte Jensen (1980, 2011)—have built on this idea. They see the Iliad and the Odyssey—written texts that provided archetypes for the subsequent written textual transmission of the poems—emerging in the Archaic period. For this group, only a one-time process of oral dictation during the Archaic (p.102) period could account for the production of the Iliad and/or the Odyssey by an orally performing poet who flourished amid an active oral tradition. This scenario, known as the “dictation model,” differs from two other well-known scenarios for the creation of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Martin L. West favors the idea that a poet of the Archaic period utilized the technology of writing to fashion a poem over an extended period of time, maybe years; he perhaps “engaged an amanuensis and recited to him at dictation speed” (2011a: esp. 3– 14, quotation from 10). The “perhaps” is important. As José González observes, it is “hard to imagine a long-term association between poet and scribe that spanned the ‘many years’ of the Iliad’s writing,…Accordingly,…West has effectively disposed of the scribe and, with him, of the possibility that the poem may be an oral-dictated text” (2013: 41–2). This poem became the archetype for the subsequent written textual tradition. M. L. West finds support for his hypothesis in what he takes to be evidence that the poet “working over many years, made insertions, some of them lengthy, in what he had already written” (2011a: 3, cf. 2003a: 12). One can trace an evolution in M. L. West’s position (cf. González 2013: 41–2). For instance, in a 1990 essay, M. L. West wrote in support of the dictation hypothesis (as against the idea of a writing poet) (43) but with the caveat that the poem once dictated was subject to revisions and interpolations (48–9). Ten years later, M. L. West sharpened his Page 2 of 94

 

Textualization criticism of those “naïve believers in a once-for-all dictation process” (2000b: 487, cf. 2011b). Gregory Nagy’s five-period “evolutionary model” stands as the second alternative to the dictation model. Challenging current formulations of the dictation model (1996a: 31–4, 2003: 4–6, 49–71), Nagy proposes that the Iliad and the Odyssey gradually crystallized over centuries of oral performance and that by the time the fifth period starts (around 150 BCE) one can speak of the Iliad and the Odyssey (esp. 1996a, 2014) (or more or less speak of the Iliad and the Odyssey because at this stage “Homeric poetry was least susceptible to change” (2009: 5)). Critical to this process was the dissemination of the increasingly rigid versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey that emerged at the performances of the poetry at the recurring festival of the Panionia at the Panionion of the Ionian Dodecapolis in the late eighth and early seventh centuries BCE and, later, at the recurring festival of the Panathenaia in Athens starting in the mid-sixth century BCE (2004: 28, 2010: 22, 313). Examples of steps in this evolution include the movement toward “even weighting” of episodes (1996a: 77–82, 88), the establishing of a set number of verses for the Iliad and the Odyssey (2004: 25–39), “choices among variants…to suit Athenian interests” (2010: 265), and the shift from the “relatively more augmented or expanded” Homerus Auctus to the “relatively unaugmented” Homeric Koine (2009: 356, 589–92; 2010: 333–5 (quotations from 334), 355–6, 369). So for Nagy, “there can be textuality—or better, textualization—without written text” (1996a: 109). At the same time, to repeat what I reviewed in section 1.3, in Nagy’s reconstruction written texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey appear after 550 BCE and take one of three forms: at first, as transcripts that have no influence on oral performances; then, starting in the later part of the fourth century BCE, as scripts that are mandatory for a successful oral performance; and (p.103) finally, starting in the mid-second century BCE, as scriptures that take the place of an oral performance.1 Given that written texts play a part in both the dictation and the evolutionary models, some scholars yoke the two models together. For them, Nagy’s model explains the workings of Homeric poetic production into the sixth century at which point a written, archetypal Iliad emerged and a written, archetypal Odyssey emerged, texts acquired by means of dictation (Foley 1990: 27 n. 16; Niles 1999: 223 n. 33; cf. Bakker 1997a: 22, 26–7). Most proponents of the dictation model, however, deny the possibility of what Nagy calls “textualization without written text,” and question the role Nagy assigns to written texts (Jensen 2011: 184, 216–17). Moreover, they tend to date the relevant acts of dictation to the ninth or eighth century: for instance, Cornelis Ruijgh offers a ninth-century date (1995: 21–6, 49–50) while Janko proposes “775–750 B.C. for the Iliad and slightly later for the Odyssey” (1998: 1). Others, like Jensen and

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Textualization Antonio Aloni (e.g. 1998: 41, 77; 2006: 109), spotlight Peisistratean Athens, with Jensen specifying 522 BCE for the dictation of both poems (2011: 244). M. L. West’s vision of a writing oral poet stumbles over the matter of revision (González 2013: 68–70) and strikes many as anachronistic (B. Powell 2018). I will be more open to the specifics of Nagy’s model of gradual fixation down to the level of the verse once the model finds a parallel (or two) in modern oral traditions (cf. Ready 2017: 500–1). To my mind, the best way to explain the uniformity of the written textual tradition of the Iliad and of the Odyssey from our earliest witnesses is to imagine that a dictated text served as the archetype for the textual tradition of each poem. Multiple, but not many, dictation events might have produced written versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey (cf. Bakker 1997a: 26–7). Although one cannot claim that only one act of textualization produced a written version of the Iliad and that only one act of textualization produced a written version of the Odyssey, we only have traces of one such act in each case (cf. M. L. West 2001: 3). I join those who favor later dates for these acts: Jensen’s 522 BCE can serve as a provocative terminus ante quem. At the same time, the creation of the Iliad and the Odyssey had little or no impact on subsequent oral performances of the Iliad and the Odyssey (cf. Jensen 2011: 174, 264; 2017), just as when a written version of a Kyrgyz singer’s performance of the Manas epic appears, it is not “the ‘true’ text—it is merely one single version of the Manas” (van der Heide 2015: 88, cf. 304), and other Manas singers who compose in performance (145, 303) do not (p.104) read, much less memorize, it or any written version (228; cf. de Vet 1996: 67). I would allow for the possibility that the homēristai—performers of the late Hellenistic and Roman imperial periods who acted out portions of the Homeric epics (González 2013: 447–65; Gangloff 2018)—memorized a specific text (cf. Nagy 1996b: 170, 177 n. 90). I return to some of these claims in section 4.3, but for the moment my preferences on these matters are neither here nor there. I offer the previous paragraph so that the reader may know where I stand, but I am not interested in this chapter in the endgame of the dictation model as currently formulated— namely, that dictated texts became archetypes. I do not mount another defense of the dictation model as an explanation for the emergence of the Iliad and of the Odyssey. Instead, I propose to revise our understanding of what it meant to textualize the work of Homeric poets by way of dictation. For the purposes of this investigation, I take the following components of the dictation model as a given: a collector engineered the recording of an oral poet by way of dictation and made the written text acquired thereby suitable for presentation to a readership. My goal is to get a better sense of what that textualization event most likely entailed. Toward that end, I adopt a comparative approach in surveying modern instances in which a collector instigated the collection of an oral traditional work, above all an epic and above all by way of manual transcription. Based on this survey, I argue that the textualized versions of the Page 4 of 94

 

Textualization work of Homeric poets, versions that stemmed from a process of dictation, should be understood as co-creations of the poet, scribe, and collector. Nine parts follow. Section 3.1 lays out what proponents of the dictation model surmise happened when a collector had a Homeric poet dictate his poetry. Section 3.2 explains the comparative approach I adopt in sections 3.3 through 3.7. Section 3.3 considers the process of recording by hand and its effects on the performer, the performer’s work, and the resulting written text. Section 3.4 focuses on the collector’s impact on the content of the emerging poem during the act of recording. Section 3.5 investigates the collector’s editorial procedures. Section 3.6 looks at the best practices adopted by today’s researchers in collecting oral traditional works. Section 3.7 explores the degree to which the written text that the collector creates differs from the speech event that the collector records. Section 3.8 returns to the formulations outlined in section 3.1 and reevaluates them in light of the intervening analysis. In section 3.9, I suggest one way in which what we have learned in sections 3.3 through 3.8 pertains to an element in Nagy’s evolutionary model, the transcript. I round out the chapter with an excursus on the collector of oral traditional works as represented in Herodotus’s Histories and on Herodotus’s own textualization practices.

3.1. The Dictation Model Proponents of the dictation model make seven points. (1) There was a collector. (p.105) The dictation model holds that a collector prompted and saw to the inscription by one or more scribes of a dictated text. In support of this proposition, scholars cite evidence demonstrating that individuals other than performers and most frequently outsiders instigate most recordings of oral traditional material (whether by manual transcription or electronic means) (Lord 1953a: 130–1, 2000: 152; Jensen 1980: 93, 2011: 175; M. L. West 1990: 39–40, 47; B. Powell 1991: 229, 2000: 114–15; Janko 1998: 12; Foley 2005a: 208–9). (2) The process of dictation differed from the poet’s normal performances. It still qualified, however, as a performance. Steve Reece elucidates the first point (2005: 87; cf. Lord 1953a: 132; Jensen 2011: 282, 297): It is likely that the occasion of recording was in many ways unusual for the singer: it was not a typical epic song performed under typical circumstances in the presence of a typical audience. The singer may have recited rather than sung to the accompaniment of his lyre; his tempo may

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Textualization have been slower than usual, since the pace of normal live performance would probably have been too rapid for a scribe to keep up,… The performance was not of the usual kind, but it was a performance: Minna Skafte Jensen stresses repeatedly that a dictating poet remains a performing poet, one assuming responsibility for a display of skill (1980: 84–5, 166–7; 2011: 297, 324; cf. Lord 1995: 200). (3) Nevertheless, the poet took advantage of the opportunity to craft an exceptional poem. If the process of dictation differed from the poet’s normal performances, the poet made the most of the peculiarities of dictating to a scribe. Albert Lord explains (1953a: 132–3; cf. 2000: 128, 153): The chief advantage to the singer of this manner of composition is that it affords him time to think of his lines and of his song…. He can ornament his song as fully as he wishes and is capable; he can develop his tale with completeness, he can dwell lovingly on passages which in normal performance he would often be forced to shorten because of the pressure of time or because of the restlessness of the audience. The very length of the Homeric poems is the best proof that they are the products of the moment of dictation rather than that of singing. The leisureliness of their tempo, the fullness of their telling, are also indications of this method. The poetic moments of the tradition, used perhaps sparingly in normal performance, accumulate to provide that richness of poetry which [C. M.] Bowra feels suggests writing. To the method of dictation one can also attribute the piling up of similes in Homer and the extended simile. Recent scholarship endorses Lord’s vision (Hainsworth 1990: 31–2; Janko 1992: 38, 1998: 7; Jensen 2011: 283, 298; cf. Okpewho 2014: 54, 146, citing Bauman 1986: 106). (4) The collector had a modest impact on the content of the poet’s poetry as he performed. (p.106) The collector asked the poet for a long poem, for the poet to “demonstrate his competence by telling his story as fully as possible” (Jensen 2011: 257, 265, 298, quotation from 298; cf. B. Powell 1991: 230). In order to help the poet with this task, he provided him with an “attentive” and “stimulating” audience that appreciated and perhaps encouraged the poet’s efforts: the unusually attentive and cooperative demeanor of his audience (i.e., the person[s] recording the song) may have allowed him the leisure to be more careful about details than usual, to consider where the song was leading Page 6 of 94

 

Textualization more deliberately than usual, and to produce in the end a somewhat longer song than usual. (Reece 2005: 87–8) The scribe must have been very good at stimulating the singer, putting interesting questions and through comments showing his knowledge of the tradition. (Jensen 2011: 298; cf. 1980: 85, 87) The primary effect of the collector and his scribe(s) on the poet’s performance came in their being an inspiring audience, sufficient to take the place of the poet’s usual audience and in fact better than the poet’s usual audience for the job at hand (cf. Lord 1953a: 132, 1954: 8). Jensen also offers a more specific reconstruction of the collector’s impact. In her 1980 book, she casts Peisistratus as the patron who saw to the recording of the Iliad and the Odyssey (e.g. 162). In her 2011 book, she envisions Hipparchus, Peisistratus’s son, in that role (296). She ponders how the poets—one each for the Iliad and the Odyssey (299)—would have responded to this performance context: put differently, how did the task facing the poet—dictate a song for the Athenian tyrant—affect the poet’s performance? Jensen finds evidence that in this case as in all others “the oral poet’s concentration on the interests and thoughts of his imagined audience influences his composition at all levels” (1980: 170, cf. 44). In particular, the poems can be seen “to celebrate them [his patrons], their city [Athens], and their goddess [Athena]” (170, cf. 2011: 299–300). For instance, “the rhapsode decided during the dictation to introduce this element [the building of the Achaean wall at Nestor’s suggestion in Iliad 7], presumably to honour the ancestor of the Pisistratids” (2011: 270); “since Iliad ii is so eager to emphasise the positive aspects of monarchy, I like to imagine that that book was dictated on one of the days when Hipparchus deigned to attend” (297; cf. Janko 1998: 13); “the rhapsode [of the Odyssey] stressed the family links between Nestor and the Athenian tyrants, as well as the almost motherly care that Athena bestows on Odysseus” (2011: 300); “a rhapsode engaged by the Athenian tyrants to dictate an epic would in all likelihood deviate from his normal version of a politically loaded passage such as the Catalogue [of ships in Iliad 2] and substitute new passages for those he knew by heart in order to please his patrons and the local audience” (315); and “the rhapsodes, I suppose, were from the start intent on pleasing their audience by giving Athens a more prominent role in the Trojan War than the city traditionally had” (326). Jensen, then, looks for items the poets may have added to please their patron: she rejects the notion that they granted Hipparchus’s request to omit references to Theseus’s two sons (326 n. 100). (p.107) Page 7 of 94

 

Textualization (5) The scribe faithfully recorded the poet’s words. Bryan Hainsworth dismisses the idea that the scribe would have sought to correct the poet as he performed: “But I doubt that any scribe in archaic Greece would have had such an idea, or would have been allowed to stop and question that which the prestigious poet was singing. So I am convinced that corrective actions on the part of the scribe played a minimal role in the process” (1997: 103, my translation; cf. Berg and Haug 2000: 8–9). Jensen entertains the possibility of an activist scribe: “in the process of recording from dictation the distinction between the singer’s and the scribe’s contributions is not always clear-cut” (2011: 314); and “the scribe may have copied carefully what the singer dictated or may have chosen to leave out passages that he felt to be irrelevant for the written copy” (396; cf. Reece 2005: 87). Indeed, in her earlier work, Jensen endorses the need “to consider any written oral poem as a co-production of singer and scribe” (1980: 87, cf. 82). In the end, however, she favors in the case of the creation of the Iliad and the Odyssey a diligent, conscientious scribe (2011: 327, cf. 312–13): The written text of the Iliad and Odyssey originated in a process of dictation, as a cooperation between singer and scribe not unlike what takes place when in modern times an oral epic is recorded. They confirm what Janko asserted…the hypothesis of a singer dictating to a scribe who carefully wrote what was dictated without tampering with the text…. Richard Janko had spoken of “a faithful dictated text” (1998: 8). Jensen allows that in recopying the text from wax tablets to papyrus “another careful process of standardisation must have taken place” (2011: 300), but these changes are minor: “beyond such standardisations of detail the scribes seem to have interfered very little” (301). (6) The collector minimally edited, if at all. Jensen notes in reference to the collection of oral poetry that “normally some degree of redaction will take place before a version is published” (1980: 14, cf. 86). Martin L. West contends that, when it came to the making of the Iliad and of the Odyssey, the scribe or the collector cleaned up “obvious errors, discrepancies, omissions and metrical offenses” (1990: 48, my translation). Hainsworth adds to this list “ensures the match of repeated passages” (1990: 32). More recent criticism is not willing to go even that far. Reece concludes that the texts “do not have the appearance of having gone through an extensive editorial process—proofreading, correcting, reworking, tidying up of loose ends, polishing up of rough spots, and so on” (2005: 57; cf. Lord 2000: 128; Hainsworth 1997: 104–6; Janko 1992: 37, 1998: 7–9; Jensen 2011: 317–27).

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Textualization (7) The collector’s written text qua written text differed from the poet’s oral presentation qua oral presentation. Barry Powell writes (2000: 107), Speech consists of gesture, intonation, facial expression, bodily movement, and other deictic behavior that contributes to the meaning of the utterance…. The Iliad and Odyssey, (p.108) which we know only through alphabetic versions, do not therefore even theoretically resemble the living experience of Homer’s speech, his oral song. Jensen makes a similar point: “It is easy to forget how much is lost in the passage from oral performance to published edition: not only the music, but also intonation, accentuation, mimicry, and gesticulation, as well as interaction with the audience and the overall atmosphere of the event” (2011: 290; cf. Thomas 1992: 117–19, 2003; Reece 2011). These scholars are not speaking of a dictating performer in these instances, but one extrapolates that, however restrained the Homeric poet was when dictating, the act of dictation differed in so far as it was an oral presentation from the collector’s written text in so far as it was a written text. Breaking down the discussion into these seven points illuminates the current understanding of the dictation model. If an earlier group of scholars focused on how the technology of writing may have influenced the Homeric poems at the conceptual level (e.g. Havelock 1986: 13), present-day scholarship has followed Lord in considering what happened during and what resulted from a process of text-making that began with writing to dictation. After reviewing in sections 3.2 to 3.7 what tended to and still tends to occur when collectors collect(ed) oral traditional works, especially epic and especially via manual transcription, I will reassess these seven points in section 3.8.

3.2. A Comparative Approach To repeat, I assume that some written texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey emerged this way: a collector instigated the recording of an oral poet by way of dictation and saw to the preparation of the written text acquired thereby for presentation to a readership.2 In keeping with the scholarly interest evinced in the previous sections in the process of dictation and the role of the collector, I wish to consider anew the details of that event. Using a term from folkloristics— see the titles of Lauri Honko’s 1998 monograph, Textualising the Siri Epic, and the volume he edited from 2000, Textualization of Oral Epics—I label that event “textualization”: textualization denotes a multifaceted process that included both the recording of the poem by hand and the readying of that recording for use as a written text.

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Textualization Readers may be more familiar with the definitions classicists have offered of textualization. Christos Tsagalis defines textualization as “the act or process of rendering as text”: this phenomenon need not require writing. He chooses the term “textification” to “define the act or process of rendering as text by means of putting into writing” (p.109) (2011: 211). Tsagalis calls “textualization” what, as Chapter 1 shows, I join linguistic anthropologists in calling “entextualization.” Tsagalis calls “textification” what I join folklorists in calling “textualization.” Andrew Ford proposes to restrict the word “textualization” to a situation in which written texts are no longer used solely as prompts for oral performance but are also the object of what he defines as real reading (2003: 18–19): I will ask when did the Greeks begin to read their own “literature,” and when do we find them taking up song texts and going through them (silently or aloud) as a way of fully experiencing and enjoying the benefits song was thought to offer? The passage of song from performance event to the object of such reading I call “textualization” to distinguish it from transcription, or the simple writing down of the words of a song. I use the word textualization to refer to the creation of a written text based on the recording of an oral performance. Moreover, how that text is deployed is immaterial to my usage. Egbert Bakker too seeks to restrict the word’s meaning. Toward the start of his 1997 book, he distinguishes between “writing something down” and “composing something with the aid of writing” (1997a: 25) and in a footnote cites Wulf Oesterreicher’s distinction between Verschriftung and Verschriftlichung (1993): “Verschriftung (writing in the medial sense, the transcoding of a discourse into text) and Verschriftlichung (writing in the conceptional sense, the textualization of a discourse)” (1997a: 25 n. 22; cf. Morales 2017: 75). At the end of the same book, Bakker states, “Writing too was a process, not of mere transcription, but of textualization” (1997a: 209). Here as well a footnote points to Oesterreicher: “For the difference between transcription and textualization, cf. the German terminological distinction between Verschriftung ‘textification’ and Verschriftlichung ‘textualization’” (209 n. 5). As I mentioned in this book’s introduction, Bakker rightly separates “writing in the medial sense” from “writing in the conceptional sense,” and Oesterreicher’s work is useful here (cf. J. Harris 2010: 120–1). I for my part do not oppose textualization to transcoding or transcription. Rather, textualization can come in various forms, including but not limited to transcoding or transcription, and Oesterreicher’s terminology helps one see that. Karl Reichl’s rehearsal of Oesterreicher’s Verschriftung and Verschriftlichung brings this out (2012a: 8–9, emphasis in original, cf. 2015: 33– 4):

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Textualization The difference between the transposition from the medium of spoken language to the medium of writing on the one hand and the transformation of oral speech into a written text on the other can be captured by the German terms Verschriftung and Verschriftlichung…. While the first denotes a mere change of medium, as in the transcription of a spoken text, the latter designates the re-orientation of spoken discourse according to the forms and, more importantly, the concepts of written texts. By Verschriftung no more than a change of medium is ideally implied…. In Verschriftlichung, on the other hand, a colloquial register or a dialect form might be replaced by the forms appropriate to the written standard, or a native genre might be recast in the mould of written poetry. The degree of ‘literariness’ varies and ranges from the total re-writing of oral discourse on one (p.110) end of the scale…to a point where the oral utterance is left largely ‘unedited’ and Verschriftlichung and Verschriftung virtually merge.3 I understand textualization to embrace a range of possibilities, from Verschriftung to Verschriftlichung, and where a written text falls on this spectrum comes down to the degree to which the original oral production is reworked in the creation of the written document. I will investigate from a comparative perspective the textualization of a poet’s performance of the Iliad and of a poet’s performance of the Odyssey. Lacking external evidence for what transpired in those cases—the internal evidence being what scholars extrapolate from the Iliad and the Odyssey themselves—one can gain a better sense of what might have happened by turning to the work of nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century collectors who textualized the work of oral poets or practitioners of other genres of oral tradition. In adopting this approach, I follow above all Minna Skafte Jensen (1980: 9–16; 2011: 19, 300) and Honko (1996) but also acknowledge Martin L. West’s suggestion that one can approach the appearance of written versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey by looking at “comparable materials from other cultures” (1990: 34, my translation) as well as Bakker’s use of scholarship by medievalists to think about what it would have meant to create written texts of Homeric poetry (1997a: 22– 7). I enumerate here the five parameters of the investigation. (1) A turning point in the textualization of oral traditional works came with the research of Milman Parry (1902–35) and Albert Lord (1912–1991) in the former Yugoslavia. The pair made great advances in field research techniques, and Lord made great strides toward generating a written text that aims to represent faithfully an oral performer’s words (Lord 1991: 13; Honko 1998: 184–8; Foley 2000: 78, 80; 2005b: 235; Čolaković 2007: 342–3). For my project, the work of

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Textualization pre-Parry collectors is most illuminating, but I also attend to the work of Parry and Lord’s epigones. (2) I look at those collectors who transcribed performances by hand (or had a scribe transcribe them by hand) as the performers sang, recited, or dictated; at those collectors whose editing strategies did not differ from those of previous collectors even after the interventions of Parry and Lord; and at those collectors whose collecting and editing strategies are in keeping with current theories on the best way to textualize an oral traditional work. In section 3.7, I consider the collection of oral traditional material tout court. Overall, I highlight but do not restrict myself to collectors who collected by way of manual transcription. (3) I have not sought out instances of textualization in which the performer initiated the project. As I noted earlier, M. L. West speculates that a Homeric poet might have (p.111) arranged of his own accord to dictate to a scribe, but that vision is not the one I am interrogating here. This restriction necessitates that I set aside instances of textualization with respect to which I cannot be sure if a collector was involved. For example, from October 3, 1938 to January 24, 1939, the Uzbek poet Saidmurod Panoh-o‘g‘li dictated a version of Alpamysh to a 13-year-old boy named Shamsi Murodov (Reichl 2001: 64), but one does not know whether the poet himself or someone else, such as the local teacher, prompted this act of dictation (Reichl, personal communication). This restriction does not pertain to the discussion of the scribal process in subsection 3.3.5.2. Moreover, I include those instances in which an outsider collector recorded a performer at the performer’s request. For example, in 1923, the Seto singer Anne Vabarna (Estonia) compelled the Finnish ethnomusicologist Armas Otto Väisänen (1890–1969) to take down her poetry although he was looking to talk to her about midwifery (Kuutma 2006: 144–5). Between October 1985 and March 1986, Gopala Naika dictated the Siri epic on his own initiative to Dr. Chinnappa Gowda and the doctor’s student Miss Sudha (Honko 1998: 258, 2000b: 28–9). (4) I strive to incorporate as diverse a collection of material as possible (cf. Ready 2018a: 13). Doing so provides a sense of almost universal practices, not those limited to one time or place or motivated by a specific agenda (cf. Jensen 1980: 15–16; Culley 1986: 51). It also helps one avoid the confirmation bias that manifests itself when one cherry-picks from the various modern textualizations an example that confirms a preexisting understanding of the emergence of the Iliad and of the Odyssey. (5) Jensen surmises that in the Homeric case textualization would have involved recopying “the raw manuscript” with its “more or less unreadable cursive hexameters… onto neatly written papyrus rolls” (2011: 300). Documentary evidence for this sequence comes from the ancient Near Eastern site of Ugarit (M. L. West 1997: 604), and one may also see a parallel in the multi-stage compositional process—from interviews to notes to draft to fair copy— Page 12 of 94

 

Textualization undertaken by medieval historians writing in Latin (Mortensen 2008). Indeed, as a process, textualization generates various kinds of texts that merit definition. As I showed in Chapters 1 and 2, one can label an “oral text” what the performer generates orally as he performs. The collector of the verbal component of an oral text—I address the other components (for example, paralinguistic and prosodic) of an oral text in section 3.7—can fashion different sorts of written texts: field notes (an initial inscription by hand of the verbal component of an oral text); a fair copy (a tidied-up version of field notes); and a final printed edition (cf. Prior 2002: 196). Annekie Joubert even urges the collector to create four written texts: a pre-text, providing “background information regarding the performance event”; a transcribed or main text; a sub-text, “which can be regarded as the performance directions”; and an interpretative text, offering “literary interpretation…of the performance event by the textmaker” (2004: 89, emphasis in original). As my survey unfolds in keeping with these five parameters, my primary sources will be both the collectors’ own self-reflexive commentary as well as studies of those collectors’ works. I quote frequently and liberally from these sources. To be sure, one (p.112) can never know the precise details of the textualization of the work of Homeric poets, but that limitation, imposing as it is, does not give one license to stop thinking about what most likely transpired. The comparanda I study do not reveal what exactly happened in the Homeric case, but they do suggest the kinds of things that most likely did occur (cf. Ready 2018a: 2, 13, 191). The argument is one from probability, and, in order to make such an argument, I present numerous examples of each phenomenon I discuss. To anticipate my conclusion again: this survey suggests that neither a written version of the Iliad nor a written version of the Odyssey, stemming as they did from a process of dictation instigated by a collector, was “an unmediated gift of an oral poet’s inspiration” to borrow a phrase from John Niles (1999: 104). Jensen draws attention to the presence of three parties in the dictation event: “patron, rhapsode, and scribe” (2011: 301). I suggest that the resulting text was a co-creation of these individuals—the poet, scribe, and collector. To avoid any confusion, I stress that I am not decrying this state of affairs. I am not expressing some sort of longing for “an unmediated gift of an oral poet’s inspiration,” nor am I characterizing the collector who oversaw the production of a written version of the Iliad or a written version of the Odyssey as one who corrupted something pure (cf. Niles 2013a: 242). Nor, nostalgic for some authentic experience, a common desire among those who work with oral traditions (Bendix 1997; cf. Hofmeyr 1995: 20–1), am I lamenting a lack of authenticity in this co-created text. I am exploring what went into producing a dictated text of the Iliad and a dictated text of the Odyssey. I want to bring out the applicability of the following sorts of statements made by students of oral

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Textualization literatures over the past decades to the textualization of the work of Homeric poets: Folklore texts cannot escape from reflecting the focus of their makers. (Fine 1984: 85) Where do the single-voiced, expository texts that appear in ethnographic monographs and folklore collections come from? In good part, they are a product of the interaction between the ethnographer and native Andeans. (Becker and Mannheim 1995: 245) Through this process of textualization, collectors become collaborators in the act of poetry, not just recorders of it. As the inventors of texts accessible to a literary community, collectors make myriad choices that determine the character of the product of their intervention into the realm of oral performance. (Niles 1993: 139; cf. 2013a: 241–2; 2013b: 208, 220) The oral text, which will of necessity be made available to the public in written form, is the result of a series of textual interventions made up of social relations: those between informants—poets or storytellers—and transcribers, between transcribers and translators, between translators and publishers…. In its written form, the text is thus the result of a whole series of transactions, all of which are situated in different scholarly and social domains. (Ricard 2004: 29–30) The process that we too easily reduce to a simple song-to-book trajectory actually begins with fieldworkers’ predispositions and selections, continues with the idiosyncratic conditions of the performances they attend and engender along with the editorial decisions they make. (Foley 2005a: 209, cf. 211) (p.113) The qualities we impute to them may sometimes lie with the collectors and publishers as much as with their imagined originators…. “Oral texts”… have now to be increasingly recognised as…often co-created by multiple— and possibly conflicting—parties. (Finnegan 2007: 178, 199, cf. 2015: 13)

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Textualization As co-productions, told-to narratives conceal and reveal a surplus of contradictory intentions of recorders, tellers, and other intermediaries, all of whom are involved in selecting and shaping the narrative…. It is a mistake to view told-to narratives as either reliable recordings of oral traditions or examples of textual colonization. Two or more mediators produce these composite texts,… (McCall 2011: 40–2) A published folkloric text is the joint product of the collector and the performer. (Ziolkowski 2013: 79–80) Folklorists continue to call for the study of the complex dynamics of textualization (Niles 2013a: e.g. 230–1). The evidence to be presented suggests that the textualization of a poet’s presentation of the Iliad and of a poet’s presentation of the Odyssey involved more than proponents of the dictation hypothesis have so far acknowledged. Because, on the one hand, I am inspired by Jensen’s comparative work but, on the other hand, my overarching conclusion that the textualization of the work of Homeric poets needs to be understood as an act of co-creation differs from Jensen’s comparison-based reconstruction, my disagreement with her position is instructive. The disagreement is twofold. First, Jensen comments in the spirit of the scholars I just quoted—“The influence of the collector on the material exerts itself in all fields…. Thus the publication of any folksong may be regarded as a result of interaction between informant and collector” (1980: 14); “singers around the world all seem to be able without further ado to conform to the scholars’ wishes and structure their performance in ways they have not attempted before” (2011: 106); “for the scholar dictation has its attractions, too, mainly that he/she may ask questions during the process, require a passage to be repeated when the content is unclear, protest if a verse does not scan, etc.” (283); “before Parry and Lord, editors did not hesitate to introduce emendations tacitly” (288). Nevertheless, I do not find that she sufficiently applies these findings to the Homeric scenario. Second, I suggest consulting a more diverse set of comparanda. Jensen introduces Homerists to several exemplary feats of textualization, like Reichl’s work with the Karakalpak Edige (Uzbekistan) (2007), but when she sets out to align the textualization of the work of our Homeric poets with “what takes place when in modern times an oral epic is recorded” (2011: 327), she focuses on Honko’s work with the Siri epic (1998): “When we speculate what such a dictation would be like, the best comparative material accessible is Honko’s description” (2011: 296). For example, “Like Naika [Honko’s singer], during the Page 15 of 94

 

Textualization long, strenuous process the [Homeric] rhapsode would have kept in mind the audience of his regular performance” (298); and “Honko’s experience when Gopala Naika recited his Siri Epic to him included similar instances of confusion when one error led to others” (321). Honko’s research is indispensable for one who wishes to understand Homeric poetry as oral poetry, but neither his project nor any of the other (p.114) instances of diligent textualization in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries suffices as an analogue for the textualization events that produced written versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey. As stated in this section’s item (1), one needs to focus as much if not more on pre-Parry collectors. Working with those figures—seeing, for instance, that “the idea of obtaining an accurate text of a given performance is comparatively recent” (Lord 2000: 126); that “it is a well-known fact that older editions of ‘folk poetry’ are not very careful to offer authentic texts” (Jensen 1998: 102); that “not many scribes and editors had the urge to stay close to what they heard” (Honko 2000b: 8)—leads to the idea of co-creation, a much more plausible scenario than that which Jensen proposes.

3.3. The Process of Recording by Hand This section first charts the difficulties recording a performance by hand posed for collectors and performers (subsection 3.3.1) and the techniques collectors adopted to work around those challenges (subsection 3.3.2) and then notes the rare occasions when performers took to dictation (subsection 3.3.3). It next reviews how dictating performers produced something different from when they performed in their usual way (subsection 3.3.4). Finally, it considers what was written down (subsection 3.3.5), looking at the collector’s role as gatekeeper (subsection 3.3.5.1) and at the scribe’s contribution (subsection 3.3.5.2). The larger goal is to trace how the collector (and scribe) exerted his influence in the very process of recording. 3.3.1. The Challenges of Manual Transcription

Martin L. West (1990: 43–5) and José González (2013: 20–3) are two Homerists who have stressed the challenges of recording an oral traditional work by hand. I elaborate here on this fundamental fact that both collectors, often operating as their own scribes, and performers frequently found manual transcription difficult. I start with the collectors’ struggles. Luka Marjanović (1844–1920), who collected the work of Muslim epic and lyric poets in northwestern Bosnia from 1862 to 1864 and again in the 1880s, wrote in 1864, “It is particularly difficult to find and convince someone to recite what they know…, and even then the most difficult thing is to write down everything correctly and faithfully…; I can say this because I have attempted it all myself” (Tate 2011: 165). Tsyben Zhamtsarano (1880–1942) wrote in 1914 of collecting epic poetry among the Buryats (Siberia) (1980 [1914]: 5–6, my translation):

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Textualization The task of the collector is to achieve sufficient proficiency [in transcribing] that one can follow the singing rhapsode without making him stop. Such skill one can only acquire over time and, to be sure, after many sleepless nights and days in which one’s nerves are stretched to the breaking point. (p.115) Nikolaus Poppe (1897–1991), who collected poetry in Mongolia, similarly describes trying to keep up with a narrator and to write everything down faithfully as a nerve-wracking endeavor (1955: 4), and the Mongolist Byambyn Rinchen (1905–1977) cites his judgment approvingly (1960: p. xiii). The Russian collector of byliny (oral epic songs) Nikolai Onchukov (1872–1942) writes (quoted in Ziolkowski 2013: 78, emphasis and suspension points in original): As regards my written recordings, they’re uneven—some better, some worse. I always tried to record directly from storytellers and tried conscientiously to observe all the peculiarities of the local speech, but I didn’t always succeed. First of all, even a researcher who is very experienced in the matter of recordings won’t always catch or be able to write down or notice everything about what and how the storyteller sitting in from of him is saying…. E. Arsenio Manuel (1909–2003) reports on collecting epic poetry by way of dictation among the Manuvu’ in the Philippines: “Since I did not have any mechanical device for recording the text, I had difficulties with my right arm, which began to swell after days of writing. I was disabled for sometime” (1975: 33). James Delaney, who collected folklore in North Longford, Ireland, in the 1950s, recalls, “Patrick would talk into the small hours so that on leaving him my right arm would be banged from writing as fast as I could, for hours on end” (1990: 18). So too as he recorded Jusup Mamay, a Kyrgyz poet in China, in 1961, the amanuensis’s hand grew “numb” (Lang Ying 2001: 229). Oskar Kolberg (1814–90), a collector of the work of Polish folk singers and musicians, wins the prize for the most vivid (and melodramatic) description of the difficulties facing one seeking to record folk performances by hand (quoted in Stęszewski 1992: 112): Again and again I had to take down in shorthand the short-lived sound of a violin being played in a dirty room, amidst choking smoke, smells and the noise of the numerous people gathered around me—and often I had to fear for my life; I also had to take down notes in a forest, with a sheet spread on a tree trunk, or somewhere out in a field holding a sheet on my own knew [sic] or on the shoulder of a companion. Performers had trouble too. Elias Lönnrot (1802–84) gathered material for a Finnish epic between 1828 and 1844, generating five versions between 1833 Page 17 of 94

 

Textualization and 1862 and publishing the third through fifth: “‘Lemminkäinen’, ‘Väinämöinen’, and ‘Wedding Songs’ (1833), the Proto-Kalevala (1833), the Old Kalevala (1835), the New Kalevala (1849) and the Abridged Kalevala (also called the School Kalevala) (1862)” (Hämäläinen 2013: 55 n. 1).4 When collecting Kalevala-meter poetry (Honko 2002a: 18), Lönnrot had soon discovered that dictation was not the most fortunate mode of performance. The singer had to wait until the scribe had scribbled down his line. Not only the flow of words but also the rhythm, melody and intonation were affected by the unnatural staccato of dictation. Inexperienced singers soon got confused and unwilling to continue. (p. 116) More experienced singers were able to cooperate but probably at the risk of shorter length and less embellishment of the oral text. K. Golstunskij’s (1831–99) attempts to record the Jangar cycle from Kalymk performers (Russia) in 1862 were frequently stymied by the fact that “those he worked with were unaccustomed to being interrupted during performance to allow time for someone to copy the libretto into his notebook” (Chao 2001: 405). In the foreword (translated into English in Radloff 1990) to his 1885 publication of Kyrgyz epic collected in 1862 and 1869, Wilhelm Radloff (1837–1918) states (1885: pp. xix–xx, my translation), The repeated singing of one and the same song, the boring process of dictation, and my frequent interruptions regularly weakened the singer’s zeal, an element necessary for good singing. He could only dictate to me in a weary and slovenly fashion that which shortly before he had performed with passion. I of course provided applause and gifts in order to spur on the singer to some degree, but I could nevertheless not provide a substitute for the usual motivation. The transcribed verses, therefore, lack much in the way of vigor. Of collecting stories in Iran, Douglas Craven Phillott (1860–1930) writes, “They were taken down in writing by a Persian with considerable difficulty, just as they fell from the lips of their professional narrators. Persian story-tellers speak with great fluency and rapidity; they cannot dictate slowly: if interrupted they miss the point and become incoherent” (1906: 375). Mikhail Speranskii (1863–1938) collected epic poetry (dumy) from a Ukrainian minstrel named Terentii Parkhomenko who (Kononenko 1998: 120) had a hard time dictating. According to Speranskii, when asked to “tell” his songs, the minstrel “made errors and omissions; noticing his mistakes, he would immediately correct it and restore the text, only this time singing it, having played several chords on his bandura, at which point he would recite it correctly.”

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Textualization Of collecting oral traditional tales in the former Rhodesia, E. W. Smith (1876– 1957) and A. M. Dale (d. 1919) recall (1920: 336), It was all good to listen to—impossible to put on paper. Ask him now to repeat the story slowly so that you may write it. You will, with patience, get the gist of it, but the unnaturalness of the circumstance disconcerts him, your repeated request for the repetition of a phrase, the absence of the encouragement of his friends, and, above all, the hampering slowness of your pen, all combine to kill the spirit of story-telling. Hence we have to be content with far less than the tales as they are told. Tsyben Zhamtsarano faced similar challenges (1980 [1914]: 5, my translation): That which offers the greatest difficulty is transcribing precisely all the words of the rhapsodes or shamans without distorting a word or a sound. The rhapsode, like the shaman, is in his own way an enthused poet. Although he follows a certain model when he sings, he brings in some different variants according to his mood and the external setting. As soon as one causes a singing rhapsode or shaman to pause even if only for a moment, he immediately loses the thread of his thought and becomes confused, and his vigor disappears. Nevertheless, if he should succeed in continuing his narration, it emerges only in an altered form, and so one is compelled to write down one variant and then another, etc. (p.117) Boris Vladimirtsov (1884–1931), a collector of Oirat heroic epics in northwestern Mongolia in the 1910s, reports (1983–4: 40–1), All the singers I saw ascribed tremendous significance to the balalaika, the tobshuur, saying that without it it would be very difficult, almost impossible to be inspired, and be put into an impassioned state…. The bards are so accustomed to execute their epics with the tobshuur that at times it is extraordinarily difficult for them to “tell” the bylina, and even more to dictate it. Nora Chadwick relays what Vladimir Zazubrin (1895–1938) learned about the Altai epic poet (Russia): “the slow process of writing or dictating causes him [the performer] to lose his thread and diverge into some different variant of the story” (1969: 221; cf. Zazubrin 1935: 10). E. Arsenio Manuel speaks of the difficulties a singer of the Agyu epic of the Ilianon people (Philippines) had when asked to dictate (1969: 39–40; cf. Revel 1996: 119): Though Blagtas was not a shy man, when requested to dictate the epic he could not do so, the singer lapsing into mere prose. We tried to make him sing once more and dictate what he had sung, but he could not make it….

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Textualization This experience showed how difficult it is for a singer to dictate his text without the mnemonic aid of the chant. Gopala Naika, who performed the Siri epic for Lauri Honko in 1990, “finds dictating the epic more difficult than singing it. The extra time provided during dictation is a problem, not a resource” (Honko 1998: 90). The singer explained (90): One must tell stopping all the time…. While stopping all the time, the telling does not proceed. Once you stop suddenly, you are forced to think. Where did I stop, from where to start again, one must begin to think…. So, it does not come right unless my heart is in it. So, a little will be left aside if I must think what to do. So, while writing down, some aksaras might have been left aside, thus it was not proper. Franz Boas (1858–1942), the father of the discipline of anthropology in North America, collected oral narratives in the Pacific Northwest, especially on the northwest coast of Canada. He too comments on “the difficulty of taking down accurate rapid dictation from natives” (1982 [1940]: 452) and, in an earlier piece, writes, “The slowness of dictation that is necessary for recording texts makes it difficult for the narrator to employ that freedom of diction that belongs to the well-told tale, and consequently an unnatural simplicity of syntax prevails in most of the dictated texts” (1917: 1). In a discussion of Somali poetry, Martin Orwin provides the rule-proving exception (2005: 293): The transcription was something that was not in any way problematic for the collector: the poems were there, the people who knew the poems knew the definitive texts, and these could then simply be transformed from “oral definitive texts” into “written definitive texts.” The introspection and thought that have, quite rightly, gone into Western academe’s consideration of what it is to transcribe and how to properly transcribe was simply not an issue in this case. (p.118) As I demonstrate in the next subsection, collectors deployed various measures to combat the difficulties that emerged when they tried to record a performer’s oral text by hand. 3.3.2. Steps to Work around These Challenges and their Effects

Collectors took one or more of three steps to address the challenges posed by manual transcription: slowing the performer down, having the performer repeat his performance, and adopting various scribal tricks. These techniques engendered unintended consequences as the collector came to play a role in the form the performer’s oral text took and in the form the written text took.

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Textualization Collectors often required performers to pause to allow time for their words to be recorded by hand. For instance, Aleksandr Hilferding (1831–72) details how he collected byliny in Russia’s Olonets Province in 1871 and 1872 (quoted in Ziolkowski 2013: 69, emphasis in original): Having listened for several days to the first tellers I met and struggled in vain with them in order to write down a bylina completely correctly, with observance of the meter in which it was sung, I tried to train my rhapsode companion to sing (and not just retell in words) a bylina with sufficient pauses between verses that it would be possible to write it down. August Hermann Francke (1870–1930) writes of arranging for a scribe to record a poet’s dictation of a version of the Kesar epic in the Ladakh region of India: “The following… was dictated slowly” (2000 [1905]: p. ii).5 Gustav Friedrich Meyer (1878–1945), a collector of folktales in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, compelled his informants to dictate slowly (Jeske 2002: 305). In discussing Alfred Kroeber’s (1876–1960) textualization of a Mohave epic (United States) in 1902, Lauri Honko comments on what happened when a “telling was pieced into bits not regulated by the narrator”: “he must have had some difficulty in keeping the subtleties of oral discourse alive” (1998: 181). Having noted “the stops and starts of the dictation process” (1983a: 38), Dennis Tedlock avers, “Dictation hopelessly distorts delivery” (123, cf. 1977: 508). Similarly, Margaret Ziolkowski observes of Hilferding’s tactics, “That such a procedure might result in a certain artificiality seems not to have worried him” (2013: 69). Milman Parry in his notes written between 1933 and 1935 toward a book with the working title Cór Huso: A Study of Southslavic Song opined as follows (1971: 450–1): But dictation also makes for faults of its own kind…. [I am thinking] of faults which arise when a singer lacks the powers of concentration which would enable him to hold in mind exactly the train of thought, while he is waiting for the last verse to be written, and at the same time compose to himself the verse which he will dictate next, and which will carry (p.119) that train of thought ahead as it should be carried. The necessary slowness of dictation is itself trying in the singer’s attention; the pause for writing gives place for distraction; and finally, the singer, as in the pause for writing he thinks ahead, may more or less forget just how he dictated the last verse, and may even skip some verse which he has thought of in his own head, and thinks he has dictated. The collector’s interference rendered the performance less fluid than usual and therefore can be seen to have determined in part what the performer said.

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Textualization Other collectors chose to have a performer present a given piece two or more times. Vuk Karadžić (1787–1864) published the first edition of his four-volume Srpske narodne pjesme (Serbian Folk Songs) between 1823 and 1833 and the second edition between 1841 and 1862 (Petrovic 2016: 319). He collected all kinds of poetry including “the Christian epic tradition of the Serbs” (Foley 2004b: 103–4, quotation from 103). Karadžić describes having to ask a teller to perform repeatedly an epic (quoted in D. Wilson 1970: 169; cf. Koljević 1980: 315; M. L. West 1990: 44–5): I could think of nothing better than to make sure that he sang each song to me several times until I’d got it well enough by heart to know when he was skipping something; then I’d ask him to sing it slowly to me, drawling out the words, and would write after him, as quickly as I could. When I’d copied down a song like this, he’d have to sing it to me again, and I’d look at my manuscript to see if it was all written down properly. In this way I spent about a fortnight on four songs. Pavel Rybnikov (1831–85) recorded byliny in Russia’s Olonets Province in the 1860s. The impossibility of recording a singing singer led him to the following arrangement (quoted in Ziolkowski 2013: 77): He spoke the bylina word for word…and I wrote down a rough copy. When he finished, I asked him to sing it and corrected my record according to what was sung…[suspension points in original] More than once I threw down my pen and greedily listened to the course of the story, then asked Riabinin to repeat what had been sung and reluctantly set about filling up the gaps. Unable to record singers while they were singing and finding the singers incapable of dictating slowly enough without losing their way, Wilhelm Radloff asked a singer first to sing an episode during which he wrote down “the order of presentation” (1885: p. xv, my translation). He then had the singer dictate the same episode and he used his notes from the sung version to keep the singer from forgetting anything (cf. Honko 1998: 178). Natalie Kononenko reviews Porfirii Martynovych’s (1856–1933) collecting techniques among Ukrainian minstrels (1998: 130): Martynovych gives many remarks about variation in the margins of his manuscripts. He apparently recorded his songs by having the informant dictate, then read the text back to the minstrel and allowed him to make corrections. When questioned about their corrections, minstrels told Martynovych that both versions were acceptable. They gave whole series of lines, saying that these were alternates for each other and that a minstrel could use one set, if that seemed appropriate, or the other, if he felt it to be more effective. Page 22 of 94

 

Textualization (p.120) Of collecting stories from Iranian storytellers, Douglas Craven Phillott declares that “the same story has to be repeated many times before the recorder can accurately fill in all the numerous blanks that occur after a first narration” (1906: 375). Franz Boas had “the material dictated and redictated” (Clements 1996: 150). V. N. Vasil’ev (1877–1930) adopted a tactic similar to Wilhelm Radloff’s when recording in 1905 the Jakut poet Timofeev’s version of Kulun Kullustuur (Siberia). He had the singer perform in a natural context: then “Vasil’ev could proceed to recording it by hand with some confidence that under the bard’s dictation he would at least notice major omissions, alterations, or deviations” (Hatto 2000: 141). In 1957, P. Chorloo (1917–2008) took down by hand two epics from the Mongolian singer Senijn Bujan. Senijn performed the poems three times in total “in order to provide the scribe with the opportunity to make corrections and to occasionally ask questions” (Koppe 1992: 4, my translation). E. Arsenio Manuel deployed a related tactic when trying to textualize Blagtas Pandakan’s version of the Agyu epic: “So we requested him to synopsize the story, to put order to his narrative…. Then Blagtas went home and came back…. He dictated the major portion of the epic from November 21st to the 25th. Guided by his own synopsis, we discovered some lapses” (1969: 40). An oral performer’s oral text possesses a certain stability (Lord 2000: 100, 1994: 17; Dollerup et al. 1984: 250; Bauman 1986: 56–9, 74–5; A.-L. Siikala 1990: 84– 6; Kaivola-Bregenhøj 1996: 100, 121; Scodel 2002: 18, 56; Jensen 2011: 120–1, 142–3; Reichl 2012a: 27; Levaniouk 2018: 184–5), although much can depend on which genre the text belongs to and which part of the text one is talking about (Kaivola-Bregenhøj 1996: 192–9). But already in 1884, the Danish collector Evald Tang Kristensen (1843–1929) noted, “It is no use to ask the informant to tell once more exactly the way he did previously, for he cannot and will not” (tr. Dollerup et al. 1984: 250 n. 29), and Albert Lord too points out the folly of asking an oral poet to repeat himself exactly (2000: 125, 149). Honko’s criticism of Wilhelm Radloff’s method applies to those of the other collectors as well (1998: 178): This double recital is questionable. Experience shows, and Radloff was well aware of it [Radloff 1885: p. xvi (JR)], that a singer cannot perform identically twice. It is most likely that the text will deteriorate in repetition and that intervening questioning will add to and bring about confusion. The oral discourse will be compromised in a number of ways and the composition will also be affected by being in a way in two hands. When a collector opted to have a performer repeat a song or tale, the collector’s actions resulted in a written text that was a hybrid based on two or more different performances. In some cases, the collector guided the performer’s

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Textualization presentation and, in some of those cases, hampered the performer’s production of the oral text. Collectors also attempted to mitigate the difficulties of recording by hand by using shorthand or taking notes. Elias Lönnrot developed an elaborate system of abbreviations to record singers as they dictated and as they sang (Honko 2002a: 18; Saarinen 2013: 36, 40). Pavel Rybnikov’s “original drafts were…marked by a multitude of abbreviations,” and his contemporary Aleksandr Hilferding “did not always write out (p.121) complete words, or even complete lines” (Ziolkowski 2013: 77). Hannelore Jeske describes the technique of Wilhelm Wisser (1843– 1935), a collector of folktales in Schleswig-Holstein (Germany): “Thereafter he took dictation in shorthand as faithfully as possible during the narration; however, he often had to be satisfied with sentence fragments or keywords (Stichworte) when he could not keep up with the pace of narration” (2002: 244, my translation). Tsyben Zhamtsarano aimed to get down at least two-thirds of what was said by way of “stenogram” (1980 [1914]: 6). Sometimes the collector jotted down notes during the performance and fleshed them out subsequently. Giuseppe Pitrè (1841–1916), a collector of Sicilian folklore, “took notes when he heard a tale told in dialect, and based on a hearing, and possibly two or three, he reconstructed the tale” (Zipes 2009: 11). Balbai Mamay (1892–1930s) took notes as he recorded Ebrayin Akunbe’s performance of five sections of Manas (China) (Lang Ying 2001: 231). Erika Taube provides an account of collecting tales among the Altai-Tuvinians (Siberia) in 1966 (quoted in Hatto 2000: 134): We asked them to narrate more slowly so that Galsan could write it down hard after the performer. But that inhibited the free flow of the narrator’s utterance. So we let him [sic!] tell on tranquilly, with [Galsan] taking down only the “strongpoints” (opornye mesta), but after the performance of the tale, Galsan recorded everything and only in individual cases—on the next day, basing himself on notes made at the time of the narration, and fixing the names, special concepts, felicitous or original thematic turns and expressions, picturesque comparisons, formulae etc., as on a frame the scarlet thread of the action’s unwinding. Hinrich Johannes Rink (1819–93), a collector of Inuit tales (Greenland), relied on shorthand (Thisted 2001: 179) and perhaps just note-taking during a performance (Thisted 1996: 261). Starting with Frederic Bartlett’s study of the changes participants in his experiments made when retelling a story titled “The War of the Ghosts” (1995 [1932]: 63–94), researchers have stressed the fallibility of human memory when it comes to the reproduction of narratives first voiced or generated by another (cf. Tannen 1986: 313; Carr 2011: 14). Linda Dégh claims that shorthand can “insure literal accuracy” (1965: p. xxvii), but not for nothing did Wilhelm Wisser urge collectors to take dictation in shorthand as a last resort (Jeske 2002: 245). Page 24 of 94

 

Textualization Tsyben Zhamtsarano avers that a transcript written in shorthand, his “stenogram,” “must be immediately checked then and there and all ambiguities dealt with while the collector still remembers everything” (1980 [1914]: 6, my translation). The collector will not remember everything later on. Because Evald Tang Kristensen “relied on some kind of rapid notation and memory,” “his recordings are not verbatim” (Dollerup et al. 1984: 253). When a collector sought to reconstruct the words of an oral text by relying on notes, he taxed his memory even more. Whether he used shorthand or notes, when it came time for the collector to make a fair copy, his version of what the performer said differed in at least some respects from what the performer actually said. Lastly, collectors who recorded by hand had one more trick up their sleeves. Thomas DuBois reports of collectors of Finnish folk poetry: “In the interest of saving time and (p.122) paper, finally, the folklorists skipped entire passages when they perceived them as repetitions, recording these in their texts only with shorthand ellipses, such as ‘etc.’ or ‘the same two more times’” (1995: 42). Margaret Ziolkowski reports on Russian collectors (2013: 77): When Rybnikov encountered repetition by a singer, he would mechanically transfer verses from one section of a recording to another…. In the case of epic commonplaces or stock episodes, Hilferding often wrote down only a direction to reuse one portion of text in another place, to the point that some byliny consisted almost entirely of compilations of repetitions. DuBois comments, “The kinds of fine details that may have been used to give form to the performance—a repetition of a line, the shift of a verb tense, or the addition of a particle, for example—may have been lost in such missing lines” (1995: 42). Just so, speaking of the Russians’ practice, Bella Čistova (1998: 44) and Ziolkowski (2013: 77, 80) each observe that the ensuing homogeneity masked the diversity of those supposedly equivalent passages. Once again, a tactic adopted by a collector confronted with the challenges of manual transcription led to a written text marked by the collectors’ efforts. 3.3.3. The Rare Exceptions

“Some of the singers adapted well to what was for all of them a new method of proceeding…but most did not” (Foley 2000: 78; cf. 2004a: 34; Okpewho 1992: 50; Clements 1996: 164; Honko 1998: 82, 162; 2002b: 337, 340). Kaare Grønbech (1901–57), who collected prose narratives among the Tsakhar in Mongolia in 1938 and 1939, wrote of his 18-year-old informant’s rare ability (“das seltene Vermögen”) to dictate successfully: he was able to repeat himself (Heissig 1985: 2; cf. Biebuyck and Mateene 1969: p. vi; Honko 2002b: 337). So, on rare occasions—and I stress the rarity of this development—a performer became good at dictating to a scribe and used the opportunity provided by this new performance arena to produce “the finest and longest of songs.” Of poets in

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Textualization the former Yugoslavia, Albert Lord writes (2000: 128; cf. 1991: 46–7; Danek 2002a: 305): From the point of view of verse-making, dictation carries no great advantage to the singer, but from that of song-making it may be instrumental in producing the finest and longest of songs. For it extends almost indefinitely the time limit of performance. And with a little urging, under the stimulus of great accomplishment for a worthy audience, the singer of talent will apply every resource of his craft to adorn and enrich his song. The case of the Seto poet Anne Vabarna supports Lord’s findings. In 1923, Vabarna dictated an epic of 6621 lines to the Finnish ethnomusicologist Armas Otto Väisänen. The collector “did not realise until later that he was actually witnessing the birth of not (p.123) only an epic but also the long format sought in vain by so many for so long in the Baltic-Finnish region” (Honko 2002b: 337).6 For my purposes the critical point is not only that the collector created and maintained this exceptional situation, this unique performance space, for the performer but also that he played a role in the oral text’s assuming the form it did. The performer’s ability to take his or her time was far from the sole factor in his or her success (pace Ruijgh 1995: 26). Rather, Lord stresses the collector’s need to motivate the dictating poet: “the singer discovers the advantages of the technique and proceeds to profit by them, as long as the scribe can mitigate the boredom of slow performance, and maintain the singer’s interest” (1991: 46). And as the collector and/or scribe, to borrow Lord’s metaphor (1954: 8), “nursed” the performance, he shaped it. 3.3.4. Dictated Texts versus Sung Texts

Irrespective of how performers responded to the dictation process, they produced oral texts different from those produced when they performed in their usual way. The mode of performance affects the form and/or content of the performance. Dennis Tedlock observes that Zuni taletellers (United States) altered their performances when dictating: in particular, comparing Zuni tellers’ dictated texts to those recorded on a tape recorder, he detects shorter sentences and a greater amount of “mechanical” parallelism in the former (1983a: 38–9). Jack Goody finds that a dictated version of the creation account told to the LoDagaa members of the Bagre society (northern Ghana) “is substantially longer than the others, and it is also both more elaborate and more deliberate” (1987: 95) (the “others” having been electronically recorded “in the course of the ceremonies or at a special recital”). Writing on Old Norse eddic poetry, Frog suggests that “the degree of regularity in the Alvíssmál stanzas might be more pronounced in

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Textualization dictation than in a fuller performance because the aesthetics of minor variations are not relevant to that context” (2011a: 50). Scholars’ analyses of the differences between sung, recited, and dictated songs offer a similar lesson. Albert Lord juxtaposes Salih Ugljanin’s sung, recited, and dictated performances of The Captivity of Đulić Ibrahim (Serbia) (1954: 350–4), and Georg Danek sums up the differences between his recited and dictated performances: “The mode of recitation in comparison with dictation led always to shorter songs, to a less regular construction of the verse, and to an especially mechanical technique of phrasing” (2002a: 305, my translation). Nigel Phillips comments on the (not great) (p.124) differences between spoken (recited) and sung versions of the West Sumatran epic about the hero Anggun Nan Tungga (1981: 22–3). Reporting on an experiment conducted in November 2008, Nicola Scaldaferri details the metrical differences in an Albanian singer’s sung, recited, and dictated renditions of the same stretch of verse: the sung version tends toward a line of ten syllables; the recited toward a line of eight syllables with two stress points; and the dictated toward an eight-syllable line (2011a: 152–5). Indeed, nineteenth-century scholars, such as Axel August Borenius (1846–1931) and Adolf Neovius (1858–1913) (Timonen 2000: 630, 633) as well as Matija Murko (1861–1952) (Murko 1990: 117–18), already recognized the differences between dictated and sung texts. I concentrate in what follows on subsequent scholarship that has continued to delve into the differences between the two. Of Kalevala-meter poetry recorded in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jukka Saarinen observes, “When kalevalaic poetry is dictated, texts show morphological features closer to the spoken language and different from those texts transcribed from singing” (2013: 40), and Kati Kallio finds not only that the choice of melody affects the structure of a poem but also that the structure of a dictated poem, being “in a looser (and more common) manner,” differs from that of a sung poem (2017: 348). She also reports, “Some metrical details may be different in song and speech…In speech, the words may take shorter forms than in song, while, in song, the singers may use additional syllables or use particular song structures with partial repetitions, absent syllables or refrains” (2014: 94). Lotte Tarkka confirms that these performers did not repeat lines when dictating whereas they often did when singing (2017: 281). Boris Vladimirtsov’s informant pointed to some specific differences in the realm of content (1983–4: 41, emphasis in original): The Bait bard [northwest Mongolia] once was dictating to me, and noting the peculiarities of this bylina: one action, no different epic details, repetitions, and glorifications. But, added the storyteller, if he had to sing this epic with a tobshuur, then probably he would insert much more in the way of side issues, under the influence of inspiration, i.e., the usual

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Textualization “common passages” would have appeared, adapted to this or that high point…of the epic, to the steed, the homeland of the knight, to battle, etc. Lord writes, “A dictated text, even when done under the best of circumstances and by the best of scribes, is never entirely, from the point of view of the line structure, the same as a sung text” (2000: 127). Furthermore, “a certain amount of normalizing occurs during both the dictating and editing processes, so that the published song does not by any means exactly reproduce the formulaic style of the sung performance. A study of actual sung texts, however, indicates considerable formula deviation” (1991: 41). In another comment on the dictating poet, Lord adds the following (1991: 11): He also, it appears, can enter into a different rhythm of composition from that of his singing performance…. The rhythm of dictation may induce, or enhance, structures that are endemic to traditional poetics, such as parallelisms and other paratactic arrangements of ideas and words. Just as the singing brings with it sequences of rhythmic and melodic patterns, so the dictating may have its own distinct structures. (p.125) In 1956, E. Arsenio Manuel collected epic poetry by way of dictation from Manuvu’ performers in the Philippines (1975: 27): Even if a singer’s dictation is faithfully recorded by ending the lines where the singer rests longest, the result is different from the epic that is sung. Furthermore, Manuvu’ poetry in its written form seldom attains the regularity of syllabic count that Tagalog poetry or metrical romances has attained. The Manuvu’ singer skillfully adds syllables at the end of lines to even them up. These syllables can then be prolonged to suit melodic-poetic requirements. These extra syllables are not recited in dictation at all and therefore do not appear in the written texts. Just so, the Ladakhi folksongs that August Hermann Francke collected by way of dictation lacked the vital “meaningless syllables,” “an essential element in delivering a text in sung performance” (Trewin 1992: 73; cf. Abramovich-Gomon 1999: 58). In 1965, Brenda Beck collected two versions of an epic, Aṇṇanmār Katai, in Tamilnadu, India, from E. C. Rāmacāmi—one a recording on cassette tapes of a performance stretching over nineteen nights before an audience that ranged in size from twenty to forty people; one typed to dictation “in relative privacy in a house” (1982: 4). The epic is prosimetric: the performer alternates between speaking “prose narrative sections” (60) and singing songs.7 In chapter 3 of her 1982 monograph, she lays out the distinct features of the dictated text (cf. Jensen 2011: 34–5). Highlights include: The quantity of words was reduced by about 70%. Page 28 of 94

 

Textualization (Beck 1982: 59) Much descriptive detail, particularly information on the general setting, was eliminated. (59) Much humor was eliminated. (60) The order of presentation was changed; a general overview of the action was placed before mood-setting descriptions. (60) The dictated version gets to the key events of the story faster. It tells one just as much or more about what happened, but less about how things looked and felt. (67) The dictated text makes easier reading. Its more condensed prose allows the underlying logic of various action sequences to come through. (68) Analyzing the songs in the two versions, Beck finds that in the dictated text “the average number of feet per line is reduced from eight to four, mainly by leaving out filler material…and omitting repeats…. The regularity of the meter is also improved considerably” (71). Regarding the presentation of sung lullabies, Beck notes that “Rāmacāmi used end rhymes, often even at the expense of grammar” in both presentations (73). Yet “where similar irregularities are present in other songs in his performance, he has carefully eliminated them from his dictated version.” (p.126) Minna Skafte Jensen collected epic poems in Albania in 1974. Asked to help go over the recordings of his sung performances, the poet, Mirash Ndou, proposed to dictate them: “Thus he both sang and dictated some twenty songs to us; and there is considerable difference between the two versions…. His dictated versions are almost always longer than the sung ones,” and metrical differences emerge as well (1980: 83). Jensen attributes this trend to the fact that Ndou had not performed in a natural setting for many years but had only dictated to folklorists (83). Lauri Honko juxtaposes Gopala Naika’s dictated and sung versions of the Siri epic (1998: 259):

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Textualization The dictated version is just over half (54.5%) of the sung version, 8,538 lines. Even this percentage is misleading, because if we were to compare the number of words instead of the number of lines, the difference would be even greater in favour of the sung version. Dictated epic discourse is, it would seem, more a listing of events with less or none of the embellishment inspired in the sung version by the melody alone…. It seems that the dictating singer is concentrating on giving a correct and fairly “full” sequence of the main elements of the plot, not so much on the processing of connotative meaning and emotional emphasis. To flesh out where the difference arises, Honko concentrates on what he terms “multiforms, repeatable expressive units appearing in both tellings but at different lengths” (82; cf. Frog 2015/2016). For example, an episode in the dictated version takes seventeen lines while the same episode in the sung version takes forty-six lines (Honko 1998: 82–6). Honko reflects (86–7, emphasis in original): The same three multiforms are found in the latter but their handling is different, as is the total length. The dictated episode amounts to only 37% of the sung one. It contains all that is essential to the main plot but not all the structural and textural elaboration manifest in the multiforms of the sung episode…. The singer finds it difficult to develop the fine structure of a multiform in a performance based on dictation. In the present example, the Silken Cradle multiform is divided in dictation into three steps:…The sung version has five steps:… Whereas the dictated performance is content to list the three main events, the sung version creates a logic between the details and develops the silk as the poetic key to the multiform. Others have also noted the shorter length of some dictated performances in other traditions (Jensen 1980: 16; Goody 1987: 94; Danek 2002a: 295 n. 360; Prior 2002: 150). Karl Reichl compares two versions of the prosimetric Edige by the Karakalpak Jumabay-jïraw Bazarov (Uzbekistan): one was dictated by the singer in 1986; the other, performed in five modes (“narrating, declaiming, narrating-declaiming, singing, and singing in a recitative” (2013: 264, emphasis in original)), was recorded audio-visually by Reichl in 1993 (2007: 57; cf. Jensen 2011: 139): When comparing the two texts, one can see that the dictated version is longer. It comprises about 39,400 words, while the recorded version comprises about 27,600 words. Most significantly, many prose passages in the 1993 version are found as verse passages in the 1986 version…. It also turns out that the 1993 recording, although shorter in toto, is sometimes more detailed than the 1986 version.

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Textualization (p.127) Mihailo Antović and Cristóbal Pagán Cánovas study how three Bosniac poets recorded by Milman Parry and Albert Lord introduce speeches of characters (2018). In their sample corpus of six texts, one was dictated, the other five sung. In the dictated poem, “the percentage of introductions without particles…is doubled” (17). The trend becomes clear: dictated texts differ from sung texts. The Finnish team of Lauri Honko, Anneli Honko, and Paul Hagu provide a rule proving exception. They compare selections from three of Anne Vabarna’s sung performances (in two of which a choir accompanied her) with her dictated versions of the same portions of those three songs: in the case of the first song, “the lines are exactly the same in both form and content in both the sung and dictated versions”; in the case of the second song, “the lines of the epic text dictated by Anne are closer to the repeat lines of the sung text performed by the choir than her own text as lead singer”; and in the case of the third song, “in principle the only differences are the words of address to the object of the lament” (2003: 83–6). They conclude that “even in dictation, Anne Vabarna used a unified format without in any way adapting it to the demands of dictation” (86). The collector set up and sustained a peculiar performance arena in which the dictating performer produced something different from what he usually produced. The evidence, especially the numbers, detailed here reveals the extent to which the dictating performer operated on the collector’s terms and thereby highlights the degree to which the collector was responsible for the resulting oral text. As John Niles says, “the sponsors of oral poetry acts help to create a new kind of poem” (1999: 113). 3.3.5. What was Written Down

Finally, when exploring past instances of the collection of oral traditional works by hand, one should consider what was written down. I highlight the collector’s authority in this matter (subsection 3.3.5.1) and the nature of the scribal process itself (subsection 3.3.5.2). 3.3.5.1. The Collector as Gatekeeper

The collector decided whether to record: “The aesthetic sensibilities of collectors, in turn, determined which poems would be worthy of the written record” (A.-L. Siikala 2000a: 268). For instance, Chokan Valikhanov, a Kazakh collector of Kyrgyz poetry (1835–65) (van der Heide 2015: 176–83), likely “heard more than he took down” (Prior 2002: 64). One surmises the same about collectors of orally performed Hispanic ballads, who began their work in the mid-fifteenth century CE: “Many of the earliest attested written ballads are based on striking historical events. The collectors seem to have preferred such narrative material, often ignoring the decontextualized tales of lovers and

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Textualization princesses which appealed to the Romantics three centuries later and must have been in existence then too” (Wright 2012: 412). (p.128) Having decided to record, the collector decided what to record (Finnegan 2007: 163): The act of creating from dictation is always a matter of transformation— more, or less, radical—rather than of mechanical transfer. The enscriber makes choices about which elements to catch in writing: opening and closing formulae? indications of volume or speed? repetition? elements judged to be “digressions”? songs? different modes (singing or intoning as opposed to speaking for example)? The nature of the resultant texts depends on such decisions. Timothy Tangherlini notes, for example, that collectors often failed to take down what scholars of legends call the “abstract,” a “brief overview of the story,” such as “Did I tell you about the time Pastor Larsen conjured a ghost?” (2013b: 182). In addition, the collector decided in what format to record the performance. For example, Nikolai Nevski (1892–1937), a collector of Ainu folklore (Japan), went back and forth on the matter of how best to set down and present certain tales. Regarding a tale recorded on February 12, 1922, “Nevski at first recorded the text as a prose text with a rhythmical structure. However, when re-writing it in another note-book, he tried to modify it into a poetic structure” (Kabanoff 1991: 116). A written record of a tale made on February 14, 1922 “begins as a song, but after 67 lines it suddenly changes to a prose manner” (116; cf. Hatto 2017: 25). Similarly, collectors of Ukrainian historical songs opted for either “sixteensyllable lines with couplet rhyme or eight-syllable lines with alternating rhyme” (Kononenko 1998: 21; cf. 17, 23). The collector also decided how much to record, a fact driven home when one reads that the archives of a collector—such as the Hungarian linguist József Pápay (1873–1931) who worked among the Ostyaks in Siberia—include “fragments of heroic songs” and “fragments of tales” (Erdélyi 1972: 8–9, my translation) or that a collector’s published book—such as Verrier Elwin’s (1902– 64) studies of oral stories from northeastern India—contains mostly “fragments” (Blackburn 2008: 8). Wilhelm Radloff reports: “The singer wanted to perform for me as well the song of Jügörü, but I had to break off in the middle of the latter song and I have not included this fragment (Bruchstück) in my literary samples because it was only a boring recapitulation of previous descriptions, which lacked any interest” (1885: p. xviii, my translation). Of course, a performer can refuse to perform or can refuse to perform certain material in his or her repertoire (A.-L. Siikala 1990: 88; Bartens 1997: 27; Kononenko 1998: 114, 291; Hatto 2000: 134), and fragmentation may also arise

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Textualization as a result of gaps in the informant’s memory (Biebuyck and Mateene 1969: p. vi; Vierke 2007: 46; Dushi 2014: 43). 3.3.5.2. The Scribal Process

The scribal process mattered. Different scribes would have heard different things. Krista Woodley writes of working with oral histories, “Each of us will hear, interpret and transcribe a recording in a slightly different way” (cf. Honko 2000b: 31); after all, “the analytical or interpretive process begins as soon as we start to translate sound into any textual form” (2004: 50). In a book devoted to the sung tales of the Papua New (p.129) Guinea Highlands, Don Niles and Alan Rumsey note the “difficulties in transcribing and translating Melpa kang rom texts…because of the possible variable interpretations resulting from slightly different hearings of the text, for example, whether the performer sings pili or pilin, köni or könin” (2011: 11).8 In addition, all scribes made errors (cf. Hatto 2000: 146, 150; Foley 2004a: 147–8). Thomas DuBois discusses the field notes of nineteenth-century collectors of Finnish folk poetry: “Occasional underlinings, scratched out words, and marginalia attest to the collectors’ confusion about the texts they were hearing as well. It may be that they heard words wrongly” (1995: 42). Jukka Saarinen finds instances in which these collectors “missed the wording and wrote something incomprehensible or incoherent in the context” (2013: 38). Arthur Hatto reviews Antal Reguly’s (1819–58) transcriptions of Khanty (Siberia) heroic epics: he “did not comprehend an appreciable proportion of his texts, for evidently he cut some words in twain and fused others together” (2017: 24). İlhan Başgöz recounts his early efforts at recording Turkish romances (hikâye) by hand. He and his two colleagues each wrote down the poetry as the singer performed: “In the course of our comparison, we would discover that one of us missed a line in a song, the other some personal names” (2008: 68–9). In other words, a written text created by way of manual transcription reflected not what the performer said but what the scribe heard or did not hear. Once one resurrects the scribe as a living and breathing individual, it is but a small step to the phenomenon of the “scribe as performer.” I investigate this figure in detail in Part III but highlight the following for now. Reassessing the variation found in different manuscripts of the same Old English work, Alger Doane attributes it not to scribal error or revision but to the scribe’s stance as a performer who presented the “gist” of the exemplar before him (1994a: 435). He relied not only on that text but also on his “knowledge of the traditional discourse and native-speaker competencies” as he “restructure[d] it [the exemplar] in the memory in the moment between reading and copying” (431). In an earlier formulation of this idea, Doane sees scribal performance in play not just when a scribe copied a preexisting written text but also when he wrote “directly from a full performance” (1991: 93, cf. 1994b: 131), such as, one may specify, during a recording session.

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Textualization Scribal performance did not cease in the Anglo-Saxon period and, to repeat, pertains to more than just copying written exemplars. Lauri Honko applies the concept to the fieldwork of Elias Lönnrot (2002a: 18–20, cf. 2002b: 339–40): The process of mental editing started early, much earlier than we would imagine. In fact, it started in the process of taking notes…. Lönnrot started to make his pen fly at the pace of singing by putting only the first letters of words on paper…. Lönnrot had to rephrase everything he heard in two stages, first, when deciding while the sung line still echoed in the room what the line was and how it could be abbreviated, and second, when making a fair (p.130) copy of the performance with the help of his scanty notes…. There is multiple evidence that this rephrasing turned into real editing of text in the field situation already…. Dialectal forms got slightly normalized, stereotype expressions, phrases and formulas were taken in their “normal” form internalised by Lönnrot in a number of field and editing situations…. He was an exceptional collector in his superb command of oral traditional poetry, which he used not only passively as a recipient of oral performance but also actively, rephrasing and editing the lines as soon as they began to take shape in his mind. For example, as Lönnrot wrote down the Kalevala-meter poetry of Karelian singers, he “‘Finnishized’” many of their words: the two languages are related, but distinct (Saarinen 2013: 37). Comparing the transcriptions of a poem performed by Arhippa Perttunen and made independently by Lönnrot and two other collectors, DuBois notes, “Lönnrot’s transcription is both more regular and more succinct, particularly with regard to formal parallelism” (1995: 46), and goes on to speculate (46): It is reasonable to suspect—although impossible to prove—that this marked regularity in terms of formal parallelism is due to some extent to Lönnrot’s own emendations or selections while recording the poem, since the opening lines recorded by subsequent folklorists are all more variable and less tightly parallel than Lönnrot’s. John Miles Foley speaks of Nikola Vujnović (Parry and Lord’s “cofieldworker” (2004a: 145)) as a scribal performer (145–91, cf. 2005b: 247–9). Foley sums up his analysis of one of Vujnović’s transcriptions of a recording as follows (2005a: 207): In effect, he re-made the song as he wrote it down. Variant words, inflections, lines and other features point to something very different from mere verbatim transcription; as a guslar himself, the amanuensis-bard had harnessed the epic language idiolectally to create his own page-bound performance.

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Textualization Vujnović did not simply “emend” mistakes that he heard (pace Jensen 2011: 300): “he reconstrues the song, remakes it on his own terms” (Foley 2004a: 156). One infers that Vujnović performed also when he wrote to dictation (cf. Foley 1990: 28 n. 18). I wonder too about Ïbïrayïm Abdïrakhmanov, who served as amanuensis to the Kyrgyz poet Sagïmbay Orozbaqov from 1922 to 1926 as he dictated his Manas tales: he “later became a Manas-performer himself” (Prior 2000: 12; cf. van der Heide 2015: 189–92). This phenomenon might not have been relevant in all cases of recording by hand: it would have been less applicable to situations in which an outsider collector, not as familiar with a tradition as an insider, functioned as his own scribe. In many other cases, the scribe and the teller created the written text in a “mutually interventionist” manner (Doane 1991: 88). The performing scribe made a distinct contribution to the textualization project.

3.4. The Collector’s Impact on the Oral Text To this point I have traced how in the very process of recording a collector and/ or scribe affected the performer’s oral text and the written text. Before leaving this initial (p.131) stage of textualization, I wish to address in more detail a matter touched on in section 3.3 and consider other ways in which collectors influenced the performer’s oral text. In these instances, the audience often comprised the collector, a scribe (if not the collector), and the performer (cf. Jensen 2011: 287). As Cay Dollerup et al. stress, “with only the recorder present” the likelihood increases of “more influence and feedback from the recorder, affecting repertory told, contents and the like” (1984: 255). For heuristic purposes, I imagine a spectrum of increasing intervention from unwitting (subsection 3.4.1) to purposeful (subsection 3.4.2) interference. 3.4.1. Unwitting Interference (or the Collector’s Presence)

Folklorists have long debated whether a collector can function as a fly on the wall, as it were, and record a normal, an authentic, performance (e.g. Briggs 1993; Bendix 1997: 204). One can begin to understand this conundrum if one interrogates the concept of an “insider” collector. Folklorists distinguish between a collector who comes from another culture and a collector who comes from the performer’s own culture (Niles 1999: 91–3; cf. Lord 1995: 222; J. Siikala 2003: 23, 25), but they also relativize these concepts. Franz Boas tasked George Hunt, son of a Tlingit woman and an Englishman, with writing down oral texts he heard from Kwakwaka’wakw informants (Pacific Northwest coast (Canada)). Hunt spoke their language and married a Kwagulh woman, but “he was considered to be, and considered himself to be, an outsider” (Berman 1996: 226– 31, quotation from 230). Jukka Siikala points to the recording of Hawaiian oral traditions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by “prominent members of the aristocracy” (2003: 23) and notes that “indigenous intellectuals and academics were the main pillars of the collection and publication of folklore” on

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Textualization the Cook Islands and in New Zealand as well as in Hawaii (23–4). Susan Rasmussen reports (1992: 156; cf. A.-L. Siikala 1990: 88): I asked a Nigerien transcriber whether he would encounter fewer difficulties when he went into the countryside to collect texts than I would, since he was closer culturally than I was to local residents. But he replied, no, indicating that local residents in the countryside would regard him as “just as different” (i.e., as much an outsider or “Other”) as they would me, since he resided in the capital and lived very differently from them. James Delaney, an Irish collector of Irish folklore from County Wexford, recalls his work as “a stranger” in County Longford whom some derided as one of “them fellows with the collars and the ties” (1990: 18–19). Michael J. Murphy, another Irish collector of Irish folklore, writes, “I never attempted to record their tradition until I had…persuaded them to stop calling me ‘mister’ or ‘sir’” (quoted in uí Ógáin 2000: 171, suspension points in original). So even an “insider” collector may not be truly an insider. Some degree of difference between collector and informant persists, be it due to class, education level, ethnicity, or place of residence. In fact, as Sophie McCall stresses, “there is always a gap between recorder and storyteller even when the (p.132) interlocutors belong to the same community or family” (2011: 6). The collector always remains a noticeable presence. If as a general rule the performer feels the collector’s presence, the question becomes what effect that dynamic has. Rüdiger Schott adopts the heterodox stance that an outsider’s presence does not necessarily influence the teller (1994: 175), but most scholars—perhaps the earliest being Nikolai Onchukov, a Russian collector of byliny (Ziolkowski 2013: 73)—take it as axiomatic that the presence of a recordist, be he an outsider or an insider, affects the performance (Haring 1972; Mills 1990: 222; Briggs 1993: 406; Clements 1996: 38–9, 203; Kaivola-Bregenhøj 1996: 47, 152–3, 174; J. Johnson 2000: 239; uí Ógáin 2000: 163–5, 171; Schieffelin 2005: 83; Cashman 2008: 23, 58; Kononenko 2011: 426; Okpewho 2014: 85). Let me trace in specific ways how a collector’s presence could have an impact on the content of a performance even when the collector did not aim to guide the performer in any way. Performers might change their diction. Nikolai Onchukov found “that peasant performers who delivered narrations in an unaffected manner to their peers might attempt to produce bookish speech in the presence of a gentleman [collector]” (Ziolkowski 2013: 73).9 They might make changes at the level of the individual word. Wilhelm Radloff recorded “among the Bugu in 1862” (Hatto 1990: 602) a Kyrgyz singer’s rendition of the epic Bok-murun. The poet substituted Kulja for the usual site of a feast, Karkara, presumably to please Radloff (Prior 1998: 259): Page 36 of 94

 

Textualization The…bard had the opportunity to allude to his patron’s own itinerary. Radloff and his renowned bard traveled together for over two weeks to Vernoe, and the linguist’s next destination after that was Kulja. It would be difficult to imagine that Radloff’s plans did not come up, even inadvertently, in talks with his companion. The bard then incorporated this knowledge into an allusion to his patron in the poem. Here the bard’s flattery would consist in opening up a ground for comparison between the patron and the hero: the two men’s paths (jol) are one. A watershed event in the history of the textualization of Kyrgyz epic (Prior 2000: 12–20, 2002: 229–45), Kayum Miftakov (1892–1949) saw to the recording of Manas tales by Sagïmbay Orozbaqov, a Kyrgyz epic singer, from 1922 to 1926: “Miftakov was a new Turk, and Sagımbay seems to have obliged his interests, referring to the ‘Kyrgyz’ rather than the ‘Nogay’ for the first time in a recording, and to the ‘Türk’ as an umbrella ethnonym for all Turkic people” (Howard and Sultanova 2010: 97; cf. Prior 2000: 15, 2002: 238; van der Heide 2015: 251, 253).10 When Nigel Phillips, a scholar from (p.133) London, recorded a West Sumatran poet in the 1970s, the singer used “urang kunieng (yellow men) for urang putieh (white men) when referring to the men taken captive by Anggun Nan Tungga after vanquishing a Dutch fleet” (1981: 22). They might make yet more noticeable changes at the level of content. Chokan Valikhanov arranged the recording of a performance of a Kyrgyz epic, The Memorial Feast of Kökötöy-Khan, likely from a singer named Nazar Bolot uulu between May 26 and 28, 1856 (Prior 2002: 61–2; cf. 2006: 1 n. 33; van der Heide 2015: 179). Arthur Hatto surmises that the collector’s antiquarian interests influenced the singer’s rendition. Only this version contains a “Ritual Return to the Abode of an Ancestral Khan.” A parallel for this motif, however, appears, as Hatto notes (1977: 92), among the Eastern Turks of the seventh century, and indeed a parallel well known to Valikhanov, since he quotes it in his essay ‘On the Western Frontier of the Chinese Empire’…. We must regard Valikhanov himself as the source of the bard’s information, however innocently Valikhanov divulged it. Valikhanov makes no secret of his eagerness to discover tribal antiquities and of the tireless way in which he pressed his inquiries. All that we need to assume is that he incautiously discussed ancient matters with or in the circle of the bard, who then ‘obliged’ his patron…. Just so, a singer recorded in 1862 among the Bugu (Hatto 1990: 602) performed a portion of the Manas epic in which he altered the plot in light of Wilhelm Radloff’s presence (Radloff 1885: p. xiv, my translation; cf. Hatto 1977: 92; Honko 1998: 177; Prior 2002: 66 n. 173, 162–3):

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Textualization Through the entire song, the bard represents Manas as a friend of the White Czar (the Russian Emperor) and the Russian people. The Czar repeatedly intervenes in the course of the narrative as an active participant. This insertion of the Czar was provoked solely by my presence. The bard was of the opinion that a Russian official might take it amiss that Manas defeated the Russians as well. Accordingly, he saw to a change that would please me. Although he acknowledges that the depiction of the Czar was “a feature peculiar to this bard,” Hatto has his doubts that the singer deployed it for the first time in Radloff’s presence: “it looks as though the bard has had some practice at the theme” (1990: 73; cf. van der Heide 2015: 237–8). Nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Greenlandic taletellers (who both dictated their stories to and wrote them down themselves for Danish collectors) also made changes on the level of content (Jensen 1998: 101): The narrators no doubt purged their stories of such elements that might be frowned upon by the collector—the local (Danish) minister, schoolmaster, or colonial administrator. This will typically have been the case regarding heathen aspects of the stories or elements that might be expected to offend the collectors’ sexual norms. Furthermore, passages for some reason considered difficult to understand for the foreigner will have been explained or left out. Kirsten Thisted even finds that whereas the earliest texts exhibit influences from European literature, such elements disappear in later texts, and she interprets this…as an expression of the collectors’ wish to have only pure old Greenlandic texts. (p.134) In 1951 Alfred Kroeber published a Mohave epic that he took down by dictation with the aid of an interpreter in 1902 (Honko 1998: 180–3). Exegesis intended for the ignorant collector appears here as well. The performer, Inyokutavêre, realizing that Kroeber was keen on various ethnographic data, inserted such comments into his story: “This is evident where he traces the path of the scalping instrument in all anatomical detail…. No narrator among his own people at a great telling would have bored them with such platitudes” (Hatto 1999: 36, cf. 2000: 155). William Clements discusses Rufus B. Sage’s (1817–93) recordings of a Brulé chief named Tahtunga-egoniska in 1841 (United States): the performer felt the need to “fill in background that he could assume his usual audiences would already possess” (1996: 39). Clinton Bailey, a collector of Bedouin poetry in the Sinai and Negev, reports (1991: 228): The bulk of the narrative, for example, was rendered by Mūsā al-‘Aṭāwna, who was the only source to give the ‘stocking-up trip’ background to the story, including details that he would not have related to a bedouin listener but which he thought necessary for the present writer, and entailing some Page 38 of 94

 

Textualization unnecessary improvisation that might not have been part of the original story. When Ann Gold recorded in Rajasthan, India, Madhu Nath’s performance of the tales of King Bharthari and King Gopi Chand, “if he was in a generous mood, his arthāv [explanatory portions] was noticeably changed: he used more standard Hindi (versus Rajasthani) vocabulary; he explained cultural phenomena he thought I might not understand; he glossed terms he suspected I was failing to grasp” (1992: 21). Richard Bauman relates how a Nova Scotia storyteller fleshed out a tale with a description for Bauman’s benefit of the community’s method of salting fish: “Every adult islander would be expected to know all this, but Bush appears to have realized that I might not” (2004: 116; cf. Urban 1986: 22; Darnell 1989: 332; A.-L. Siikala 1990: 83; Kaivola-Bregenhøj 1996: 54, 172; N. M. Dauenhauer and R. Dauenhauer 1999: 7; Cashman 2008: 23; Fox 2016: 26). Other performers responded to the collector’s presence by referring to his collecting activity. Isidore Okpewho quotes two examples, the first from “a masquerade chant recorded by Romanus Egudu from the Igbo of Nigeria” and the second from the Mwindo epic (Democratic Republic of the Congo) transcribed by Daniel Biebuyck’s team: “The copyist cannot pick up / All that flows from my voice, what I am singing”; “May they join Mwindo. / Oh! scribe, march!” (1992: 64–5). In 1869 (Prior 2002: 75–6), Wilhelm Radloff even prompted a new composition by accident (1885: p. xiii, my translation; cf. Honko 1998: 177; Prior 2002: 176): The first episode, “The Birth of Manas,” which I recorded among the Sary Bagysch south of Tokmak, is of very meager content and appears to me to be a song provoked spontaneously by my question about the birth of Manas. My question alone sufficed to inspire the singer to a new song. Performers seek to “please” their listeners (e.g. Diop 1995: 167; Jensen 2011: 126–7) and different audiences prompt different performances (e.g. KaivolaBregenhøj 1996: 27; (p.135) Jensen 2011: 132; Okpewho 2014: 66), but one errs in simply attributing the deviations discussed here to the performer’s habit of responding to the needs of his audience and patron. This stance obscures the nature of the disruptions provoked by the collector. The collector’s presence compelled the performer to make decisions of a kind not made before his usual audiences. The performer’s audience and, therefore, the performance context differed from the performer’s usual context of display. Because performance context affects text (e.g. Kaivola-Bregenhøj 1996: e.g. 17, 46–8, 52–6, 157, 168– 9; uí Ógáin 2000: 165; Okpewho 2014: 142), the oral performer in this distinct context produced a text that departed from that which he produced in a more usual context. He was still performing (Clements 1996: 39) but doing things differently than he typically did. Page 39 of 94

 

Textualization 3.4.2. Purposeful Interference

Collectors often engaged with the performer’s oral text, offering guidance at the micro-level of the verse and/or the macro-level of the story. Russian collectors of byliny (Ziolkowski 2013: 76, 80) were often ready to interfere in the oral-performance process, by asking their subjects to adjust their speed and manner of delivery, to address particular themes, and restore accidently or otherwise omitted material…. Often collectors did not even attempt to exercise self-control and relatively harmless dissimulation, instead making suggestions and demands about both the content and matter of performance. Collecting byliny in Russia’s Archangel Province between 1899 and 1901, Aleksandr Grigor’ev (1874–1940) made some allowances (quoted in Ziolkowski 2013: 71): If a singer through inattentiveness omitted a few verses in a starina, the presence of which sense demanded, I would cautiously ask him if he didn’t need to sing about something more here. If the omission was accidental and the singer soon grasped what was going on and what he needed to sing, then I would make the singer sing what had been omitted and would write it down; but if the singer asserted that nothing had been omitted here, i.e. didn’t understand that there was an omission, then I didn’t try to demonstrate to him the presence of an omission and didn’t try to force him to sing what had been omitted, so as not to introduce my personal influence. If Grigor’ev granted some leeway to his performer, Luka Marjanović, collecting in Bosnia, would have none of it (Čolaković 2007: 338): Marjanović…stated openly that he advised his assistants about how to write the songs down, and the singers how to dictate them. According to Marjanović, a good collector is one who is able to train the singer how to dictate his songs “correctly”; he should also be able to catch the singer’s mistakes and warn him about them. Marjanović considered topographic and historical confusion in the contents of songs mistakes on the part of the singer (which explains the lack of mythic poems in his collection). The repetitions and duplications that are common features of traditional Bosniac epic singing, and Homeric epics as well, irritated Marjanović. He explained that it was sometimes hard to teach singers (p.136) to avoid repetitions and “irregular” lines and not to make their songs too long. He clearly forced the singers to dictate the songs in a way that suited his own personal taste.11

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Textualization Nineteenth-century Ukrainian collectors might offer their own input regarding content (Kononenko 1998: 114): Scholars shared material they had collected from one minstrel with other kobzari and lirnyky. Sometimes they “reminded” minstrels of material they felt that the minstrels should know…. Sometimes they were trying to change the course of the tradition. Panteleimon Kulish was one of the people who tried the latter approach, seeking to preserve material that was dying out. After the publication of Elias Lönnrot’s Old Kalevala in 1835, collectors took the poem with them into the field “reading portions of the epic aloud to the peasants in order to prompt recall” (DuBois 1995: 184; cf. Timonen 2000: 632). Accompanied by Johan Fredrik Cajan (1815–87), Lönnrot “used the epos as a matrix for collecting poems—a practice Cajan identified as ‘singing the Kalevala.’ On their journey, the men met Vaassila once again…. Cajan encouraged him to sing the book” (Tarkka 2013: 81). Adolf Neovius read the Kalevala to Larin Paraske, a singer of Kalevala-meter poetry, and “the verses Neovius read reminded her of what she herself already knew” (Timonen 2000: 632). This brand of overt guidance affected what the poets performed: “the literary text…was returned to its sources, thus further imposing the collector’s vision onto the new poetic fragments” (Tarkka 2013: 81). Two points bolster this assessment. First, as Thomas DuBois’s collations of performances of the same poem by a single performer show (1995: 82–7, 141–55, 158–61), a performer of Kalevalameter poetry did not reproduce the same text verbatim each time. For instance, of Arhippa Perttunen’s performances DuBois notes that “the texts apparently vary in length from 185 to 295 lines;…Act II stands as the greatest source of variability in performance length, varying from Castrén’s sparing transcription [of] roughly one hundred lines to Lönnrot’s extensive two hundred line version” (1995: 83). The poets composed in performance (cf. 88–91), and, because they composed in performance, they, like all such poets, shaped their composition in response to the context of the performance. In this case, the context included a collector comparing the poet’s poems to those in a book. This component of the context likely affected the text the poet produced for the collector. Second, DuBois reviews the impact the publication of the Kalevala had on the singers themselves. Analyzing Luka Tarasov’s performances for the collector Väinö Salminen in 1909, DuBois concludes (184): The Kalevala’s influence could touch even the long established repertoires of experienced singers, leading at times to the merging of once distinct songs, the alteration of key lines or (p.137) images, and the improvisation Page 41 of 94

 

Textualization of songs based loosely on the epic’s plot…. Many Karelian peasants regarded the Kalevala as a valuable sourcebook for extending, emending, and understanding their locale’s traditional songs. We can view the Kalevala’s folk reception overall as a process of incorporation rather than supplantation. These responses to the Kalevala required some years to materialize, but that they happened in the first place encourages one to imagine a more immediate transaction: when collectors read portions of the Kalevala to performers, one can picture performers adjusting as they go and altering their texts, however minimally, so as to respond, however minimally, to the Kalevala. Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs discuss a similar tactic adopted by Franz Boas. George Hunt, Boas’s collector among the Kwakwaka’wakw, “did not take down material by dictation, but rather listened to the rendition and then went home and reconstructed—and thus re-entextualized—the discourse” (2003: 275; cf. Berman 1996: 233–4). In an attempt to influence Hunt’s own texts (Bauman and Briggs 2003: 276, emphasis in original), Boas sent Hunt copies of some of the volumes of texts he had published, including those documenting other Native American groups…. Perusing such a volume would seem to provide a number of important models for narrative structures, rhetorical parameters, and stylistic features,…It would seem difficult to believe that Boas did not anticipate that this sort of implicit metadiscursive modeling would take place. Andrea Bear Nicholas illuminates the case of the anthropologist Frank Speck (1881–1950): “Speck set out to prove the erroneous (and later seriously discredited) theory that pre-Columbian Algonquian Peoples had a well developed European-like sense of private property and land ownership based in a patriarchal hunting territory system” (2008: 21–2). Bear Nicholas speculates that Speck saw to his informant, Gabe Paul, telling him what he wanted to hear in order to buttress this theory (21): In all of the early versions this story explained the origin of various creatures, but Speck’s 1917 rendering of the story presents a small but very significant difference. His new version of the story, attributed to Gabe Paul, now detailed how humans had been turned into various creatures which supposedly became the totems (animal relations) of different Maliseet families. Considering how consistent the story had been until Speck recorded it, the new and anomalous twist made the story seem more than a little contrived, especially since it now had all the elements Speck needed to demonstrate the existence of a Maliseet clan system that in his theory formed the basis of a family hunting territory system.

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Textualization Bear Nicholas suggests that just as Speck “seems to have gone so far as to feed his paid Algonquin informants with precisely the information he sought” so too “he may have done the same with Gabe” (22). Collectors of oral poetry in China’s lower Yangzi delta, presumably collecting by electronic means, merit attention as well (McLaren 2010: 175): Performers face pressures from the editors and compilers of transcriptions in the contemporary period [after 1949], who are often amateur ethnologists of their own local traditions. (p.138) The Wu songs, and particularly the “epic” tales, bolster regional pride and enhance the standing of singers and editors in the local community. For this reason it is hardly surprising that the consensus opinion of those involved in Wu song compilation is that the tales related by the amateur peasant performers in the 1980s should be “healthy” compared with the “salacious” versions associated with the literati from the late Qing period.12 I end this segment by considering Anne Vabarna’s work with two collectors. Here one deals not with the performance of traditional works but with a poet using traditional compositional mechanisms to create new poems, so new, in fact, that the poet did not perform them in her own community (Hagu 2002: 462). Nevertheless, Vabarna’s career furnishes support for this subsection’s point that collectors intervened in matters small and large. Paul Hagu sees Armas Otto Väisänen’s guiding hand in Vabarna’s performance in 1923 (2002: 444 ≈ Honko with Honko and Hagu 2003: 69–70): Although Väisänen has assessed his own role in the creation of the Setu wedding epic to be insignificant, in actual fact this is not quite so. At some point in the middle of the description of the wedding, he realizes that he is actually the one writing down the wedding epic…. From this moment on, Väisänen takes an active role in the process of the creation of the epic. Naturally, the wording of the epic is still the exclusive right of the singer, with the folklorist accepting everything that Anne performs, as well as her (rare) corrections. However, he sees to it that no important or interesting detail is overlooked by the singer, i.e. that the description of the wedding is as comprehensive and detailed as possible, while being compositionally clear, without any unnecessary repetition. Väisänen encourages Anne to describe details of the wedding rites from an onlooker’s point of view. Vabarna stopped when she reached her story’s conclusion, but Väisänen went back over his transcription with her: They reviewed everything that had been written down, making additions in appropriate places. The most extensive appendices included a description of the ceremonial marriage proposal and the bridal’s ritual visit to her Page 43 of 94

 

Textualization godmother to invite her to the wedding, with the accompanying bridal laments. It was probably Väisänen who encouraged the singer to include in the epic an authentic bridal lament in its non-runo-verse form. Shorter appendices were added in other places to elaborate the original description of the wedding. Because Väisänen’s field notebooks survive, one can reconstruct these two phases of the epic’s production (Honko with Honko and Hagu 2003: 131–40). What is more, Väisänen peppered the notebooks in which he recorded the poems with a running, often self-reflexive commentary (141–7). These comments reveal how he helped shape the oral text: for instance, “‘The singer wanted, when I presented her with different possibilities, to add here a description of the acts that took place at the bride’s home’” (142); “‘I suggested this line when she was thinking of another’” (143); “Väisänen also (p.139) had his doubts about the constant, lavish serving of liquor at the wedding: hence, it was discussed and lines were refashioned to make them more proper” (144). The poem stemmed from the “cooperation” (Hagu 2002: 443) or “partnership between the singer and the folklorist” (Honko with Honko and Hagu 2003: 69). Vabarna also collaborated with the Estonian folklorist and poet Paulopriit Voolaine (1899–1985) (who collected poetry Vabarna dictated to her children (Kuutma 2006: 155–6, 159–60)). Voolaine first worked with Vabarna to create an epic about Peko, the legendary king of the Seto. He might have introduced her to the topic: “it is possible that the name Peko was not familiar to Vabarna since she lived in a different location and such Peko rituals were not practiced in her region” (Kuutma 2006: 166). He certainly modeled for Vabarna the structural and thematic features of the epic (158–9): Voolaine was seeking a composition with epic characteristics, i.e. with certain compositional and thematic constraints. But taking into account that no compositions documented earlier from Seto singers met the perceived criteria, he proposed to assist her in developing thematic guidelines…. The composition of the epic proceeded relatively quickly after Vabarna received the letter with thematic suggestions and plot guidelines. After this successful endeavor (159), Voolaine gave Vabarna another topic to sing about, addressing issues important to Voolaine and having significance for the singer as well. Inspired by the temperance movement, the next epic/lengthy poem Vabarna composed was called Ale, a story about the disastrous deeds of viinakurat (the vodka devil). Hagu provides further details (2002: 446–7):

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Textualization It is fairly plausible that in fact Voolaine proffered the singer the complete storyline of the verse novel from beginning to tragic end, including the names of the characters. It is also safe to believe that the singer did not deviate from the schema offered for the main character’s life, but followed it quite precisely. Voolaine made one more request (Kuutma 2006: 159; cf. Hagu 2002: 449): After she finished composing Peko and the narrative poem Ale, Voolaine suggested that Vabarna continue singing about Peko. He proposed that the singer should continue telling about the giant Peko’s deeds as the leader of his people…. Concurrently, this suggestion shows what themes and issues Voolaine regarded as important, but apparently found lacking in the epic Peko. Interpreters rightly stress Vabarna’s authorship of these tales (Hagu 2002: 446, 449; Honko 2002b: 338; Kuutma 2006: 160), but the collector’s contribution is self-evident. In all these cases, the poets were paying attention to their audience as good oral performers always do (cf. J. Johnson 2000: 239–40; subsection 3.4.1). Yet all these cases also reveal how the collector could shape the performer’s oral text in specific ways. Often going far beyond requesting the entire epic from the performer (cf. Belcher 1999: 92; Prior 2002: 237), collectors made suggestions or demands. As David Bynum writes, (p.140) “With no exceptions whatever, some element of prejudice on the part of collectors and their helpers as to what the poetry should be has crept into the actual fixing of it in its finally fossilized textual form” (1986: 308, emphasis in original).

3.5. Editing I turn to the movement from field notes to final edition. I comment on the problems posed by handwritten field notes (subsection 3.5.1) and document the myriad ways in which collectors consciously altered performers’ work (subsections 3.5.2, 3.5.3). 3.5.1. Field Notes

Field notes are not always easy to read. There is a reason for the metaphor of “fair” in the phrase “fair copy”: it points to the need to clean up the initial notes, to make them prettier, as it were. In his edition of The Memorial Feast of Kökötöy-Khan, Arthur Hatto describes Chokan Valikhanov and his scribe wrestling with their field notes: “study of the manuscript reveals that Valikhanov and his scribe were not always able to interpret what they had set down in their field record, of which the Leningrad Manuscript is a fair copy made when contact with the bard was lost,…” (1977: p. vi). For example, “they may give several different versions of what is obviously Page 45 of 94

 

Textualization one and the same recurrent formula” (p. vi), or opt for “a lectio facilior” when confused by the field notes (157), or find an abbreviation “too cryptic” to decode (247). More collectors than Valikhanov were confronted with the age-old problems of not being able to read one’s own handwriting and not understanding what one wrote down (cf. Steinitz 1968; Kononenko 1998: 292; Niles 2011: 90). The only way they could respond was by taking their best guess, and they could not have always hit upon what the performer said. If a span of time intervened between the initial transcription and the recopying, the challenge must have been even greater: over a two-year period beginning in 1987, P. Chorloo recopied his own handwritten recording from 1957 of two Mongolian epics, a manuscript that Walter Heissig labeled “nearly unreadable” (Koppe 1992: 4, my translation). Recopying also introduced errors. Hatto provides the most useful commentary here too, tracking the errors made by Valikhanov’s scribe as he wrote out the fair copy: for example, at verses 2023 and 2870, one finds “erroneous expansion of abbreviated forms” in the field notes (1977: 248); between verses 3059 and 3060, “The scribe’s eye has overleapt an unknown number of verses” (83); a moment later, at 3084–6, the scribe failed to make sense of the repetition in his field notes that marks a “‘war-cry’ or ‘shout at the finish of a horse-race’” and produced nonsense (237). Further (p.141) opportunities emerged for the collector’s textualization effort to leave its mark on the written text. 3.5.2. Editorial Work in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Collectors sought to “improve” the initial recording (Niles 1999: 103) for a variety of reasons. The Slovak collector Samuel Reuss (1783–1852) believed that folktales needed to be “corrected” so as to be returned “to their ancient form” (Cooper 2001: 288). Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Grimm’s (1786–1859) rewritings sought to restore a tale’s “‘spirit’ and ‘genius’” (Briggs 1993: 399– 403, quotation from 401). Elias Lönnrot “aimed at offering the poetry in an aesthetically or morally correct way…. He had a two-dimensional task to educate, seeking to present folk poetry in a way that it would be understandable to middle-class readers and also to present texts that could instruct common folk with moral advice” (Hämäläinen 2013: 46; cf. 54; DuBois 1995: 111). In addition (Dubois 1995: 98), Lönnrot viewed poems not as a singer’s own creation and property but as entities possessed of their own separate existence outside of performance. This superorganic view of the poems, of course, led the editor more toward regularization and emendation than toward absolute fidelity to transcribed texts,… Luka Marjanović made editorial changes to bring the epic poetry he collected in line with a written poetics (Lord 1995: 17–18), and, in his collection of tales from Page 46 of 94

 

Textualization Appalachia, published in 1974, Leonard Roberts (1912–83) “removed typical oral features. His versions contain no false starts, vocalized pauses, or repetitions of ‘he said.’ Roberts’ texts seem to have been edited to fit the conventions of written style” (Fine 1984: 152). Dave Harker charts how “English and Englishspeaking Scots [folk]song-mediators, from around 1700 until the middle of the present century” shaped the materials they gathered for consumption by the (emerging) bourgeoisie (1985: p. xiv; cf. Dollerup et al. 1984: 263, 1986: 28). David Bynum points to a different culprit: “The fault has been in the very idea— the western European idea, indeed—of Textkritik and editing in accord with it: to establish from flawed epigonic copies and conflation a perfect original text in all its self-explanatory pristine clarity as it must have been before later folly and error obscured it” (1986: 309). John Neubauer shows that “folk poetry could only function properly as a unifying force within nineteenth-century national ideologies if it was linguistically standardised and exemplary in terms of morality and politics” (2008: 110–12, quotation from 110; cf. Hämäläinen 2013: 44). Bella Čistova discusses the theory of gesunkenes Kulturgut, according to which peasants corrupted tales originally concocted by elites, as motivating the editing of folkloric texts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (1998: 36; cf. Dollerup et al. 1984: 247, 259–60). Conversely, Andrea Bear Nicholas writes that many of those who collected the oral traditions of First Nation peoples in the Americas altered them “to make both the oral traditions and the people who told them appear ridiculous, incapable, inhuman or savage” (2008: 19). (p.142) A variety of motivations compelled editorial change, and, although I will not do so here, one may profitably study the collectors’ differing understandings of their task and its purpose. For my project, it suffices to document that collectors made changes, not why they made them. I take a step back and review some specific instances of how, when they put together a final edition, collectors exercised what they took to be their prerogatives as editors. They made changes of every sort. They sought to remove metrical irregularities and to address putative lapses in sense or decorum. They substituted, they subtracted, they added, they combined. I begin with collectors operating in the Slavic-speaking Balkans. Duncan Wilson comments on how Vuk Karadžić shaped his materials (1970: 320): It is clear that he made his emendations mainly to satisfy his sense of what was linguistically appropriate, or to preserve the ten-syllable metre strictly. He also did not hesitate to delete odd lines that confused the narrative, to insert others in order to clarify it, and occasionally to add stock similes from other and similar songs in order to enhance the poetic effect. Other scholars (Milošević-Djordjević 1994: 63–4; Ziolkowski 2013: 20–3) have backed up D. Wilson’s findings, including even John Miles Foley who avers that Vuk Karadžić “interfered little with the received transcriptions of oral Page 47 of 94

 

Textualization performances during editing” (1997: 5; cf. 1995a: 70, 2000: 74–5). Having reviewed the “surviving manuscripts,” Foley points to “adjustment of a word or words to a dialect equivalent or apocopated or syncopated form to make the line involved a regular decasyllable” and notes that the editor “will on rare occasions add or substitute hemistichs [half-lines] or whole lines” (1983: 193). Ivan Franjo Jukić (1818–57) and Grgo Martić (1822–1905) collected the work of Muslim and Christian poets in Bosnia. Zlatan Čolaković observes (2007: 327–8): Martić clearly acknowledges that he had consistently changed the original texts he and Jukić collected. Martić admits to having made the following corrections: He had changed all the “awkward” provincialisms, and he changed the dialect in which the songs had been dictated…. Čolaković concludes (330, emphasis in the original): The Franciscans Jukić and Martić freely edited the texts they collected. There is no doubt that they introduced products of their own poetic inspiration into the texts without acknowledging the fact and that they changed the dialect of the songs, thus depriving the texts of their authentic and aesthetic quality. Luka Marjanović edited the songs he collected (Lord 1995: 16; cf. 1991: 35–6, 125; Čolaković 2007: 337; Tate 2011: 162): Marjanovic made many changes in the manuscript. He left out lines and added lines; he left out blocks of five to ten lines. He changed all elevensyllable lines to ten syllables, and sometimes he combined two lines. His edited texts do not represent the exact words of the singer who dictated them. Marjanovic brought to the editing criteria different from those of the singer. Sometimes he omitted “awkward” lines…. (p.143) Čolaković adds, “Marjanović felt that it was unjust to the singer as an artist to represent his song in its unedited form…” (2007: 338, emphasis in original). Kosta Hörmann (1850–1921) published collections of Bosniac epic songs in 1888 and 1889 (Čolaković 2007: 333): In his introduction to the first volume of the collection, Hörmann admitted “only” the following interventions: 1) he changed the dialect of the songs to the established literary norm; 2) he shortened lines that were “too long”; and 3) he excluded “non-aesthetic” expressions from the texts (perhaps he meant vulgarities, awkward lines, and so forth). Hörmann was not the only editor of the material he published. Bynum discusses the editorial work done on a poem titled “Džanan buljuk-baša i Rakocija” (“Captain Džanan and Rákóczy”) and published in Hörmann’s 1888 volume (1993: 600; cf. 619, 627): Page 48 of 94

 

Textualization Whoever “edited” this originally oral traditional poem for publication in Hörmann’s book not only altered a great many individual words, phrases, and lines of the original dictated text, but also introduced lengthy passages into it having both content and stylistic traits unknown to the oral tradition. Bynum sums up the work of these and other editors of texts collected in the Slavic-speaking Balkans (1986: 309; cf. Petrović 2008: 100–1): Editors’ interventions have often falsified published texts outright…. Editors have only with rare exceptions assumed not only the license but indeed have felt the positive responsibility to “correct” texts so as to render them better literature than they appeared to be in their original, true oral traditional form…. The many ways in which deliberate meddling with texts has distorted the record of the tradition are almost too many to name, and they infest every moment of the record from its very beginning. Additional examples come from collectors who worked in Ukraine, central Asia, Mongolia, Russia, and China. Natalie Kononenko surveys the textualization efforts of scholars of Ukrainian oral poetry, including epic: “The compilers of the early books of Ukrainian epic and song felt no compulsion to preserve the exact words of their performers, and felt free to alter the texts of songs they published to produce what they considered to be a more ‘correct’ version” (1998: 284). For instance, Mykhailo Maksymovych (1804–73) (286) characterized what he had done in the preparation of his [1827] edition as comparing texts and making them “agree,” sometimes combining two versions into a single text, sometimes discarding extraneous material, always trying to produce what was logical and best captured folk outlook and folk language…. Maksymovych used his many variants to remove all of the inventiveness and all of the incorrect forms and to produce texts as he believed they should be. Panteleimon Kulish (1819–97) published a collection in 1843: he “compared his own work as editor to clearing the underbrush from a forest, making it into a grove where one could walk with pleasure and without difficulty. His goal, he stated, was to give (p.144) lovers of folk poetry a book containing the best of folk songs, without distortions or lacunae” (286). Chokan Valikhanov made a variety of editorial changes in the production of the fair copy of The Memorial Feast of Kökötöy-Khan. At the level of the individual word, he, for instance, eliminated “the idiomatic pivotal bir in the third syllable, which seems to have irritated Valikhanov on stylistic grounds” (Hatto 1977: 97). Arthur Hatto discerns several moments in which “Valikhanov and his scribe made cuts of repetitive matter” (93): for example, they let the character Bokmurun lay out in a detailed speech his “Plan for Itinerary and Feast” but cut the Page 49 of 94

 

Textualization narrator’s account of “the actual execution of Bok-murun’s Plan” (132, cf. 158). Conversely, Valikhanov inserted speech attributions and “connecting passages… in kazakhizing prose” (98, see also 247). Hatto acknowledges the possibility that the performer made these atypical insertions, “as it were indulgent comments for the non-initiates Valikhanov and his scribe” (98). In that case, one would have another example (to be added to those discussed in subsection 3.4.1) of how the collector’s presence compelled the performer to make non-traditional moves. G. J. Ramstedt (1873–1950) recorded by dictation sixteen epics of the Khalkha Mongols in 1900 and 1909. They were published posthumously in 1973. In evaluating Ramstedt’s editorial practice, Harry Halén tracks the differences between Ramstedt’s field notes and his unpublished final version of an epic titled Aguulan Khaan (1996). He breaks down Ramstedt’s “normalizing and creative input” (105) into five categories: Morphological adjustments… (100) Words and expressions may be replaced by others with the same or different meaning, the replacement sometimes comprising a number of syllables better fitting the scansion. (101) Through changing the word order and/or adding expletives a verse may be elaborated to fit the scansion better or to form subsequent patched-up verses. (102) Words that are felt to disturb the verse structure may be simply dropped. (104) Sometimes faultless and elucidating verses are dropped, perhaps mistakenly. (104) Halén sums up by quantifying the editorial interventions (104–5): A scrutiny of the 391 verses in Ramstedt’s final transcript of his epic No. 1, Aguulan Khaan, reveals altogether 107 verses (27 per cent) with more or less significant adjustments. His epic No. 8, Khüren Mergen Baatar, of 623 verses shows in its final state 242 manipulated lines (39 per cent).

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Textualization Aleksei Markov (1877–1917) published in 1901 a collection of byliny he had recorded from performers living by Russia’s White Sea. He made “dozens of changes in a single text:…This might involve the omission or transposition of entire lines or details or actual additions” (Ziolkowski 2013: 78). In the early part of the twentieth century, Balbai Mamay textualized performances of Manas from Kyrgyz poets in China (Lang Ying 2001: 226). After he wrote to dictation the poetry of Jusup Ahong and took notes during a performance by Ebrayin Akunbe, he set about editing. He “treat[ed] it with artistic finish” (226), “adding and deleting” as (p.145) he saw fit (226 n. 4), and changing the prose sections of Akunbe’s presentation into poetry (231). He “participated personally in re-creating Manas” (231). Over the course of 1927 to 1928, Hodi Zarif (d. 1972) took down a prosimetric epic, titled Rawšan, from the Uzbek singer Ergaš Džumanbulbul-Oġlï (Reichl 1985: 4). First published as an abridged version in 1939 and again in 1956, the text exhibits “modifications of passages that were inspired by Islamic religious practice as well as alterations and deletions of difficult words and expressions” (8, my translation). In 1971, Zarif published an unabridged edition of the epic in which he undid many of the changes he had made in the earlier editions. Still, the prose portions of the text reveal “stylistic changes…an elimination of redundant particles (such as ana, mana) and a tightening up on the level of syntax of the colloquial style” (8). Moreover, the verse portions of the epic are all told 15 percent shorter than those in the original manuscript (9–10). For instance, in Zarif’s manuscript the first verse section is forty-eight verses long, but in the 1971 edition it is forty verses (11). Karl Reichl finds that Zarif cut out repetitive material but did not thereby alter the course of the plot or mar the text’s poetic effects (12). Another example of omission comes from Alfred Kroeber’s publication of a Mohave epic. He left out the entire opening section, what Hatto terms the preamble, which filled “the first two pages plus three lines of the third page of Kroeber’s field record” (Hatto 1999: 156–9, quotation from 156; cf. Hymes 2002: 166). Continuing in this vein, I observe that today’s conscientious editors retain and present the contextualizing details that ground the text in a specific time and place and identify the text as the product of a specific performer (cf. Jensen 2011: 87). Susan Slyomovics’s edition of the Egyptian epic tale Sirat Bani Hilal (1987), Ruth Stone’s edition of the Wọi epic (Liberia) (1988), and John ClarkBekederemo’s edition of the Ozidi story (an epic from the Ijo people of Nigeria) (1991; cf. Ricard 2004: 39), among others, include the performer’s interactions with his audience as well as the audience’s laughter and comments. Mugyabuso

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Textualization Mulokozi’s textualized version of Habibu Selemani’s performance of the epic of Rukiza (Tanzania) begins thus (2002: 323): Eeeee wewe, Now, Ta Yoweli, let no one make noise, So that you may all hear well this nanga from its beginning to its end Eeeee wewe Eeeee, alas the day! And you, Bwana Mugyabuso, listen well to this nanga lest later you complain that you did not get your money’s worth

In line 2, the poet refers to the performance context: Ta Yoweli, Mulokozi’s father, hosted the recording session (369 n. 6). In line 6, the poet refers to his patron, Mulokozi himself (369 n. 7). Sana Camara’s textualized version of Sirifo Camara’s performance of the epic of Kelefaa Saane (Senegal) begins thus (2010: 3–4, ll. 8–21, 31–2): Who is playing this kora? It is Solo Kutujo of Bantanjang, (p.146) With Manjaara and myself, Sirifo Camara. To whom do we have the honor? Suufule Jiite, son of Bannaa, Abdulaay Kebe Jakaraasi, And Keeluntang Kebe. Our Jaahanke, Sankung Jaabi, is also here, With the Jaahanke of Jaakundaa. They asked us to tell them the story of Kelefaa Saane, Recounting the facts, as we understand them. O Jiite Bannaa, husband of lady Daraame! It’s us, Sirifo Camara, Solo, and Maalang, Who are talking to him in his room, here in Dakar. … This Jaahanke, Mr. Kasama, who is sitting here, Knows something about this.

Older textualized versions of oral traditional works lack these kinds of specifications because editors removed that material. Nora Marks Dauenhauer and Richard Dauenhauer, collectors of Tlingit (Alaska) oral traditions, point to the typical excision of the narrative frame (1999: 9; cf. R. Dauenhauer and N. M. Dauenhauer 1995: 92–6): The narrative frame is a kind of preface in which the storyteller somehow identifies him- or herself, traces knowledge of the story from a reliable source, asserts the right to transmit the story, and in other ways establishes the context for and validity of the performance…. Most previous editors have deleted them as unimportant or extraneous.

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Textualization Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs relay that Franz Boas “stripped off many of the features that tied texts to the contexts of their production” (2003: 281). Noting what one may take as performers’ reticence to mention themselves in songs, Minna Skafte Jensen rightly speculates that the editors lie behind many such omissions: “Another possibility is that a bard actually presented himself when performing for the scholar but the latter did not include the presentation part of the performance and therefore did not include it in his edition” (2011: 86–7). Finally, I cite an example of editorial work that can be said to exceed by several orders of magnitude the editorial work considered so far: Elias Lönnrot’s manipulation of his collected materials in the production of his five editions of the Kalevala. Scholars respond to this editorial activity in opposite ways. On the one side, David Elton Gay positions the Kalevala as “the product of a literate writer revising his versions of the epic, not of a traditional singer in performance” (1997: 65; cf. Bowra 1952: 356). On the other side, Lauri Honko declares, “Lönnrot must qualify as an epic singer” (2002a: 20). On the one side, Alan Dundes labels the Kalevala “fakelore” (1985: 10), and, on the other side, Honko exclaims, “A fake of what? Such researchers prefer, it seems, to adhere to the Romantic epic concept rather than to debate the question of how the various folk epics in the world actually came into being” (1990: 226). These disputes have no bearing on the present investigation. Because Lönnrot expressed a “desire to (p.147) recover and present the ancient [oral] epic traditions of the Finnish people” (DuBois 1995: 94, cf. 111), his editorial activity represents an important chapter in the history of the textualization of oral traditional works. However one wishes to categorize Lönnrot and his poem, Lönnrot’s actions differ only in degree from those of other editors (cf. DuBois 1996: 271). Thomas DuBois (1993; 1995: 93–125, 262–92; 1996: 283–5) and David Elton Gay (1997) offer detailed case studies of Lönnrot’s editorial methods. I provide here four examples of how he worked. To begin with, he altered Karelian forms to Finnish forms: he “deliberately rejected certain forms that the singer used…. The reason for this was that he preferred to use forms which would be more easily understandable to the Finnish public” (Saarinen 2013: 37–8; cf. DuBois 1995: 30). He also added material at the level of the verse. For instance, Niina Hämäläinen notes that “negative expressions and advice or warnings are commonly and intertextually used stylistic devices in the kalevalaic poetry tradition” and analyzes how “Lönnrot also added negative phrases and advice to poem sections where they did not traditionally belong” (2013: 45, 47). Next, over a given span of verse he would combine material from different poems and poets: “while individual lines correspond to material collected by Lönnrot, larger passages do not;…It is rare for the Kalevala to match up with one of Lönnrot’s sources for more than ten successive lines” (Ziolkowski 2013: 26–7; cf. DuBois

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Textualization 1995: 103). Lotte Tarkka reviews a striking example of one form this combinatorial activity took (2013: 95–7): Kalevala-meter oral epics contain episodes of incantation, lyric poetry, aphorisms, prayers, proverbs, riddles, yoiks, and kölli-nicknames expressing joking relationships between neighboring villages…. [Lönnrot] interlaced the epic text in the Kalevala with incantations, lyric poems, ritual songs, and proverbs. While compiling and editing the oral texts into an epic, however, Lönnrot exaggerated and mechanized the strategies of generic intertextuality. Allusions, hints, and even short generic inserts were extended into full-fledged performances and framed carefully as lines uttered by the protagonists. Even ritual songs, which were quite distinct from other genres in actual performances were placed within the epic as descriptions of the rituals in question: a wedding was thus represented by embedding framed wedding songs into the narrative. Lönnrot justified this editorial decision by referring to what he learned in Archangel: the incantations and ritual songs were, according to his informants, sung “alone” (i.e., separately), but they were, nonetheless, closely linked to the epic universe. While singing an episode about an incantation or ritual song, the singers “often leave them unsung, saying: ‘Here starts the common incantation for iron,’ or, ‘Here one should sing wedding songs, and you will get them from the women’.”…Singers could choose not to perform these combinations in their entirety because the audience knew precisely what was implied. Lönnrot highlighted the multi-generic nature of the Kalevala by including material of one kind from one source in his rendition of material of a different kind from a different source (cf. DuBois 1995: 262–83). Lastly, Lönnrot believed that an original poem had over time become fragmented and scattered and he sought to reconstruct “an epic whole that had once existed” (Tarkka 2013: 81). He reports that through (p.148) conversations with a singer named Vaassila Kieleväinen “I came to know all of Väinämöinen’s heroic deeds in one sequence; and according to this, I have arranged all the poems about Väinämöinen” (Tarkka 2013: 81). Lönnrot put the tales he had collected into an order he favored, trusting in “his own judgment as to how the storyline of a large epic might run” and believing “that there was no difference between his sequences and the singers’” (Honko 1998: 174–5; cf. Niles 1999: 111). Wilhelm Radloff would soon do the same thing: once he had his material, he put the poems into a larger sequence of his own devising based on the series of events in Manas’s life (Honko 1998: 179). In 1849, the Finnish scholar and collector of Kalevala-meter poetry Matthias Alexander Castrén (1813–52) criticized Lönnrot’s Kalevala: “ultimately he arrived at the demand that a collection of the original verses should be published, in which the verses were not artificially welded together into an Page 54 of 94

 

Textualization epic” (Haavio 1952: 24; cf. Lukin 2013: 64). Writing to a colleague at some point in the 1850s, George Webbe Dasent, a scholar of Norse literature, “offered advice regarding fieldwork techniques that was far ahead of its time, recommending the faithful transcription of story texts as given by the reciter” (Shaw 2007: 348). Indeed, by the last third of the nineteenth century, other scholars, such as Max Müller, were asserting that “the collector’s ultimate goal was to transcribe popular texts with absolute fidelity to the narrator’s telling” (C. Johnson 2010: 467). In 1926 Mark Azadovskii approvingly quoted Walter Berendsohn’s comment in his 1920 Grundformen volkstümlicher Erzählerkunst in den Kinder- und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm: Ein stilkritischer Versuch: “We need collections which present us with the living art of the folk, completely uncorrupted, with all its preferences and its mistakes” (1974 [1926]: 13). Yet hundreds of collectors of folklore operated in the modern era—see, for instance, Bynum’s lists of collectors who worked in the Slavic-speaking Balkans (1986: 305–7), Hans-Hermann Bartens’s survey of collectors of Sami tales (1997; cf. Mathisen 2000), and Timothy Tangherlini’s study of collectors in Scandinavia, especially Denmark (2013b: 26–85, 120)—and it is fair to say that before Milman Parry and Albert Lord altered the landscape editorial intervention was these collectors’ modus operandi. Those who professed the need for faithful transcription, such as the Finnish collector Henrik Gabriel Porthan (1739–1804) or the Ukrainian collectors mentioned earlier, doctored their published texts too (Honko 1990: 187–9; Kononenko 1998: 287). One can even see “some traces of editing in his text copies” (Saarinen 2013: 40), the “his” referring to the very Castrén who criticized Lönnrot for concocting his Kalevala.13 (p.149) Exceptions do appear. Simo Milutinović Sarajlija (1791–1847) published in 1833 textualized versions of epic songs from Montenegro and Herzegovina. Čolaković cites the collector as the “only” one of his era who did not feel like he had the right to alter the collected texts (2007: 328 n. 9). Svend Hersleb Grundtvig (1824–83), in his role as editor of Danmarks gamle Folkeviser (Denmark’s Old Folk Ballads), asserted “the need to publish all variants in their entirety, with no editorial intervention. This approach marked a sharp departure from that of the more literary-minded scholars who came before him” (Tangherlini 2013a: 26). His vision for the volume found support in some quarters, but other Danish scholars objected, such as Christian Molbech (1783– 1857), “who believed the edition should include only a single variant of each ballad, chosen and refined by the editor into the best example of any given ballad type” (27). Venceslaus Ulricus Hammershaimb (1819–1909) collected ballads and legends on the Faeroe Islands: “While he edited the ballads in his first editions, his later 1855 edition Færøske Kvæder (Faeroese Ballads), under the influence of Grundtvig, hewed to more modern theory, and he allowed each variant to stand on its own merit” (Tangherlini 2013b: 77). In her 1880 publication of Swedish folklore, Eva Wigström (1832–1901) “did not edit the Page 55 of 94

 

Textualization texts she collected, which led to criticism from Swedish colleagues such as Djurklou” (Tangherlini 2013b: 73). Jack Zipes writes of Giuseppe Pitrè, the Sicilian folklorist, “Unlike many of his predecessors in Europe, Pitrè endeavoured to provide accurate renditions of the spoken word”; and “Pitrè respected the narrators’ voices, and styles, and…endeavoured to record them as ‘authentically’ as possible” (2009: 4, 14). Foley directs attention to the “ballad chapbooks of Yacob Abraham Yoná [1847–1922], published in Ladino in 1891– 1920…. Of special interest is the observation that Yoná, unlike many other collectors and editors of his time, apparently abstained from tampering with recorded texts from living tradition” (1995b: 618). In 1928 Ghazi Alim Yunusov (1893–1938) textualized Polkan Shair’s performance of an Uzbek epic: “The text does not appear to have been modified to suit anyone but the bard himself” (Feldman 1980: 26). Walter Feldman comments, “A comparable care and concern with the individual ‘informant’ and the dignity of his art was rarely to be found at that time in western folkloristic publications, and even less commonly in later Soviet work” (1980: 26; cf. Pegg 1995: 79; Prior 2006: 89). Harker divides a history of English and Scots collectors of folksongs and ballads operating before Francis James Child (1825–96) into three periods (1760–1800, 1800–30, and 1830–70) and singles out one individual from each period: Joseph Ritson (1752–1803) offered “the beginnings of a genuinely scholarly approach to mediation” (1985: 35, 117, quotation from 37); John Bell (1783–1864) was “the most reliable textual editor before Child” (72, 77, quotation from 72); and James Henry Dixon (1803–76), although he sometimes collated, emended, or corrected his texts, provided accurate transcriptions (94–5). (p.150) Čolaković, Tangherlini, Zipes, Foley, Feldman, and Harker make clear that these were the odd men out.14 Far more regularly, to quote John Niles again, “collectors become collaborators in the act of poetry, not just recorders of it” (1993: 139). Foley notes the judgment passed on Vuk Karadžić’s work: “within his own period… Karadžić was criticized for his perceived ‘failure’ to sufficiently edit the texts he published, to bring them into line” (2000: 74, emphasis in original; cf. Ziolkowski 2013: 23; Petrovic 2016: 325). As Foley points out, this “reaction…serves as a good index of what the assumed editorial policy really was” (2000: 74). I have concentrated in this subsection on collectors of epic, but, as these last two paragraphs imply, expanding the field of investigation to include the collection and editing of, for instance, ballads or folktales would strengthen the argument. Note Peter Burke’s summation regarding early European collectors (2009: 45; cf. Töpelmann 1973: 3; Lord 1995: 215): Thus to read the text of a ballad, a folktale or even a tune [folksong] in a collection of this period [late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries] is much like looking at a Gothic church which was “restored” at much the same time. One cannot be sure whether one is looking at what was Page 56 of 94

 

Textualization originally there, at what the restorer thought was originally there, at what he thought ought to have been there, or at what he thought should be there now. For instance, Clemens Brentano (1778–1842) and Achim von Arnim (1781–1841) collected German folk ballads: “as was the practice of the day, all the ballads were rewritten and edited, and, in this case, aligned with von Arnim’s aesthetic tastes” (Tangherlini 2013b: 32). Between 1814 and 1818, Arvid August Afzelius (1785–1871) published three volumes of Swedish ballads, almost all of them collected from oral performers: he “felt justified in working together two or more variants of a ballad, in filling in gaps in the text and in ‘improving’ the verbal expressions according to what he imagined was an ‘ideal’ ballad style” (Jonsson 1969: 85; cf. Tangherlini 2013b: 71). In 1883 Nils Gabriel Djurklou (1829–1904) published a collection of Swedish legends and folktales: “His use of dialect in the language of his stories was an important step toward accurate reproduction of the tales as performed,…But Djurklou’s use of folk expressions and dialect were highly contrived…. One can easily discern his editorial pen” (Tangherlini 2013b: 73). A collector of Danish folklore, especially legends, Just Mathias Thiele (1795–1874) “often concatenated legend variants in his editions to create complete versions. Similarly, his collecting methodology was at times less than thorough” (Tangherlini 2013a: 23). Peter Christen Asbjørnsen (1812–85) and Jørgen Engebretsen Moe (1813–82) collected Norwegian folktales: “When necessary they combined several variants, and in order to compensate for the loss of oral performance they made the style richer, more concrete and logical, using a more oral style and (p.151) vocabulary than in normal writing” (Kvideland 2003: 161; cf. Dollerup et al. 1984: 262; Tangherlini 2013b: 76). In editing material sent to him by collectors for his Gamle danske minder i folkemunde (Old Danish Lore in Oral Tradition), Svend Grundtvig “had few scruples about making changes, albeit minor ones” (Dollerup et al. 1984: 259). For example, in his presentation of “Whitebear, the King’s Son,” he changed “coffee” to “a hot drink” in the belief that tellers of the original version of the tale would not have known of coffee (260). Alexander Carmichael (1832–1912) collected Gaelic lore in Scotland (Shaw 2007: 351–2): It is evident through comparisons with the original field notes that textual alterations were routinely made,…Carmichael was in any case partial to archaic and picturesque turns of phrase gleaned from his reciters, and tended to apply ornate language at every opportunity,…In at least one case there is evidence of a lengthy interpolation based on other sources in his published Diedre tale; elsewhere a passage of considerable historical interest has been excluded from the published version of a shorter story in order to comply with Victorian views on propriety.

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Textualization Pēteris Šmits (1869–1938) took “liberties” in his collection of Latvian folktales and legends (I. Carpenter 1980: 24–7). Edward Sapir (1884–1939) made changes to the published version of a Chinookan tale (United States), as did Melville Jacobs (1902–71) to an English-language performance recorded from a Nehalem Tillamook performer (United States) (Hymes 1994: 341–3, 355–7).15 Finally, of heuristic value to this investigation are the editorial practices of researchers who translated into another language texts they or others had collected by way of dictation (cf. Dollerup et al. 1984: 263–4). Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (1793–1864) edited the Ojibwe texts (United States) he collected and translated or others collected and translated for him (Clements 1996: 111–28; Bauman and Briggs 2003: 236–41, 248–9): he reports, for example, that he “weeded out many vulgarisms”; that “it has been sometimes necessary, to avoid incongruity, to break a legend in two, or cut it short off”; that he “expung[ed] passages, where it was necessary” (quoted in Clements 1996: 117). In 1866, Hinrich Johannes Rink published Eskimoiske Eventyr og Sagn (Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo), translations of Greenlandic tales into Danish from the original Kalaallisut. Rink omitted what he labeled “the more arbitrary reiterations and interpolations” (Mishler 2013: 34): Craig Mishler suggests these include “the stylistic devices known today as ‘reporting speech.’ Phrases equivalent to ‘they say’ or ‘it is said’ or ‘it is told’” (2013: 34). Rink also “made an editorial decision to combine all the known variants of each tale type so that they would be as full and as (p.152) complete as possible” (34). In his collection and translation of North Sámi narratives (Norway), Just Knud Qvigstad (1853–1957) “adjusted to some extent the language of the narratives to a written form” in the original language texts and “left out several sentences that he considered superfluous or redundant” in his Norwegian translations (Cocq 2008: 73, 68). This survey reveals the extent to which editors intervened in matters small and large. They might alter individual words, rework individual lines, drop portions of the performer’s presentation, rearrange whole chunks of text—the list goes on. 3.5.3. Editorial Work from the Second Half of the Twentieth Century until Today

I divide my review of editorial work here to acknowledge again (section 3.2 (1)) Albert Lord’s efforts to produce a written text that presented what an oral performer had said. Lord published one volume of original language texts in the series Serbocroatian Heroic Songs in 1953 (Lord 1953b) and worked with David Bynum to produce another volume of original language texts for that series in 1974 (Bynum and Lord 1974). Despite the arrival and dissemination of Lord’s work, editors in the second half of the twentieth century continued to put their stamp on the texts they published. One again finds editors addressing perceived

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Textualization errors and infelicities. One again finds editors deleting, adding, substituting, and combining. Elisabetta Chiodo reports on a Mongol bard from Inner Mongolia (2008: 221): Five episodes of Lobsang’s Qor Geser were recorded on tapes and subsequently published in a book [in 1986]. When Lobsang compared the printed versions with that recorded on tapes he noticed, to his disappointment, that the two versions differed greatly from each other. The five episodes have been subjected to an editor’s embellishment. In the textualized version of Kanku Madu’s performance of the Sunjata epic (Mali) published in 1987, “[Madina] Ly-Tall deleted every repetition of a set of praise lines” (Jansen 2001: 34). In their 1995 editions of portions of Shuihu (Water Margin), a tale recounted by Yangzhou storytellers (China), Fei Li and his fellow editors strove to “delete redundant narrative passages” and “correct small omissions and inappropriate passages” (1999: 221). Fei adds of the latter group, “When we come across such passages, we consult the storyteller in person in order to correct them” (221–2). In 1982, three folklorists published the so-called first arranged edition of an epic song-cycle, titled “Fifth Daughter,” that they had recorded from Lu Amei in the town of Luxu (China) (McLaren and Zhang 2017: 25–7). For this edition, the collectors “took it upon themselves to devise a ‘logical sequence’ for the story, to form narrative linkages between individual songs, and to provide a ‘satisfactory’ ending” (26). P. Marcel Kurpershoek writes of ʿAbdallah Ḥmēr’s anthologies of Bedouin lyric poetry from Saudi Arabia published in 1988: “the discrepancies between the published text and my recordings in the poets’ own voices were so pervasive and significant that in my (p.153) opinion hardly any line in Ḥmēr’s publications qualified to serve as a basis for transcription and interpretation” (2002: 168). Focusing on the fate of the work of one poet, nicknamed ad-Dindān, Kurpershoek reviews in detail the “mutilation Dindān’s work has undergone in Ḥmēr’s edition” (1994: 72). He points to “major changes in the oral text,” such as the insertion of verses of Ḥmēr’s own making and the excision of other verses (75–7), as well as “minor changes,” such as “a desire to correct Dindān’s use of language in matters with religious connotations or having to do with the supernatural” (77) or making “the style closer to literary expression” (79). Julie Cruikshank’s collaborative Life Lived Like a Story and its textualization of narratives told by three Yukon women (Canada) appeared in 1990. On the level of the individual sentence, “textual alterations…include rewording and restructuring sentences through the use of different terms, subject references, and punctuation” (Blacker 2012: 247). On the level of the individual teller, Cruikshank brings “together materials recorded in many different sessions and over many years as one continuous narrative. I have ordered the account using a chronology that is roughly the one each woman instructs me is the ‘correct’ way to tell her life story” (1990: 18). In handling Annie Ned’s tales, Cruikshank opts to “combine accounts she tells Page 59 of 94

 

Textualization more than once rather than to present several parallel versions of each event” (269). Emily Blacker observes that “separating the narrators’ ‘life stories’ into distinct sections requires Cruikshank to edit the narratives to a greater degree in order to maintain their ‘coherence’ and chronological order” (2012: 247). Moreover, in order to concoct a “life history” for each teller, Cruikshank sets the teller’s traditional narratives alongside the teller’s personal narratives even though the performers themselves do not make this link: they “avoid detailed explanations of their personal experiences, preferring to recount (and therefore preserve) ‘traditional narrative[s]’—stories told to them by their Elders documenting ‘a shared body of [local] knowledge’” (Blacker 2012: 243, cf. 248). Linda Hess admits to “tinkering with texts and translations” in her presentation of Kabirian oral poetry from India (2015: 97, cf. 101). The performers she “worked with” used a verse that she did not much like in a certain song. Then she found in a book a version of the song with a different verse. That verse struck a chord with her, and she substituted it for the offending verse. John Niles makes the following observation about even the most conscientious collectors: “unless their interests are exclusively linguistic or sociolinguistic, most fieldworkers will think long and hard before presenting in print, with its very different conventions, the ‘unimproved’ words and noise that represent an exact record of an oral session” (1999: 118–19). Relevant too are the editorial practices of researchers who translated the texts they collected into another language. In his translation of a performance of the Telugu epic Palnāṭi Vīrula Katha (from the state of Andhra Pradesh in India) recorded on cassette tapes, Gene Roghair omits “word doubling…because it is cumbersome and alien to English style” as well as “the filler words which appear in the rhythmic lines…. Most of the filler words are the names of Gods that are popular in Palnāḍu” (1982: p. xvii). In her translation of Madhu Nath’s performances of the tales of King Bharthari and King Gopi Chand, Ann Gold leaves out “the sung portions except for those that open and (p.154) close each of the seven parts of the two epics”; cuts down on “most of a particular scene when it replicated almost exactly another that was fully translated”; and took out “innumerable internal repetitions—repetitions that give the oral performer time to think, that give his audience time to take it all in” (1992: 30). Nicole Revel removes most of the “fillers,” “basically meaningless words that fill up the line,” in her translations of Palawan epic (Philippines) collected electronically (1996: 118–21; 2000: 205–6, quotation from 205 n. 21). Samba Diop, a collector of Senegalese epics, writes, “The more that is present in the transcription, the more consciously can one make decisions about what to leave out and what to retain, how to render and how far to ‘smooth’ the transition to written, translated text” (2006: 130). I have cited instances in which the collector and editor was the same person (or group), but additional examples of editorial interference can be found in the publication of material not collected by the editor(s). The Kyrgyz poet Sagïmbay Page 60 of 94

 

Textualization Orozbaqov dictated his Manas tales first to Kayum Miftakov and then to Ïbïrayïm Abdïrakhmanov between 1922 and 1926 (van der Heide 2015: 188–9). These manuscripts formed the basis of a four-volume set published in 1978, 1980, 1981, and 1982. The editors claimed to have rendered the field notes exactly in the first volume (van der Heide 2015: 208), but “there is the possibility that the importance of religion was reduced in the editing process” (252). Starting with the second volume, the editors abridged some portions and converted others into prose (208–9). Similarly, an editorial group published five volumes of the poetry of the Kyrgyz Sayakbay Karalaev (1894–1971) that collectors had gathered during his lifetime (211–12): Over half a million poetic lines on Manas have been recorded from Sayakbai alone. Out of these, around 200 thousand lines entered the 1980s five-volume publication. Some verses are shortened and overlaps are cut out, and more interestingly, as the [Manas] Encyclopedia states: Certain parts that did not meet the ideas of the time of publication also did not enter the book (ME I:416). Unfortunately, J. Sagïnov, the author of the entry, does not elaborate on which parts these were and how they did not meet the ideas of the time. To coincide with the “Manas 1000” celebration in 1995, scholars set out to redo both these editions because they deemed them compromised by editorial interventions (220–1). Alla Alieva recounts her team’s publication of the Nart epic from the Adyg region of the northern Caucasus. I highlight their approach to certain material deemed ancillary (1996: 160): In other cases the names of heroes are linked with folk anecdotes. Sometimes they become an organic part of an epic narrative, and these texts are included in the main body of the texts. But sometimes, if they completely deformed an epic story and caused it to lose its generic character, they were placed in the supplement. It was in our opinion vital to define precisely the generic frames of the epic monument. As noted in the previous subsection, editing can also involve combining material from different sources. Lauri Honko speaks of the “patchwork” text, one fashioned from (p.155) the “best” bits of a single performer’s performances, as “a plague in the history of the editing of oral epics” (1998: 163–4, quotation from 164). Some of T. G. Riabinin’s byliny were treated thus (Čistova 1998: 44). Walter Feldman reports on Hodi Zarif, the collector of Uzbek epics: “Zarif sometimes recorded a single epic more than once from the same singer…. There is no way of knowing how this was reflected in the published texts” (1980: 30–1). Editors might also base a text on the work of one performer but make changes to it in light of what other sources told them (e.g. Manuel 1975: 38; Patel 2012: p. xxiv).

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Textualization Related to these kinds of texts are so-called composite texts. Prior to the twentieth century these texts, made up of parts of overlapping performances by different performers, abounded (e.g. Dollerup et al. 1984: 242; Kononenko 1998: 289; Honko 2000d: 115–17; McKean 2001: 456; Thisted 2001: 186, 188). Collectors continued to produce them in the twentieth century, and, in some quarters, they remain fashionable. Note that this use of the term “composite” text differs from its use by scholars of “told-to narratives” produced when a nonAboriginal collector textualizes a story (or stories) by an Aboriginal narrator (e.g. McCall 2011: 8, 12, 35, 42): they use “composite” to catch the fact that two parties construct the text. John William Johnson reports on how African epics “were ‘synthesized’ into a ‘composite form’ from more than one text…. One earlier French method of historical research was to collect many variants of an epic or legend, synthesize them into a composite form, and assume that the resulting text would reflect historical truth” (2000: 239). For his 1949 and 1957 publications, Edmond Boelaert (1899–1966) cobbled together several versions of Lianja, “the national epic of the Nkundo” (Democratic Republic of the Congo) (Knappert 1990: 386–8; Finnegan 2007: 128). A collector of the Kannada epic Male Madeshwara (India) worked thus: “[P. K.] Rajashekhara got together ten different singers of this epic, and bringing together the ‘best’ versions of each singer, he gave a form of his own to the epic,…published…in 1973” (Ramachandran 2001: p. xvii). Anne McLaren finds this tactic in the presentation of some epics in China (2010: 161– 2; cf. 167–8, 183): The second situation is where Chinese ethnologists have arrived at a manuscript or printed transcriptions of a song epic by relying on one master practitioner and supplementing perceived gaps in his or her rendition with material from several other oral and manuscript renditions. The ethnologists may also have carried out other editorial work in “rearranging” the text. This is the general situation in the case of transcripts of Wu folk epics available in the scholarly domain, as represented by the leading anthology of ten folk epics compiled by Jiang Bin in 1989…. It was tape-recorded, transcribed, and in some cases, blended with other transcripts or texts to create a composite text that satisfied the contemporary need to view an aesthetically-satisfying, “complete” example of the folk epic in question. Mark Bender points to another example of this practice from China. Jin Dan, the editor of a 2012 volume of Miao epics from Guizhou province in southwest China, writes (quoted in Bender 2012: 235): The format and content of this book is essentially similar to the 1983 Chinese version. However, in the twenty-plus years since then, we have still continued to collect and (p.156) transcribe new material. Every Page 62 of 94

 

Textualization singer has a slightly different version, and whenever we came across vivid material that could be used, we added it in. Bender contextualizes Jin’s statement (2012: 235): The quote sums up what is still a very common approach to oral literature today in China…. There is still a strong tradition of creating “complete” versions of a given song cycle or story tradition that will serve as part of an ethnic group’s official tradition of oral literature. These versions usually combine several versions collected from a number of singers. Commenting on editors’ preference for composite texts, Chao Gejin reports that “the first emendation-free corpus of one jangarchi’s libretto in China” was published only in 1999 (2001: 407). Some editors concocted composite texts from the work of two performers. N. P. Tkačik (exact dates unknown) worked from 1937 to 1938 with Even (Lamut) performers in Siberia. N. G. Mokrouša dictated two epics to Tkačik, but the poet died before completing a third. Tkačik “employed the foster-son and pupil of [the] aged bard to finish the epic the old man had died over” (Hatto 2000: 137, 139, quotation from 139). Feldman discusses the recording of an Uzbek epic by two poets, “each man taking separate sections” (1980: 21). Other plans for composite texts never came to fruition. In 1985, certain Tulu scholars (India) expressed a desire “to create a bigger epic out of short paaḍdanas” (Honko 2000c: 224). E. Arsenio Manuel hoped to fashion a Filipino equivalent of the Kalevala from shorter epics (Reilly 2013: 188–90). Among Western scholars, a minority continues to advocate for the manufacture of composite texts cobbled together from different performances by different performers. Jan Knappert suggests the following editorial program (2000: 253): If version A has the most complete text, the researcher can take that as the master version, but he must never rely on it exclusively. Some versions may be repetitious, so the collator can cut out some deadwood; other versions may contain lines from other epics or other poems. These will have to be carefully weeded out,… Knappert’s goal is “the recreation of the ideal or optimal epic text from all the versions” (254). Composite texts are the work of collectors, not poets: “The quest for a master text…inevitably leads to a composite epic which never existed in the minds of oral singers…. The risk is, simply, that a composite text may not satisfy anyone and will give misleading information on the local poetic system” (Honko 2000b: 46–7). J. Johnson adds, “A composite text is one that is actually recited by no one at all, so that the textualization of such a text does not actually represent an Page 63 of 94

 

Textualization authentic performance” (2000: 239). Chao relays an anecdote that illustrates who makes a composite text. Arimpil, a singer of the Oirat Jangar cycle, says of an edited composite text that includes some of his material: “it seems these are not my Jangar songs. They are mixed with other jangarchis’ songs. These are not my Jangar” (2001: 416).

(p.157) 3.6. Best Practices The best collectors today are trained in unobtrusive documentary practices. They focus on “the individual poet’s vision of his art” (Reynolds 2000: 269; cf. Harvilahti 2003: 30 n. 10) and are aware that the final edition should not be about them. Yet “each collector is bound to make not just one but a whole series of decisions which profoundly affect the end result, the text of an oral epic” (Honko 1998: 160). When best practices are followed, this truth still obtains (163): Some of the best texts may come from situations to be classified somewhere between “induced natural” and “laboratory context”. These situations may involve motivating and guiding the singer. Sometimes performance and documentation strategies intertwine: the singer moulds his act to suit the recording and expressed goals of collaboration. All this makes it imperative that we get a full report on the documentation process, including the discussions with the singer. The reader must be able to judge how the method of documentation may have influenced the textualisation work. David Conrad’s endeavors exemplify the conscientious collector’s impact. Over the course of six sessions from February 28 to March 11, 1976, Conrad recorded on cassette tapes Tayiru Banbera, a Malian bard, as he performed the epic of Bamana Segu (1990: 9). Conrad did not interfere with Banbera’s telling: “Once the initial interview was finished and the recording sessions begun, Tayiru was not asked any further questions, and with one exception nothing was said to him that might steer his thoughts in any particular direction or otherwise influence his testimony” (11). Banbera produced a poem notable for its many digressions (20): Outside the main narrative line Tanyiru enhances his text by periodically interjecting digressions varying in length from a few lines to several dozen, on a wide variety of topics. These range from military strategy to culinary practices, and they include questions of state security and law enforcement, early market practices vs. colonial modes of exchange, taxation, manhood, hair styles, noblesse oblige, and advice on the most effective way for a Bamana man to seduce a woman of his own society. Conrad allows that his presence may explain some of these digressions: “in some instances he appears to have been prompted by an awareness of the sort of material that would be of particular interest to the interviewer” (11; cf. Barber Page 64 of 94

 

Textualization 2007: 100). Banbera had worked with other researchers prior to his sessions with Conrad (Conrad 1990: 22–3). In a review of Conrad’s book, Paulo F. de Moraes Farias (with Stephen Bulman) attributes the digressive nature of Banbera’s text in part to his interactions not only with Conrad but also with other folklorists as well (1991: 544): Conceivably, in Tayiru Banbera’s as in other cases, and without undue interference from the researcher, the interaction of scholars and traditionists has gradually generated in the latter, on the one hand, an interest of his own “[in undertaking] a sustained effort to produce a definitive text” and comprehensive survey of the epic, and on the other hand to go beyond this text, in order to recall fragments of other knowledge (of matters including market and culinary practices, and hair styles) and comment upon these. Thus the bard digresses from the main (p.158) story line…. The comparison with earlier performances by Tayiru Banbera suggests that the digressions have expanded, and grown more complex, over the years. Dwight Reynolds too acknowledges the well-trained collector’s inevitable influence: “I have begun to realize more and more how deeply and significantly the decisions I made as a fieldworker recording performances in Northern Egypt…and during the processes of transcription and translation, have shaped the final product” (2000: 263; cf. Honko 2000b: 34). For instance, to meet Reynolds’s request for a long poem, Egyptian singers of the Sirat Bani Hilal epic deployed “bridges” in connecting different episodes. These bridges were “dormant material”: poets usually sang one episode at a time and had no need for the bridges (2000: 266). The collector’s desideratum prompted the use of material rarely, if ever, heard in performance. Conversely, when Reynolds recorded “a complete performance of the epic in sequential order from Shaykh Biyalī Abū Fahmī,” he “received a clear, but starkly unembellished version.… Shaykh Biyalī, under the constraint of singing the stories ‘from beginning to end,’ had truncated them” (1995: 42). Anu Korb points to the disruptive effects of modern methods of recording: “The problem here is that in the presence of [a] camera people tend to act differently, losing natural behaviour and the recording is as if staged. The same may occur also during the audio recording…though in this case the influence is considerably weaker” (2004: 110; cf. Niles 1999: 104). Part of “losing natural behavior” includes altering how one moves through and utilizes space. Daniel Mato, an investigator of storytelling in Venezuela, testifies to such a shift: when his tape recorder was visible “the narrator began to treat the tape recorder as a privileged participant, and therefore keep closer to the machine, diminishing his or her movements” (1999: 532). Hein Willemse also comments on how modern recording techniques can affect the performance: “In my experience, recording equipment always put some pressure on the performer. Some performers dealt Page 65 of 94

 

Textualization with this pressure by incorporating the presence of the equipment in their narrative” (2003: 33; cf. Scaldaferri 2011b: 18, 28; Okpewho 2014: 98, 147). Isidore Okpewho wonders if Okabou Ojobolo’s rendition of the Ozidi saga reached its “great size…due more to the self-consciousness of the narrator before the tape recorder than to the needs of the story” (1992: 67). Researchers have come to understand “textualization as emergent” (Rasmussen 1992: 155). It is not always and everywhere the same; in fact, it never is. Rather, it depends on the immediate context, on collectors and performers interacting with one another at specific points in time.

3.7. The Collector’s Text versus the Performer’s Oral Performance One final topic requires attention before I return to the Homeric scenario: the collector creates a document that differs from the speech event that the collector records. I am not interested here in the collector’s editing—I already addressed that in (p.159) section 3.5—but in how the collector fashions a distinct entity that occludes to a greater or lesser but always to some degree the numerous contours of live speech and performance. Before proceeding, I once again recall that, although oral performers may perform differently for collectors than when performing in their usual way, they still perform when being recorded (section 3.1 (2); subsection 3.4.1 (p. 135)). One can study with profit what students of textualization teach about the differences between oral performance and written text. Oral performance includes paralinguistic components—or, if one prefers to distinguish between them (e.g. Bonifazi 2012: 295), extralinguistic and paralinguistic components—and prosodic components (Fine 1984: 114–33; Joubert 2004: 112–19; Novak 2011: chaps. 4 and 5). The paralinguistic includes “non-verbal features like gestures and facial expressions and verbal features like Trager’s vocalizations” as well as “voice qualifications (laugh, giggle, tremulous etc.), voice qualifiers (whisper, breathy, husky etc.) and tension (slurred, lax, tense, precise), the latter being also an element of prosody” (Reichl 2000: 111). (Trager’s “vocalizations are noises or aspects of noises not having the structure of language” (Fine 1984: 116).) The prosodic includes “stress (suprasegmentals over lexical items), pitch variation (intonation, i.e. suprasegmentals over utterances) and phenomena like rhythm, speed of utterance, degree of loudness or pausing” as well as tempo (Reichl 2000: 111) and silence, a phenomenon that some psycholinguists place in the category of pause (O’Connell and Kowal 2008: 99). With this knowledge to hand, researchers emphasize the following facts: “the oral performance is as a medium totally different from the printed text” (Honko 2000b: 13), and as a result textualizing an oral performance becomes an act of “intersemiotic translation” that produces “a visual trace of a material event that once existed in a different register” (Doane 1991: 88).16 “A text,” Elizabeth Fine Page 66 of 94

 

Textualization writes, “only approximately records a performance. An unavoidable ‘untranslatability’ inheres in the transmutation of breathing, moving, threedimensional life to the static, flat plane of paper” (1984: 146).17 If a modern printed edition differs from the manuscript(s) on which it is based (Doane 1991: 100–2; Trachsler 2006: 11; Quinn 2010: 22), the usual gap between an oral performance and a written text presenting the words of that performance is even greater. The field of ethnopoetics shows just how estranged a written text purporting to record an oral performance tends to be from the actual performance. Only by aggressively scoring a written text, only by presenting the words in an unconventional fashion and by inserting various symbols around and between the words, can ethnopoetics (p.160) recreate some of the nuances of oral performance.18 Apart from these and related efforts (e.g. Foley 2004a; Prior 2006; Reichl 2007), textualizers normally shut out the distinct attributes of live speech and performance. Researchers detail the loss of paralinguistic and prosodic elements (Dor 1995: 33–6; Honko 2000b: 12, 26; Reichl 2000: 111; Foley 2012: 122; Finnegan 2015: 3–4, 20, 23–4; cf. Ochs 1979: 54). The vanishing of the paralinguistic—one cannot, for instance, see the performer’s facial expressions or gestures—is perhaps most obvious. Regarding the prosodic, consider that the potent power of silence hardly ever comes across (Prior 2006: 100). Another specific example of what can be lost in terms of prosody comes from the textualized poems of Bosniac singers from Novi Pazar. Singers deploy a ten-syllable line that is written down as such, but the performers pause after the ninth syllable and use the tenth syllable to hook, as it were, into the next line (Bonifazi and Elmer 2012: 92; cf. Foley 2005b: 240). The written text does not reflect the oral practice. Similarly, note E. Arsenio Manuel’s comment on a Manuvu’ poet: “We had some difficulty recording Sumuhoy’s song as he did not mark the end of his lines (he never bothered to stop where the lines were supposed to end)” (1975: 33–4). A textualized version of his performance, divided “where the lines were supposed to end,” would suggest pauses not there in performance. Other elements of an oral performance vanish as well. The performer’s distinctive pronunciation is obscured if the collector uses “normative lexicon forms” (Honko 2000b: 31; cf. Reichl 2007: 147–53). Non-lexical sounds fall to the wayside. Nikola Vujnović did not include in his transcription Halil Bajgorić’s “performatives, excrescent consonants inserted to bridge hiatus” (Foley 2004a: 149–51, emphasis in original, quotation from 149). Dwight Reynolds does not include in his transcription Shaykh Taha Abu Zayd’s grunts as he sings Sirat Bani Hilal: see http://siratbanihilal.ucsb.edu/virtual-performances at, for example, 2:07 and 3:37 (Reynolds 2010–).

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Textualization All these features contribute to making an oral performance “an action,… something I do” (Tedlock 1983b: 375, emphasis in original). Its written documentation, by contrast, almost always obscures the narrative event, offering an “empty form,” to borrow Paul Zumthor’s phrase (1984: 70), that provides no sense of how the (p.161) teller spoke and what he was doing when he spoke. The reader’s understanding of the performer’s project suffers. The bare written text of a story from a teller in Siberia does not make clear the performer’s goals: “Although the literal transcription of the text does not sound very comical, the facial expression of the narrator during the telling of the tale, as well as her intonation hint towards ridiculing” (Järv 2000: 52; cf. A.-L. Siikala 1990: 87; Kaivola-Bregenhøj 1996: 49, 200). The bare written text of a “toast” does not suggest what makes the performance successful (B. Jackson 2004: 5): Toasts are not recited, they are acted; the teller does not just say a toast, he performs it. His voice changes for the various personae of the poem, and sometimes there is another voice for the narrator. There are differences in stress, in accent, in clarity of articulation for various characters…. People who can say the lines but cannot act them get little opportunity to perform, because they are boring. Presented with bare written text, one may not perceive the “parts” and “patterns” of an orally performed narrative because one cannot see the bodily movements that contribute to its “structuring and texture” (Scheub 1977: 349– 50). Ruth Finnegan warns against “a concentration on the words to the exclusion of the vital and essential aspect of performance. It cannot be too often emphasized that this insidious model is a profoundly misleading one in the case of oral literature” (2007: 79, emphasis in original; cf. 2015: 53–62, 72–8, 82, 132–3; Cowell 2002: 46–7). Even when one may be tempted to neglect the fact of performance, one would err in doing so. Of a genre of Somali oral poetry, Martin Orwin writes, “The performance of maanso is not something to which the reciter brings an affective contribution; rather the recital is such that the words are allowed to speak for themselves” (2005: 287). Yet “a good clear voice” is valued, and the performer has to offer a “clear presentation of the words” (287). Practitioners of verbal art deploy a range of paralinguistic and prosodic tools when performing, and most collectors do not catch these features in textualized versions of verbal art. In the end, the collector reduces “experience to object” (Foley 1997: 3; cf. R. Dauenhauer and N. M. Dauenhauer 1995: 102). To denaturalize this object, a book, one must turn to the field of book history (Mroczek 2011; Allen et al. 2011; T. Phillips 2016: 15–18). The collector’s book is possessed of its own “tactile, haptic, visual, and sometimes olfactory dimensions” (Baisch 2012: 203). This object’s typography influences how one comprehends its content (Chartier 1995: 21; McKenzie 1999: 21; Gregory 2012: 91; Finnegan 2015: 134), and its physical (codex) form shapes how one uses it (Chartier 1995: 20; Mroczek 2011: 258). As Page 68 of 94

 

Textualization a result of a book’s particularities, one’s encounter with a book differs from one’s encounter with other media. Plato’s claim that a text says the same thing over and over (Phaedrus 275d; cf. Alcidamas On Sophists 28.167–9) reminds one of how much a book differs from an oral performance: the audience at an oral performance can provide feedback to the teller and thereby influence the teller as he performs whereas the reader of a tale cannot engage with the teller (Dollerup et al. 1984: 261). (p.162) But easy now. Scholars from a range of disciplines have determined the supposedly impermeable boundary between orality and literacy to be in reality quite porous.19 Moreover, one should not insist on a complete separation of oral traditions and the tangible world (cf. Assmann 2006: 108). I cite Greg Sarris’s observation regarding Native American stories that “the mere mention of a feature in the landscape, for instance, may bring to mind a story and a notion of taboo associated with the feature” (1993: 31; cf. Scheub 2002: 84; McCall 2011: 164–5), and I recall from section 1.1 Karin Barber’s comments on “the embeddedness and entanglement of [oral] texts in the material world” (2007: 212; cf. Perkins 1989). Oral traditions can be linked with natural and man-made objects in the material world of performers and audiences. Aware of such interactions, one should not overstate the differences between oral performance and tangible, written text (cf. Prior 2002: 40–1; Finnegan 2007: 177, 192–6; Polak 2015: 217). Instances of textualized verbal art can retain a few “traces of orality” (Reichl 2012a: 16–21; cf. Talmon 1991: 158; Giles and Doan 2008: esp. 279; Morales 2017: 100–8) and can provide access to the ways such works produced meaning in their original performance contexts. One thinks especially of John Miles Foley’s model of traditional referentiality, a prominent mode of signification in an oral tradition that remains discernable in written texts (1992: 290–4, 1995a: 64–5, 1997: 14–18; cf. Thisted 2001: 184, 195). The written text can even offer indications as to which paralinguistic effects a performer deployed. Isidore Okpewho, for instance, detects such hints in the textual record of Okabou Ojobolo’s performance of the Ozidi story. He extrapolates from the editor’s insertion in parentheses of the audience’s reactions (2014: 81, emphasis in original): Okabou’s kinesic strategy is thus made up partly of the dances he does with his orchestra at appropriate moments in the performance and partly of histrionic movements accompanying or illustrating the plights and behaviors of various characters in the tale. Outstanding dramatist that he is, Clark-Bekederemo has aided our reading of numerous such moments by indicating, in parentheses, the reactions of members of the audience: laughter, exclamation, ululation, and so on. The value of these editorial aids is that they force us to read between the lines of the narrative to find out what it is that has caused the audience’s reaction. For instance, when we see so many indications of laughter in the episode dealing with the Page 69 of 94

 

Textualization Scrotum King (210–29), we need hardly be told that the narrator accompanied his descriptions of the character’s ponderous steps and his laborious maneuvering of his extraordinary testicles with ample histrionic movements. When the audience laughs twice in quick succession at the picture of Ogueren’s eyes rolling under the spell of Oreame’s majic that has transfixed him and left him at the mercy of Ozidi’s blows (124), it is clear that Okabou must have mimed the plight of the helpless figure to his audience’s delight. (p.163) One need not overcorrect, however. Just as the phenomena of orality and literacy have distinct attributes (Shuman 1986: 16–17, 78–9, 146–51, 161–2, 178–82, 192–200; M. W. Edwards 2002: 18; Eve 2014: 2–4, 8, 14; Hess 2015: 204–5, 215, 246; Saussy 2016: 73; Antović and Pagán Cánovas 2018: 18; cf. Kelber 2007: 17), so, in working up the final text, the collector assumes responsibility for making something distinct from the performer’s performance. A proposal by John Niles helps me wrap up this review of modern textualization events. Mellinger Henry, an amateur collector of folksongs, and his wife met Samuel and Polly Harmon in 1930 in Cades Cove, Tennessee. Henry’s wife recorded twenty-four songs by dictation from the Harmons including Polly Harmon’s version of the folksong “George Collins.” The text of the song appeared in Henry’s 1938 volume Folk Songs from the Southern Highlands (Niles 2013b: 206–7). Pointing to this sequence of events, Niles suggests a way to make clear that a textualized oral traditional work “is emphatically the result of a collaborative process” (208). Instead of labeling it “‘the Harmon variant’ of ‘George Collins’,” Niles writes, one should call it “‘the Harmon/Henry variant’”: this label will indicate the “hybridity” of what one reads in Henry’s book.

3.8. The Formulations in Section 3.1 Reevaluated A Sumerian “praise poem of Šulgi” known as “Šulgi B” states (http:// etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=t. 2.4.2.02%26display=Crit%26charenc=gcirc%26lineid=t24202.p12#t24202.p12) (Black et al. 1998–2006): In the south, in Urim, I caused a House of the Wisdom of Nisaba to spring up in sacrosanct ground for the writing of my hymns; up country in Nibru I established another. May the scribe be on duty there and transcribe with his hand the prayers which I instituted in the E-kur; and may the singer perform, reciting from the text. Is the scribe writing to dictation (cf. Telleteller 2007: 70)? Investigating ancient Egypt, Donald Redford points to “an epithet applied to chancery scribes that indicates their function as transcribers of the ipsissima verba of the king” and to “scenes showing scribes taking down his speeches and more casual obiter dicta” (2000: 185–6). Of authorial practice in late antiquity, Pierre Petitmengin and Bernard Flusin comment, “Normally an author dictated to his Page 70 of 94

 

Textualization secretary” (1984: 252, my translation). They go on to argue that, when the Nestorian patriarch Timothy I (727/8–823) had three copies made of a SyroHexapla manuscript, the six copyists wrote to the dictation of two readers (255– 62; cf. Gentry 2016: 138–9). Other researchers have pressed further, pondering the impact of the use of dictation in the ancient world in the reproduction of books (or other texts, such as inscriptions) or in the initial creation of written texts. In a classic article on the former topic, (p.164) Theodore Skeat comments on the challenges facing the scribe writing to dictation (1956: 207): He depends entirely on a single, fleeting, auditory image for the production of his text, and if he mishears the chances of his rectifying, or even realizing, the mistake are small. All he has before him at any one time is the small section of text with which he is currently concerned: he cannot look forward to see what is coming, and as he must keep up with the dictator, he has little or no time to see what has gone before. Martin Worthington nuances this idea a bit, speculating that an Akkadian scribe familiar with the language of inscriptions would have been less prone to making phonetic mistakes when reproducing an inscription from dictation than when copying it visually (2012: 13). For his part, Ernest Richards explores “secretarial mediation” (1991: 1) in the writing of letters in the Greco-Roman world. He posits a spectrum of secretarial roles from writing to dictation to composing on behalf of another (23–53; cf. Botha 2012: 242). Regarding dictation, Richards discusses how “the author (and thus the letter) was affected by the rate of delivery” (1991: 199), noting Quintilian’s comments on the matter (Institutes of Oratory 10.3.19–20) (113, 115); how the secretary’s presence influenced what the dictator said (“The use of a secretary perhaps prompted more pragmatic productions. One left experimentations and practice for autographs” (116)); and how the secretary regularly edited the document (“The content and style remained very much that of the author, but editorial corrections and changes were common, varying with the relative proficiency of the author and the secretary” (127)). Richards concludes, “Regardless of the role of the secretary, the resulting letter was different than if it had been written by the author eigenhändig [with his/her own hand]” (111). Pieter Botha suggests extending Richards’s observations to the production of literary texts (2012: 84, cf. 129). Although some of these researchers’ findings intersect with points made earlier in this chapter, they do not pertain to the collection and textualization of oral traditional works, the subject of my investigation. Homerists lack the kind of data that gives scholars working on, say, the Brothers Grimm an advantage: a paper trail helps them reconstruct the steps in the Grimms’ textualization efforts (Dollerup et al. 1986; Blamires 2003: esp. 73). One cannot find anything comparable in, for example, ancient accounts of the Page 71 of 94

 

Textualization so-called Peisistratean recension, according to which “the Homeric poems were subject to some kind of processing in Athens” in the sixth century BCE during the reign of Peisistratus or of his son Hipparchus (Andersen 2011; cf. Nagy 1996a: 73–4). To get a sense of what the textualization of a performance of the Iliad or of the Odyssey involved, one needs to adopt a comparative approach and consider instances of textualization of oral traditional works from other times and places. According to Delbert Hillers and Marsh McCall, “The bulk of the evidence from Near Eastern literature cited in support of Lord’s theory of Homeric dictated texts should not be so used” (1976: 23). In truth, the ancient Near East provides a modicum of help for this endeavor. Thorkild Jacobsen explores metapoetic references to compositional practices in some Sumerian literary texts. He concludes, “In the process of (p.165) recording oral poetry in writing, reliance on the scribe’s memory rather than on direct dictation seems to have been the preferred way, but things may have differed from case to case”; and “in establishing the final written form the scribes who were well versed in poetics are likely to have done a good deal of editing” (1982: 135). Mary Bachvarova detects an instance of collaboration between scribe and performer in the creation of a bilingual Hurro-Hittite text (KBo [Keilschrifttexte aus Boghazköi] 32.12): “The scribe and bard moved back and forth between the two languages, paragraph by paragraph, shortening the Hurrian version in order to accommodate both versions on the space left” (2014: 94). Susan Niditch speculates that “dictated, written versions of oral performances in the Hebrew Bible” may be found in the material attributed to the prophets, such as Isaiah and Amos (1996: 117–20, quotation from 120). Following John Niles, she states, “The very process of recording a performance alters it” (119; cf. van der Toorn 2007: 111). Paulson Pulikottil writes of the scribes involved in the initial “composition…of the Hebrew Scriptures”: “the scribes who collated the floating oral traditions amplified them also by adding their own comments” (2001: 33). Catherine Hezser offers one take on the creation of the Mishnah, a compendium of rabbinic teachings, around the turn of the third century CE (2002). Rabbinic editors collected orally transmitted materials (180– 1, 187–8) (along with some written ones (187–8)). Then they reshaped this material (181): The highly patterned structure of the Mishnah clearly indicates that the traditions the editors used were subjected to a thorough recasting to fit the Mishnah’s formulaic character…. The imposition of this formulaic pattern must be seen as the work of the editors rather than the form in which the traditional material was transmitted to them. Hezser concludes (190):

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Textualization The editors seem to have (re-)formulated most of the received traditions and combined them with contemporary views and concerns. Accordingly, the Mishnah is not merely a collection of prior teachings but the creation of its editors, whose opinions and world-views determined the selection, formulation, and arrangement of the material at hand. For their part, when the editors behind the Jerusalem Talmud decided to make a written text of rabbinic teachings—a project traditionally assigned to the beginning of the fifth century CE (cf. Alexander 2006: 81)—they had to reckon not only with written sources but with oral ones gathered from the students of earlier rabbis: “one may imagine that the editors of rabbinic works had scribes at hand who would first write down the many oral traditions during the process of collecting material” (Hezser 2015: 51). Looking to scholarship on other parts of the ancient world, I find Antoinet Schimmelpenninck’s summary of the state of our knowledge about the origins of the Chinese Shijing (Book of Odes) (1997: 2): The 305 songs brought together in this book during the Zhou dynasty are believed to include many folk songs, authentic or in polished form. They possibly stem from a much (p.166) larger body of songs collected between 1000 and 600 BC by the so-called music masters of the royal court…. The music masters relied heavily on oral tradition, and “folk song collecting” in the early dynasties may well have meant collecting the folk singers themselves and bringing them to the court for live performances. Charlemagne’s (742–814 CE) biographer, Einhard, reports that the king “had ancient vernacular songs, in which the deeds and wars of old kings were celebrated, written down and recorded” (barbara et antiquissima carmina, quibus veterum regum actus et bella canebantur, scripsit memoriaeque mandavit, Vita Karoli Magni 29 Holder-Egger): these songs were “obviously orally disseminated texts” (Müller 2012: 303). Such accounts are thought provoking, but testimony from antiquity about textualization events should not simply by virtue of being ancient have pride of place in an investigation into the creation of written versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey by way of dictation, and, in any case, one wishes for more details. So I turn to textualization efforts starting in the nineteenth century of our era. Some of that material may seem irrelevant, such as when the issue to which one attends arises from the collector’s representing a colonial or imperial power, a dynamic at work in many instances of textualization (e.g. Blaeser 2012: 336–7). The discussion of composite texts (subsection 3.5.3 (pp. 155–6)) may evoke the outmoded approach of Homeric analysts who saw evidence in the epics that a compiler of discrete poems concocted the epics (cf. Hainsworth 1990: 32). Yet even these examples are of heuristic value to the extent that they help Page 73 of 94

 

Textualization defamiliarize and denaturalize the textualization of oral traditional works and by extension the textualization of the work of Homeric poets. In any event, one should not seek a precise analogue for Homeric textualization events among the scenarios detailed in this chapter. One should not, for example, reverse Elias Lönnrot’s idea—he aligned the creation of the Kalevala with the creation of our Homeric epics (Honko 1990: 214–15, 225)—and find in Lönnrot’s making of the Kalevala an exact model for the making of written versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Instead, I have sought to present a picture of the sorts of things that take place when collectors collect oral traditional works. If trends appear, one should by default—and in the absence of evidence to the contrary—imagine those trends to be applicable to the Homeric case (cf. Ready 2018a: 13, 191). To review: I have surveyed the effects on the performer’s oral text and on the written text when a collector collected by way of manual transcription; I have noted the scribe’s role in the creation of a written text; I have looked at the extent to which collectors—both those operating before Milman Parry and Albert Lord and those who subsequently continue(d) to deploy older methods—shaped their informants’ work, both during the performance and during the production of a written text; I have observed that even today’s skilled and self-aware collectors shape the material they collect; and I have outlined the extent to which the collector’s text omits attributes of the performer’s speech and performance. A trend emerges: the final written text is a co-creation of performer and collector (and scribe, if a third party). (p.167) It gets messy, and it is tempting instead to buy into collectors’ claims of transparency, of offering a minimally mediated access to what an oral performer typically says.20 Take two of Alexander Chodzko’s assertions in his Popular Poetry of Persia: “Many Mirzas were quite surprised, nay shocked, when I watched them and insisted upon their writing, without any additions of their own, without any flourishes in their bookish style, every line word by word, of the narrative dictated by the Kurroglou-Khans” (1842: 13); “the following tolgaws [songs] were communicated to me by one of my Tatar friends, Aly Beg Sharapow…. I wrote them down under his dictation…. I give [them] here…in the state that they were handed to me by Aly Beg and the bards of his country, the Gyrans” (347). Similarly, August Hermann Francke speaks of textualizing a version of the Kesar epic: “Now I closeted this bard (for the metrical parts of the saga are sung during the recital) for several weeks with Ye-shes-rig-’adzin, clerk and schoolmaster at Khalatse, and in this way gained the Lower Ladakhi version of the Kesar Saga” (2000 [1925]: p. xxviii; cf. Bray 1999: 27). Or consider the anecdote, apparently taken as true in 1955, concerning the textualization of the Persian prose romance Amīr Arsalān (Hanaway 1985: 958): The story was composed by Mīrzā Moḥammad ʿAlī Naqīb-al-mamālek, the naqqāl-bāšī or chief storyteller of Nāṣer-al-dīn Shah (r. 1264–1313/1848– 96). According to D.ʿA. K. Moʿayyer-al-mamālek (Yaḡmā 8, 1334 Š./1955, Page 74 of 94

 

Textualization pp. 554–56), Tūrān Āḡā Faḵr-al-dawla, daughter of Nāṣer-al-dīn Shah, wrote down the story of Amir Arsalān, as the naqqāš-bāšī related it in the evenings to help the monarch fall asleep. More recent collectors perpetuate this fantasy as well. Sophie McCall reviews “the absent editor phenomenon”: “The recorder denies his or her role as listener in shaping the story, stressing his or her neutrality or objectivity” (2011: 6). One must not be lulled by such mystifications: “textualization is a more complicated process than simply writing down a dictated text” (Reichl 2012a: 54; cf. Hämäläinen 2013: 44). Better to be skeptical in the manner of early Muslim scholars: “al-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī [d. 1005–10] reports the criticism against the famous Ibn Kaysān, that faults the scholar for distorting knowledge three times: first, for recording what he hears in the field inaccurately, second, for transferring his field notes into his journals inaccurately, and third, for reading the information inaccurately from the texts of his journals” (Omidsalar 2002: 260). My findings occasion a reevaluation of the seven points presented in section 3.1 (“The Dictation Model”). (1) There was a collector. Yes—that is a given in the dictation model under discussion—but my entire survey encourages one to pay more attention to this figure, however nebulous, and his involvement in the process of textualization. Perhaps one will be more apt to do so if (p.168) one trades in the anodyne, vague term “collector” for the more vivid “textmaker,” “textualizer,” or “song-mediator.” There was a patron, but, more to the point, a textmaker/textualizer/song-mediator worked with the poet. Perhaps the patron was this individual or perhaps the patron tasked this individual. Perhaps this individual operated as his own scribe or perhaps this individual tasked a scribe (or scribes). Whatever series of relationships obtained, the poet was not an autonomous agent. (2) The process of dictation differed from the poet’s normal performances. It still qualified, however, as a performance. On the one hand, the first of these two assertions represents an advance over declarations like “the texts of the Iliad and Odyssey (in so far as they are oral poems) are somehow the record merely of a performance of Homer’s poems” (Hainsworth 1970: 90). Such framing used to be common. One can compare—to pick but one example among many (cf. Heissig 1972: 145, 148)— Nikolaus Poppe’s comment on a textualized Mongolian epic: “Dieses Epos wurde 1957 von einem gewissen Dendew… vorgetragen und von den Mitarbeitern des Instituts für Sprache und Literatur…niedergeschrieben” (“This epic was performed in 1957 by a certain Dendew and was written down by the staff members of the Institute for Language and Literature”) (1975: 2, my emphasis Page 75 of 94

 

Textualization and translation). These kinds of statements overlook the distinctiveness of the performance recorded by the collector. A dictating poet is indeed a performing poet (Honko 1998: 81)—one need not worry here about “performance authenticity” (Fine 1984: 61; Bendix 1997: 201–2)—but, in his early article in support of the dictation hypothesis, Lord rightly stressed that the Homeric epics “are not the improvised text of normal oral performance; without recording apparatus it is impossible to obtain such texts” (1953a: 131; cf. Murko 1990: 121; Janko 1992: 38; Niemi 1997: 162; Okpewho 2003: 2–3; Frog 2011a: 50). The first sentence was reworked to read, “They are not the text of normal oraltraditional performance” (Lord 1991: 45). Some recent formulations have again clouded the issue. Graeme Bird, for example, argues that each fragment of Iliadic poetry preserved on papyri stems from “a transcript of a live performance” (2010: 100) by which he means a performance that does not involve the poetry’s “being dictated slowly and carefully” (95; cf. Nagy 2009: 355; Reece 2011: 302). Minna Skafte Jensen writes of Athenian schoolteachers sending “their scribal slaves to record selections of oral epic” (2011: 273), presumably from bards performing in public. Scholars in other fields make the same error. Discussing the textual environment in which Q, the source that supposedly lies behind portions of the gospels of Matthew and Luke, emerged in written form, Richard Horsley states, “Written texts…were oral-derived texts, copies or transcripts of communication that took place concretely in oral performance before a group” (1999: 6). No one in the ancient world could have made a written text that reproduced word-for-word a “live performance” (as Bird understands that phrase), “selections of oral epic” (as Jensen understands that phrase), or an “oral performance before a group” (as Horsley understands that phrase). On the other hand, section 3.3 (“The Process of Recording by Hand”) shows that the first statement—the process of dictation differed from the poet’s normal (p. 169) performances—does not go far enough. The degree to which the process of dictation is different is underappreciated. This difference emerges most clearly in the fact that a dictating performer gives a very different performance than he gives when singing (or chanting, etc.) (subsection 3.3.4: “Dictated Texts versus Sung Texts”). This fact also directs one toward the bigger point: the dictating performer produces an oral text on the collector’s terms and in accordance with the collector’s needs. Research continues into what a Homeric performer did when performing in his usual way—should one speak of singing, recitative, and/or declamation?—and how what he did differed from normal speaking (M. L. West 1981, 1986: 45; Danek 1989; Nagy 1990: 19–24, 1996b: 131; Danek and Hagel 1995; González 2013: 343–6, 419). Whatever the precise contours of the Homeric performer’s usual method of singing or recitative or declamation, this mode of presentation would have differed from the speech style required of him when dictating. Like his modern dictating counterparts the Homeric poet gave a very different presentation when dictating than he gave Page 76 of 94

 

Textualization when performing in his normal mode. This shift implies, moreover, that like his modern dictating counterparts the Homeric poet generated an oral text on the collector’s terms and in accordance with the collector’s needs. The process of recording by hand is not just different but challenging (subsection 3.3.1: “The Challenges of Manual Transcription”). It therefore requires interventions of various kinds on the collector’s part, and, again the bigger point, these interventions result in both oral and written texts that bear the collector’s imprint (subsections 3.3.2: “Steps to Work around These Challenges and their Effects”; 3.3.3: “The Rare Exceptions”). The difficulty of the process of recording by hand and the implications and consequences of that difficulty would have obtained in the Homeric case. (3) Nevertheless, the poet took advantage of the opportunity to craft an exceptional poem. I build on my reassessment of point (2). When Homerists make point (3), they pass over the collector’s role in the recording process as reviewed in subsections 3.3.2 (“Steps to Work around These Challenges and their Effects”), 3.3.3 (“The Rare Exceptions”), and 3.3.5.1 (“The Collector as Gatekeeper”). The majority of collectors who collected by way of manual transcription devised ways, some quite elaborate, to circumvent the challenges that method posed (subsection 3.3.2). The default assumption when imagining the creation of written versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey by way of dictation should be in that direction. Granted, I have no idea what sort of mitigating tactics the collector felt necessary to capture the performance. The important point is that these measures resulted in oral texts and in written texts whose content was determined in part by the collector’s efforts. Even if one insists that the poet took to dictation, it was the collector who maintained the performance arena for the poet and who “nursed” the song (subsection 3.3.3). Finally, as subsection 3.3.5.1 shows, whatever ended up in the written text did so because the collector admitted it to the text. (4) The collector had a modest impact on the content of the poet’s poetry as he performed. (p.170) Section 3.4 (“The Collector’s Impact on the Oral Text”) and 3.6 (“Best Practices”) demonstrate the inadequacy of this formulation and of the examples Homerists cite to flesh it out. The collector likely not only interfered unwittingly but also made suggestions as to content. The collector helped shape the oral text. It was not just a matter of providing an arena conducive to the production of a long poem. And even Jensen, who offers a detailed assessment of her collector’s impact, wrongly downplays his importance. She writes, “Pisistratus and Onomacritus may have explicitly asked the poet to celebrate them, their city, and Page 77 of 94

 

Textualization their goddess; we cannot know. Such a theory is not necessary, however, as the oral poet would give his songs the form most pleasing to his audience anyway” (1980: 170). Jensen’s caveat retains the poet as the sole agent behind his poem, but I doubt that the collector left it to the poet to divine his preferences. Note Jensen’s reference to the audience. She treats the audience for the dictation session as the same as the audience for the poet’s usual performances. In her 2011 book she makes a similar claim: despite the fact that the poet’s “audience will have been the scribe and perhaps other persons” (297), he “would have kept in mind the audience of his regular performance” (298). By conflating the audience for the recording with the poet’s usual audience, Jensen fails to distinguish between what happens when performers confront a large audience and when they confront a small audience. A given audience member amid a large group has less of a chance to affect the performer’s presentation (Dollerup et al. 1984: 252). When the audience comprises a small group, including the collector, or perhaps just the collector alone, the collector can much more easily influence or even direct the performance. One must take this fact into account when envisioning the Homeric collector’s impact. (5) The scribe wrote down exactly what the poet said. Unlikely. The scribe (whether or not he was the collector himself) would have exercised a considerable influence on the written text. He would have shaped it as he took dictation, writing what he heard and engaging in his own scribal performance (subsection 3.3.5.2: “The Scribal Process”): pace Bryan Hainsworth (1997: 103), these interventions would not have required the scribe to interrupt the poet. And he would have shaped it as he later recopied the field notes (subsection 3.5.1: “Field Notes”).21 (6) The collector minimally edited, if at all. Exceedingly unlikely if one pays attention to the material reviewed in subsections 3.5.2 (“Editorial Work in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries”) and 3.5.3 (“Editorial Work from the Second Half of the Twentieth Century until Today”). One should assume a high degree of editorial intervention when reconstructing the textualization of Homeric poets’ work. The collector did not offer a diplomatic edition of the initial recording. (p.171) This claim may meet with resistance, given the lengths Homerists have gone to in itemizing mistakes in our Homeric poems that are supposed to prove an almost purposeful lack of editorial work (e.g. Reece 2005: 57). Now, others have countered that some of these “mistakes” are not in fact mistakes at all (e.g. Nagy 2003: 49–71; González 2013: 25–7). Furthermore, even if one grants that these mistakes qualify as such, these lists of errors prove that a battery of scholars who have spent a lifetime rereading the texts with all the advantages offered by modern technology (i.e. computers) turns out unsurprisingly to be Page 78 of 94

 

Textualization better at editing than the collector of the Iliad or the Odyssey. Martin L. West’s vision of a writing oral poet relies on a scenario analogous to what I am getting at here: his poet revises but fails to notice errors (2011a). I set these two points aside and support my claim of extensive editorial engagement by referring to the modern material reviewed in this chapter. Gisli Sigurđsson declares, “It is impermissible to postulate something for oral art forms of former ages for which we do not possess living examples in the present” (2008: 26–7). I apply this principle to the question at hand (cf. Ready 2018a: 191 n. 2). Subsections 3.5.2 and 3.5.3 catalogue numerous instances in which the collector aggressively edited the performer’s work. I cannot attribute to the collector of the work of Homeric poets a hands-off approach that some present-day collectors have not adopted. Jensen acknowledges the trouble this issue poses for current formulations of the dictation model (2011: 301–2): Beyond such standardisations of detail the scribes seem to have interfered very little. This is actually strange when we compare with how freely preParry editors used to tamper with oral epic on its way from performance to printed text.… Compared with modern editors, and especially with those who were active before the oral-formulaic theory changed the routines, the editor of the Iliad and Odyssey must have felt more respectful towards the singers and less tempted to tamper with their texts. Strange indeed—too strange, to my mind. Subsections 3.5.2 and 3.5.3 detail the forms of editorial intervention. Collectors, for instance, moved some things around and deleted others and made changes in keeping with their own aesthetic preferences. Their editing often went far beyond correcting (incidental) errors. In the Homeric case, chances are good that similar sorts of vigorous editorial work occurred. Just because the collector did not catch every (incidental) error does not mean that he did not edit. And just because one cannot pinpoint the editorial interventions does not mean they are not there (cf. S. West 1988: 38). Having said all that, I hasten to add that I do not think any of these putative changes required conceptional literacy to come about. (7) The collector’s written text qua written text differed from the poet’s oral presentation qua oral presentation. Building on John Miles Foley’s comment that Homeric scholarship occasionally overlooks this point (2005b: 259), I suggest that the material rehearsed in section 3.7 (“The Collector’s Text versus the Performer’s Oral Performance”) indicates the need to flesh out this formulation. Two related issues require greater attention. First, (p.172) one can specify the ways in and the degree to which the collector’s written text passed over the features of live speech and performance. Second, having grasped the first point, one is better positioned to Page 79 of 94

 

Textualization introduce the matter of agency: the collector made something different from the oral performance he recorded. The collector preserved the poet’s use of dactylic hexameter, thereby providing a minimal sense of the performance’s prosody. Yet if one assumes that each verse took up one line (Immerwahr 1990: 19), giving each verse its own line masked the use of intonation units that straddle the verse end (subsection 1.2.2 (p. 39)): the reader has to figure that out.22 Moreover, the other components of live speech and performance reviewed in section 3.7 disappeared. The collector did not create an ethnopoetic score, nor did he strive for an ideal transcript in the technical sense outlined by Edward Schieffelin: “the attempt to record transparently and objectively in writing every significant detail of a performance” (2005: 80). Given the nature of early manuscripts—written in uncial letters and scriptio continua (Carr 2005: 98; González 2013: 145 n. 128)— the collector had little interest in producing a “gestural imitation of speech” of the sort that Alger Doane sees in Old English manuscripts (1994a: 425). For instance, the scribe who copied the charm Wið Færstice (“Against a sudden stabbing pain”) in a late tenth-century manuscript did not put a space between words pronounced together (1994b: 138): his writing “reflect[s] suprasegmentals, the rhythms of spoken phrases” (134; cf. Niles 2013b: 209– 10). Instead, the collector made a bookroll that was, to use Doane’s description of a generic manuscript, a discrete “three-dimensional object demanding attention in its own right” (1991: 85), possessed of its own materiality and having to be handled on its own terms.23 If animal skins were used, one perhaps saw “the pores and hairs” (85; cf. González 2013: 77). If, as Michael Haslam prefers (2005: 152), papyrus was used, one felt the “tough but very supple” material and saw the “sheet-joins” (150).24 This technology required the reader to unroll the bookroll from left to right with two hands (and perhaps the chin to reroll it (per Martial 1.66.8)) (Vandendorpe 2009: 28) and to read right to left or in a boustrophedon format (Haslam 2005: 153). These material realities shaped a reader’s experience of the poetry found in the bookroll in ways peculiar to the reading event. Other material components of the text, such as the nature of the handwriting and the layout of the verse on the page—whatever form they took, Barry Powell’s vision of what an eighth-century BCE text of the Iliad looked like being (p.173) good to think with (2000: 115)—worked in the same way. Tom Phillips investigates what it meant to read poetry (especially that of Pindar) in a bookroll (especially in the Hellenistic period), exploring, for instance, how colometrization and the use of critical signs influence a reader’s interactions with a poem (2016: 102–17) and how where a poem appears in a book affects how a reader interprets it (121–36, 143, 154, 211–12, 274–5, 279; cf. King 1997: 128; Gregory 2012: 91; Prodi 2017). So too the look and format of the verse in the Homeric collector’s text informed a reader’s encounter with the verse.

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Textualization As I mentioned at the end of section 3.7, it is unnecessary to overstate the differences between written text and oral performance to appreciate those differences. To begin with, just as Brent Nelson tries to reconstruct from the text itself how John Donne vocalized and gestured when presenting his second prebend sermon (2012), readers of the Homeric epics like to see in the text hints as to which paralinguistic effects the poet might have deployed in performance. Alan Boegehold argues that gestures could have accompanied demonstratives and taken the place of protases and apodoses of conditional sentences (1999: 36–47), and Katherine Kretler envisions a rhapsode mimetically gesturing with his staff as he describes, for example, Odysseus wielding his sword to keep order among the shades of the underworld (2019: 325–7). Anna Bonifazi imagines the poet adding “a paralinguistic effect of vocal emphasis” when placing keinou (“of that one”) at the start of Od. 4.149 (2012: 44–5), sees an opportunity for mimetic sobs at Od. 1.243–4 (48) and for a gesture at Od. 14.156–7 (89–90), and postulates “that a performative pause could have preceded the utterance of αὐτάρ [“so”]” (236). More generally, Phillips’s comment on Pindar’s poetry —“effects created in the reading situation are often extensions of those that would have occurred in (re)performance scenarios” (2016: 37)—applies to Homeric poetry too. Lastly, one notes that eventually some people used written texts of the Homeric epics as prompts for oral performance, the performers finding the texts helpful for that purpose (Foley 1995a: 4; Nagy 1996a: 67; Bakker 1997a: 31; Ford 2003; Carr 2005: 4–7, 98, 104). Nevertheless, I reiterate the basic fact that the collector fashioned a document distinct from the oral performance he sought to capture. I sum up this reevaluation as follows. Section 3.1 (“The Dictation Model”) noted that proponents of the dictation model endorse point (1) in light of what a comparative approach teaches. I have sought to extend that logic—follow the lead of the comparanda—in this section’s reconsideration of points (1) through (7). One thereby is able to picture better what a text resulting from a process that began with dictation was: a co-created entity.

3.9. The Evolutionary Model’s Transcript One should query from a comparative perspective as well Martin L. West’s vision of writing oral poets who produced the Iliad and the Odyssey, starting perhaps with (p.174) Mark Amodio’s analysis of “literate poets [who] draw upon oral poetics as they write the oral tradition” in medieval England (2004: 28). I content myself here with exploring how this chapter’s findings help with one component of Gregory Nagy’s evolutionary model. In the introduction to this chapter, I set the dictation model in opposition to the evolutionary model. Yet Nagy makes allowance for dictated texts in his scheme. In Nagy’s model, these dictated texts could not be further removed from that of

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Textualization the dictation model. But, from this investigation’s vantage point, that distinction is irrelevant: all that matters is that one is again dealing with a dictated text. In period 3 of Nagy’s proposed five-period chronology for the gradual fixation of the Iliad and the Odyssey, written texts emerge: “the approximate date of 550 B.C.E—or perhaps a few decades later—seems to me the most plausible one as a terminus post quem for a potential transcription of the Iliad and the Odyssey” (1996a: 110–11, cf. 100). By “transcription,” Nagy means “the writing down of a composition-in-performance not as a performance per se but as a potential aid to performance” (1996a: 36). In other words, a transcript can be used to help with subsequent performances, but it does not determine or fix the content of subsequent performances. When Nagy says that a transcript “can be…an aid for performance” (1996b: 112), one should not become confused. Christian Novetzke examines a fourteenpage section of a mid-eighteenth-century CE handwritten notebook housed in the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (in Pune, Maharashtra, India). Speculating that this section would have helped a performer present the poetry of Namdev, he labels it either “a transcript” of a performance or “the outline or ‘strategy’ for one,” “the blueprint of one” (2008: 112, 119). The word “transcript” points to one individual recording what another says. By contrast, in fashioning an outline, strategy, or blueprint, the writer did not record another performer as he performed. Likewise, one should not think that someone wrote out what Nagy calls an “aid for performance” before the performance itself: it was a transcript that emerged from “the writing down of a composition-inperformance” (Nagy 1996a: 36). One does not confront here what some scholars of Jewish scripture see in their texts—“written outlines for oral elaboration,” “starting points for oral literature” concocted prior to those performances (R. Miller 2011: 55–6). One may wonder if Nagy’s category of transcript could include an outline of the sort that Wilhelm Radloff devised as an initial step in recording his singers (subsection 3.3.2: “Steps to Work around These Challenges and their Effects”): was a transcript a list of a poet’s main points? Nagy nowhere explicitly offers that possibility. Note the following wherein the transcript is a document that purports to contain everything the performer said (Nagy 2009: 355): Suppose we had access to a transcript of such a Panathenaic Homer— exactly as Plato heard Homeric poetry being performed at the Panathenaia in a given year. The question is, what Homeric text would such a transcript resemble most closely? My answer is this: the closest thing would be the quotations from Homer as we find them in the works of Plato himself. The next closest thing would be the Koine of Homer as approximated by the base text constructed by Aristarchus.

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Textualization (p.175) I also observe that for Nagy a transcript can include variants (2014: 100), variants being both horizontal (within lines) and vertical (in the length of a given passage) (2004: e.g. 54). Only a document that purports to contain all the poet’s words could be said to have such variants. What does Nagy mean when he says a transcript “can be…an aid for performance”? This aid is a written recording of a poet’s performance. It comprises hexameter verses and is not an outline à la Radloff. For my purposes, a brief reference in Nagy’s Homeric Responses (2003) proves enlightening: “In principle, my own model explicitly allows for a variety of historical contexts in which dictation could indeed have taken place, resulting in ‘a transcript, or a variety of transcripts, at various possible stages of the performance tradition of Homer [at the Panathenaia]’ [Nagy 1996a: 100]” (4). Here, the transcript is a dictated text. Fittingly, in asserting that he does “not disagree with his [Lord’s] model,” Nagy says, “My own evolutionary model for the making of Homeric poetry is not at odds with dictation models per se” (4). Because Nagy’s category of transcript includes dictated texts, it includes a product of a process of textualization that requires attention. One would be remiss if one returned to a naïve view of the creation of a dictated text—if one stopped thinking about what happens when people try to record an oral performance—because one has switched from the dictation model to the evolutionary model. I have shown that every case of textualization by means of dictation is to a greater or lesser degree, but always to some degree, an act of co-creation between the parties involved. These findings should inform one’s thinking about the creation of a transcript in Nagy’s period 3. Right away one is confronted with a difference between the making of a transcript and the process of textualization reconstructed in the dictation model. The notional collector of the dictation model sought of his own accord to acquire an exemplary manifestation of a tradition of verbal art and to display the now fixed text in a different medium. Such motivation does not factor into the creation of a transcript. In Nagy’s system, a transcript could (but in no way had to) function as an aid for performance (e.g. 2003: 3; 2014: 100). For those involved in a transcript’s production it was in the end not that valuable; it had no claim to distinction or preeminence. As a result, it could never function as what Nagy calls a “script” (“the written text is a prerequisite for performance”) or a “scripture” (“the written text need not even presuppose performance”) (1996b: 112). It could never have a status similar to that of the written text fashioned by the collector of the dictation model. Still, some number of individuals did create each transcript. In Homer the Preclassic (2010), Nagy turns to the political realities and contests discernable in the Archaic and Classical periods to attempt to account both for what one sees in our texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey and for what one can reconstruct of Page 83 of 94

 

Textualization the traditions underlying those texts (esp. 7, 182, 203–14, 233–4, 250–1, 265, 355–6, 372–3, 376–7). This grounding in political practice encourages one to imagine the interactions between the parties involved in the creation of a transcript in period 3. At least two scenarios appear possible, although the second more than the first. In the first, which I set aside in the examination of the dictation model, a rhapsode on his (p.176) own initiative dictated to a scribe.25 Much of what has been presented earlier in the context of my revision of the dictation model likely obtained, such as the difficulties of writing to dictation and the tactics adopted to circumvent those challenges (subsections 3.3.1: “The Challenges of Manual Transcription”; 3.3.2: “Steps to Work around These Challenges and their Effects”), the scribe’s “nursing” the song (subsection 3.3.3: “The Rare Exceptions”), the likelihood that the process of dictation resulted in an oral text different from the sort of oral text usually produced by the rhapsode (subsection 3.3.4: “Dictated Texts versus Sung Texts”), the effects of the scribal process (subsections 3.3.5.2: “The Scribal Process”; 3.5.1: “Field Notes”), and the extent to which the scribe’s written text differed from the oral performance it documented (section 3.7: “The Collector’s Text versus the Performer’s Oral Performance”). Even in this scenario, a transcript needs to be understood as a co-production. In the second scenario, someone got a rhapsode to dictate a transcript. Working within Nagy’s reconstruction of his period 3, I tease out this scenario as follows. Important players in period 3 were the Homeridai of Chios, a group of performers who became not only “the authorizers of Homer in Athens” (Nagy 2010: 61) but also “the official regulators of rhapsodic competitions in performing the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey at the Panathenaia in Athens” (62, cf. 69 n. 16): it was they who, at the instigation of the Peisistratidai, introduced to the Panathenaia the idea of competitively performing the epics in sequential relay (28, 69). Now, Nagy writes, “We may posit multiform ‘transcripts’ stemming from a multiplicity of seasonally recurring performances of Homeric poetry at each successive Panathenaic festival” (2004: 35, cf. 2003: 4 quoted earlier (p. 175)). If transcripts “stemmed” from the Panathenaia and the Homeridai were “authorizers” and “regulators” at that festival, perhaps the Homeridai instigated some efforts at transcription.26 Imagine the Homeridai arranging for either one of their own number or a rhapsode not associated with the group to dictate to a scribe. Here, again, the steps taken to address the complications of dictation, the scribe’s helping the performer along, the creation of an oral text distinct in many ways from the kind of oral text normally created by the rhapsode, the realities of scribal activity, and the differences between the written text and the rhapsode’s oral performance— all these factors would have (p.177) rendered a transcript a co-creation of the

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Textualization parties involved. At the same time, this scenario might have seen more negotiation than the first scenario. For, although the performance tradition of period 3 in “allow[ing] for only minimal variation” (Nagy 2004: 30) was relatively more rigid than that of the preceding two periods, performances in period 3 exhibited multiformity (30, 33): “the textual evidence…cannot be reduced to a single ‘uniform’ Panathenaic text” (38). To be precise, Nagy’s period 3 includes two traditions of Homeric performance, which he terms the Homerus Auctus and the Homeric Koine, the former giving way to the latter in the fifth century BCE (esp. 2009: 589; 2010: 369). (Note that “the Homerus Auctus can be reconstructed even farther back, to the era of Solon” (2010: 354), toward the end of period 2.) Nagy characterizes the Homerus Auctus as a “fluid phase” (2010: 352–5, quotation from 354) and argues for relative fluidity in the age of the Homeric Koine (2009: 445–6, 475, cf. 1996a: 109 n. 167). Fluidity means multiformity. The fact of multiformity, however limited, might have prompted debate among the several rhapsodes (i.e. the (other) Homeridai and the dictating performer) involved in the transcription. One may fairly speak of the potential for others besides the performer to have an impact on the performer’s oral text and so the final written text. Prods Oktor Skjærvø’s reconstruction of how the Avestan texts came to be written down resembles in part the sort of interaction I am envisioning took place (2012: 19): Either a priest recited to a scribe who wrote down the text or a priest was taught the script and how to use it and wrote down the texts he himself knew. The writing down may have taken place under the supervision of priests who may have been commissioned to control the text that was written down, perhaps by comparing versions known by the priests and choosing among variants. Nagy in fact links multiformity and transcription. In fleshing out the notion of “multiform ‘transcripts’,” he explores the matter of the numerus versuum, a “principle of regulating the number of Homeric verses [that] seems to be at work already in the fourth century, possibly as early as the time of Plato” (2004: 35; cf. 1996b: 144, 2009: 16). The absence of a regulated verse count contributed to multiform performances (as evidenced in the survival of plus verses (2004: 36–7); section 4.1 (p. 190)). Nagy connects the category of transcript with this stage: “The passage from unregulated to regulated versecounts in the performance tradition would correspond to a passage from ‘transcript’ to ‘script’ in the text tradition” (2004: 36, cf. 1996b: 155–6). To speak of multiform transcripts is to speak of transcription of performances within a tradition marked by multiformity. In such a context, the rhapsodes involved in the second scenario might have discussed what the dictating performer should do.

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Textualization On occasion Homerists speculate about the existence of an “official written text,” an “Athenian Homer,” that performers at the Panathenaia were “required to respect the basic integrity of” (Scodel 2007: 150–1). Some who favor Nagy’s notion of a transcript suggest that it would have been used as a “control” text: “At the Panathenaia a written text was a control on what the rhapsodes performed” (Frame 2009: 559 n. 111). If a transcript functioned in this normative way, the creation of the transcript would (p.178) presumably have involved negotiation between the parties involved, perhaps more than the amount of negotiation involved in the scenario outlined in the previous paragraph, as well as some amount of editorial work after the dictation event proper. I segregate this reconstruction from the others concocted in this section because it conflicts with the concept of a transcript in Nagy’s model. On page 65 of his 1996 Homeric Questions, Nagy defined a transcript as a manuscript used “to record any given composition and to control the circumstances of any given performance” (emphasis in original). By page 67, the transcript became an “aid to performance,” and this is what the transcript has remained in subsequent publications (as I mentioned earlier (p. 175)). In a 2014 piece, Nagy writes, “My use of the term [transcript] makes it clear that a transcript has no influence on performance” (100). By contrast, a script “controls the performance” (2003: 3). If the transcript has “no influence on performance,” it cannot simultaneously “control” any aspect of a performance—as a Panathenaic control text would by definition. In any event, this speculative foray into the transcript of Nagy’s model underlines the fact that one cannot make reference to the creation of a written text by way of dictation and leave it at that. Even in a situation in which the goal was distinctly not to collect an exemplary instantiation of an oral tradition, the messy realities of textualization likely asserted themselves.

Excursus: The Interventionist Textmaker and Herodotus’s Histories Scholarship has profitably compared the historian Herodotus and our Homeric poet(s) and their respective works (Pelling 2006; Jensen 2011: 209–13). One can also bring Herodotus into the discussion of a collector’s creation of a written version of the Iliad or the Odyssey through a process of textualization. The material reviewed so far leads one to imagine the Homeric collector as an interventionist textmaker. One wonders if such a figure is conceivable in Greece’s Archaic period. Herodotus’s Histories brings one as close as one can get via ancient testimony to attitudes toward textualizing oral traditional works in archaic Greece. Let me briefly and partially examine first the figure of Herodotus-the-collector-of-oral-traditional-works that the Histories urges one to envision and then Herodotus’s actual textualization practices. Doing so will provide support for the vision of an interventionist Homeric collector outlined in this chapter.

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Textualization Scholars have gleaned much from Herodotus’s self-representation as a researcher (Luraghi 2001: esp. 141; 2006; 2009: esp. 440; Dewald 2002). Leaving aside for a moment how Herodotus conducted his inquiry, I first interrogate the figure of Herodotus-the-collector-of-oral-traditional-works as he appears in the Histories. Pursuing ta legomena (2.123.1, 7.152.3 Hude; cf. e.g. logous, 2.99.1), that collector of oral traditional works comes across as transparently interventionist in his presentation of (p.179) those stories.27 I start at the global level, as it were. As Stewart Flory stresses (1987: 64–5), the collector is portrayed as exercising firm control over what stories get included in his final text. Carolyn Dewald demonstrates how the “I” of the text emerges as one who arranges stories told by others into “a composite account” such that they “fall into a meaningful and coherent set of relationships with one another” (2002: 287–8): the stories acquire their significance, perhaps a significance unknown to their original tellers, based on how the “I” situates them in relation to one another. Following Dewald again, I note that Herodotus the collector appears as one not required to pass on what his informants have told him in exactly the manner in which they did so: above all, he is free to interject his own voice in the midst of the tale “in order to fill out for the particular audience details about the events and the people narrated that would have remained incomprehensible without these addenda” (Dewald 2002: 285). Finally, I mention the historian’s use of “divided sourceattributions” (Hornblower 2002: 379). Herodotus explicitly forefronts his yoking together different versions of an anecdote when he fleshes out what one source has told him with material from another source. Regarding, for instance, Alyattes’s attack on Miletus, Herodotus relates that the Milesians add further details to a story told by the Delphians (1.19–20) (J. Evans 1991: 110–11). Herodotus the collector does not surreptitiously “contaminate” one epichoric source with another (Murray 2001 [1987]: 26–7), but he does fashion one story from discrete sources (cf. Thomas 1989: 247–51, 264–82). A more localized phenomenon—Herodotus’s choice of indirect discourse in the presentation of informant speeches (Lang 1984: 142–9; Luraghi 2001; de Bakker 2007: 160–78; Scardino 2012)—is also relevant. Mathieu de Bakker lists the informant speeches in the Histories (2007: 238–45; cf. Dewald 2002: 275), defining them as those speeches that “are not addressed to another character within the narrative, but are used by Herodotus to present material which he ascribes to informants” (2007: 160). These speeches appear in indirect discourse: “The information is embedded in a complement which depends on a verb expressing a speech” (160, cf. 180). Herodotus introduces informant speeches with a verb form such as legousin “they say” or legetai “it is said” (160 n. 1), what Nino Luraghi terms akoē statements (2001: 146). These statements mean that a story is found among a particular population (Marincola 1987: 127), but they also acknowledge the possibility of multiple tellers retailing the tale.28 Herodotus (p.180) the collector emerges as the one who either gives priority to Page 87 of 94

 

Textualization one of these voices or concocts a single version, relentlessly monologic, that draws on several voices. As to the presentation of this information in indirect discourse, I note the following. Because Herodotus remains the speaker throughout, his ultimate control over the discourse remains palpable (cf. Fowler 2012: 339; Scardino 2012: 69–70). An additional focalizer, the informant(s), comes into view (cf. Scardino 2012: 69–70), but a manifestly secondary one: the informant(s) become(s) a secondary focalizer whose focalization is embedded within the focalization of the primary narrator focalizer, Herodotus himself (de Jong 2004: 37–8; D. Beck 2012: 80). (A focalizer is a “person (the narrator or a character) through whose eyes the events and persons of a narrative are ‘seen’” (de Jong 2001: p. xiv).) Moreover, the use of indirect statement raises the possibility that Herodotus gives a selection from a larger speech and/or paraphrases the original speech, in part or entirely (Scardino 2012: 70). To sum up, Herodotus’s use of indirect statement makes one think of him as a collector of oral traditional works who chooses from among versions of a tale, combines different versions of the same story, and filters his informants’ words. Although a fraught endeavor, I also consider the probable realities of Herodotus’s textualization of oral traditional works. For scholarship has seen Herodotus influencing and shaping his informants’ tales at both stages in the process. Maurizio Giangiulio turns to the fact long recognized among folklorists that the ethnographic encounter affects the material recorded therein (2001: 134; cf., e.g., Kapchan 2003: 137) and suggests that Herodotus’s description of the foundation of Cyrene could “be the product of some interaction between the historian and the people who provided him with information.…From this perspective Herodotus’ text presupposes a kind of combined effort on the part of both the historian and his informants” (2001: 136; cf. J. Evans 1991: 132; Thomas 1996: 177–8). Alan Griffiths surveys how Herodotus “subjects the raw material he has collected to a thoughtful process of selection, adaptation and disposition” (2006: 140). For instance, the stories of Arion and of Gyges and that about Cypselus’s birth each exhibit Herodotus’s propensity for “stripping away” supernatural elements (140–1, quotation from 141; cf. Griffiths 2001: esp. 75–6 (on stories involving Rhampsinitus and Amasis), 88). Similarly, Giangiulio sees Herodotus editing the material he gathered: “He used what he had at his disposal (p.181) to construct narratives that appear more coherent and detailed than any tradition the ἐπιχώριοι [“local informants”] ever kept” (2001: 137, cf. 2005: 119–20). I dispense with the idea that Herodotus made up many of the tales (or even everything) that he attributes to his informants (cf. Murray 2001 [1987]: 16; Thomas 1996: 177; Kurke 1999: 28 n. 73; Luraghi 2006: 83). Yet those who stress Herodotean invention look not only to entire stories but also to certain details in those stories. Hartmut Erbse finds, for instance, that Herodotus, upon learning from Egyptian priests that Cambyses killed the Apis bull, concocted the detail about Cambyses striking the bull in the thigh (3.29.1) (1992: 54). If one Page 88 of 94

 

Textualization favored such readings, one could point to them as examples of Herodotus’s further interventions in the presentation of the stories he collected. The evidence surveyed in this chapter’s previous sections suggests that the Homeric collector influenced and shaped in numerous ways the text he collected. The Herodotean witness of the Classical era makes it a bit easier to imagine an interventionist collector at work in Archaic-era Greece. For both Herodotus’s actual practices and the practices of the Herodotus-as-collectorfigure that one constructs while reading the Histories can be termed interventionist. This chapter has explored one theory of how written versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey came about. I did not investigate Martin L. West’s vision of a writing oral poet. Part III considers what the reproduction of written texts entailed, whether they originated from a process of textualization by way of dictation or from the hand of the poet himself. (p.182) Notes:

(1) With Nagy’s model of transcripts and scripts, compare Alexander’s reconstruction of how Jews used written texts of the Mishnah (section 3.8 (p. 165)): “the texts before us today functioned in antiquity within a complex cycle that led from the fluidity of oral performance to the fixity of written transcription and then back again to the fluidity of oral performance.…The textual artifacts before us today are seen both as the summary of oral exercises already performed and a script that teaches or guides disciples in future such performances. Here, the text is not a final product but a jumping-off point for future improvisations” (2006: 120–1, emphasis in original). With Nagy’s understanding of the emergence of texts as scriptures, compare Jaffee’s understanding of a Rabbinic literary text as “finished only at the point that the perceptions of its transmitters and users began to define the compilation as a text representing ‘tradition’ itself rather than the ad hoc storage-place of tradition’s texts” (1999: 23). (2) Carey writes that the dictated texts had “no audience” because “even at the latest possible date [for textualization by way of dictation], we are a century before the creation of even an elite reading public” (2007: 137–8). I would rather characterize whoever used the written text as its audience and readership. The size and nature of that readership is beyond the scope of the present endeavor. On literacy in the Archaic period, see W. Harris 1989: 45–64; Thomas 1992: 52– 73; Enos 2002; J.-P. Wilson 2009. (3) By “Verschriftlichung and Verschriftung virtually merge,” Reichl must mean that the writing down of an oral utterance necessarily changes it “for example, by ignoring allophones for phonemically based graphemes—thus subjecting it to Verschriftlichung” (J. Harris 2010: 120). In other words, “every Verschriftung is a Page 89 of 94

 

Textualization Verschriftlichung” (121). I should register my discomfort with J. Harris’s insistence, an insistence that grows over the course of his article, that Verschriftlichung refers to how writing influences oral utterances. I fail to see the benefit in limiting the significance of Verschriftlichung to the oral medium. (4) I echo Gay in singling out Honko 1990 as a comprehensive introduction to Lönnrot’s work and its milieu (1997: 63 n. 4). (5) On the name of the hero, Kesar (more commonly spelled “Gesar”), see Wahid 2003/4: 54 n. 1. (6) For additional testimony that not all performers fared poorly when dictating, see Herskovits and Herskovits 1958: 7; Hymes 1994: 355. Niles finds that “artificial collection events,” including those involving dictation, can produce great texts (1999: 104–7, quotation from 104); cf. Honko 2000c: 233. Hatto, however, argues that twentieth-century Kyrgyz bards produced in such settings “a veritable ragbag of zealous compilation, one might almost say of lay-minded folklore-collecting. So far as tradition is concerned, these miscellanea are largely of spurious value” (1990: p. xv). (7) On the terms “prosimetric” and “prose,” see Ready 2018a: 86, to which add Fabb’s defining poetry and prose in opposition to one another (2015: 9–10). (8) Ochs explores how “transcription is a selective process reflecting theoretical goals and definitions” (1979: 44): it is subject to the vagaries of the transcriber’s preferences (cf. Holm 2017: 384 n. 29). See also Haviland (1996) and Urban (1996; discussed in section 4.4 (p. 214)) for the changes transcribers make, purposefully or not, to an original oral discourse when they write it down. (9) Performers also might change the way they sounded. Boris (1889–1930) and Iurii Sokolov (1889–1941), also collectors of byliny, related that “the peasants themselves did not always maintain their pronunciation…it was possible to observe a conscious imitation of the pronunciation of the collectors” (quoted in Ziolkowski 2013: 79). (10) Prior acknowledges the possibility that the poet “was already acquainted with pan-Turkism. He may even have begun using such themes already in front of other audiences who appreciated the new ideas…. Meeting Miftakov then would simply have reinforced him in his venture into innovation” (2000: 15). (11) Cf. “collectors of oral narrative usually have a certain kind of literature in mind and may be dismissive of other ‘irrelevant’ types or genres. They can specify whether a plot is to be fully elaborated or given in brief. They may ask that certain themes be highlighted while others are muted or are left out altogether” (Niles 1999: 103).

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Textualization (12) See also Yun (2011) for how an ethnographer, working in 1996, “shapes,” “monitors,” and “policed” a performer’s telling of the myth of Tan’gun, an etiology of the Korean people. (13) Additional examples of a tension between claims of fidelity and actual editorial practice abound. On English and Scots collectors of folksongs, such as Robert Cromek (1770–1812), Alan Cunningham (1784–1842), William Motherwell (1797–1835), Cecil James Sharp (1859–1924), and Alfred Owen Williams (1877–1930), see Harker 1985: 71, 75, 196, 230. On Slovak collectors of folktales, such as Samuel Reuss (1783–1852) and Pavol Dobšinský (1828–85), see Cooper 2001: 288–90. On Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786– 1859), see Dollerup et al. 1986: 14. On John Wesley Powell (1834–1902), the founder of the Bureau of American Ethnology, see Fine 1984: 20. On Natalie Curtis (1875–1921), a collector of Native American music and verbal art in the American Southwest, see Clements 1996: 164, 167–8, 176–7; cf. McCall 2011: 20–1. Even the eminent American folklorist Richard Dorson (1916–81), while requesting faithful transcription, “hedged on the question of editing” (Fine 1984: 41; cf. Bendix 1997: 191). (14) On the efforts of two Russian collectors of folklore, Petr Kireevskii (1808–56) and Aleksandr Afanas’ev (1826–71), see Haney 1999: 28 and Čistova 1998: 38 (but see Haney 1999: 32), respectively. On the Italian scholar Domenico Comparetti’s (1835–1927) opting for “a limited fidelity to the microtext” in his folkloristic endeavors, see C. Johnson 2010 (quotation from 466). On Franz Boas’s striving for “phoneme by phoneme” accuracy, see Clements 1996: 150. (15) For the texts “of only relative authenticity” concocted by Hungarian collectors of folktales of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Dégh 1965: pp. xxviii–xxix. For a detailed study of the editorial interventions made by folktale collectors in Schleswig-Holstein, see Jeske 2002: 264–83 (on Wilhelm Wisser), 305–11 (on Gustav Friedrich Meyer, 1878–1945), 321–2 (on Bruno Ketelsen, 1903–45), and 333–4 (on Paul Selk, 1903–96). For the editorializing of Latvian collectors of folksongs, see I. Carpenter 1980: 22–3. For the need for “a cautious and critical approach” to Oskar Kolberg’s collections of folksongs and music from Poland, see Stęszewski 1992: esp. 113–17, quotation from 117. (16) “Intersemiotic translation or transmutation is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems” (Jakobson 1959: 233, emphasis in original). Scholars of textualization have appropriated these terms: for “intersemiotic translation,” see e.g. Fine 1984: 96; Foley 1995b: 602; Honko 2000b: 13; for “transmutation,” see Niles 1999: 91. Cf. a “transcoding” (Bakker 1997a: 25); “a transformation and a reduction” (Titon 2003: 70); a “translation” (Finnegan 2007: 172).

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Textualization (17) For a more vigorous critique of textualization—“It is in fact nothing less than uncivilized”—see Foley 2005b: 233–4, quotation from 234. (18) Ethnopoetics aims to revivify both the linguistic and paralinguistic features of a textualized oral performance (Cowell 2002: 18). Foley offers an introduction to the field (2002: 95–108), and Montenyohl (1993), Reichl (2007: 153–62), and Niles (2013b: 219–20) helpfully express some reservations. A 2013 issue of the Journal of Folklore Research (Kroskrity and Webster 2013) is devoted to the approach. Cowell provides an exemplary ethnopoetic analysis of a performance by an Arapaho storyteller (United States) that brings out how the features discussed in this section contribute to the storyteller’s goals (2002: esp. 31–9). Cf. Gingell 2005: 221 on the ways “Canada’s dub poets…try to capture on the page the dynamism and other essential characteristics of oral performance” as well as on their debates over the possibility of doing so. In her invaluable 1984 book, Fine reviews efforts prior to her own (from, for instance, those of Edward Sapir and Bronislaw Malinowski to those of Ray Birdwhistell and Dell Hymes) to do more than just present the words of a performance. Doane discusses the features of Old English manuscripts that seem to be attempts to document the oral/aural nature of the scribal process (1994a: esp. 425, 434). Rijksbaron surveys the marks found in Byzantine manuscripts that “were intended to guide a reader while reading aloud” by giving a sense of when and for how long to pause (2007: 69–71), but this practice tells one little about attempts to record oral performance. (19) Finnegan 1988, 1992; Shuman 1986: 184, 192, 198–200; Barber and Moraes Farias 1989: 3–5; D. Green 1990: 272; Hofmeyr 1994: 158–9, 1995; Gamble 1995: 29–30; Scollon and Scollon 1995: 20–1; de Vet 1996; King 1997: 106; Fraade 1999: 35–6; Lumpp and Steele 2000; Amodio 2004; Carr 2005; S. Davies 2005; Alexander 2006: 15–18; Grotans 2006: 15–23; Barber 2007: 70; Novetzke 2008: 99–131; Aune 2009: 74; Jensen 2011: 191, 193; Keith 2011: 59–61; R. Miller 2011: 20–7, 54, 2015; Herzog 2012: 643–6; O’Brien O’Keeffe 2012; Shayegan 2012: 81, 105; M. Miller 2015: 72; Nam 2015; Pavlović 2016; Saussy 2016: 65. (20) On researchers’ desire for “immediacy and transparency,” see Bauman and Briggs 2003: e.g. 252; cf. Briggs 1993. (21) Cf. “from the very moment when (let us hypothesize) an amanuensis started to commit Homer’s words to writing, there began an editing process that continues to the present day” (Foley 1990: 28). (22) One can imagine a manuscript in which each verse takes up more than one line (cf. S. West 1967: 257) or in which (some) lines contain more than one verse (cf. Fournet 2009). M. L. West describes the eleventh-century manuscript Y: “A composite manuscript which includes extensive excerpts from the Iliad, written Page 92 of 94

 

Textualization out as prose, the verses being divided by the sign + and excerpts by ++ +” (2001: 141). Of Jewish texts from Qumran, S. Miller writes, “Stichographic texts are arranged in a bewildering array of manners: one to four cola per line or a running text with vacats” (2017: 83). (23) Ayers critiques the use of the term “materiality” in discussions of books (2003). (24) Turner comments on the look and feel of a papyrus roll (1980: 2–5). For the papyrus roll’s physical attributes, see esp. W. Johnson 2004: chap. 3 (“Formal Characteristics of the Bookroll”), 2009: 256–65, 2012: 17–22; Bülow-Jacobsen 2009: 19–21. (25) There is another option for both scenarios: a plurality of rhapsodes dictated in succession just as they performed at the Panathenaia. Nothing in Nagy’s model rules out this possibility. Compare Panaino’s musings on the textualization of the Avestan corpus: “We must imagine that a number of wise and learned priests from various corners of the Empire were summoned and asked to deliver their own knowledge under the supervision of a Persian sacerdotal élite, which normalised and edited the final version of the Abastāg [Avesta] and its ritual applications” (2012: 82). (26) I do not mean to exclude other possible instigators (perhaps Hipparchus at some point between 522 and 514 BCE (cf. Nagy 2011: 113)?). I focus on the Homeridai because of their prominence in Nagy’s system. Cf. “The rhapsodic guilds on Samos [= Kreophyleioi] and Chios [= Homeridai] may well have produced written texts, and they may have spread to Athens as well as to other places in the Mediterranean” (Cassio 2002: 119). I stress here as well that Cassio’s formulation in no way absolves one of the need to reckon with the issues raised in this chapter. (27) Debate continues over whom Herodotus represents as his main sources for stories, with much activity focusing on the term logioi. In 1987 [2001], Murray wrote, “This limitation to Herodotus’ respect for logioi andres should not obscure the fact that in general his work is explicitly founded on the testimony of such men” (26); “in principle we must assume that Herodotus wishes us to believe that each account is drawn from those whom he regards as logioi andres” (27, cf. 40). In the same year, Nagy styled the logioi andres “master[s] of oral traditions in prose” (1987: 182). Luraghi rejects Nagy’s characterization, proposing to translate logios as “authoritative” and declaring, “Herodotus’ λόγιοι are not storytellers” (2009: 455). The latter statement opposes Murray’s statements: by testimony and accounts, Murray means stories. Luraghi does not dispute that Herodotus relied on storytellers (2006: 82–3); he just dismisses the idea that logioi are represented as the sources of those stories.

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Textualization (28) In a thorough consideration of these statements, Luraghi suggests that they are neither concerned with literal acts of speaking (2001: 146–7, 158) nor “intended to spell out the source of such knowledge” (158). Rather, nearly always referring to a plurality, they “make explicit…the group to which it [the knowledge] belongs, the group which holds it to be true” (158–9). With these introductory phrases, “Herodotus is not quoting sources, as a modern historian does, but is simply referring to what he holds to be the social and/or ethnic dimension of the knowledge he is drawing from” (148). For Luraghi, Herodotus uses akoē statements to highlight “the past as a shared possession” (149–50) and thereby “credits a community with knowledge about its past” (150). (See Luraghi 2006: 81–5 for a briefer restatement of this idea. Cf. Giangiulio 2001: 136–7.) I accept this argument, but it ought not displace the other reading of these statements according to which they point to the researcher’s having learned this information aurally (Dewald 2002: 274–5). One should not forget, moreover, that Herodotus claims to present not just what people say (or what they would say (Luraghi 2006: 84)) but what he has heard people say (e.g. 2.99.1, 2.123.1, 4.14.1), as the very term “akoē statement” signals.

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The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics

Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An Interdisciplinary Study of Oral Texts, Dictated Texts, and Wild Texts Jonathan L. Ready

Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9780198835066 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198835066.001.0001

The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics Jonathan L. Ready

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198835066.003.0005

Abstract and Keywords This chapter offers a new way to think about the scribal activity that produced the texts one sees in the Ptolemaic wild papyri of the Homeric epics. After reviewing previous research in Homeric studies on these texts, the chapter introduces the model of the scribe as performer put to work by students of several literatures, such as Anglo-Saxon and Israelite texts. Per this model, the scribe performs in the act of copying. The chapter then demonstrates the model’s relevance to the study of the wild Homeric papyri and considers at what point in time people capable of generating the texts one finds in the papyri would most likely have been around—much rests on the extent of the oral performance of Homeric poetry in the Classical and Hellenistic periods—and who these capable people might have been. Keywords:   scribes, scribal performance, wild papyri, Anglo-Saxon scribes, Israelite scribes, Ptolemaic papyri, oral performance, copyists

Introduction Scribes are individuals. Alger Doane comments that Old English texts are “always the product of a variable human hand connected to an individualized consciousness possessing a competence in the language and an inner ear” (1994b: 131). In a study of the fourteenth-century CE Libro de Buen Amor, John Dagenais writes (1994: 17):

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The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics The manuscript text is constituted by the individuals who created it: scribe, rubricator, corrector, illuminator. In the case of the scribe, these traces include individual hands (no matter how formalized), the variants caused by minor distractions whose causes are lost to us forever (a bird flying through a window), misreadings, misunderstandings, interference of dialects, poor eyesight, an aching back, and a host of other quirks that situate the product squarely in the process of its creation in a way that the printed book can never be. Scribes are fallible human beings, not computers able to complete the same task with the same results over and over again (cf. Zetzel 1981: 254, 2005: 152–3; S. Powell 2013: 283). Lene Schøsler concludes an examination of two thirteenthcentury CE manuscripts of Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval copied by the same individual (2004: 223): We do not find essential differences in variation between one copyist copying the same exemplar and different copyists copying one and the same exemplar. Absence of a norm makes individual variations so frequent that independent copyists and one and the same copyist working on the same text behave equally freely when copying. The conclusion to be drawn from this comparison, then, is that we have no linguistic clues for distinguishing a single person’s individual variation from different person’s [sic] variations—when copies were made at approximately the same moment and in the same dialect. Malachi Beit-Arié reports on Yeḥiel ben Yequti’el ha-Rofe’s copying of the Jerusalem Talmud in 1289: “For codicological reasons, Yeḥiel copied twice the text of one folio, in large format. I. Z. Feintuch, who compared the text of the two parallel leaves and analyzed the differences between them, found at least fifty disagreements in the seventy-six duplicated lines!” (2000: 232; cf. 1993: 42– 3; Smallwood 1986). At the same time, scribes can display astounding mental and physical discipline. In his study of scribes who copy English texts between 1375 and 1510 CE, Daniel Wakelin stresses what it takes to (p.186) reproduce an exemplar with a minimum of divergences from that exemplar: “non-variant copying might involve immense concentration and attention.…Correct reproduction might be witting, the product of conscious effort” (2014: 54; cf. 56; M. Fisher 2012: 56). In order to get at what happened when people began copying written texts of the Iliad and of the Odyssey, this chapter and the next revivify the scribes behind the so-called wild papyri of the Homeric poems. I argue that the texts they produced count as instances of scribal performance. I do not engage in the long and continuing tradition of using these texts for the purpose of reconstructing some notional original poem: for defending the authenticity of what one finds in the texts of the medieval manuscripts of the Homeric epics, or for detecting Page 2 of 64

 

The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics words or whole verses erroneously displaced from the subsequent written textual tradition, or for demonstrating that a verse in the medieval texts did not belong to that original poem (see, among others, Jachmann 1949; Pasquali 1962: 241–3; di Luzio 1969; D’Ippolito 1984; Huys 1988; Zumbo 1994; Natalucci 1996; M. L. West 2017: 18–22). I want to consider each text in its own right (cf. Maltomimi and Pernigotti 1999: 304, “nella sua individualità”). This chapter comprises five parts. Section 4.1 introduces the wild papyri and juxtaposes them with Helmut van Thiel’s texts of the Homeric poems to illustrate their distinctive features. Section 4.2 rehearses the well-known point that many of the differences between the wild papyri and the medieval texts do not arise because of scribal error. The same kinds of variation between texts of the same work appear in several other corpora—medieval Irish saga, medieval French literature, Anglo-Saxon poetry, Israelite literature, Mesopotamian literature— and in no case does scribal error explain all the variants. Section 4.3 lays out how Homerists have accounted for the texts in the wild papyri. Some see the texts as (derived from) transcriptions of oral performances. Others suggest that people who orally performed Homeric poetry wrote the texts. Still others assign the texts to copyists. I dissent from the proposal that the texts represent transcriptions of oral performances and suggest that the texts emerge from a process of copying by a scribe, who was either an oral performer himself or a copyist. Section 4.4 reviews how scholars of other literatures look to the concept of scribal performance to account for the variations in their corpora: the scribe performs as he copies. Unfolding in three subsections, section 4.5 urges the application of this model to the wild papyri. Because the texts of the wild papyri resemble what those who speak of scribal performance see in their texts, I find it plausible to label as performers the scribes behind the texts found in the wild papyri (subsection 4.5.1). We can debate when these agents operated—in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE or later? (subsection 4.5.2)—and their status— were they slaves or free? (subsection 4.5.3). First, though, a brief word on terminology. When talking about the wild Homeric papyri, Homerists often juxtapose them with what they call “the vulgate.” Gregory Nagy speaks of this term “vulgate” as “one of the most basic—and elusive—concepts in the history of Homeric scholarship” (2004: 54, cf. 16). I find the concept too elusive to be useful. Graeme Bird defines the vulgate as “the reading of the majority of the medieval manuscripts” (2010: 30 n. 18; cf. Pagani and Perrone 2012: 98). So too Marchinus van der Valk speaks of the “vulgate of our manuscripts” (1964: e.g. 583). In theory, an editor could concoct an actual vulgate text based on this common denominator, and one even finds references to “the modern printed vulgate” (Apthorp 1996b: 142, cf. 1980: 137) (although (p.187) no editor of the Iliad or the Odyssey prints the readings found in the majority of our medieval manuscripts and leaves it at that: cf. van der Valk 1964: 576–83). At the same time, Homerists use the term “vulgate” to refer to “the

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The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics medieval manuscripts” “in general” (Jensen 2011: 217). Michael Haslam clarifies how to do so responsibly (1997: 63): The stabilization of the 2nd century B.C., however drastic, was still only relative. Manuscripts continue to show a great deal of textual variation (more than is sometimes made out), but its range is narrower than seems to have been the case earlier. In this context the ‘vulgate’ text may mean the collectivity not just of the majority readings but of all readings in subsequent general circulation, as distinct from the different textual instantiations of the early Ptolemaic manuscripts. In this sense the vulgate text is a real thing, but far from being a uniform entity. From this perspective, the medieval vulgate is a group of similar texts, and one could not make a vulgate text of the entire Iliad or Odyssey. Martin L. West exhorts us not to “speak glibly of a medieval vulgate, as if the medieval tradition were more or less agreed on a single form of the text” (2017: 16). His review of the relationships of the Iliad’s manuscripts provides a concise reminder of their different readings within lines (2001: 143–56). Van Thiel prints nine plus verses that he finds in some medieval texts of the Odyssey (1991: p. xiii; Apthorp 1996a: 106 n. 11). M. L. West excludes from his edition of the Iliad thirty-eight “poorly attested” verses: they occur in some medieval texts (2001: 11). In tracking the attestation for various verses, reviewers of these editions provide another concentrated demonstration of the differences between medieval texts of the same work (Janko 1994; Nardelli 2001a; cf. Apthorp 1980, 1999 on “weakly attested” “post-Aristarchean interpolations”). In the context of the medieval evidence, then, Homerists use the term “vulgate” in two different ways: either a selection of readings or all the readings. Antonios Rengakos brings out how a disjunction likewise emerges in discussions of the vulgate as an ancient phenomenon (2011: 172): some will speak of the vulgate’s pre-Alexandrian existence to emphasize that the written textual tradition of the Homeric poems “already very early on was exceptionally stable” (my translation) (cf. Ludwich 1898; T. Allen 1924: 327); others will speak of the vulgate only after the textual record indicates the emergence of standard verse counts for the Iliad and the Odyssey in the second half of the second century BCE (cf. Janko 1992: 20; Haslam 1997: 85). This “confusion” (Jensen 2011: 217 n. 11) suggests the term “vulgate” may not be worth the trouble. In the discussion that follows, I do not use “vulgate” except when quoting or paraphrasing someone who does. I speak of the medieval texts.

4.1. The Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics Found in the sands of Egypt, fragments of papyri preserve snippets of the Iliad and the Odyssey. These earliest direct witnesses to the written textual tradition of the Homeric poems date from the third century BCE to the seventh century CE. Within that set are the so-called Ptolemaic papyri that date from the third to the first centuries BCE (Bird 2010: 66). (p.188) A search in April 2019 in the Page 4 of 64

 

The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics Trismegistos database turned up fifty-seven Ptolemaic papyri of the Iliad and thirty-six of the Odyssey. The texts found in some of these papyri cleave to what one finds in medieval texts of the epics (Cadell 1966: 3–5, 9–12; S. West 1967: 283–7; Bird 2010: 76– 8). As a rule, the texts found in papyri that date from after 150 BCE exhibit this degree of similarity (cf. van der Valk 1964: 477; Bird 2010: 78). I present two examples of such papyri. The left-hand column contains Helmut van Thiel’s text, and the right-hand column the papyrus text. Because I seek to juxtapose the papyri with the medieval texts (section 5.1), van Thiel’s edition is the natural choice: his edition prioritizes a selection of medieval manuscripts (1991: pp. iii– v; 2010: pp. iii, xii–xiii). The first text dates from between 299 and 200 BCE. Hector threatens Polydamas, and the Trojans attack the Achaean wall. Editors deem the omission of verse 262 an oversight (Cadell 1966: 12; S. West 1967: 286–7). The editor whose text I reproduce here, Hélène Cadell, fills in lacunae using Thomas Allen’s 1931 edition (1966: 3).

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The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics

Il. 12.246–65 νηυσὶν ἐπ’ Ἀργείων, σοὶ δ’ οὐ δέος ἔστ’ ἀπολέσθαι· οὐ γάρ τοι κραδίη μενεδήιος οὐδὲ μαχήμων. εἰ δὲ σὺ δηιοτῆτος ἀφέξεαι ἠέ τιν’ ἄλλον παρφάμενος ἐπέεσσιν ἀποστρέψεις πολέμοιο, αὐτίκ’ ἐμῷ ὑπὸ δουρὶ τυπεὶς ἀπὸ θυμὸν ὀλέσσεις.” ὣς ἄρα φωνήσας ἡγήσατο, τοὶ δ’ ἅμ’ ἕποντο ἠχῇ θεσπεσίῃ. ἐπὶ δὲ Ζεὺς τερπικέραυνος ὦρσεν ἀπ’ Ἰδαίων ὀρέων ἀνέμοιο θύελλαν, ἥ ῥ’ ἰθὺς νηῶν κονίην φέρεν· αὐτὰρ Ἀχαιῶν θέλγε νόον, Τρωσὶν δὲ καὶ Ἕκτορι κῦδος ὄπαζε. τοῦ περ δὴ τεράεσσι πεποιθότες ἠδὲ βίηφι ῥήγνυσθαι μέγα τεῖχος Ἀχαιῶν πειρήτιζον. κρόσσας μὲν πύργων ἔρυον καὶ ἔρειπον ἐπάλξεις, στήλας τε προβλῆτας ἐμόχλεον, ἃς ἂρ Ἀχαιοὶ πρώτας ἐν γαίῃ θέσαν ἔμμεναι ἔχματα πύργων. τὰς οἵ γ’ αὐέρυον, ἔλποντο δὲ τεῖχος Ἀχαιῶν ῥήξειν. οὐδέ νύ πω Δαναοὶ χάζοντο κελεύθου, ἀλλ’ οἵ γε ῥινοῖσι βοῶν φράξαντες ἐπάλξεις βάλλον ἀπ’ αὐτάων δηίους ὑπὸ τεῖχος ἰόντας. ἀμφοτέρω δ’ Αἴαντε κελευτιόωντ’ ἐπὶ πύργων by the ships of the Argives, yet you should have no fear of dying: for your heart is not firm in the fight nor warlike. But if you keep away from combat or beguile another with your words and turn him from war, at once struck by my spear you will lose your life.” So he spoke and led the way, and they followed after

P[apyrus] 496 (TM 61239) νηυσὶν ἐπ’ Ἀργείων, σοὶ δ’ οὐ δ[έος ἔστ’ ἀπολέσθαι· οὐ̣ γ̣[άρ τ]οι κραδίη μενεδήιο[ς οὐδὲ μαχήμων· ε[ἰ] δ[ὲ σὺ] δηιοτῆτος ἀφέξεαι, ἐ̣[ή (sic?) τιν’ ἄλλον παρ[φά]μενος ἐπεεσειν ἀποστρέψ[εις πολέμοιο, αὐ[τίκ’ ἐμ]ῷ ὑπὸ δουρὶ τυπεὶς [ἀπὸ θυμὸν ὀλέσσεις. Ὣς ἄρα φ[ω]νήσας ἡγήσατο, τοὶ δ’ ἅμ’ [ἕποντο ἠχῇ θεσπεσίῃ· ἐπὶ δὲ Ζεὺς τερ[πικέραυνος ὦρσεν ἀπ’ [Ἰ]δαίων ὀρέων ἀνέ[μοιο θύελλαν, ἥ ῥ’ ἰθὺς νηῶν κονίην φέρεν· α[ὐτὰρ Ἀχαιῶν θέλγ̣ε νόον, Τρωσὶν δὲ καὶ Ἕκ[τορι κῦδος ὄπαζε. Το[ῦ] π[ε]ρ δὴ τεράεσσι πεποιθό[τες ἠδὲ βίηφι ῥήγνυσθαι μέγα τεῖχος Ἀχα[ιῶν πειρήτιζον· κρόσσας μὲν πύργων ἔρυ̣ο̣[ν, καὶ ἔρειπον ἐπάλξεις, στήλας [τε προβ]λῆ[τας ἐμόχλεον, ἃς ἄρ’ Ἀχαιοὶ πρώτας ἐ[ν γαίῃ θέσαν ἔμμεναι ἔχματα πύργων· τὰς οἵ γ’ αὐ[έρυον ἔλποντο δὲ τεῖχος Ἀχαιῶν ἀλλὰ οἵ γε ῥ[ινοῖσι βοῶν φράξαντες ἐπάλξεις β]ά[λλο]ν ἀπ’ [αὐτάων δηίους ὑπὸ τεῖχος ἰόντας. Ἀμ]φ[οτέρω δ’ Αἴαντε κελευτιόωντ’ ἐπὶ πύργων

(Cadell 1966: 11)1 by the ships of the Argives, yet you should have no fear of dying:for your heart is not firm in the fight nor warlike; but if you keep away from combat or beguile another with your words and turn him from war, at once struck by my spear you will lose your life.”

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The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics with a wondrous din. And Zeus, who delights in thunderbolts, roused from the mountains of Ida a blast of wind that carried the dust straight against the ships; and he bewitched the minds of the Achaeans but granted glory to the Trojans and to Hector. Trusting therefore in his portents and in their might, they tried to break the great wall of the Achaeans. The projections on the outworks they dragged down and overthrew the battlements and pried out the supporting beams that the Achaeans had set first in the earth to be buttresses for the wall. These they dragged out and the wall of the Achaeans they hoped to break. But not even now did the Danaans withdraw from the path, but closing up the battlements with bull’s hides, they cast at the foe from them as they came up against the wall. And the two Aiantes gave continual encouragement along the walls

So he spoke and led the way, and they followed after with a wondrous din; and Zeus, who delights in thunderbolts, roused from the mountains of Ida a blast of wind that carried the dust straight against the ships; and he bewitched the minds of the Achaeans but granted glory to the Trojans and to Hector. Trusting therefore in his portents and in their might, they tried to break the great wall of the Achaeans; the projections on the outworks they dragged down and overthrew the battlements and pried out the supporting beams that the Achaeans had set first in the earth to be buttresses for the wall; these they dragged out and the wall of the Achaeans they hoped but closing up the battlements with bull’s hides, they cast at the foe from them as they came up against the wall. And the two Aiantes gave continual encouragement along the walls

(p.189) My second example of a Ptolemaic-era text that cleaves to what one finds in the medieval texts dates from the second or first century BCE. The Trojan Agenor confronts Achilles. The scribe “either did not know Greek or was not really paying attention to what he was copying” (Torallas Tovar and Worp 2009: 14 at 571). Corrections, indicated by the editors’ use of white square brackets, appear “probably in a second hand” (11). The editors rely on Martin L. West’s text to fill in lacunae (2000a).

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The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics

Il. 21.567–81 εἰ δέ κέν οἱ προπάροιθε πόλιος κατεναντίον ἔλθω· καὶ γάρ θην τούτῳ τρωτὸς χρὼς ὀξέι χαλκῷ, ἐν δὲ ἴα ψυχή, θνητὸν δέ ἑ φάσ’ ἄνθρωποι ἔμμεναι· αὐτάρ οἱ Κρονίδης Ζεὺς κῦδος ὀπάζει.” ὣς εἰπὼν Ἀχιλῆα ἀλεὶς μένεν, ἐν δέ οἱ ἦτορ ἄλκιμον ὡρμᾶτο πτολεμίζειν ἠδὲ μάχεσθαι. ἠύτε πάρδαλις εἶσι βαθείης ἐκ ξυλόχοιο ἀνδρὸς θηρητῆρος ἐναντίον, οὐδέ τι θυμῷ ταρβεῖ οὐδὲ φοβεῖται, ἐπεί κεν ὑλαγμὸν ἀκούσῃ· εἴ περ γὰρ φθάμενός μιν ἢ οὐτάσῃ ἠὲ βάλῃσιν, ἀλλά τε καὶ περὶ δουρὶ πεπαρμένη οὐκ ἀπολήγει ἀλκῆς, πρίν γ’ ἠὲ ξυμβλήμεναι ἠὲ δαμῆναι· ὣς Ἀντήνορος υἱὸς ἀγαυοῦ, δῖος Ἀγήνωρ, οὐκ ἔθελεν φεύγειν, πρὶν πειρήσαιτ’ Ἀχιλῆος. ἀλλ’ ὅ γ’ ἂρ ἀσπίδα μὲν πρόσθ’ ἔσχετο πάντοσ’ ἐίσην, What then if in front of the city I go out to meet him? For in fact surely his flesh may be pierced with the sharp bronze, and in him is one life, and men say he is mortal; but Zeus, son of Cronus, gives him glory.” So speaking he crouched to await Achilles, and within him his mighty heart was eager to fight and to battle. Just as a leopard comes out from a deep thicket against a huntsman, and not at all in her spirit is she scared, nor does she turn to flee when she hears the baying; for if the man strikes her first with a thrust of a spear or with a missile,

MP3 1147.01 (TM 118717) [εἰ δέ κέ οἱ πρ]ο̣πάρ̣οι̣θε πόλιες κατεναντίος ἔλθω· [καὶ γάρ θην] τούτῳ πρωτὸς χρὼς ὀ⟦χ⟧ξέϊ χα⟦α⟧ λκῶι, [ἐν δὲ ἴα ψυχή, θ]νητὸν δέ ἕ φασ’ ἄνθρωποι⟦ς⟧ [ἔμμεναι· αὐ]τ̣ά̣ρ̣ οἱ̣ Κ̣ρονίδης Ζεὺς κῦδος ὀπάζει. [Ὣς εἰπὼν Ἀ]χιλῆ ἀλλὶς ηέν⟨εν⟩, ἐν δέ οἱ ἦτορ [ἄλκιμον ὁρμᾶ]το πτολεμίζεϊν ἠδὲ μάχεσθαι. [ἠΰτε πάρδαλις εἶσι β]αθε[ί]η̣ς̣ ἐκ ξ̣ελόχοιο̣ [ἀνδρὸς θηρητῆρος ἐναντ]ίον, οὐτέ τι θ[υ]μ̣ῷ̣ [ταρβεῖ οὐδὲ φοβεῖται, ἐπεί] . κεν ὑλαγμ̣ὸν̣ ἀκο̣[ύσῃ·] [εἴ περ γὰρ φθάμενός μιν ἢ οὐ]τ̣άσηι [ἠ]ὲ βάληισ̣[ιν,] [ἀλλά τε καὶ περὶ δουρὶ πεπαρμ]ένη̣ ο̣ὐ̣κ̣ ἀπολή̣[γει] [ἀλκῆς, πρίν γ’ ἠὲ ξυμβλήμεναι ἠὲ δαμ]ῆ̣ν[αι]· [ὣς Ἀντήνορος υἱὸς ἀγαυοῦ, δῖος Ἀγήν]ω̣ρ, [οὐκ ἔθελεν φεύγειν, πρὶν πειρήσαιτ’ Ἀχι]λ̣ῆ̣ο̣[ς], [ἀλλ’ ὅ γ’ ἂρ ἀσπίδα μὲν πρόσθ’ ἔσχετο πάντοσ’ ἐΐ]σ̣η̣ν̣,

(Torallas Tovar and Worp 2009: 13) What then if in front of the city I go out to meet him? For in fact surely his flesh may be pierced with the sharp bronze, and in him is one life, and men say he is mortal; but Zeus, son of Cronus, gives him glory.” So speaking he crouched to await Achilles, and within him his mighty heart was eager to fight and to battle. Just as a leopard comes out from a deep thicket against a huntsman, and not at all in her spirit is she scared, nor does she turn to flee when she hears the baying;

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The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics even so, although pierced through with the spear, she ceases not from her fury until she grapples with him or is slain; so the son of noble Antenor, brilliant Agenor, refused to flee until he had make trial of Achilles. But he held before him his shield that was wellbalanced on every side,

for if the man strikes her first with a thrust of a spear or with a missile, even so, although pierced through with the spear, she ceases not from her fury until she grapples with him or is slain; so the son of noble Antenor, brilliant Agenor, refused to flee until he had make trial of Achilles, but he held before him his shield that was wellbalanced on every side,

(p.190) Others of these Ptolemaic-era texts—in fact, most of the extant Ptolemaic-era texts that date from before 150 BCE—depart from the medieval texts. Like Zenodotus’s or Rhianus’s texts of the Iliad or like the so-called city texts or like the mysterious ho polustikhos (M. L. West 2001: 26–8, 40–5, 56–7, 67–8, 72), these papyri reveal a degree of variability in the written textual transmission of the Iliad and the Odyssey during this period. When viewing these papyri from the perspective of the medieval texts, one speaks of their variations within lines. One speaks of their omission of the occasional verse, what one calls a minus verse, or a verse found in medieval texts but not in the papyrus: for examples of minus verses, I direct the reader to MP3 851.1 (TM 67369), covering Il. 9.696–10.3 (Nodar Domínguez 2014); P31 (TM 61238) at Od. 9.529–48 and 10.56–80 (S. West 1967: 231, 233–4); and P214 (TM 61225), covering Od. 22.420–34 (Pernigotti 2008). Finally, one speaks of their additions of verses (plus verses). These plus verses, verses not found in the medieval manuscript tradition’s version of a given passage, have attracted the most attention (cf. Bird 2010: 53, 75; Nodar 2012: 567). Scholarship has dubbed papyri with these features “wild,” but one should not overstate the matter. The “wild” papyri are not always and everywhere wild: they overlap to a great extent with the medieval texts (cf. Graziosi and Haubold 2015: 6). I present two examples of wild papyri. Again, the left-hand column contains van Thiel’s text, and the right-hand column the papyrus text. To make it easier to track how the two texts come in and out of contact with one another, I have done the following. The portions in bold indicate variations within lines. Spacing between verses in van Thiel’s text appears when the papyrus has one or more plus verses at that spot. Per convention, the plus verses are marked with a letter. The first papyrus dates from between 299 and 150 BCE. Priam addresses the assembled Achaeans and Trojans. The second one dates from between 299 and 200 BCE. Hector speaks to Hecuba, and she prepares a dedication for Athena.

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Il. 3.302–10 ὣς ἔφαν, οὐδ’ ἄρα πώ σφιν ἐπεκραίαινε Κρονίων. τοῖσι δὲ Δαρδανίδης Πρίαμος μετὰ μῦθον ἔειπε· “κέκλυτέ μευ, Τρῶες καὶ ἐυκνήμιδες Ἀχαιοί· ἤτοι ἐγὼν εἶμι προτὶ ι Ἴλιον ἠνεμόεσσαν ἄψ, ἐπεὶ οὔ πω τλήσομ’ ἐν ὀφθαλμοῖσιν ὁρᾶσθαι μαρνάμενον φίλον υἱὸν ἀρηιφίλῳ Μενελάῳ. Ζεὺς μέν που τό γε οἶδε καὶ ἀθάνατοι θεοὶ ἄλλοι, ὁπποτέρῳ θανάτοιο τέλος πεπρωμένον ἐστίν.” ἦ ῥα, καὶ ἐς δίφρον ἄρνας θέτο ἰσόθεος φώς, So they spoke, but the son of Cronus would not yet grant them fulfillment. And Dardanian Priam made a declaration to them: “Hear me, Trojans and well-greaved Achaeans; now surely I am going back to windy Ilion because I will not bear to see with my eyes my son fighting against Menelaus dear to Ares. Zeus, I suppose, and the other immortal gods know it, to which of the two the fate of death has been assigned.” He spoke, and then the godlike man had the lambs placed on his chariot,

P[apyrus]40 (TM 61203) [ὣς ἔφαν, εὐχό]μενοι, μέγα δ’ ἔκτυπε μητίετα Ζεύ̣ς [….….….] φ̣ων ἐ̣π̣ὶ̣ δὲ στεροπὴν ἐφέηκεν· [θησέμεναι γ]ὰρ̣ ἔμελλεν ἔτ’ ἄλγεά τε στοναχάς τε [Τρωσί τε καὶ] Δαναο̣ῖ̣[σι] διὰ κρατερὰς ὑσ[μί]νας. [αὐτὰρ ἐπεί ῥ’ ὄ]μοσεν τε τελεύτησέν [τε] τὸν ὄρκον, [… Δαρδανί]δ[η]ς̣ Πρίαμος πρὸς μῦθον ἔειπ[ε· [“κέκλυτέ μευ Τ]ρῶες̣ καὶ Δάρδανοι ἠδ’ [ἐ]π̣ίκ ̣ ̣[ουροι, [ὄφρ’ εἴπω] τά μ̣[ε θυ]μὸς ἐνὶ στήθεσσιν ἀν[ώ]γε[ι. [ἤτοι ἐ]γὼν εἶμι πρ[ο]τὶ Ἴλιον ἠνεμόεσσαν· [ο]ὐ̣ γάρ κεν τλαίην [ποτ' ἐν ὀφθα]λμοῖσιν ὁρᾶ[σθαι [μα]ρνάμ[ε]νον φίλο[ν υἱὸν ἀρηϊφίλωι Μενελάωι· [Ζεὺς μέν που] τ̣ό̣ [γ]ε̣ [οἶδε καὶ ἀθάνατοι θεοὶ ἄλλοι, [ὁπποτέρωι θα]ν̣ά̣τοιο τέ[λος πεπρωμένον ἐστίν.” [ἦ ρα, καὶ ἐς δίφρο]ν̣ ἄ̣ρ̣[νας θέτο ἰσόθεος φώς,

(Bird 2010: 87)2 So they spoke, praying, and counsellor Zeus thundered greatly. …and hurled a bolt of lightning: for he was about to put additional woes and groanings on the Trojans and Danaans through mighty battles. But after he swore and finished the oath, …Dardanian Priam made a declaration: “Hear me, Trojans and Dardanians and companions, so that I may say the things that my heart in my breast urges me. Now surely I am going to windy Ilion: for I could not ever bear to see with my eyes

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The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics my son fighting against Menelaus dear to Ares; Zeus, I suppose, and the other immortal gods know it, to which of the two the fate of death has been assigned.” He spoke, and then the godlike man had the lambs placed on his chariot,

(p.191)

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The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics

Il. 6.280–92 ἔρχευ· ἐγὼ δὲ Πάριν μετελεύσομαι ὄφρα καλέσσω, αἴ κ’ ἐθέλῃσ’ εἰπόντος ἀκουέμεν. ὥς κέ οἱ αὖθι γαῖα χάνοι· μέγα γάρ μιν Ὀλύμπιος ἔτρεφε πῆμα Τρωσί τε καὶ Πριάμῳ μεγαλήτορι τοῖό τε παισίν. εἰ κεῖνόν γε ἴδοιμι κατελθόντ’ Ἄιδος εἴσω, φαίην κεν φρέν’ ἀτέρπου ὀιζύος ἐκλελαθέσθαι.” ὣς ἔφαθ’, ἣ δὲ μολοῦσα ποτὶ μέγαρ’ ἀμφιπόλοισι κέκλετο· ταὶ δ’ ἂρ ἀόλλισσαν κατὰ ἄστυ γεραιάς. αὐτὴ δ’ ἐς θάλαμον κατεβήσετο κηώεντα, ἔνθ’ ἔσαν οἱ πέπλοι παμποίκιλοι, ἔργα γυναικῶν Σιδονιῶν, τὰς αὐτὸς Ἀλέξανδρος θεοειδὴς ἤγαγε Σιδονίηθεν, ἐπιπλὼς εὐρέα πόντον, τὴν ὁδόν ἣν Ἑλένην περ ἀνήγαγεν εὐπατέρειαν. go; but I will go after Paris, to summon him, to see if he is willing to hear what I have to say. Right now for him may the earth open; for the Olympian reared him as a great pain for the Trojans and for great-hearted Priam and his children. If I should see that one gone down into the house of Hades, I would say that my mind had forgotten its painful affliction.” So he spoke; and she going to the hall summoned her maids; and they assembled in the city the older women. But she descended to the sweet-smelling chamber,

P[apyrus]480a (TM 61240) ἔρχευ, ἐγὼ] δὲ Πάριν μετελ[εύ]σομαι, ὄφρα καλέσσ[ω, ]  ον στονόεντα μ[. ….]ρ̣ω̣α̣ . . α . τ . . ω . ο̣υ̣ ]  ι εἰπόντος ἀκουέμεν· ὥ̣ς̣ κ̣έ̣ οἱ αὖθι γαῖα χάν]οι· μέγα γάρ μιν Ὀλύμπιος ἔτραφε πῆμα Τρωσί τε] καὶ Πριάμω μεγαλήτορι τοῖό τε παισίν· εἰ κεῖνόν] γε ἴδοιμι κατελθόντ’ Ἄϊδος εἴ̣σ̣ω, φαίην κε] φρέν’ ἀτέρπου ὀϊζύος ἐκλελαθέσθαι.” ὣς ἔφατ’, ο]ὐδ’ ἀπίθησ’ Ἑκάβη, ταχὺ δ’ ἀ[μ]φιπόλοισι κέκλετο· ταὶ δ’ ἄ]ρ’ ἀόλλισσαγ κατὰ ἄστ[υ] γε̣ραιάς· αὐτὴ δ’ ἐς] θάλαμογ κατεβήσετο κηωίεντα, κέδρινον] ὑψερεφῆ ὃς γλήνη πολλ’ ἐκεκεύθει ]  φωριαμοῖσι παρί[στ]ατο δῖα γυνα[ικῶν ἔνθ’ ἔσάν οἱ ]πέπλοι παμπο[ίκι]λοι ἔργα γυν[αικῶν Σιδονίων, τὰς α]ὐτὸς Ἀλέξανδ[ρος θεοειδὴς ἤγαγε Σιδονίη]θεν, ἐπιπλ[ὼς εὐρέα πόντον, τὴν ὁδὸν ἣν Ἑλέ]νη[ν περ ἀνήγαγεν εὐπατέρειαν·

(Bird 2010: 94)3 go, but I will go after Paris, to summon him, …causing groans… …to hear what I have to say. Right now for him may the earth open; for the Olympian reared him as a great pain for the Trojans and for great-hearted Priam and his children. If I should see that one gone down into the house of Hades, I would say that my mind had forgotten its painful affliction.” So he spoke, and Hecuba did not disobey but quickly summoned

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The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics where she had manycolored robes, the work of women from Sidon, whom godlike Alexander himself led from Sidon, as he sailed the wide sea on the same journey when he led back Helen of the noble father.

her maids; and they assembled the older women in the city; but she descended to the sweet-smelling chamber, made of cedar and high roofed, which contained many treasures …fair among women, she stood beside the chests where she had manycolored robes, the work of women from Sidon, whom godlike Alexander himself led from Sidon, as he sailed the wide sea on the same journey when he led back Helen of the noble father.

(p.192) 4.2. The Nature of the Variation: Not Scribal Error The phrase “scribal error” traditionally denotes missteps, such as writing the same item twice when it appears once in the exemplar (dittography), writing an item once when it appears twice in the exemplar (haplography), and dropping material because the eye skips from one identical word or phrase to the next instance of that word or phrase and prompts the omission of the intervening material (parablepsis or saut du même au même resulting from homoeoteleuton or homoearchon) (M. L. West 1973: 24–5; Orton 2000: 21–42; Tov 2012a: 222–4). I refrain from getting involved in the debate over the applicability or utility of the term “error” when it comes to scribal activity (cf. Millett 2005: pp. li–liii; Parker 2008a: 151–2; Hobson 2012: 13–14), and I move on to note that, although one can find examples of what one traditionally refers to as “scribal error” in the wild papyri (e.g. Hurst 1986: 223; Huys 1988: 68), “scribal error” cannot account for most of the differences between the texts of the wild papyri and the medieval texts (S. West 1967: 11; M. L. West 2001: 161; Bird 2010: 18–19, 47, 59, 72, 81; Jensen 2011: 218). To drive this point home, I review Stephanie West’s findings on the wild papyri (1967). She does not shy away from labeling a reading in a papyrus a “slip” (46– 7), a “blunder” (80), or a “mistake” (89), but she also detects other patterns in, or trends that explain, the variations within lines and the plus verses. (I follow Gregory Nagy’s use of “variant” for both variation within lines and variation in the number of lines (section 3.9 (p. 175)). Older scholarship tended to reserve “variant” for variants within lines: e.g. van der Valk 1964: 562.) I do not seek hereby to endorse S. West’s judgments either as to why a particular variant appears in a papyrus fragment or as to whether in a given passage the medieval texts or a papyrus offers the original reading. With this rehearsal I stress that scribal error does not often explain why the text of a papyrus fragment differs from the medieval texts at any given point. To expedite this presentation and Page 13 of 64

 

The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics because I wish to highlight the nature of her explanations, I will not identify the passages she is explaining. S. West posits the following motivations for variations within lines: • a preference for augmented forms (verb forms with a past indicative augment) (1967: 46, 168, 212) • changes prompted by a desire to avoid repeating words in close proximity (49, 155, 157, 169, 215, 216, 218, 235) • variations in speech introductions (81, 114, 156, 206) • assimilation of consonants (e.g. in sur rh’ ebalon (“then they dashed together”) instead of sun rh’ ebalon, the nu of sun becomes a rho (84); see also 130, 191, 242, 246, 263) • addition of proper names to ensure the audience knows who is in focus or who is being referred to (85, 166, 174, 222) • changes prompted by a desire to remove hiatus (87, 165, 174, 211, 240, 243, 244, 247, 251, 253, 271; cf. M. L. West 2001: 45). Hiatus refers to the pause one makes between the pronunciation of two successive vowels in adjoining words or syllables. • assimilation of parallel passages (90, 112) (p.193) • changes prompted by a desire to avoid metrical irregularities (96, 98, 209, 239, 241, 247, 250) • “vulgarization,” or a change that seeks to do away with a putatively strange bit of morphology or word choice (131, 170, 221, 243, 248); this move often involves, for example, eliminating forms in the dual (130, 165, 185, 214, 240) • “modernizing” (e.g. phare’ eneike “she brought cloth” becomes pharē eneike (216); see also 51, 81–2, 85, 107, 164, 172, 183, 197, 236, 240, 244, 248, 250, 251, 254, 271, 272, 279) • efforts to clear up any source of confusion in the text or to work around items considered difficult (49, 57, 96, 99, 111, 127, 159, 163, 173, 175, 180, 188, 206, 210, 211, 215, 237, 251, 255, 259, 270, 275) As for plus verses, they can comprise “common” elements (S. West 1967: e.g. 48) or two recognizable hemistichs (half-lines) (e.g. 197; cf. Haslam 1997: 66), but they are not necessarily formulaic, at least as far as our extant data suggest (S. West 1967: e.g. 245). Most striking, they are often what scholars label “concordance interpolations” (12–13; cf. M. L. West 2001: 13): Passages containing many versus iterati [repeated verses], like Θ [Iliad 8]… or a summary of a typical scene described elsewhere in greater detail… attracted plus-verses, while a passage for which there are no close parallels elsewhere in Homer was likely to remain free from them. Concordance interpolation exercised a powerful attraction: thus a line or a group of lines which follow a particular formula in one place are inserted Page 14 of 64

 

The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics after it in another passage where they may be rather less suitable. Many of these plus-verses have been transferred verbatim from other parts of the Homeric poems, or have been created by the combination of two common formulae;… S. West finds several motivations for the wild papyri’s plus verses (cf. T. Allen 1924: 325): • “the interpolated line removes the ambiguity” (1967: 48) • “to mitigate or remove this inconsistency” (86) • to clarify who is in focus especially by way of genealogical interpolations (93, 102, 108, 111, 238; cf. di Luzio 1969: 80) • “Possibly the absence of an expressed subject to ἕλοιεν [in the previous verse] led to the interpolation” (105) • to “make the correspondence between question and answer more exact” (116) • “Jachmann suggests that the line was inserted to mitigate the harshness of Hector’s speech” (126) • to “simplify the construction” (156) • “Gerhard suggested that the line was interpolated because Hector’s speech might otherwise leave the impression that he was afraid of Achilles” (164) • to provide a gloss (167) • to “remove this obscurity” (179) (p.194) • “to supply what was felt to be a deficiency in the account of the ritual” (180) • “to counterbalance the addition to the description of the horses” (181) • “the zeugma was found difficult; this made it necessary to insert a further line” (182) • “for the sake of symmetry” (207) • to “make Zeus’ speech correspond more exactly to Hermes’ report” (208) • “an attentive reader might feel that something was missing in the Vulgate:…The papyrus supplies what is lacking” (266) • “Perhaps the line was inserted in order to explain how Odysseus could hear Penelope weeping” (276) • “Presumably someone felt that the story was incomplete” (281) S. West often envisions a rationale for a minus verse too. For example, she speculates that P31’s (TM 61238) omission of Od. 10.70 reflects an attempt to circumvent a perceived difficulty in the verse’s use of the participle kataptomenos: Odysseus does not “assail” Aeolus’s family (1967: 255; cf. di Luzio 1969: 127–8).

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The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics One draws the same lesson from Aldo di Luzio’s defense of the wild texts’ conformity to Homeric usage (1969). He argues that, in matters of morphology, syntax, and diction (including formulae), the variations within lines adhere to “models typical of the composite language of Homeric epic in its archaic phase” (14, my translation, cf. 150–1). Di Luzio’s list of what plus verses do includes the following: they stand in apposition; they function parenthetically; they take the form of relative clauses; they anticipate; they expand and resume; they specify and intensify; by reusing and mimicking material found elsewhere, they create symmetry and produce thematically efficacious repetitions (14; cf. 62, 142, 151). He concludes, “The structure and position of these verses is characteristic of the language of archaic epic.…At least a quarter of Homeric verses present a similar structure and typology” (62; cf. 143, 151). Just as one need not endorse S. West’s explanations, one need not endorse di Luzio’s thesis —that the variants found in the wild papyri frequently reveal the original text before it suffered the scribal missteps and editorial purging evident in the medieval texts—to take away from his findings that scribal error does not account for what appears in the wild papyri. Subsequent scholarship continues in this vein. Alberto Nodar Domínguez finds that the scribe of MP3 851.1 (TM 67369) eliminates Il. 9.697 and 709 to make “a simpler text” (2014: 31). Nor does scribal error enter into discussions that reject choosing one reading over the other. For Graeme Bird, “there are many cases where both the papyrus and the ‘vulgate’ reading…can be demonstrated—often by both internal and external evidence—to be ‘authentic,’ i.e. that the passage is ‘Homeric’ whichever variant is read” (2010: 73; cf. 34–9, 52, 56–60; Nagy 2004: 59, 61). Maurizio Sonnino suggests reading makhlo]sunēs apekhesthai (“to abstain from lasciviousness”) in P214’s (TM 61225) rendition of Od. 22.423 and finds it just as “authentic” as the medieval texts’ doulosunēs/-ēn anekhesthai (“to endure slavery”) (2015, quotation from 9). Because in sections 4.4 and 4.5 I look to research in other fields to account for this variation, I note here that the nature of the variation in the wild papyri of the Homeric (p.195) poems is matched by the nature of the variation in the textual corpora of other traditions. When they copy sagas, medieval Irish scribes “add or rearrange or ‘correct’” (Slotkin 1977–9: 450). Reviewing manuscripts of medieval French literature, Bernard Cerquiglini notes the “constant torrent of paraphrastic utterances,” “the range of variants that are paraphrases of one another from one manuscript to the next” (1999: 75, 80). Scribal error does not come into play at these moments. Alger Doane juxtaposes manuscripts of the same Old English work (1994a: 425; cf. Liuzza 1995: 293; Orton 2000: e.g. 100, 109–19): Yet when they are compared in their two versions line by line, they are clearly the “same” texts, not different recensions. And the variations are not of the nature of random error; they are for the most part “indifferent” Page 16 of 64

 

The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics variations—they could not be detected as erroneous or ungrammatical if they were the only one uncontested copy (as is the case with the vast majority of poetry): all but a handful of the variants make sense—there is usually nothing to choose between them in this regard, though sometimes one variant breaks the rules of alliteration. In the introduction to his edition of the A version of Piers Plowman—a fourteenth-century Middle English work that scholars sort into three versions: A, B, and C (Hanna 2014)—George Kane writes, “Many of the variants are adequate readings in the sense that they would pass muster if not exposed to comparison” (1988: 134). Reviewing Tablets I, VI, and XI of the epic of Gilgamesh, Andrew George concludes, “Variant vocabulary, variations in tense, the addition of single lines, the transposition of lines, and, rarely, more radical reordering are established features of the sources for the Standard Babylonian epic” (2003: 430; cf. Jensen 2011: 226). Neither here nor in reference to the transmission of other works of Mesopotamian literature does the concept of scribal error provide a useful frame: “the variations between copies are more considerable than can be explained from errors of transcription or dictation. They include dialect variations, differences of word order or phrasing, substitution of synonyms, and occasional plus-lines” (M. L. West 1997: 601). Discussing “nonsignificant variants”—“variants that represent virtually synonymous words or phrases”—in an Akkadian epic about the descent of Ishtar, David Carr observes, “Most of the variants are not the sort that would be caused by visual errors, such as confusion of similar signs or skipping or duplicating lines” (2005: 42). Comparing versions of the same work as found in, for instance, the Masoretic Text (MT), the Old Greek (OG) translation, and/or in texts from the Judaean Desert (Masada, Naḥal Ḥever, Naḥal Arugot, Naḥal Ṣeʾelim, Qumran, Wadi Murabbaʿat, and Wadi Sdeir), scholars of Jewish scripture speak of “plurality,” “multiformity,” and “pluriformity” (Ulrich 1999: 8, 31; 2000: 54; Kelber 2010: 118; Person 2015: 206–7; Grossman 2016: 327).4 Of “The Great Isaiah Scroll” from Qumran (1QIsaa), (p.196) Eugene Ulrich writes, “It would give a valid impression to say that there is a variant from the Masoretic Text on every line throughout the entire sixty-six chapters” (2000: 52; cf. Pulikottil 2001; I. Young 2005: 95, 110; Ulrich 2015: 109–29).5 Russell Hobson comments on manuscripts of Leviticus (2012: 126; cf. I. Young 2002: 374, 2005: 87; Ulrich 2015: 39–40): The best-preserved scroll, 11QpaleoLeva, is an atypical example in that it differs from the MT very little in terms of minor stylistic variations, such as the use of particles and prepositions, but contains a number of more significant stylistic differences. These involve short expressions, whether through apparent harmonization or differences in phrasing, lexicography, the harmonizing of expressions, or difference of expression. Other Page 17 of 64

 

The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics manuscripts, such as 4QLevd, differ in the expression of short formulaic phrases, and also longer phrases.6 Ian Young crunches the numbers regarding manuscripts of Samuel (2014: 19– 20; cf. Tov 2012a: 255–6, 261): 4QSama, our best preserved Qumran Samuel manuscript, as we have stated above, has 2155.5 words. Of these, 499 are variant from the MT.… We can do the same investigation for the other Qumran Samuel manuscripts. Taking all variants into account, 4QSamb has 304 words, of which 53 are variant or 17.43%.…Every single Samuel manuscript has a remarkable proportion of variant words when compared to the MT. Here too scribal error cannot explain these variations (Talmon 1975: 326, 1989: 120–2; Pulikottil 2001: 20–4, 37, 200–1; cf. Kelber 2010: 120; Hobson 2012: 19). David Parker treats the Second Testament’s Gospels as “living text” (1997; cf. Epp 2005: 572–5). For instance, he presents three manuscripts’ renditions of Luke 6: 1–10: Codex Vaticanus (mid-fourth century CE), Codex Bezae (around 400 CE), and Codex Dionysiou 10 (sixth century CE). They all make sense—one should not speak of errors—but collating them reveals “addition and omission of words, changes in order, and substitution of one word for another” (1997: 38, cf. 197–8). Subsequent studies by scholars of the Second Testament provide yet more examples (Comfort 2004; Hernández 2006; Royse 2008; Charlesworth 2016: 155–212), but earlier scholarship had already pointed the way (cf. Kruger 2012: 64). Analyzing P. Bodmer II’s presention of the Gospel of John (around 200 CE), Ernest Colwell observed the scribe’s propensity for brevity—“he omits adverbs, adjectives, nouns, participles, verbs, personal pronouns”—and tallied forty-three “singular readings…due to clarification, to smoothing out the text, to simplification or to (p.197) logical agreement with context” (1969: 114, 121; cf. Comfort 2004: 37; Head 2008: 60; Royse 2008: 544). Larry Hurtado categorized the distinct elements of Codex Washingtonianus’s rendition of the Gospel of Mark (fourth or fifth century CE): “harmonizations,” “vocabulary preferences,” “grammatical improvements,” “changes toward concise expression,” “additions for clarification,” “significant sense changes,” and alterations in word order (1981: 69–80; cf. Jongkind 2008: 45).

4.3. Accounting for This Variation Homerists have offered various explanations for the differences between the texts in the medieval tradition and the wild papyri. I pass over Aldo di Luzio’s contention that the papyri reveal the original texts of the epics before copyists and editors deformed them (1969). Di Luzio’s piece represented the height of the trend to see the texts in the papyri as revealing the epics in their authentic and original state. Resistance was mounting already, as evidenced by Marchinus van der Valk’s discussion of the papyri in part 2 of his Researches on the Text and Scholia of the Iliad (1964: chap. 14). I do not see Homerists endorsing di Page 18 of 64

 

The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics Luzio’s model of devolution at present. Still, because di Luzio showed that the papyri’s variations from the medieval texts qualify as good Homeric poetry, his article has influenced some of the scholars whose work I review here (cf. Dué 2001; D. Collins 2004: 204, 214–15; Bird 2010: 58–9), and I too will make use of his findings in Chapter 5. For some, the texts of the papyri stem from transcripts of oral performances. For instance, Graeme Bird comments on P40’s presentation of Il. 3.302–10: “As in other passages to be considered, the papyrus gives the impression that it is a ‘version’ of a performance with a somewhat heightened emotional tone. If this is so, what we have is apparently some sort of ‘transcript’ of a particular performance” (2010: 89; cf. 73, 81, 88, 92, 95, 99). The papyrus’s variants are there because the performer decided to perform that way and a scribe who was transcribing wrote them down (cf. Foley 1990: 25; Nagy 1997: 111, 2004: 13; Olson and Sens 1999: 15 n. 38; Dué 2001: 45; Martin 2005: 170 n. 45). Another possibility ventured by Homerists is that performers themselves wrote these wild texts. Rhapsodes could have written them: If there were amplified texts in existence at any period, they must have been in existence in the eighth, seventh, and sixth centuries, the period of the great Homerids.…The additions we can trace are such as would have been made by vocalists relying largely on memory.…The long texts withered of themselves. They had depended on the rhapsode.…He had his book, probably he made one. (T. Allen 1924: 267–8, 326) There is no need to assume that between 540 and (say) 400 B.C. written reproduction of the Homeric poems was always a process in which a scribe simply copied a written exemplar: from time to time a rhapsode who knew the Panathenaic version more or less by heart but who had no text of his own may well have dictated the poems to a scribe or written them out himself from memory,…These texts produced from the memories of rhapsodes (and, (p.198) of course, the descendants of such texts) would have differed from the original sixth-century Chian-Panathenaic version, and from each other, in some of the wording within the lines (e.g. by the substitution of one formula for another) and through the addition, at various points, of single lines and small groups of lines such as those found in the “eccentric” Ptolemaic papyri,…I would assume that most of these additional lines would be due to lapses of memory (this would apply especially to the numerous examples of concordance interpolation), but that some (including some examples of concordance interpolation) would be deliberate attempts to improve the text. (Apthorp 1980: 67, emphasis in original) Page 19 of 64

 

The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics Some manuscripts were probably written by rhapsodes, whether for their own use or at the request of others. A rhapsode held the text of entire episodes, or a form of it, in his head. When he had occasion to write it down, he might well rely on his memory and write it in the form in which he had most recently recited it, with the oral variants and extra lines that had come to him while reciting it; perhaps making a few further embellishments or unconscious changes as he wrote. (M. L. West 2001: 15; cf. 1997: 601–2; 2004; 2011a: 72; 2017: 16) The Ptolemaic papyri of Homer very possibly do go back to performergenerated texts. (Scodel 2007: 144) More probably the manuscripts do somehow represent real rhapsodic versions, just as actors’ versions successfully infiltrated manuscripts of Euripides. (Haslam 2011)7 In speaking of “variations as stemming from or produced for live performances” (2004: 216, my emphasis), Derek Collins attributes the texts in the papyri to a more specific set of performers. He entertains the possibility that homēristai were “responsible for the variations” (211) but ends up pointing to a more elusive group (216): We may conclude that these papyri reflect the interests of a delimited group of performers/authors who specialized in Homer, because we do not find the same extent of verse manipulation in Homeric papyri after 150 BCE, even though rhapsodic (and homeristic) performance continued until the third century CE. I regard it as more than probable that these papyri issued from the Ptolemaic equivalent of the Homeridae of Chios or the Creophylei [sic] of Samos.8 The arguments of those who favor attributing the variants in the papyri to people who orally perform Homeric poetry intersect in one particular. The performers who generate these texts are not scribes tasked with copying: In this short examination of a handful of so-called “eccentric” Ptolemaic texts, we have seen that, far from being the result of careless scribal activity, what we are looking at can be viewed as functioning as a transcript of a live performance, and not only that, but a performance in which the “performer” could and did choose to heighten the emotional (p. 199) level by means of such things as variation in word choice, and intertextual links to other Homeric episodes.

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The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics (Bird 2010: 100) The advantage of the approach outlined here is that it offers an alternative to attributing such plus-verses and variations to pedantic scribes or misinformed copyists,… (D. Collins 2004: 216) As one sees in the passage quoted earlier, Michael Apthorp positions the rhapsode who copies out his text from memory against the scribe who copies an exemplar (1980: 67): There is no need to assume that between 540 and (say) 400 B.C. written reproduction of the Homeric poems was always a process in which a scribe simply copied a written exemplar: from time to time a rhapsode who knew the Panathenaic version more or less by heart but who had no text of his own may well have dictated the poems to a scribe or written them out himself from memory,… In setting up the sentence quoted earlier (and which I quote here again), Michael Haslam rejects the idea that a scribe could operate as a “virtual rhapsode” (2011): It is arguable that scribes so thoroughly interiorized the Homeric language as to produce such freewheeling texts; that would make them virtual rhapsodes. More probably the manuscripts do somehow represent real rhapsodic versions, just as actors’ versions successfully infiltrated manuscripts of Euripides. There are scribes and there are oral performers, and they are to be kept distinct. At the same time, all of this group of scholars does not pass the same judgment on their performers. For D. Collins, one should avoid “dismissing them [the variants in the papyri] as uncreative interpolations of inferior performers” (2004: 216). By contrast, in arguing that Zenodotus’s “corrected” text of the Iliad was “a rhapsode’s copy, or directly descended from one” of the fourth century (2001: 40–5, quotation from 43), Martin L. West speaks of that text as “deformed by many oral variants, arbitrary abridgments, trivializations, modernizations, and so forth” (45). M. L. West’s criticisms of a text created by a typical rhapsode lead one to the several Homerists who have endorsed an alternative source for the variations in the wild papyri: scribes—defined as copyists—may be responsible. Whereas scholars of interpolation are careful to speak of readers and copyists as possible sources of interpolations—one can never know, for instance, if an interpolation originated as a reader’s marginal or interlinear gloss—(Wilson and Heyworth 1998; Tarrant 2016: 98), these Homerists focus on copyists. I return to this issue Page 21 of 64

 

The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics in section 4.4 (p. 212). For now, I draw attention to the ways in which those who allow for the scribe’s input talk about him. Note the portions I have set in italics. For Stephanie West, one deals with a “vice” (1967: 13), with an absence of “concern,” and with a propensity to “tamper” (18, cf. 1988: 48): It has been disputed whether rhapsodes or scribes were responsible for the insertion of extra lines. Almost certainly both: the presence of actors’ interpolations in drama suggest that rhapsodes would feel free to take similar liberties with the texts on which their livelihood depended; but scribes occasionally inserted extra lines in Roman and mediaeval MSS., and it would be absurd to suppose that Attic and Hellenistic scribes were free from this vice.…The work of the Alexandrian scholars led to a general rise in the standards of book production, (p.200) including a much greater concern for accuracy. Whereas previously scribes were not greatly concerned to reproduce the exact wording of their exemplar, provided the sense of the passage (or what they conceived the sense of the passage to be) remained the same, they now felt less free to tamper with the text. S. West anticipates Eric Turner’s comments on “early Ptolemaic literary papyri” in general: they reveal (1980: 107–8) a lack of respect for the accurate recording of an author’s words.…The writers of these early papyri felt no compulsion to copy accurately because they did not regard the exact expression (especially the order of words) of the author as sacred.…To what corruptions may not the classical writers, especially in prose, have been exposed in the copies of the fourth and third centuries? Elsewhere, S. West speaks of “the misplaced creativity of copyists” (1988: 40). Minna Skafte Jensen writes (1980: 108): A scribe copying the whole of Homer, having been taught in school how to read and write from the text of Homer, living in an age where rhapsodic recitals were still common, must have had his mind crowded with epic lines and half-lines. If he found himself introducing an extra line he would hardly bother; deliberate additions cannot be excluded either. More recently, Jensen chastises the scribe for making “mistakes” (cf. Apthorp 1980: 68–9) and being “pedantic” (2011: 228): Presumably the scribe whose mind is full of verses and passages that are repeated unchanged or with minor variation may easily make mistakes and introduce a well-known and memorised phrase where something similar is actually in his model.…The scribe had attended Homeric performances, and during his training he had read and no doubt been made to memorise long passages of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Whereas the meticulous Page 22 of 64

 

The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics copying that is in general typical of the Homeric manuscripts makes it hard to imagine a wilful Homeric scribe, a pedantic one would not be unthinkable. M. L. West finds the copyist acting “unconsciously or because he thought it would be just as good so” (1998b: 98): He [the copyist] was not transcribing an unfamiliar or sacrosanct text word by word. He was producing a new exemplar of a poem that he had running in his head. Perhaps he was writing whole stretches of it out from memory, introducing echoes of similar passages elsewhere, whether unconsciously or because he thought it would be just as good so. Both the attempts to separate the performer from the scribe offered by those who assign the variant texts to oral performers and the characterizations of the scribe offered by those who assign the texts to scribes, taken as copyists, impede understanding of these texts. To be sure, these two moves characterize research on other textualized oral traditional works as well (cf. A. Kirk 2008: 229–33). The editors of an edition of Hindi poems attributed to a fourteenth-century CE saint, Nāmdev, write, “Interaction in the oral tradition and corruption in the scribal tradition act like fog and pollution” (Callewaert and Lath 1989: 82). In exploring the three written versions of the Old Norse eddic poem (p.201) Vǫluspá, Elsa Mundal does not fault scribes and allows for “the possibility that the scribe has interpolated his text with extra material which he knew from oral tradition” (2008: 222, cf. 219), but she persists in asking whether the differences in the three written texts stem from oral performers or from scribes. Nevertheless, in the next section, I review how some scholars in other fields address the variation in their corpora and I apply the lessons learned to the wild Homeric papyri. I thus build on the work of Homerists who have gestured toward a comparative approach to the topic: Haslam mentions English ballads (1997: 69), and M. L. West refers to Babylonian poems (1998b: 98). Before delving into that material, I need to make the following specifications. David Carr rejects the idea that the earliest manuscripts of Jewish scripture with their abundance of variants represent transcripts of oral performances (2015: 171–2). Just so, I reject for three reasons the scenario most clearly articulated by Bird—that the wild papyri either are or descend from distinct transcriptions of distinct performances (2010: 43–4; cf. Apthorp 1980: 57–72 on multiple dictation events in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE). First, transcription is not undertaken casually, and as I reviewed in Chapter 3 writing down a performer’s oral text is a fraught endeavor. It is implausible that the papyri either are or stem from distinct transcriptions of distinct performances (cf. Haslam 2011; Cantilena 2012: 94–5). Scholars of Old Norse poetry can reasonably debate whether the multiple written versions of a poem Page 23 of 64

 

The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics of, say, sixty stanzas stem from one transcription event or several transcription events (Mundal 2008: 209–12). Homerists, dealing with much lengthier poems, strain credulity when they imagine myriad transcription events. Second, the medieval texts and the texts of the wild papyri overlap to a great extent: they belong to the same textual tradition. Two subpoints follow, which I label (2A) and (2B). (2A) If the papyri are not descendants of copies of one text, if they instead are or go back to transcripts of discrete performances by different poets, one has to imagine poets capable of producing lengthy oral texts that are down to the level of the verse nearly the same as those produced by other poets. The requirement is not that one poet reproduce the same oral text down to the level of the individual verse again and again but that multiple poets generate the same oral text down to the level of the individual verse as their peers do. This requirement can be met when some institutional context constrains oral performers to cleave to a shared and fixed oral text. That institution may be the family: active in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries CE, the Russian singers of oral epic (byliny) in the Ryabinin family stuck close to their predecessors’ songs (Levaniouk 2018: 184–5). That institution may be a religious entity: some like to point to the Avestan or the Vedic texts as examples of texts transmitted orally but verbatim (Finkelberg 2017: 35 n. 24). Such factors are either not relevant to or not in play in the Homeric case. When we think about the transmission of Homeric poetry, we are not thinking of a family affair. Performers of the Iliad and the Odyssey linked themselves to the Muses and may have resembled seers (González 2013: chap. 8); they performed at festivals held to honor gods (p.202) (Tsagalis 2018a, 2018b); they incorporated actual ritual practices into their poetry (Cook 1995)—one can continue detailing the religious elements of Homeric poetry and performance, but I resist equating Homeric poets with performers of the Avestan and the Vedic texts who were tasked with perpetuating their cultures’ religious tenets and traditions (Cantera 2012: pp. xi–xii; Jamison and Brereton 2014: 2–4, 7–9, 25–53).9 Alternatively, this requirement can be met when different performers base their performances on the same written text (e.g. Tokita 2015: 63). S. Douglas Olson and Alexander Sens suggest that performers of the Homeric poems memorized the same written text and, when having their oral texts transcribed, offered versions that differed from each other (1999: 15 n. 38). Again, I reject the idea that the texts in the papyri stem from multiple discrete acts of textualization. More to the point, I find no reason to think that oral performers of the Iliad and the Odyssey memorized one specific written text during the time frame in which the texts in the wild papyri emerged (see p. 103). (By contrast, as I mentioned in

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The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics the introduction to Chapter 3, I can picture the homēristai of the late Hellenistic and Roman imperial periods memorizing a specific text.) (2B) One can distinguish between multitextuality and multiformity. Multitexts differ from one another less than multiforms differ from one another. Multiformity likely marked the Homeric performance tradition (see (2A); Bird 2010: 29; Jensen 2011: 174, 246, 280), but the wild papyri do not exhibit a sufficient degree of variation from the medieval texts to qualify as copies of transcriptions of multiform performances of the Iliad and the Odyssey (cf. Jensen 1980: 108, 2011: 247; Finkelberg 2000: 5; Reece 2005: 77; contra Bird 2010: 49). In other words, if the texts in the papyri were or stemmed from transcripts of distinct performances, they would differ far more than they do from the medieval texts. Instead, the term “multitextuality” catches the degree of difference between the wild papyri and the medieval texts (Bird 2010: 60), although I grant the subjective nature of assessing how much the texts in the papyri differ from the medieval texts (cf. Lenzi 2016: 65).10 To be sure, as I note in section 4.4, multiformity in a tradition of oral performance can contribute to multitextuality in the corresponding written tradition. Third, variation from the standard text appears in the papyri of other texts by other authors, such as Plato, Euripides, Thucydides, and Xenophon (van der Valk 1964: 537–40; S. West 1967: 11; Turner 1980: 107–8). The transcription of discrete performances is unlikely to be a factor in these cases. Copyists would seem to be the responsible party (cf. van der Valk 1964: 538, 540). (p.203) All that said, it will become clear in a moment that my proposal intersects with Bird’s to the extent that we both consider the factor of performance. Moreover, readers who like Bird’s model should recall the material reviewed in subsection 3.3.5.2: scribes manually transcribing what a performer says affect the written text. I add now that they do some of the same things that people do when copying. Because the following pages explore in detail what people do when copying, readers who favor Bird’s model will benefit from the presentation. Similarly, given my take on what the rhapsodes who performed the Iliad and the Odyssey did, I do not agree with those who attribute the texts in the papyri to rhapsodes who memorized a standard oral or written text and reproduced that text from memory in written form. If we are going to look to rhapsodes, I would prefer Ruth Scodel’s “performer-generated texts.” That phrase implies nothing about working from memory. It only implies that rhapsodes produced the texts. Nevertheless, the following discussion accounts for what would have happened during a scenario of memorial copying by a rhapsode. I agree with those who attribute the texts in the papyri to a writer, stylus in hand. This writer is copying. He may copy a text he has in his head—as I just said, I do not want to lose those who think this is what is going on—but, like Page 25 of 64

 

The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics Israelite scribes (Tov 2004: 11), he more probably copies a written exemplar he has before him (and from now on I speak with that thought in mind). An oral performer—someone who performs orally in public—may produce these texts for himself and others. A copyist—someone who, not an oral performer himself, makes copies of literary texts for others—may produce these texts for others. When I am not concerned with distinguishing between an oral performer and a copyist, I will label this writer a scribe. The word “scribe” ranges in implication —from, for instance, copyist to expert—across several areas of study and means different things in different cultures and even, from a diachronic perspective, within a culture (cf. Richards 1991: 2 n. 5; Beit-Arié 1993: 38–9, 2000: 229–30; Schams 1998: 309–27; Hezser 2001: 118–20; Jaffee 2001: 20; Tov 2004: 7–12, 24; Millett 2005: p. li; Parsons 2007: 262; A. Kirk 2008: 220; Haines-Eitzen 2013: 482–3; Mouton and Roche-Hawley 2015). When I use the word scribe, I am adhering to the simple definition offered by Daniel Wakelin: the person who wields the pen (2014: 72). Again, this scribe could be an oral performer or he could be a copyist. My goal is to reframe the nature of the scribe’s activity. He performs as he reproduces his exemplar.

4.4. The Scribe as Performer Scholars in other disciplines, several already mentioned in section 4.2’s review of variation in the textual corpora of other traditions, turn to the concept of scribal performance to explain the variation in their textual records; they speak of the scribe as a performer to account for those variations. They thus go beyond those who talk about the scribe’s copying activity as involving a voicing of the text to himself (p.204) (Gamble 1995: 204; Liuzza 2000: 147, 162; Redford 2000: 205; Grotans 2006: 18; Jongkind 2007: 23; McNamee 2007: 28–9; Royse 2008: 90; Schorch 2016) and they deploy the concept of performance in a more precise fashion than those who use it in a pedestrian sense to ask, how does the scribe perform in his job? (cf. Moffatt 1998: 56; Head 2008: 62; Jongkind 2008: 43; Schmid 2008: 3, 5), as one may ask, how did the car’s engine perform? Discussing medieval Ireland, Edgar Slotkin refers to the “scribal performance of the tale” and “the need to treat such a manuscript as if it were a somewhat specialized separate performance” (1977–9: 450). Tim William Machan writes of Late Middle English scribes, “A variety of the conscious alterations effected by scribes as they ‘copied’ texts are similar to the changes made by oral poets as they re-create songs—…a model of improvisation can describe the performance qualities of both oral poets and scribes” (1991: 237; cf. Foley 1995a: 74 n. 30). Alger Doane has fleshed out this idea in a series of articles on Anglo-Saxon scribes (1991: 80–1): Whenever scribes who are part of the oral traditional culture write or copy traditional oral works, they do not merely mechanically hand them down; they rehear them, “mouth” them, “reperform” them in the act of writing in Page 26 of 64

 

The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics such a way that the text may change but remain authentic, just as a completely oral poet’s text changes from performance to performance without losing authenticity. Accordingly, “[the scribe] restructures it [the exemplar] in the memory in the moment between reading and copying” (1994a: 431). A later formulation recapitulates this model in a helpful way: “He was frequently content to copy gists rather than exact words, that is, he looked, he looked away, he listened, he recomposed” (1998: 63, emphasis in original; cf. O’Brien O’Keeffe 1990: esp. 40– 1, 66–7, 76, 191; Robinson 1994: 37; Foley 1995a: 73–5; Pasternack 1995: 8, 16, 27; Foley and Ramey 2012: 89–90). David Carr writes of Mesopotamian scribes: “Every manuscript was truly an ‘Einheit für sich,’ a new scribal performance of an authoritative, sacred tradition” (2005: 44). Going beyond an approach to the pluriformity in manuscripts of the same biblical work that speaks of editorial activity and different editions (Ulrich 1999: 61–73, 107–9; 2015: 9, 41–3, 92, 98, 206, 315– 16; Müller et al. 2014), Raymond Person casts Israelite scribes as performers (1998: 602; cf. 2015: 197–8; Carr 2011: 36; Mroczek 2011: 252; I. Young 2014: 27, 2018: 161–3): When they copied their texts, the ancient Israelite scribes did not slavishly write the texts word by word, but preserved the texts’ meaning for the ongoing life of their communities in much the same way that performers of oral epic re-present the stable, yet dynamic, tradition to their communities. In this sense, the ancient Israelite scribes were not mere copyists, but were also performers. Alan Kirk applies this model to the manuscript traditions of the Second Testament’s Gospels: they “are best viewed in light of the scribal tradent competence that was a feature of oral-manuscript culture” (2008: 234), and this “scribal tradent competence” was a “performative competence that significantly resembled that of the oral-traditional (p.205) performer” (220).11 David Aune concurs: “During the early transmission history of the various works making up the New Testament, it is widely recognized that scribes took the freedom to add, substract, and modify the texts that they were copying. Thus each new ‘copy’ of an exemplar was itself a performance in its own right” (2009: 67).12 The performing scribe does not earn that label because he declaims his text orally before an audience (pace P. Evans 2017: 755), although he often had an “oral-recitational tradent role in the community” (A. Kirk 2008: 222; cf. Horsley 2007: 101–4; S. Miller 2015: 183). The performing scribe does not earn that label because he prepared a text for someone else to perform. Such preparation did happen (cf. S. Miller 2017) and, as I touch on later in this subsection (p. 211), explains in part why the scribe performs, but that is not the primary focus Page 27 of 64

 

The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics of investigations into scribal performance. The scribe performs in the act of copying. Again, scribal performance is not about correcting errors in the manner of a modern copy-editor (Slotkin 1977–9: 443, 448) or collating manuscripts in the manner of a modern textual editor (Beit-Arié 1993: 48–9, 2000: 234–5). Scribes can produce a “completely rewritten” text (I. Young 2016: 287), but the model of the performing scribe does not require the wholesale reworking of a preexisting text (Carr 2011: 99; Harris and Reichl 2012: 161). Lastly, one more point of differentiation, this time between my focus and that of some other researchers who deploy the term “scribal performance.” Looking at the two earliest manuscripts of the homily by Archbishop Wulfstan of York titled De temporibus Anticristi, Joyce Lionarons applies the concept of scribal performance to the scribe’s insertion of an exemplum “taking up 56 manuscript lines out of a total of 142 in CCCC 201, and 89 manuscript lines out of 245 in Hatton 113” (2004: 80), the exemplum being “neither composed in Wulfstan’s characteristic rhetorical style nor comprised of the type of material Wulfstan usually includes in his homilies, where exempla are as rare as similes.” The scribe did not copy any part of that lengthy portion from his exemplar. Analogously, others apply the concept of scribal performance to the fashioning of written texts that are not copies of an exemplar (Person 2015: 211; Wire 2015: 67). By contrast, I, to repeat, address what I take to be moments of copying. Scholars attribute the nature of these texts to two forces. To start with, scribes often memorized texts as part of their training (A. Kirk 2008: 218–20; Kelber 2010: 116–17; Horsley 2015: 146–7). The scribe’s performance from memory might produce the distinctive manuscript marked by “memory variants” (Carr 2005: 44; 2011: 17, 25–34, 57–65, 98; 2015: 167; Lionarons 2010: 31–2; Boklund-Lagopoulou 2012: 569–70; cf. Hobson 2012: 135; I. Young 2014: 24; S. Miller 2015: 183).13 If he did seek to copy an (p.206) exemplar placed before him, the text he produced was the result of a negotiation between his immediate memory of what he had just encountered in the exemplar and the versions of that and related works he kept stored in his memory (A. Kirk 2008: 221–2; cf. Comfort 2004: 38–40, 44; Carr 2010: 28; Person forthcoming). Human memory works in this associative fashion. Dirk Jongkind refers the student of scribal activity to one particular investigation of memory by psychologists: having heard a list of related words, subjects later recall hearing additional related words not on the list (2008: 49–50). Next, whereas Jan Assmann stresses the disjunctions between tradition, by which he means oral tradition, and writing (2006: 63–4, 69; cf. Hezser 2012: 287–8, 291), students of scribal performance emphasize the impact of the “ambient oral tradition upon scribal transmission” (A. Kirk 2008: 232). The point here is not to account for variations in manuscripts by claiming that “they reflect the sensibilities of oral performance, which makes room for the views of the performer” (King 1997: 122–3). Rather, one observes that scribal activity took Page 28 of 64

 

The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics place amid a continuing and concurrent tradition of relevant oral performances. These oral performances comprised those of the work the scribe was tasked with reproducing and those of other works composed in the same idiom and register. These performances affected what the scribe generated as he copied. One can focus, in particular, on how the dynamism of the multiform oral tradition provided an important, even necessary, impetus for the multitextuality of the textual tradition (cf. Foley 1995a: 75). In an article on Irish traditions, Joseph Nagy writes of (1986: 289) monks and, later, members of scribal families, none of whom were by any means isolated from the oral tradition thriving in the society around them [cf. Hillers 2014: 97 (JR)].… The medieval transmitter of literature may not always have treated the text as fixed, partly because he wanted to incorporate multiform oral material, and partly because he viewed or mentally “heard” certain types of passages in the written text in terms of oral performance. Doane suggests scribes can perform because they “are part of the oral traditional culture” and/or because they live at a time when “the oral tradition is still alive and productive” (Doane 1991: 80, cf. 1998: 64–5) and/or because they possess “knowledge of the traditional discourse and native-speaker competencies” (Doane 1994a: 431; cf. Wire 2015: 67). Here is what that adds up to: “The text being copied functions as a ‘pre-text’, a kind of external memory for the scribe, who produces the new text by a combination of [a] the synchronic textual ‘memory’ and [b] the internalized competence consisting of linguistic and formulaic compositional skills (plus ideas, if any)” (Doane 1998: 54; cf. A. Kirk 2008: 221–2). I have added the [a] and [b]: [a] represents the scribe’s understanding of his exemplar; [b] represents his exposure to oral performances. The work of other scholars directs one to this phenomenon even if they do not speak of scribal performance. Noting that the texts of Second Temple Judaism “normally (p.207) circulated in a variety of textual forms, some longer and some shorter, one copy distinct in a variety of ways from any other” (2001: 18), Martin Jaffee looks to the factor of oral performance: The manuscript substrate of the book often bore the influence of the performative contexts in which it was shared.…In functional terms, the ‘original’ text meant the version whose words reached the audience at a given performative reading. Accordingly, additions to the manuscript text were incorporated through copying into the next version of the text in an incremental process of textual transformation.

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The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics Citing the work of Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe (1990), Doane (1994a), and Person (1998) (2007: 235 n. 42), Richard Horsley’s discussion of the milieu in which scribes at Qumran operated points in the same direction (119, cf. 124–5): A wide range of cultural materials were cultivated in scribal(-priestly) circles such as the Qumran community. The range included (a) written and/ or oral texts that had already reached distinctive form, some of which (while still developing) later became biblical, and others that rivaled them as authoritative, at least at Qumran; and (b) other orally cultivated cultural materials (evident, for example, in alternative texts of torah), some paralleled in books that later became biblical, and others not so paralleled. …Texts, whether those that later became biblical or other revered, authoritative texts, underwent continuing development in the interaction of scribal learning, recitation, and copying. Edgar Kellenberger proposes that variants in the text of Daniel 1–6 show the influence of the oral performance of the same tales on copyists (2008: esp. 212). Eugene Ulrich speaks of scribes of Jewish scripture making “isolated interpretative insertions” derived from “customary oral supplements” (2010b: 114). Horsley also attends to the “disagreement/variation among (fragmentary) manuscripts of a given Gospel” (2010: 103). Looking to David Parker and Kim Haines-Eitzen, Horsley links this variability to the dissemination of the Gospels via oral performance: “Oral cultivation of the texts influenced and was reflected in the copying of the texts” (101–4, quotation from 104; cf. Rodríguez 2010: 156– 67).14 At the same time, tradents continued to pass on orally the stories that were also recorded in the Gospels (Dunn 2003a: 202, 249–50; 2003b: 172), and these performances influenced scribal reproductions (Ehrman 2011: 353). Parker discusses the variants of the Lord’s Prayer found in manuscripts of Matthew and Luke (1997: 49–74). These differences likely stem from “the fervent, dynamic worship environment in early churches,” from “the creative dynamism and eloquent expansiveness of early Christian liturgy” (Epp 2005: 745–6). (p.208) Practitioners said the prayer in various ways, and scribes’ renditions reflected that variability (cf. Dunn 2003a: 226–8; Ulrich 2015: 99). Haines-Eitzen makes a similar argument in an analysis of harmonizations found in P72, which includes Jude, 1 Peter, and 2 Peter: they attest to the influence of liturgical texts—“oral ones, heard in the context of early Christian services”—on the scribe (2000: 72–3, quotation from 72). One should compare Bruce Metzger’s reminder in the introduction to A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament that scribes might omit material they considered “contrary to… liturgical usage” (1994: 13*).

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The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics John Dagenais observes of ScribeG’s rendition of passages in Latin in the Libro de Buen Amor that he “seems to be employing an oral memory of the Latin texts in their Iberian pronunciation” (1994: 140). He also offers a general comment on the “‘oral/memorial overlay’” (146): This overlay is especially important in the transmission of medieval lyric. This register comes into play when the scribe possesses, in addition to (or in place of) the written text of the exemplar, a personal knowledge, a memory, of the specific text he is copying. The mouvance of the oral text may dominate the variance of the written text and cause the scribe to substitute his remembered version for the written one.15 In the introduction to his edition of the Oxford manuscript (O) of the Song of Roland, Ian Short examines the “oral influence on the transmission process” (2005: I/46) and looks for “evidence of scribes negotiating between oral recollection and the written transmission mode” (I/48). He focuses on “scribal formulaic variation”: “the hemistich-formula [a formula taking up half a line], which is an integral and constant feature of oral delivery, is modified in the written tradition either by alteration or by substitution, depending both on scribes’ exemplars and on their personal familiarity with the techniques of the oral tradition” (I/50, my emphasis). The oral performance of the Song of Roland and other chansons de geste (Boutet 2012) would have influenced the scribe’s copying: yes, “variants…can be attributed to the activity of scribes as well as to different recitations by jongleurs [performers of chansons]” (Boutet 2012: 366), but the jongleurs’ “different recitations” contribute to the variations generated by scribes. S. N. Azbelev rehearses the scholarly consensus regarding the origin of a Russian tale about the Battle of Kulikovo in 1380 CE that scholars call “Zadonshchina”: “the manuscript version of the Zadonshchina goes back to the transcription of an oral text” (2012: 492). He then observes that “the scribes, when copying the written originals, corrected these on the basis of the oral variants of the narratives about the Zadonshchina or other tales of a similar nature that were known to them” (494). Karl Reichl reviews the variability found in the manuscripts of Turkish popular romances, a genre that “probably goes back to the beginning of the thirteen century [CE]” (2012b: 685). He attributes this variation in part to scribes —“scribes of popular works felt free to change, add or omit” (686)—and in part to the continued oral performance of these romances: “These works were generally recited and read aloud (p.209) to an audience, and in the process of their performance changes were introduced which reflect both the skill of the narrator and the taste of his audience” (687). Again, one can speculate that the

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The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics scribe’s attendance at oral presentations marked by multiformity affected his reproduction of the text.16 Reichl zeroes in on the same process in an article on “poetry that is textualized in Middle English”: “It is in particular with poems for which an oral background can be reasonably presupposed that scribes felt free to change what they copied” (2013: 253). Writing on the same corpus, Rosamund Allen elaborates on this point (2013: 297–8, 301, 303, emphasis in original): They [scribes] had access to a feature the written tradition cannot reveal: a memory of a version of the original which does not survive in the extant tradition. This memorial supply, which is of course lost to us, is most likely to have been activated when writing out popular poems. Precisely because they were “popular” entertainment they were well known, perhaps sung or intoned.…As the scribe hums his way through the exemplar of a work he has heard sung or chanted, perhaps many times—unbidden from his memory bank a reading leaps out, making him pick up a verbal recollection from his memory and replace the wording in his copy by this word or phrase.…The scribe’s intervention may reflect familiarity with the wording of a version from a distinct and [today] no longer extant branch of the tradition, such an alternate tradition having been absorbed by hearing it recited, perhaps many times (like BBC repeats). Vishnu Sukthankar analyzes a certain family of manuscripts of the Mahābhārata: “the Devanāgarī version of Nīlakaṇṭha” (1933: pp. lxv–lxix). Nīlakaṇṭha flourished in the last quarter of the seventeenth century CE. Sukthankar reports, “The manuscripts of the Nīlakaṇṭha version (which show among themselves slight discrepancies) contain a number of lines which are not found in any of the other versions.…They belong perhaps to the oral tradition which, at one time, had probably as great value and authority as the written text” (p. lxviii; cf. Novetzke 2008: 126). David Pinault studies nineteenth-century CE editions of the Arabian Nights and manuscripts ranging in date from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century that contain one or more of the same tales as found in the Arabian Nights. The redactors behind these texts looked to the continued oral performance of the tales as they “in a process of deletion, re-wording, and creative interpolation, retold the stories they found in their source-manuscripts” (1992: 250, cf. 113). Thomas Herzog explores Egyptian and Syrian manuscripts of the Sīrat Baibars that date from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century (2006: 147). He finds evidence for more than just “mere copying” (reinen Abschreibens), pointing to “elements, which the author/redactor of (p.210) the relevant version apparently read or heard in another version of the Sīra, which he remembered in the midst of redacting his own version, and which he preferred albeit nonsensically to work into his new version” (my translation). Amin Page 32 of 64

 

The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics Sweeney discusses written Malay literature: “It has often been remarked that every Malay copyist was a potential rewriter or a joint author.…It comes as no surprise…to read his following observation that ‘real freedom of the copyist is usually found in the kind of literature that is also orally transmitted’” (1980: 68). This phenomenon can affect the way a scribe lays out a text. The presentation of Psalm 119 differs in each of the four manuscripts from Qumran that preserve it: “these divergent spacing arrangements of Ps 119 likely arose from variations in the oral performance of this acrostic psalm” (S. Miller 2017: 93). And this phenomenon can appear in other scenarios, being restricted neither to those writing out words nor to those writing by hand. Musicologists, for instance, also speak of scribal performance. In “Manuscripts as Répertoires, Scribal Performance and the Performing Scribe,” Margaret Bent argues, “There is no such thing as a neutral copy or a neutral performance. Every copying and every performance subtly or grossly changes the composition” (1990: 144). In a piece that has caught the attention of non-musicologists (Nagy 1996b: 11 n. 14; Carr 2011: 21), Hendrick Van der Werf analyzes the different melodies found in different manuscripts for a given medieval French chanson: the melodies have a “common parentage…even if the discrepancies are considerable” (1965: 62); the variations are not the result of scribal error (63–5); the scribe “must have sung to himself a section from the manuscript in front of him…and then copied from memory what he had heard rather than what he had seen. Consequently he put himself in the position of a jongleur notating his own performance” (65–6, emphasis in original; cf. 1972: 26–34; Treitler 1981: 484). To account for the different melodies, one presumes that the version the scribe sang to himself stemmed in part from how he had heard the song sung previously. In her investigation of five fifteenth-century CE chansonniers (song books) from France’s Loire Valley, Jane Alden attributes variations to the scribes’ memorial recall: “Scribes would need to have known pieces by heart, probably from firsthand experience singing them, to move beyond mechanically reproducing what lay in front of them” (2010: 146). I refer as well to Thomas Pettitt’s survey of research into the compositors (typesetters) of broadside ballads: “A compositor can be seen adding changes of the kind which can also be encountered in oral transmission,…Although they are clearly copying the text from a sheet in front of them, as they read its text they are effectively singing the ballad in their minds, and printing what they hear” (2012a: 441). Here too one can infer that these changes arise partly from the compositor’s familiarity with orally performed versions of the ballad he prints or of others like it. I return to our scribes. A thirteenth-century CE compiler of a troubadour chansonnier, Bernart Amoros testifies in his own words to the interaction I have been tracing (Huot 1987: 333):

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The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics Bernart identifies himself as “clerk” and “scribe” and explains that he is a native of Auvergne, “don son estat maint bon trobador” (where many good troubadors are from). He assures us that he has “uistas et auzidas” (seen and heard) many songs, and as a result of his familiarity with oral and written productions, he has learned “tant en lart de trobar que (p.211) sai cognoisser e deuezir en rimas & en uulgar & en lati per cas e per verbe lo dreig trobar d’l fals” (so much of the art of making verse that I know how to recognize and distinguish in rhymes, in both vernacular and Latin, by case and by verb, the correct verse from the false…). These credentials authorize Bernart’s editorial activity in compiling and, as he tells us, frequently emending the songs; and he requests that no one attempt any further emendations unless they are well qualified for the job. Additional examples of the influence of the oral performance of traditional works on scribes could be cited: for instance, Jan-Dirk Müller’s discussions of medieval German epic and of medieval German courtly love poetry suggest a similar process in play in each case (2012: 314–19, 321–5). But as the previous review suffices to prove the point, let me sum up. Attempts to distinguish between “two kinds of variants, those resulting from the oral tradition and those from the scribal tradition” (Callewaert and Lath 1989: 120; cf. Kane 1988: 144–5; Orton 2000: 191) can be misleading. Rather, hearing oral performances of a specific work—call it work A—and/or of related works engenders a degree of familiarity with and competence in how to put together that work and/or works of that sort. This familiarity and competence influences what the scribe produces as he copies a written version of work A.17 As to why scribes perform in the first place, researchers observe that the text they make has a life in the community for which it is made: “vernacular texts were preserved to be heard and to be used” (Doane 1998: 51, emphasis in original); “the texts had to change as they were reproduced, because their use was centred on the present” (53); “texts are seized for present use and changed carelessly or deliberately under the pressure of immediate demands and are copied to be used, not preserved for future use” (54; cf. 1994a: 435; Liuzza 2000: 148). Fittingly, “a medieval scribe is usually in immediate contact with the community or individuals for which the writing is being done” (Doane 1991: 83). Just so, in discussing the late tenth-century CE Vercelli manuscript’s text of the Old English Soul and Body, Douglas Moffatt attends to the following aspect of the scribe’s performance: the copyist “might well have felt it his duty to illuminate obscure passages for the benefit of future readers who, like himself, might have only a passing interest in a poem’s artistry” (1992: 825; cf. Orton 2000: 85, 93, 104, 129–30, 132–3, 136–7, 151, 198). After a meticulous review of the variants in the manuscripts of the A version of the Middle English Piers Plowman that “make the text more easily intelligible” (1988: 128–36, quotation from 136), George Kane suggests that the scribes aimed thereby not only to help out subsequent readers but also, because the work was of “direct, personal Page 34 of 64

 

The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics moment” to the scribes too, to enhance the utility of the text for themselves (136–44, quotation from 136; cf. M. Fisher 2012: 6, 48, 52). I draw attention again to Person’s phrasing: Israelite scribes produce texts for “the on-going life of their communities” (cf. Fishbane 1988: 87; Ulrich 1999: 11, 24, 75; Jaffee 2001: 19; Thatcher 2008: 10; White Crawford 2008: 3; Lemmelijn 2012: 215; I. Young 2018: 163). Of the late Second Temple period, George Brooke writes, “The rewriting activity (p.212) must have been motivated by the desire to achieve some aim in a particular situation,” be it scholastic or legal or liturgical (2002: 35). So too Carr: “Insofar as [Mesopotamian] scribes did modify texts, it appears that they concentrated their efforts on those texts that were playing a continuing role in the project of scribal education and socialization” (2005: 41). A. Kirk sums up the matter: “The activities of scribes were driven by the exigency of any enactment of tradition—namely, to render in this case the chirographic [manuscript] tradition responsive to the realities and crises of the tradent community” (2008: 222, emphasis in original; cf. 228; Quinn 2010: 29). Scribes performed because they were fashioning texts for people to use. In Chapter 5, I discuss in detail what scribal performance entails and thereby deepen our understanding of the practice. For the moment, I add four general considerations to the discussion of scribal performance. First, along with the sources for the performing scribe’s departures from the exemplar on which previous scholarship tends to focus—written texts he had memorized and performances he had heard—I do not want to lose sight of marginalia and interlinearia. As I reviewed earlier (p. 199), discussions of interpolation refer to the scribe or the reader as the source of an interpolation. A reader’s marginal or interlinear comment, gloss, or attempt at emulation—to list a few possible responses to a text—might find its way into the main text in a subsequent copy. It “might find its way in” because a scribe opts to put it in (cf. Beit-Arié 1993: 42; Schmid 2008: 16–23; Ulrich 2010a: 218–19). Keeping marginalia and interlinearia in mind has the added salutary effect of not letting one forget that various individuals can contribute to what one sees in any given manuscript: the scribe does not operate alone but in tandem with editors and readers and other scribes (Parker 2008a: 133, 2008b: 175, 184; Schmid 2008; Mugridge 2016: 152–3). Second, a basic tenet of performance theory holds that a performance requires an audience (Diop 1995: 229; Kapchan 2003: 130, 133; Bauman 2012: 101). The scribe does not lack an audience (pace P. Evans 2017: 755–7). Not only does he witness his performance (cf. Glassie 2003: 185; Carlson 2004: 5; Oring 2011: 382 n. 3; Gingell with Roy 2012: 5; Karanika 2014: 22, 51, 189–90; M. Miller 2015: 26) but an audience witnesses the result of the performance: the text that he creates (cf. Bauman 1986: 105; Keith 2011: 62–4; Peretti 2017: 105). This audience could on any one occasion be a solitary reader or a group listening to

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The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics someone read aloud (Thomas 1992: 13; Jaffee 2001: 8). The scribe performs for these audiences. Third, a scribe is a mediator: he passes on a source text to a receiver. I return to material covered in Chapter 2. As Richard Bauman shows, a mediator can be a performer (2004: 128–58; cf. Nagy 1996b: 19–20). Among his three examples of “mediational performance,” that involving an Akan okyeame’s (spokesman) mediation of his chief’s words most clearly illustrates how a mediator functions as a performer. A chief speaks to his spokesman utterances intended for listeners who are themselves present. At times, the spokesman relays the chief’s words to the intended audience verbatim, but “by contrast with the low-keyed style of the chief, the okyeame’s relay involves performative display: it is louder, fuller, more lively in gesticulation and histrionics, vocally more expressive…, subject to open, public, on-record evaluation” (p.213) (Bauman 2004: 144). At other times, the spokesman engages in “analytic relay”: this mode “exploits the okyeame’s prerogative to embellish and enhance the chief’s message by paraphrase, elaboration, or proverbial reinforcement” (153); “analytical relay displays the okyeame’s skill to best advantage and is the most highly valued in aesthetic terms” (154). Just because a scribe is a mediator does not preclude his performing. Fourth, some scholars find that a performing scribe earns that label when he departs from his exemplar. Jonathan Watson studies Lawman’s Brut, a Middle English poem from the twelfth or thirteenth century CE that presents the story of King Arthur for the first time in English in writing (1998: 65, 72): reperformance seems limited to scenes of battle, in which we might readily expect, because of their highly stylized nature, the greatest concentration of residual orality.…Whatever privileged notion the scribes had of Lawman’s ‘authorship’ would surely recede, we might presume, in these stock battle treatments, for the textual signals transcend any one author:… We should expect the redactors in these stock battle scenes to “reperform” the text, to enter into a more elastic mode of composition, to participate in (with their co-creating audience) a traditionally resonant poetic matrix.… Not all of Lawman’s text is reperformed: for much of the narrative the scribes follow their shared script carefully. Commenting on the dissemination of Hebrew scriptural texts, Philip Davies contrasts a model that sees “each new inscription of a text as a performance” with the process of “copying” (2013: 39). Although attractive at first glance, neither proposal takes scholarship on performance into account. As I discussed previously (p. 16), a performer goes on record and assumes “responsibility for a display of communicative competence” (Bauman 2004: 110). Conversely, a teller stops performing when he becomes “unwilling to assume responsibility for an adequate narration” (117). Bauman reports on a tale told by Howard Bush: Page 36 of 64

 

The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics “whether on the basis of a lack of ability or knowledge, he excuses himself from full competence and thus from full responsibility in recounting the story” (116). Over the course of telling a narrative, a performer may move in and out of performance mode (124): Bush’s presentation reveals a shifting hierarchy of dominance in this text, in which he is willing to assume responsibility for the correct doing of the orientation section, disclaims performance in the course of recounting the central narrated event…and breaks through into full artistic performance at the end,… A scribe never stops performing; he never disclaims responsibility. He performs both when he sticks to his exemplar and when he departs from it. Although, as will be apparent in Chapter 5, it is easiest to see the performer at work when he deviates from the model, verbatim repetition does not disqualify one as a performer. Attempts to valorize scribes by objecting to talk of “mere copyists” (Huot 1987: 333; Person 1998: 602; Pulikottil 2001: 35, 200, 203; van der Toorn 2007: 109; Milstein 2016: 210; S. Miller 2017: 100; cf. Talmon 1975: 381; Herzog 2006: 147; Tov 2008: 211 n. 17; Haines-Eitzen 2013: 489) backfire and obscure what is going on. As I noted in subsection 2.2.2, a competent presentation may require “replicating the author’s text correctly,…reproducing it well, marking it as worthy (p.214) of special communicative care and effort” (Bauman 2004: 152), and to assume responsibility for the competent presentation of a text means to take on the role of performer. In this vein, consider Greg Urban’s exploration of “whether the social relations between originator and copier affect the copying process” (1996: 23). He studies two reproductions of a tape-recorded performance of a mythic narrative by Nil: one, a transcription by a young man, Nãnmla; the other, an oral re-presentation by an elder, Wãñpõ. All three lived on a government-run indigenous reservation in Brazil; like all the native members of the community, they were related to one another, with Nil and Wãñpõ being cousins (24, 26). Urban reports: “Nãnmla was constantly at pains to produce an exact replica of the ‘authoritative’ discourse he heard on the tape” (24–5); “Nãnmla’s transcriptions are generally closer to phoneme-by-phoneme accuracy” (28). The elder, Wãñpõ, departs from the original because he does not think Nil should have the last word (36): Wãñpõ does not regard the relationship between originator and original discourse as privileged, although he did acknowledge Nil’s mastery of the traditional culture and grant that it was superior to his own. Unlike Nãnmla, who hung on the authoritativeness of Nil’s words, Wãñpõ saw the original as itself another copy. As such, it was not necessarily more definitive than other copies. Since Wãñpõ had heard and himself told this myth on numerous occasions, he had a sense that the discourse produced by Nil was a copy of other originals to which he had equal access.…When Page 37 of 64

 

The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics Wãñpõ transforms the discourse through deletion and substitution, he is in effect responding to it, albeit not explicitly. He is not only copying it; he is using the original as a kind of cue or stimulus for telling his own story, producing his own original discourse. At times, a scribe behaves like Nãnmla, reproducing the text before him. At times, he adopts an attitude toward the act of replication akin to Wãñpõ’s attitude toward Nil’s utterance. One could adopt this latter stance who has often heard and read this or similar material and who does not privilege the text before him as the sole possible instantiation of the work’s presentation (cf. Machan 1989: 156; Watson 2002: 291; A. Kirk 2008: 233). No matter which pose he chooses, the scribe performs in taking responsibility for transmission, just as Nãnmla and Wãñpõ do, each in his own way. I find it preferable not to restrict the use of the term “(re)performance” to a particular kind of scribal act. An effort to distinguish kinds of scribal performances could concentrate on texts that have no corrections or variants, texts that have corrections by the original scribe intended to replace or add to what was initially written (cf. S. West 1967: 223; Pulikottil 2001: 16; Tov 2004: 223, 2012a: 202–4; Epp 2005: 370; Hernández 2006: 58, 137–8; Head 2008: 61– 2 (but see Comfort 2004: 43); Royse 2008: esp. 74–9; Montanari 2011: 4–6; von Weissenberg 2011; Wakelin 2014), texts in which the original scribe presents variant readings side by side—“the premeditated retention of parallel readings” (Talmon 1989: 85; cf. Talmon 1975: 344; Tov 2012a: 225–7; Person forthcoming)—texts that have variant readings written in the margins or between lines by the original scribe (Maltomini and Pernigotti 1999: 303), texts that contain exegetical commentary provided by the original scribe in the margins, et cetera (cf. T. Allen 1899a; McNamee 2007: e.g. 17–18, 23–5, 86, 92). One could also compare scribal performances of literary and subliterary texts, such as manuals and commentaries (p.215) that were especially “fluid in content” (McNamee 2007: 34; cf. 128; Zetzel 2005: 154; Millett 2005: p. lv). The reader will not find such explorations here.

4.5. The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics Some researchers contrast the scribal practices that allow for the performance evident in their corpora with what they take to be Greco-Roman scribal practice (Haines-Eitzen 2000: 130; A. Kirk 2008: 224). Yet this opposition can be overstated (A. Kirk 2008: 224, 231) and should not keep one from applying the findings about scribal performance to the wild Homeric papyri. Subsection 4.5.1 argues that the scribes behind the texts of the wild papyri are to be understood as performing as they copy. Subsection 4.5.2 asks after the most plausible time frame for the existence of such agents, and subsection 4.5.3 inquires into their status.

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The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics 4.5.1. The Wild Papyri and the Comparanda

I address in more detail here a matter raised in section 4.2: the Homeric data resemble the data with which those who speak of scribal performance work. I start with individual letters and syllables. Note the assimilation of consonants at various points throughout the papyri, such as in verses 287 and 288 of P480a (quoted earlier): κέκλετο· ταὶ δ’ ἄ]ρ’ ἀόλλισσαγ κατὰ ἄστ[υ] γε̣ραιάς· / αὐτὴ δ’ ἐς] θάλαμογ κατεβήσετο κηωίεντα. The forms are properly aollisan and thalamon, but, when spoken aloud, a nu followed by a kappa sounds like a gamma. Stephanie West points as well to “the scribal tendency to assimilate a final ν to an initial labial [β, μ, π, φ]” (1967: 191, cf. 196). As Graeme Bird observes, “These represent the way the language was heard rather than seen” (2010: 100; cf. 95, 99). Whereas Bird imagines how the poets sounded when they performed, I look rather to Alger Doane’s formulation that a scribe “rehears” and “mouths the words.” Note as well the papyri’s attempts to address metrical irregularities and hiatus (as documented by S. West) and their gemination (doubling) of “an initial consonant (δ, λ, μ, ν, ρ, σ) when it lengthens a preceding short vowel” (S. West 1967: 113): these phenomena appear to one hearing and mouthing a text. By the way, this rehearing and mouthing takes place twice: once when the scribe reads the exemplar and once when he writes his copy (Royse 2008: 90). Two opportunities arise for the scribe’s oral and aural interaction with his exemplar to shape what he writes. Parallels appear in ancient Near Eastern works. Some variants in manuscripts of Tablet XI of the Standard Babylonian version of the epic of Gilgamesh likely originate from “differences in the underlying pronunciation of certain forms” (Hobson 2012: 80), and some variants in Pentateuchal texts from Qumran likely reflect differences in (p.216) pronunciation (119–23). Other variants in Jewish scriptural texts stem from different oral renderings of the same consonantal framework. For instance, compare the responses to‫ ר ואמ‬at Isaiah 40: 6 (VanderKam 2012: 10; cf. Ulrich 2015: 44). The Masoretic Text understood it as a third person form, “he said”: “A voice says, ‘Cry out!’ And he said, ‘What shall I cry?’” 1QIsaa, reading a first person form, inserts a vav and a he ‫)ה)ואומר‬: “A voice says, ‘Cry out!’ And I said, ‘What shall I cry?’” (tr. VanderKam). Different vocalizations of the consonantal framework‫ ח ויפ‬at Genesis 2: 7 produce the “different anthropological concepts” in the Masoretic Text’s “Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the earth and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” and the Samaritan Pentateuch’s “Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the earth and let breathe in his nostrils the breath of life” (Schorch 2016: 121–2). Other traditions abound in the same sort of variation within lines that mark the wild Homeric papyri vis-à-vis the medieval textual traditions of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Manuscripts J and T of Tablet XI of the Standard Babylonian version of the epic of Gilgamesh read “your hatch/door” whereas manuscript W has “your Page 39 of 64

 

The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics boat” (Hobson 2012: 83). Manuscript C has “Erra may destroy the land” whereas manuscript J attempts to illuminate this formulation with “Erra may destroy life” (85; cf. George 2003: 424–5; I. Young 2007). At Isaiah 45: 7, the Masoretic Text gives, “I make weal [‫ ]שלום‬and create woe [‫ ”]רע‬whereas 1QIsaa reads, “I make good [‫ ]טוב‬and create woe” [‫]רע‬: “The cave 1 manuscript [1QIsaa] uses an antonym [good (‫ ])טוב‬to contrast with ‫[ רע‬woe], not the less directly opposed ‫[ שלום‬weal]” (VanderKam 2012: 10–11; cf. Pulikottil 2001: 154–6). Raymond Person discusses “synonymous readings” (Tov 2012a: 257–8), different ways to say the same thing, in the parallel texts of 2 Kings 18–20 and Isaiah 36– 9 (on Hezekiah) and of 2 Kings 25 and Jeremiah 52 (on Zedekiah and Nebuchadnezzar) (1998: 604–5). Doane juxtaposes the texts of Soul and Body in the tenth-century CE Vercelli and Exeter manuscripts (1994a: 426–9). I present a portion of the work that he discusses (lines 17 to 22), following his lead in highlighting points of difference:

Vercelli (known as Soul and Body I) (Krapp 1932: 55)

Exeter (known as Soul and Body II) (Muir 2000a: 276– 7)

Hwæt, druh ðu dreorega, to hwan drehtest ðu me, eorðan fulnes eal forwisnad, lames gelicnes! Lyt ðu gemundest to hwan þinre sawle þing  siðþan wurde, syððan of lichoman  læded wære! Hwæt, wite ðu me, weriga!

Hwæt, drug þu dreorga,  to hwon dreahtest þu me eorþan fylnes?  Eal forweornast, lames gelicnes.  Lyt þu geþohtes to won þinre sawle sið   siþþan wurde, siþþan heo of lichoman   læded wære. Hwæt, wite þu me, werga.

Lo! thou bloody dust, why did you afflict me, foulness of earth, entirely dried up, you figure (likeness) of clay! Little did you remember what the condition of your soul would be afterward when from the body (it) would be lead! Lo! can you blame me, accursed one!

Lo! thou bloody dust, why did you afflict me, foulness of earth? (You are) entirely wasted away, you figure (likeness) of clay. Little did you think what the journey of your soul would be afterwards when it from the body would be lead. Lo! can you blame me, accursed one.18

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The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics (p.217) Peter Orton reviews numerous examples of these sorts of variants in Old English poems (2000: 99–119).19 For instance, he compares two lines in the B text of the Battle of Brunanburh with those in the C text (as a representative of A, C, and D) (100, my emphasis): B: þær læg secg monig. / garum forgrunden.       “There lay many a man destroyed by spears.” C: þær læg secg monig. / garum ageted.       “There lay many a man destroyed by spears.”

Jonathan Watson studies scribal performance in the renditions of stock scenes of battle in Lawman’s Brut. He juxtaposes manuscript C’s with manuscript O’s rendition of verses 13446–50 (1998: 68, my emphasis (after Watson); original language texts from Brook and Leslie 1978: 704–5): C: Þer heo leien stille⹎ ane lutle stunde. ⁊ hit agon daiȝen⹎ and deor gunnen waȝeȝen. Þa comen Arðures men⹎ quecchen after streten. riht þene ilke wæi⹎ þer þe oðer uerde læi. heo riden singinge⹎ segges weoren bli[ð]e. There they lay quiet for a short while. And it began to grow light, and the animals began to stir. Then Arthur’s men came, straining to advance behind. Right then, that same way, where the other force lay. They rode singing; men were happy. O: Þare hi leȝen stille⹎ one lutele stunde. and hit gan to daȝeȝe⹎ and þe deor to pleoye. Þo comen Arthures men⹎ faste in þan weye. riht þane ilke wa(y) .(ar) þe oþer ferde lay. hi(i).…. singende⹎ þe cniht(es we)ren (bol)de There they lay quiet for a short while. And it began to grow light, and the animals to play. Then Arthur’s men came, fast by that way. Right then, that same way, where the other force lay. They (rode) singing; the knights were bold.

In an analysis of scribal performances of the fifteenth-century CE The Seige of Jerusalem, Watson points to the way three manuscripts (DUC) handle a verse and the way two others (AL) handle the same verse (2002: 294): dym[m]ed þe skyes: dymmed (DUC); dynnede (A); dymned (L) her feþres r[y]s[t]en: to reste (DUC); rysten (A); rusken (L) The scribes of DUC offer “a ‘dimming’ (darkening) field and perfectly restful birds—while the others (AL) evoke a ‘dinning’ field and an animated, feathershaking bird.” I cite here (p.218) as well those who do not speak of scribal Page 41 of 64

 

The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics performance but deploy the related concept of variance.20 Bernard Cerquiglini points to differences in two manuscripts of the twelfth-century CE Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval (1999: 40–5 (his emphasis), cf. 73–4). For instance: Lor clarté come les estoiles Font quant solaus lieve ou la lune (T) …their brightness as the stars do when the sun rises or the moon lor clarté come les estoiles qant li solauz lieve, et la lune (A) …their brightness like stars when the sun rises, and the moon

John Dagenais highlights differences in the manuscripts of Libro de Buen Amor: for instance, “831b, which reads ‘loçana mente amada’ (‘loved lustily’) in S (49r) and ‘loca mente amada’ (‘loved madly’) in G (39v), represents a variance” (1994: 130).21 Pluses and minuses (analogues to what the Homerist calls plus and minus verses) appear in the textual records of other traditions. For instance, David Carr surveys the Old Babylonian and Standard Babylonian versions of the Anzu epic and manuscripts of the Old Babylonian, Middle Assyrian, and Late Standard Version of the Etana epic. He finds instances of expansions of “one or more additional lines” in the move from the OB to the SB Anzu (2011: 66–7) and “a more complex relationship of pluses and minuses” in the iterations of the Etana epic (67–70). Russell Hobson traces the “expansive pluses” and “explicating pluses” in manuscripts of Tablet XI of the Standard Babylonian version of Gilgamesh (2012: 84–6; cf. George 2003: 423–4). Person juxtaposes the Hebrew exemplar of the Old Greek’s Jeremiah with the Masoretic Text’s Jeremiah, pointing to examples of “additions providing specificity” in the latter: “additions of titles, proper names, adjectives, adverbs, divine names and epithets, and (p. 219) standard prophetic formula in the expansive MT” (1998: 605–6).22 Zooming in on the Masoretic Text’s and two Qumran manuscripts’ renditions of Daniel 8: 1–5 and 5: 12, Eugene Ulrich concludes “that 4QDana and 4QDanb stand in agreement against the MT in four readings, all of which are pluses relative to the MT” (1999: 161). In his study of 1QIsaa, Paulson Pulikottil reviews “the addition of words in the scroll, from a single letter (prepositions, for example) to a complete line of text” (2001: 105). Orton reviews “longer interpolations” of a half line or of one or two lines in the Old English Daniel and Soul and Body (Vercelli manuscript) (2000: 139–44). In a discussion of Piers Plowman, Tim William Machan explores the addition of four verses (91–4) in the manuscript labeled Harley 875 (1991: 239).

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The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics The motivations behind these pluses resemble those behind some plus verses in the wild Homeric papyri. One can compare Hobson’s attributing “explicating pluses” to a desire for clarification (2012: 84–5) and Person’s speaking of “additions providing specificity” (1998: 605) with, for instance, S. West’s suggesting that an “interpolated line removes the ambiguity” (1967: 48). Moreover, in a move relevant for a student of the Homeric papyri, manuscripts of Mesopotamian literature, Jewish scripture, and the Second Testament contain pluses in the form of harmonizations that render passages that overlap in some way even more alike (cf. Pulikottil 2001: 56–61, 70–1, 206; Hernández 2006: 68, 78, 107–8, 116, 144–5, 149; Parker 2008a: 338–9; Royse 2008: 196, 343–4, 396, 544, 609, 698; Carr 2011: 90–8; Tov 2012a: 258–9).23 For example, as James VanderKam reviews (2012: 11–12; cf. White Crawford 2008: 30–2), the Masoretic Text’s version of Exodus 20: 11 reports, “For six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it” (tr. VanderKam). The Masoretic Text’s Deuteronomy 5: 15 states, “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched (p.220) arm; therefore the Lord God commanded you to keep the sabbath day” (tr. VanderKam). Attend now to 4QDeutn, a “small” manuscript from Qumran intended “for study or liturgical purposes” (White Crawford 2008: 30). Toward the end of Deuteronomy 5: 15, it includes material found in Exodus 20: 11: “…to keep the sabbath and to hallow it. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them and rested the seventh day; so the Lord blessed the sabbath day and hallowed it” (tr. VanderKam). These harmonizing renditions parallel the concordance interpolations that account for some of the plus verses in the Homeric papyri. I quote S. West’s description again (1967: 12–13): Passages containing many versus iterati, like Θ [Iliad 8]…or a summary of a typical scene described elsewhere in greater detail…attracted plus-verses, while a passage for which there are no close parallels elsewhere in Homer was likely to remain free from them. Concordance interpolation exercised a powerful attraction: thus a line or a group of lines which follow a particular formula in one place are inserted after it in another passage where they may be rather less suitable. Many of these plus-verses have been transferred verbatim from other parts of the Homeric poems, or have been created by the combination of two common formulae;… Harmonizing pluses and concordance interpolations arise out of a sense, conscious or not (cf. Carr 2011: 98), that certain elements readily or even naturally go together. As the two previous paragraphs illustrate, pluses garner the most attention, but, to repeat, scribes in other traditions omit material just like the scribes who generated our wild papyri of the Homeric epics. For instance, painstaking Page 43 of 64

 

The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics studies of a range of Second Testament manuscripts make plain that “scribes from the first several centuries tended to omit rather than to add” (Royse 2008: 717–36, quotation from 732; cf. Hernández 2006: 193–5; Haines-Eitzen 2013: 488). Orton discusses the omission of lines in Old English poems, such as in a copy of Caedmon’s Hymn and the version of Soul and Body in the Vercelli manuscript (2000: 53, 92–3). The wild papyri’s variations resemble what those who talk about scribal performance see in their texts. I propose, therefore, that one envision the scribe behind a wild papyrus performing as he copies. The putative Greek scribe does not have the same duties or status as, say, a Mesopotamian or Israelite scribe (Horsley 2007: 72–3, 76–82; Jaillard 2013). Yet, in so far as he is a performer, the scribe behind the text of a wild papyrus resembles the performing scribes found in the other cultures surveyed here. Assuming that the Homeric papyri reveal their scribes performing as they copy, my investigation becomes twofold. First, I engage in a positivistic enterprise: in subsection 4.5.2, I weigh the evidence for these texts emerging in the Hellenistic period or earlier in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, and in subsection 4.5.3 I think a bit more about the status of those who produced the texts. Second, I explore what a performance that produces a wild text entails: in Chapter 5, I return to linguistic anthropological and folkloristic work on performance to illuminate the performances evident in the papyri. (p.221) 4.5.2. When?

Certain conditions produced texts of the kind preserved in the wild Homeric papyri. Three factors, none requiring lengthy explication, indicate a terminus post quem. One should consider four other factors, some requiring lengthier explication than others, when pondering a terminus ante quem. First, the wild texts appeared after the emergence of the Iliad and of the Odyssey, likely by way of the sort of textualization event studied in Chapter 3 (and less likely from the hands of writing oral poets). Second, the wild texts emerged at a time when written texts of all kinds are becoming ever more present. A reading public existed in Athens in the fifth century BCE (Morgan 1999; M. L. West 2001: 19–21; Whitmarsh 2004: 109, 121; Scodel 2007: 131), even if the extent and nature of literacy remain subjects of debate (cf. W. Harris 1989: 328–9). Third, just as a demand for texts prompts Anglo-Saxon, Israelite, and Mesopotamian scribal performance, a community that made use of the Iliad and the Odyssey created the demand for the texts. One could single out rhapsodes, a group likely to own texts per Xenophon Memorabilia 4.2.10 and Plato Phaedrus 252b (cf. Lentz 1989: 36–8; M. L. West 1997: 600; González 2013: 176). Moreover, just as scholars used texts in Oxyrhynchus (Turner 1956: 144; Epp 2005: 513–16), one should imagine that historians, philosophers, orators, sophists, and schoolteachers bolstered the market for copies of the Iliad Page 44 of 64

 

The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics and the Odyssey as well (cf. Cassio 1999: 82; M. L. West 2001: 24; Rengakos 2011: 168; González 2013: 275 n. 206). These three factors provide a terminus post quem of the (late?) fifth century BCE (cf. Haslam 2011). Four factors help one think about the more complex matter of a terminus ante quem: one should not assume that the variations in the papyri date from the inscription of the texts in the papyri (cf. Reiter 1996: 159 n. 36; Beadle 2013: 223; Wakelin 2014: 45). First, scribes capable of manipulating the oral traditional idiom, perhaps only when they have a prompt to follow, produce the wild texts. As John Miles Foley says, “We must make the minimal assumption that the writers knew and could use the oral traditional style, otherwise we cannot explain their characteristic variation” (1990: 29). The question is, how did they gain this competence? If one thinks the scribe was a rhapsode, one can easily answer the question: the variations in the papyri testify to rhapsodic knowledge of the Iliad and the Odyssey (or the Iliad and the Odyssey). Others assign the variants to “scribal milieus” (Jensen 2011: 229), not rhapsode-copyists. It is one thing to imagine that rhapsodes owned texts (cf. M. L. West 2001: 20), but it is another to imagine that they wrote or copied texts. If one has trouble envisioning a rhapsode systematically or just regularly altering his copy of a text (Apthorp 1980: 68; Jensen 2011: 216), one should also have trouble envisioning a rhapsode concerned with the production of new copies of a text. Moreover, a rhapsode with a side business in producing texts for rhapsodes and non-rhapsodes alike seems farfetched (pace M. L. West 2001: 26)—one does not hear of actors, for instance, copying dramatic scripts to sell to the public—and yet that is what one would have to imagine because for these texts to survive at the rate they do they would need to (p.222) be copies for a large group of users, not copies only for rhapsodes (cf. S. West 1967: 26). I play out the scenario according to which the scribe is a copyist—meaning, to repeat, someone who, not an oral performer himself, produces copies of texts for others. Recall that some scholarship on scribal performance points to scribes who memorized texts and relied on the text they carried in their memory when copying. Perhaps the copyist, after the manner of Xenophon’s Niceratus (Symposium 3.5) or in keeping with the educational practices mentioned by Plato’s Athenian (Laws 810e–811a; cf. Protagoras 325d–326a), memorized texts of the Homeric epics inspired by such efforts in his school days (cf. Robb 1994: 188; Cribiore 2001: 179, 194–7, 213; Carr 2005: 91–109, 2010: 22–3; Yamagata 2005: 119, 124–5; D. Pritchard 2015b: 113–14, 121). Or maybe the copyist did not need such a formal base; maybe what he internalized as he copied provided sufficient training. After all, on occasion the medieval copyists who produced texts of the Homeric epics generated variants from “a good knowledge of Homer,” variants that resemble those in ancient manuscripts and sometimes even coincide with them (M. L. West 2001: 146, 156, quotation from 156; cf. Page 45 of 64

 

The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics Haslam 1997: 87–8). Either way, one can imagine that what the copyist had stored in his memory shaped what he wrote as he copied. Niceratus, however, goes on to remark that he listens to rhapsodic recitations of Homeric poetry “nearly every day” (ὀλίγου ἀν’ ἑκάστην ἡμέραν, Xenophon Symposium 3.6 Marchant). One is perhaps better off assuming that in order to produce the sort of performance evident in the wild papyri a copyist needed multiple sources of inspiration, as it were: from what he memorized; from what he internalized as he copied; and from what he absorbed as he listened to rhapsodes perform. I stress again the point made by Alger Doane and others that a scribe’s connections to an oral tradition enable his performance: “Individual native scribes must have been more or less familiar with traditional performances, meaning that the texts they copied came to them not only via the exemplar but also through the mother tongue and memory” (Doane 2003: 62).24 The copyist could learn a great deal from a rhapsode, not just the various ways to render a given section (such as a proem: Tomasso 2016) or a given scene. Focusing on Plato’s characterization of the rhapsode as a hermeneus “interpreter” of Homeric (p.223) poetry, José González’s discussion illuminates what the copyist might have heard from a rhapsode (2013: 302, 304): initially the explanatory function of the rhapsode would have largely consisted of hexameters composed in performance, joining well-known episodes or speeches, effecting transitions between them, elaborating the twists and turns of the poems’ plots, as well as the thoughts, feelings, and motivations of participating gods and heroes.…Rhapsodic exposition shares to some extent the character of poetic composition.…Over time, the verse component must have given way to an increasingly large proportion of explanatory prose,…25 Both the rhapsode’s hexameters and his prose expositions could filter back into a copyist’s subsequent rendition of a text. An instructive analogy for the latter bit of alchemy comes in Martin Jaffee’s discussion of scribal practice in the Second Temple period (cf. Talmon 1989: 131–41). Written texts were publicly performed along with “the orally mediated interpretative traditions associated with written texts” (Jaffee 2001: 7), and there existed a “relatively open border” between the two (19). As a result a faithful copy might well include interpretative material that clarified the author’s thought in addition to the author’s actual words. The scribe’s judgment about what the author had meant, in other words, was legitimately included in the record of what, according to the manuscript tradition, he had said. (19)

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The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics One should situate the scribes who produced wild texts in a time when and a place where the oral performance of Homeric poetry was prominent. If one attributes the wild texts to rhapsodes, one would likely, following Thomas Allen (section 4.3 (p. 197)), place the production of the wild texts in a time when and place where rhapsodes who specialized in Homeric poetry flourished. Moreover, given what I just reviewed in the two previous paragraphs, if one attributes the wild texts to copyists, one should also place the production of the wild texts in a time when and place where rhapsodes flourished. At this point, one could make two arguments. One could argue that the Hellenistic-era scribes introduced variants, or one could argue that the variations were already in the texts that the Hellenistic-era scribes copied. In the former case, to supplement arguments for the appearance of Hellenistic literary sensibilities in the papyri (van der Valk 1964: 557, 564–6; cf. Graziosi and Haubold 2015: 6 n. 11), one would stress the evidence for rhapsodic performance of Homeric poetry in Ptolemaic Egypt and in the Hellenistic period more broadly. In the latter case, one would stress the evidence for performance in the Classical period. Gregory Nagy contends, “The ‘eccentric’ papyri dating from around 300 to 150 BC…reveal a later and relatively more fluid phase of rhapsodic tradition” (1996b: 144; (p.224) cf. 177; 2003: 70; González 2013: 333). Yet many of the variants, the plus verses, for example, are old: they belong to what Nagy terms the “Homerus Auctus” (2009: 263–7, 276, 280, 354–6; section 3.9 (p. 177)). Derek Collins follows Nagy: the variations in the texts of the papyri emerge when the papyri we have are written; some of the variants are old (2004: esp. 204–5). As I reviewed earlier, Collins imagines at work “the Ptolemaic equivalent of the Homeridae of Chios or the Creophylei [sic] of Samos” (216), an exceptionally precise reconstruction that counterbalances Marchinus van der Valk’s vague “Greco-Egyptians” (1964: 483). One may even consider the proposition that in the Ptolemaic era Egyptian copyists, bilingual and acquainted with Homeric poetry (Thompson 1994: 75–8, 82; 2009: 408, 414; Vierros 2014), could produce the wild texts. To argue for Egypt as the setting for the initial creation of the wild texts, one would point to the evidence for oral performances of Homeric poetry in Ptolemaic Egypt. Ptolemy II Philadelphus (309–246 BCE) hired a rhapsode to perform at his marriage to his sister Arsinoe (Plutarch Convivial Questions 736e) (D. Collins 2004: 205–6). Athenaeus reports, “Jason, in the third book of his work on the Divine Honors to Alexander, says that in the great theater of Alexandria Hegesias the comedian acted the poetry of Hesiod, and Hermophantos acted that of Homer” (16.620d) (D. Collins 2004: 208–9, his translation; González 2013: 483). Hermophantos can be placed in the third quarter of the third century BCE (González 2013: 499). Documentary papyri dating between the second and fourth centuries CE attest to the performance of homēristai in Page 47 of 64

 

The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics theaters and recurring festivals in Egypt (D. Collins 2004: 210–11; González 2013: 454–63). Even if one can only situate these performers in “late Hellenistic and Roman imperial times,” “the over three-hundred-year interval between the end of the classical era and the first instance of the overt declaimer-actor should itself convince us that Homeric poetry must have survived in the hands of other artists who kept its performance alive and a part of the festival setting” (González 2013: 451, 480). One would stipulate that this continuity obtained in Egypt. Of course, just because a text is found somewhere does not mean it was created there (Epp 2005: 364–6, 408, 419; cf. Bird 2010: 68). One could argue that scribes produced the wild texts not in Egypt, but in other parts of the Greekspeaking world in the Hellenistic period. A scribe somewhere in the Greekspeaking world fashioned a wild text, and that text made its way to Egypt, or a scribe somewhere in the Greek-speaking world fashioned a wild text, and that text made its way to Egypt where it was copied. Evidence for the oral performance of Homeric poetry in the Hellenistic period comes in two forms. One, the aforementioned homēristai performed, probably solo (González 2013: 461), well into the third century CE. Again, their emergence testifies to the continuity of the performance of Homeric poetry after the Classical era. One could attribute this continuity in part to the rhapsodes who belonged to the guilds of Dionysian artists (tekhnitai) formed first in the third century BCE (González 2013: 467–8, 480–1; Tsagalis 2018b: 118). They bring me to my second point. Two, victor lists from Hellenistic-era festivals refer to rhapsodes from a wide range of places performing in a wide range of places (cf. Chaniotis 2010: 259– 60; Tsagalis (p.225) 2018b). The question becomes what these rhapsodes performed. Sometimes, (a) the victor list refers to a rhapsode. Sometimes, (b) the victor list refers to both a rhapsode and a composer of new poems, a poiētēs epōn. In the case of (a), “it would have been odd if rhapsodes performed new epic poems written for this occasion in the absence not only of the poet himself but of an actual contest in which this poet competed” (Tsagalis 2018b: 119). They probably performed traditional epic poetry (Tsagalis 2018b: 121). In the case of (b), Martin L. West suggests, “Rhapsodes in these competitions presumably recited the competing poets’ new poems” (2010: 7). By contrast, González allows for the possibility that the rhapsode performed what the poiētēs epōn wrote but considers it likely that the rhapsode performed “the traditional repertoire (Homer, Hesiod, Arkhilokhos, and others)” and the poiētēs epōn “composed and performed new epic poetry” (2013: 482, 488–91, quotations from 488–9; cf. Tsagalis 2018b: 119–121). Even if M. L. West is right and the rhapsode did not perform the traditional repertoire, Homeric poetry need not have been

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The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics absent: the poiētēs epōn may have used some of the same thematic and compositional mechanisms found in Homeric poetry. Such is the evidence for the performance of Homeric poetry in the Hellenistic period. Yet it may be safer to assume that there were more, and more regular, oral performances of Homeric poetry in the Classical period throughout Greece than there were in the Hellenistic period. Christos Tsagalis presents the abundant evidence for the performance of Homeric poetry in the Classical era (2018a). He concludes, “Rhapsodes performed throughout the Greek world: Asia Minor (Klaros, Ephesos, Mykale, Phokaia), Attica (Athens, Brauron, Eleusis, Marathon), the Aegean (Delos, Samos), Cyprus, central and northern Greece (Delphi, Dodona, Eretria, Naupaktos), the Peloponnese (Epidaurus, Olympia, Sikyon), and Syracuse” (66). M. L. West opines, “We know from Lykourgos that the epics were still being recited at the Panathenaia in 330, but it is doubtful how much longer the custom continued” (2010: 5). Note that this presumed diminution occurred in Athens, a city that took its performances of Homeric poetry seriously (cf. Nagy 2010). M. L. West adds of rhapsodes in the Hellenistic period (2010: 7): Their continuing activity at festivals is documented by inscriptions. However, these records never specify what poetry the rhapsodes were reciting. We cannot take it for granted that it was always or even usually Homer. As remarked above, the public appetite for hearing rather than reading Homer may have waned by this time. One should imagine the scribe who produced the variants in the wild texts living in a time when and a place where the public oral performance of Homeric poetry was a recurring and regular part of life (cf. Bird 2010: 58). Put differently, it is easier to imagine the performing scribe at work in a time when and a place where more Homeric poetry was being publicly performed than in a time when and a place where less Homeric poetry was being publicly performed. This factor may encourage one to assign the material, the poetry, in the wild texts to scribes in the Classical period as opposed to scribes in Ptolemaic Egypt or anywhere in Greece in the Hellenistic period. One inclined in this direction can highlight three other factors (my second, third, and fourth factors). (p.226) Second, scribal performance is not just a matter of being able to work within the traditional stylistic parameters of Homeric poetry. As noted in section 4.4, Greg Urban’s study of attitudes toward textual reproduction suggests that the sort of scribal performance one sees in the papyri requires the scribe’s feeling entitled to “copy” and “tell own’s one story” simultaneously. To translate into an idiom familiar to Homerists, one can say that the scribe has to feel entitled to recompose in performance. Performing scribes are aware of what they do (cf. Ulrich 1999: 11, 24; Ehrman 2011: 337–41): they know they in part recompose in performance even if they might not put it in those terms. Their Page 49 of 64

 

The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics recomposition has to be acceptable both to themselves and to their audiences. (I return to the sources of the material they use when recomposing in Chapter 5.) Once again, the argument could be made that it is easier to envision such individuals at work in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE than in the Hellenistic period. One would point here to Nagy’s evolutionary model (but not to his dating of the emergence of the texts in the wild papyri: see p. 223). In the Classical period some degree of recomposition in the oral performance of the Iliad and the Odyssey remained a component of their performance as opposed to absolute and strict adherence to a script (cf. González 2013: 281). In the Hellenistic period, there emerged “a movement toward standardization” (Nagy 2009: 5) and the reliance on “scripts” in the performance tradition, a script for Nagy being “a prerequisite for performance” (2009: 5; cf. González 2013: 294–5). Third, one may choose to place the creation of the wild texts in the papyri in the Classical period because what one could characterize as wild Homeric texts appear in other sources from that period. Quotations of the Iliad and the Odyssey in the work of Classical-era authors sometimes behave like the texts in the wild papyri. They conform to the medieval texts for the most part, but they show variations within lines and plus and minus verses when compared with those texts (cf. van der Valk 1964: 265; S. West 1967: 11; Haslam 1997: 74–7; Olding 2007: 159).26 Moreover, these variations are not errors. One could believe, for instance, that “what is in Plato came from Homer” (Lohse 1967: 226, my translation). Perhaps these quotations reflect what an author found in an actual text he consulted, or perhaps they reflect what the author concocted on his own, or perhaps they reflect what an author concocted on his own after consulting a text (cf. van der Valk 1964: 311, 322; Olding 2007: 160; Bird 2010: 71; Efstathiou 2016: 110–12). They likely testify both to the existence of wild Homeric texts at the time these authors worked and to the prevalence of practices that could generate a wild text. These witnesses support assigning the creation of the wild texts in the papyri to the Classical era. Fourth, on a few occasions extant wild papyri reveal “a surprising amount of agreement” (Haslam 1997: 64). P432 (TM 61227), written between 250 and 200 BCE, and the second-century BCE P217 (TM 61193) share “two separate verses unknown to (p.227) the later tradition ([Il.] 12.189b and 190a) as well as a version of 192 quite different from the vulgate’s” (Haslam 1997: 65), although P432 has a plus verse at 12.130a that does not appear in P217 (S. West 1967: 91; Apthorp 1980: 155). P31 (TM 61238), written between 250 and 200 BCE (S. West 1967: 223), and P186 (TM 61249), dating from the end of the third or the start of the second century BCE (Hurst 1986: 223), share a plus verse at Od. 9.537a (subsection 5.3.2 (p. 267)). Polygenesis being unlikely (and P217 not being a copy of P432, nor P31 and P186 being immediate kin), these sorts of moments suggest that the variations entered the textual tradition before the creation of the papyri we possess (cf. Huys 1988: 68–9). Similarly, P40 (TM 61203), dating from between 285 and 250 BCE according to Stephanie West Page 50 of 64

 

The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics (1967: 40) and from the first half of the second century BCE according to M. L. West (2001: 90), has two plus verses at Il. 2.855a–b (section 5.3). The scribe who wrote P40 cannot have authored them because they appear, according to Strabo Geography 12.3.5, already in the fourth-century BCE historian Callisthenes’s text of the Iliad (Bolling 1925: 78). Even if the scribe of P40 “took over the ‘learned text’ of Kallisthenes” (van der Valk 1964: 553)—in other words, did not find them in his exemplar but added them based on his knowledge of or access to Callisthenes’s text—an earlier scribe had already made this move (cf. S. West 1967: 49–50). On balance I find it easier to situate the introduction of the variants in the wild texts in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. To be sure, the wild papyri likely reflect different performances from different stages in the transmission of the text (cf. Doane 2003: 68). One need not imagine that all the differences between the text in a given papyrus and the medieval texts emerged over the course of one copying event: they could be “the accumulated results of a series of scribes who inserted them at different times for different reasons (and thus a series of isolated insertions)” (Ulrich 2015: 98; cf. Orton 2000: 141; Parker 2008b: 183; Wakelin 2014: 45: “an accidental cumulative effect which looks like deliberate rewriting”). For instance, S. West decrees “almost certainly a late interpolation” (1967: 53) the plus verse found in P40 (TM 61203) at Il. 3.302d —“but after he swore and finished the oath.” If one agrees (but see di Luzio 1969: 124), one may envision one scribe adding 302a through 302c and a later scribe adding 302d. For his part, the Hellenistic-era scribe had opportunities to shape the text. At Od. 19.218, P99 (TM 61224) has [εἴπ’] ἄγε μοι ποῖ’ ἄσσα (“come now, tell me what sort”) (S. West 1967: 271) where the medieval texts reads εἰπέ μοι, ὁπποῖ’ ἄσσα (“Tell me, what sort”): the direct interrogative poios, able to serve as an indirect interrogative, replaces the indirect interrogative hopoios. One could attribute this move to the fact that “the use of indirect interrogatives in indirect questions was obsolescent at the time when the papyrus was written” (S. West 1967: 271; differently, di Luzio 1969: 37). The assimilation of consonants— indicative of an aural reception of the verse—might take place when the papyrus was written. Of ἐγ νηόσ (“from the ship”) at Od. 9.548 in P31 (TM 61238) (S. West 1967: 231), dating from between 250 and 200 BCE, S. West remarks: “ἐκ is normally written εγ before ν at this period” (1967: 246; cf. Hurst 1986: 229 at 548; Huys 1989: 265). Or take González’s endorsement of M. L. West’s suggestion that one “assume a form of τείνυμαι that was expelled from the manuscripts (p.228) in the Hellenistic period, when τιννυ- was common” (2013: 126): one can compare the “updaters” of Hebrew texts who deployed a “contemporary expanded orthography” fashionable in the late Second Temple period (Ulrich 1999: 88, 98) and, in particular, the scribe (or scribes (Tov 2004: 21)) of 1QIsaa, who modernized the text by using “late forms Page 51 of 64

 

The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics of proper names” and “LH [Late Hebrew] vocabulary and grammatical structures” (Pulikottil 2001: 210, cf. 117–22). I stress again that a scribe performs every time he copies a text and throughout the copying event, but that the nature of the performance can change from copying event to copying event or within the span of one copying event. In the case of the written textual tradition of the Homeric poems, some performing scribes faithfully reproduced their exemplars. Some faithfully reproduced their exemplars right from the start of the textual tradition—just like some scribes of early Christian texts (Kruger 2010: 80) and just as the similarity (or identity, if one prefers) of some manuscripts of Jewish scripture from the Judaean Desert and medieval manuscripts of the Masoretic Text shows that some scribes “very accurately hand-copied” for over 1,000 years (Ulrich 2010b: 113; cf. I. Young 2002, 2005; Hobson 2012: 3–4, 124–31; Tov 2012b; White Crawford 2012; Lange 2015: 198–9; Ulrich 2015: 256). That is why we end up with a relatively uniform set of medieval Homeric texts and why some early Ptolemaic Homeric papyri are not wild or not that wild (section 5.1). And most Homeric scribes were faithfully reproducing their exemplars at some point around 150 BCE when the wild papyri begin to die out. Scribal performance became a matter of precise (or more precise) replication of a written exemplar, a shift likewise evidenced in the stabilization of Jewish scripture beginning in the first century BCE (I. Young 2002: 385–6, 2005: 125; Pakkala 2011: 218–19; White Crawford 2011: 133). Nothing surprises here. The production of choral poetry by a group of singers reveals that the notion of a performance marked by strict reproduction of a preexisting oral or written text was in the air already in the Archaic period (cf. Pelliccia 2003: 99–102). The producers of wild texts at times chose a different path, and I find it easiest to place these agents in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. I am not wedded to this time frame: my primary goal has been to entertain the possibility that these texts emerged in the Classical period. 4.5.3. Who?

Scholars who already assign the variants in the wild texts either to oral performers or to copyists should have no problem imagining those individuals capable of performing as they copied (from a written exemplar or from memory). For them, it should be a matter of adopting the proper perspective on the oral performer’s or copyist’s work. Chapter 5 will enable that move. Some readers may be on the fence. On the one hand, they may join me in rejecting the proposition that the wild papyri represent transcripts (or descendants of transcripts) of oral performances. On the other hand, they may have trouble envisioning (p.229) someone in the Classical or Hellenistic period producing what one sees in the wild papyri—the variations within lines, the plus verses, the minus verses—in the act of copying. Were not those who made copies

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The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics of literary works mere slaves toiling in a scribal shop? I try to address such skepticism in this subsection. In an essay in which he considers papyrus finds from Greco-Roman Egypt (i.e. those that date from 130 BCE to 200 CE), George Houston can summarize (2009: 255) the consensus opinion on the production of literary works on papyrus rolls as it has emerged in the past few years. Briefly put, the consensus holds that most literary works were prepared, probably on commission, by professional, trained scribes. One scribe would copy the text from a master copy, perhaps correcting some of his own mistakes as he went. Before the papyrus was turned over to the purchaser, it was often checked against the master copy by a second scribe, the diorthotes. Both the original scribe and the diorthotes were, naturally enough, sometimes very careful, sometimes not careful at all, and usually somewhere in between. Annotations could be included in the text: the purchaser might ask the original scribe to include whatever notes were already in the master copy, or a second scribe could be commissioned to add notes, or they might be added at some later stage. The agents of this activity, though, remain obscure: “Even if we identify individual copyists, and conclude that they worked at Oxyrhynchus, we have no clear evidence about their careers and organization” (Parsons 2007: 265). Indeed, only recently have scholars begun to investigate the scribes who copied texts in antiquity (Haines-Eitzen 2000: 13, 54, 56; 2013: 486–92). Unsurprisingly, one can only guess about who copied literary texts in the Classical and Hellenistic eras (Avrin 1991: 151): Whether there was training for scribehood in Athens, either for the purpose of reproducing literary texts or for government service, is unknown. Was there a separate training program in calligraphy for students of a certain age group or for students with a fine hand? Were all boys taught the Greek equivalent of the Palmer method and only those whose handwriting did not deteriorate grew up to be literary copyists? Were favored slaves singled out to be future scribes? Did a student learning with a Sophist do scribal work to earn his own tuition when his parents couldn’t afford it? Were scribes apprenticed to master scribes? Was a scribe merely an educated drudge who couldn’t make it as a politician? As yet, nothing is known or can be reconstructed of the careers of classical Greek and Hellenistic literary scribes. Whereas one knows something about how copies of literary works were made— at least from the last third of the Hellenistic period—one does not know much about who made them in the Classical and Hellenistic periods. Aristotle says that Page 53 of 64

 

The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics it should not be up to the scribe (grapheus) to signal the end of a rhetorical period (The Art of Rhetoric 1409a20 Kassel): whom does he have in mind? If one extrapolates from the Roman imperial period for which the evidence is a bit more plentiful (cf. Haines-Eitzen 2000: 7, 25; 2013: 483; Mugridge 2016: 14– 15), one could single out slaves as copyists of literary works in the Classical and Hellenistic periods. Greeks might have enslaved more fellow Greeks than one tends to think (Vlassopoulos 2015: 107–8), and foreign-born slaves might have had children—who were born into slavery, were considered to be Greek, and spoke Greek as their first (p.230) language—more frequently than one tends to think (108–11, 123). It becomes easier to picture a slave copyist producing what one sees in the wild Homeric papyri if that slave copyist is Greek. Yet such a reconstruction rests upon a series of debatable assumptions, so it is wise to consider the alternative: as most slaves in Greece were foreign-born (Finley 1959: 153; Andreau and Descat 2011: 52–4; Kamen 2013: 8; P. Hunt 2015: 144– 5), slave copyists were most likely not Greek. To see such individuals engaging with their exemplars in the manner argued for here—especially to contemplate their production of variations within lines and plus verses—one would need to stress their acculturation in the communities of their Greek masters. I do not find it difficult to imagine slave copyists sufficiently acculturated so as to produce the texts in the wild papyri. Slaves could not wear the chlamys, the garment of choice for cavalrymen and soldiers, and they could not go to gymnasia (Andreu and Descat 2011: 99, 101; Blok 2017: 229), but start with Sara Forsdyke’s take on the extent to which slaves in Greece assimilated into their masters’ culture(s) (2012: 28): There are numerous examples from ancient Greece of slaves who were fully literate in Greek and served as accountants, secretaries, and teachers for private individuals, business enterprises, and even the state. It is likely, moreover, that slaves in Greece became Hellenized fairly rapidly.…It is not hard to see that slaves who worked alongside their Greek masters and lived in their houses would acquire elements of Greek culture. For example, in Euripides’ play Ion, the chorus of slave girls belonging to Creusa say that they have heard the stories of Heracles and Iolaus while weaving. The tombstones of non-Greeks (including slaves and ex-slaves) in Athens, moreover, show that many adopted Greek forms of selfrepresentation, despite their non-Greek origins. In Athens, slaves worshipped Greek gods, sometimes alongside or even together with citizens (Kamen 2013: 16–17, 30; Taylor 2015; cf. Andreu and Descat 2011: 114–15), or ran their own cults devoted to foreign gods as Athenian citizens would have run them (P. Hunt 2015: 136). They accompanied citizen soldiers on campaign and at times even fought (Andreu and Descat 2011: 121, 123–4, 127; Page 54 of 64

 

The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics Kamen 2013: 17, 33). They could be seated next to their masters on a trireme’s rowing benches (Andreu and Descat 2011: 124). They made clothes for Athenians to wear and food for them to eat and provided musical entertainment (Kamen 2013: 20–1). They painted vases (Schumacher 2001: 117; Vlassopoulos 2009: 356). They would have participated in “political discussion” in the “free space” of the agora (Vlassopoulos 2007: 42). They might have attended the City Dionysia (Goldhill 1997: 61–2) and competed in the Panathenaic games (P. Hunt 2015: 148). Freed slaves joined the Panathenaic procession (Nightingale 2004: 55; Gerding 2006: 392; Zhou 2010: 80). Diogenes Laertius reports that Theophrastus is said to have had a slave, Pompylus, who was a philosopher (Lives of Eminent Philosophers 5.36 Dorandi) and that Epicurus’s slaves “engaged in philosophical study with him” (sunephilosophoun autōi) (10.10). That slaves were manumitted, and in Athens became metics (Kamen 2013: 43– 54; Akrigg 2015) or were even granted citizenship (Kamen 2013: 22, 33, 58, 81– 2; Vlassopoulos 2015: 120), implies a belief that they could contribute to the political, economic, and cultural life of a city state. This acculturation could go hand in hand with slaves’ continued connections to their native cultures (P. Hunt 2015). Such is the evidence (p.231) one would cite to get comfortable with the idea of a slave copyist producing the kinds of texts in the wild papyri.27 Yet in the Roman period, not all copyists of literary works were slaves: some were freedmen (Gamble 1995: 90; Haines-Eitzen 2000: 29; Mugridge 2016: 15); indeed, “scholars who had begun as slaves might be asked to copy out texts” (McDonnell 1996: 480). One need not picture the producers of the texts in the wild papyri as slaves. Rather prosaically, one could imagine that the one producing the text is not himself copying the text but is dictating to a copyist: he is not a slave copyist (cf. Parker 2008a: 156, 2008b: 176). I would ponder this scenario if I had no other options because producing a new version of a lengthy text by way of dictation does not seem to have been standard practice in Ancient Greece (and for good reason, considering the hassle involved) (cf. Parsons 2007: 266; Mugridge 2016: 16, 144; pace Hunt et al. 2017: 31). Even briefer documentary papyri were likely copied visually, not by dictation (YuenCollingridge and Choat 2010). One may also consider the stages in producing a text. In a discussion of third-century BCE documentary papyri from Egypt, Trevor Evans writes, “It appears to have been a regular practice of Zenon to write drafts himself and to hand them over to scribes to produce fair versions” (2004: 205; cf. Del Corso 2016: 18–22). Perhaps the individual capable of performing as he copied did so and gave the text he had written to a slave to copy fair. Perhaps the first step was not thought of as quite the same thing as copying. One could continue to indulge in such special pleading. A better option will be to defend the proposition that in addition to slaves nonservile individuals copied literary texts in Classical- and Hellenistic-era Greece. To begin with, at no time were slaves the only ones who performed a given task (Vlassopoulos 2007: 50, 2009: 356; Andreau and Descat 2011: 80), and scribes, Page 55 of 64

 

The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics who one assumes copied texts, need not have been slaves. Toward the end of the sixth century BCE, three statues of secretaries or scribes were dedicated on the Athenian Acropolis: these men were not slaves (Krumeich 1997: 23; Sickinger 1999: 40; Jensen 2011: 363–93). Herodotus relates how Maeandrius, a scribe and citizen (ἄνδρα τῶν ἀστῶν, ὅς οἱ ἦν γραμματιστής, 3.123.1), became ruler of Samos following the death of Polycrates (3.140.3–148) (Roisman 1985: esp. 258– 9). These individuals aside, consider the evidence for citizen copyists in the Classical period. In Athens, public slaves (dēmosioi) would have had occasion to copy texts in their work as secretaries, undersecretaries, or clerks (Finley 1959: 147; N. Fisher 1993: 57; Kamen 2013: 21, 25; cf. Inscriptiones graecae II. 403 (Wiedemann 1981: 156)). (p.232) Be that as it may, copying texts for the city was not exclusively the province of slaves. In fifth-century Athens, the secretary of the Boule (the council of 500) was an elected member of the Boule, and therefore a citizen, until the 360s (Sickinger 1999: 74). Thereafter, the secretary was not a member of the Boule and was chosen by lot (140–1), but he remained a citizen (M. Hansen 1987: 170 n. 573, cf. 1999: 393): for example, Dieuches son of Demarchus of the deme (village or township) Phrearrhioi served as grammateus in 349/8 (Rhodes 1972: 136 n. 1 with Develin 1989: 455). The secretary of the Boule copied a range of documents (Sickinger 1999: 79–80, 84): He also made and distributed copies of decrees after ratification. A decree of the late fifth century orders the Boule secretary to prepare a copy and to deliver it to the Samian Poses, who was honored earlier in the decree.… Athenian officials may also have received texts of decrees outlining their duties.…The secretary of the Boule was presumably responsible for making such copies. Some decrees of the fifth century also required publication in cities other than Athens, and here too the secretary will have prepared copies to be sent out and distributed abroad.…He may have distributed copies of newly enacted laws and decrees to other officials. When a stonemason in Athens cut a decree, he did so following a copy provided by the secretary of the Boule (Sickinger 1999: 75). James Sickinger notes “that behind the stone texts there lay fuller and more complete documents” (1999: 64, cf. 157). The secretary made a copy of the decree—until the fourth century omitting from the prescript the date of its enactment—and the stonemason based his cutting on that copy (78, 84–90, 153–5). From 410 to 399, Athens reorganized its law code and appointed a board of anagrapheis (“recorders”) to aid in the endeavor. These anagrapheis, charged with transcribing—copying—laws (Robertson 1990: 45, 55), were citizens, however much they were “low-grade functionaries” (Rhodes 1991: 92) or

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The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics however servile their origins (Lysias 30.2 (with M. J. Edwards 1999: 163 at 2; Kamen 2013: 81–2)). In the fourth century, Athens continued its employment of “citizensecretaries” (Sickinger 1999: 140). “Several minor secretaries” (142), not to be confused with undersecretaries (cf. D. Pritchard 2015a: 77–8, 81), assisted the secretary kata prytaneian, another name for the secretary of the Boule (Sickinger 1999: 141): a secretary epi tois dēmosiois grammasi (“in charge of the public records”), a secretary epi tous nomous (“for the laws”), and a secretary epi ta psēphismata (“in charge of decrees”) (142–3). All these officials copied documents. One hears as well of an antigrapheus (“copier”), likely “involved in the copying of several types of documents” (142–3). The turn of the fourth century also saw the establishment of the Metroon to house the city’s archives (105–13). A public slave ran this operation, but his job was limited to “filing and retrieving from the Metroon the documents that various secretaries had drawn up and copied” (145). Sickinger postulates that the fifth-century secretary of the Boule had a “small staff” of “undersecretaries or others” (74, 90, 146). David Pritchard, by contrast, finds that in the fourth century the secretary kata prytaneian did not have an undersecretary (2015a: 81). For argument’s sake, I follow Sickinger’s proposal. It is unlikely that these individuals did all the copying assigned to the chief secretary. In any event, these subordinates would have, or at least could have, been drawn from the citizen ranks as well if one extrapolates from Aeschines’s and Nicomachus’s service as hupogrammateis (p.233) (“undersecretaries”) (Sickinger 1999: 145–6; D. Pritchard 2015a: 81). Just so, the undersecretary of the thesmothetai mentioned in Antiphon’s On the Chorus Boy (6.35) must have been a citizen. For the speaker reminds the jurors that he was about to bring an eisaggelia against a group of individuals that included the undersecretary, and political leaders or magistrates—citizens—faced that specific charge (Todd 1990: 223 (“Lit. ‘public announcement, laying of information’: a form of public indictment broadly corresponding to impeachment in the USA”)). This discussion of actual practices of fifth- and fourth-century Athenians should get one away from reflexively assigning the task of copying to slaves. Another consideration should too. Most who wanted a copy of a literary work did not own a slave capable of copying said work (cf. W. Johnson 2004: 159). One had two options in that case. On the one hand, the professionalism evident in the production of Hellenistic-era texts on papyri probably did not emerge in that period: the scribal skill visible in the Derveni papyrus (Betegh 2004: 61; Del Corso 2016: 13), produced as early as 340 BCE (Cavallo and Maehler 2008: 7; Kotwick 2017: 14–15), suggests that already in the Classical era trained professionals, perhaps slaves, were fashioning texts. So one might have picked up a copy of the text at a scribal shop. On the other hand, throughout antiquity those capable of writing could copy a text themselves (Talmon 1975: 336; Blanck Page 57 of 64

 

The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics 1992: 117; Haines-Eitzen 2000: 34–5; Mugridge 2010: 578, 2016: 12–13, 18; Houston 2014: 13–14; cf. Beit-Arié 1993: 38–9, 2000: 229–30). In her book on annotated Greek and Latin texts from Egypt, Kathleen McNamee observes, “Technical treatises also tended to be transcribed and annotated by a single hand—sometimes, no doubt, that of the person who needed them” (2007: 26). Eric Turner suggests that scholars made the copies of several of the literary papyri from Oxyrhynchus (1956: 144). Philo recommends copying a text oneself, not delegating the task to underlings, in order to interiorize it (On the Special Laws 4.160–4; cf. Hurtado 2014: 327 n. 20). Jerome mentions copying texts manu mea (“by my own hand,” Ad Florentium 5.2.3 Hilberg), and Galen seems to refer to copying texts himself as well (De indolentia (On Avoiding Distress) 19 with Houston 2014: 13; Touwaide 2014: 83). Schoolteachers copied (McNamee 2007: 24–5, 118). Students learned to write by copying (Cribiore 1996), and one surmises that students copied texts to read. McNamee finds several candidates in her corpus of annotated texts, such as “a text of Iliad 1 in a neat but uneven, unpolished book hand” and the first portion of “the great manuscript of Pindar’s Paeans” (2007: 25). Houston speculates that “some advanced students copied out works of literature for their own use in their studies”; “students at that level of training would be experienced enough in writing to create copies worth keeping” (2014: 14, 14 n. 7). Covering Il. 17.637–44 and 679–85 and dating from the mid-third century BCE, P672 (TM 61215) came from a bookroll that was perhaps “a private copy made by an individual for his own use” (Montserrat 1991–3: 55). Other ancient authors point to the copying activities of several high-profile individuals (Blanck 1992: 118). Athenaeus reports of Cassander of Macedon: καὶ Ἰλιὰς ἦν αὐτῷ καὶ Ὀδυσσεία ἰδίως γεγραμμέναι (16.620b Olson). S. Douglas Olson translates, “Cassander also owned an Iliad and an Odyssey that had been privately copied for him” (2006: 133). Yet Charles Gulick’s translation runs, “He had even made copies of the (p.234) Iliad and Odyssey with his own hand” (1950: 341), and Gregory Nagy observes, “For Cassander to write out the Iliad and Odyssey by hand is effectively to produce his own private edition” (http://chs.harvard.edu/CHS/article/display/2189#n.20, revising Nagy 1996b: 158 n. 20; cf. González 2013: 449). I also cite a reference in Galen’s De placitis Hippocratis et Platonis (On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato) to Posidonius: “he proves this very point in a large treatise that he wrote separately” (δείκνυσιν αὐτὸ τοῦτο διὰ μεγάλης πραγματείας ἰδίᾳ γεγραμμένης αὐτῷ, 8.1.15 de Lacy). I prefer to translate Athenaeus’s sentence as “he wrote out separately (idiōs) copies of the Iliad and Odyssey.” Cassander impresses because he copied such lengthy texts. In order for that achievement to impress, one has to believe that he would copy the epics. Athenaeus relies on his reader’s willingness to believe that. For my purposes, whether Cassander actually copied the poems himself is irrelevant. The belief that he might have done so is what matters. Just so, in thanking Marcus Aurelius for copying out by hand a speech Page 58 of 64

 

The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics of his, Fronto lists several (famous) individuals who copied (famous) works of literature (Ad Marcum Caesarem 1.7.4 van den Hout).28 Again, the reality of these instances is secondary: Fronto’s assertion demonstrates that (famous) individuals could be thought to have copied texts for themselves. Lucian claims that Demosthenes copied the entirety of Thucydides’s work eight times over (Adversus indoctum (The Ignorant Book-Collector) 4). The absurdity stems from the thought that he would copy such a long text so many times, not from the thought that he would copy a text to begin with. Rather, the joke starts from the premise that he would copy a text. These testimonia, suppositions, and anecdotes imply that, although perhaps “time-consuming and boring” (Houston 2014: 14), copying a literary text was an activity in which people could engage without worrying that they were doing the work of a slave. At the very least, they could have consoled themselves by looking to Ancient Egypt: the prophet “Neferty’s wisdom is taken down immediately by the king himself” (Redford 2000: 216). I do not suggest that the secretaries discussed earlier were the very men who generated the wild Homeric texts. I would note that one should not insist on a hard and fast distinction between those who produced documentary texts and those who copied literary texts: scribes were multifunctional (Mugridge 2010: 578, 580; 2016: 17; cf. Haines-Eitzen 2000: 32–4, 63; 2013: 483–4, 490; Tov 2004: 8; Wakelin 2014: 87–94, 126). Nor am I implying that someone like Pericles or Lysias concocted the wild texts. I have sought to make it easier to imagine some number of individuals capable of a performance that occasionally departed from the exemplar as they made copies of the Homeric poems by their own hands. Notes:

(1) I do not reproduce Cadell’s use of underlining to denote a mutilated letter the reading of which is certain. (2) Bird “follow[s]” S. West’s 1967 text (2010: 86 n. 76). I change his moi in verse 304 to meu. (3) Bird “follow[s]” Boyaval 1967: 63 (2010: 92 n. 91). Boyaval uses T. Allen 1931 and Mazon 1937 when supplementing lacunae (1967: 58). I will now stop noting whose editions editors use to supplement lacunae. (4) The Masoretic Text (MT) is “the traditional text of Hebrew Aramaic Scripture” (Tov 2012a: 2), traditional in the sense that it is the text on which “extant text editions and commentaries focus” (2; cf. Ulrich 2015: e.g. 9–12). Scholars label “Old Greek” (abbreviated OG) their reconstruction of the initial Greek translations of books of Hebrew scripture (Tov 2012a: 129; Ulrich 2015: 164). One must speak of a “reconstruction” because “from the moment that biblical texts were translated into Greek, revisions began” (I. Young 2014: 16; cf. Page 59 of 64

 

The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics Ulrich 2010b: 103–4, 2015: 164; Milstein 2016: 26). Nevertheless, the Old Greek was based on “ancient, alternate Hebrew forms of texts” (Ulrich 1999: 102; cf. 42, 72–3, 149; 2010b: 103; 2015: 150, 160; I. Young 2018: 159) and should be compared, therefore, with other witnesses to Jewish scripture. It is possible that variants in a Greek witness might at times be the work of the translator, not evidence of a variant in the original Hebrew exemplar (I. Young 2014: 19). Cf. I. Young 2016: 297–300 (on Daniel). (5) Manuscripts from Qumran were found in eleven caves. 1QIsaa means the first copy of Isaiah (the superscript a) found in the first cave (the “1”) at Qumran (the following Q). 4QLevd means the fourth copy of Leviticus found in the fourth cave at Qumran. (6) For bibliography on the different sorts of harmonizations in Jewish scripture, see White Crawford 2011: 123 n. 3. Harmonization involves rendering two stretches of discourse identical or at least more alike (subsection 4.5.1 (pp. 219– 20)). (7) On texts of tragedies made by actors, see Scodel 2007: 142–7; cf. Finglass 2015: 272–3. (8) Note D. Collins’s caveat: “I am not insisting that we always assume a one-toone correspondence between a given papyrus and a given performance, or that these texts are necessarily scripts or memory-aides for performance” (2004: 215). (9) On the supposed rigidity of orally transmitted Avestan texts, see Cantera 2012: pp. ix, x–xi (emphasis in original): “We can imagine that the capacity for creating new texts in each performance with the tools provided by the oral tradition slowly decreased, allowing fixed texts with a small degree of variation to take the place of the former free compositions. But each performance preserved a degree of liberty to introduce changes, even if it decreased in the latest phases of the transmission.…In fact, we are shifting from a picture of the Avestan transmission in which each text was composed once, transmitted more or less unchanged, then written down once, and where its different copies in the manuscripts derive from only one copy, to a more open view of Avestan transmission.” (10) Bird in effect construes the papyri as multiforms even though he speaks of multitextuality (cf. 2010: pp. vii–viii). (11) The word “tradent” is popular among scholars of the ancient Near East. It refers to practitioners of a tradition and neatly encapsulates the idea that traditions require practitioners to persist (cf. Ready 2018a: 61–2).

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The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics (12) For other relevant discussions of the scribe in the ancient Near East, see M. L. West 1997: 597–9, 604; van der Toorn 2007: 110–15; Kelber 2010: 119–20; M. Worthington 2012: 14–15, 20–1, 112, 127–46. (13) Putter juxtaposes the Eger and Grime (“a late medieval Scottish romance”) found in the Percy Folio with the printed “Huntington version” (2012: 346). The nature of the discrepancies between the two suggests to Putter “that the Percy folio text had passed through at least one stage of memorial transmission before the scribe committed the text to paper” (347). I cite Putter’s discussion because it illustrates the changes tradents make to texts when they reproduce them from memory. I defer to Putter’s hesitation to attribute the changes to the scribe of the Percy Folio himself. Pettitt also provides examples of memory variants in a discussion of the production of a Passion play “performed by the Gonfalone Confraternity on a stage in the Roman Coliseum between 1490 and 1539” (2012b: 710). (14) Hurtado wants to stress the number of people who could read silently to themselves in Roman times and to reject the idea that Christian authors composed texts in performance (2014). Even he regularly refers to Christians reading texts aloud when gathered as a group: “NT writers often (typically?) composed their texts with a view to them being read aloud to groups and experienced aurally” (340). Hurtado’s denial that such events qualify as performances (334–5, 339) fails to appreciate that reading a text aloud before a group does not have to resemble the performance of an actor or orator to qualify as a performance: any assumption of responsibility for the competent presentation of a text qualifies as a performance; it may differ from the performance of an actor or orator, but it remains a performance (cf. de Vet 1996: 59). (15) Cf. “What early Christian manuscripts preserve, in effect, is a palimpsestic testimony to the overlay of oral/verbal ‘texts’ upon written ‘texts’” (HainesEitzen 2000: 107). (16) Cf. “Oral versions of larger or smaller portions of Judges would have existed side by side with accounts that were written down. Versions preserved by Deuteronomistic-style writers who held to a certain view of history might have differed from versions preserved and told by others in the tradition.…When exploring the preserved and transmitted written manuscript traditions of Judges, one rarely encounters radically different versions; rather, the relatively set content exhibits more subtle variations in terminology and phrasing and differences in relative length.…The stories were told with certain variations that are still reflected in ancient textual traditions” (Niditch 2015: 14, 16). Here too one may imagine that multiform oral performances affected what scribes produced as they copied.

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The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics (17) M. L. West looks at Babylonian texts: “We find variants of similar character in the transmission of Babylonian poems between the late second and the mid first millennium. There too the reason is presumably that the copyists knew the texts well from hearing or actually singing them” (1998b: 98). (18) I have pieced together these translations by following Moffatt’s rendition of the Exeter version (1990: 50) and using the glossary he provides (85–98) as well as by consulting Krapp 1932: 126, Krapp and Dobbie 1936: 317, and Muir 2000b: 593. (19) Orton opposes the model of scribal performance (2000: 196, 199–208; section 5.7 (p. 283)), but his catalogue of the differences between the texts of the same Old English work provides a wealth of material for those who do favor the model. (20) Cerquiglini discusses the “variance” that marks medieval French written traditions (1999: 37–8) and favors phrases like “endless rewriting” (78). Dagenais notes, “Manuscript culture takes on features of orality.…The handwritten text as product resembles the mechanically reproduced book; the process of its creation mimics the unique, occasional nature of oral tradition and oral performance” (1994: 17). Here too one is not far from the performing scribe. Still, Dagenais also turns to the concept of variance “to talk about the system of differences constituted by the three chief manuscripts and the few fragments of the” Libro de Buen Amor (1994: 130), although he differentiates his application of the term from Cerquiglini’s. Observe, however, that Dagenais describes his notion of variance as “a subset” of mouvance (1994: 130); that Nagy detects overlaps between Cerquiglini’s variance and Zumthor’s mouvance (1996b: 10, 2004: 76); that Trachsler sees Cerquiglini’s variance as developing out of Zumthor’s mouvance (2006: 19–20; cf. Driscoll 2010: 92); and that Wakelin classifies mouvance and variance under the more general rubric of “variation,” although he hastens to add that they “are not exactly synonymous” (2014: 44). Zumthor’s mouvance—the textual fluidity or instability evident in different manuscripts of a given work (usually one not attributed to a specific author)— appears repeatedly in scholarly discussions of scribal performance (A. Kirk 2008: 225–9; cf. Kelber 2010: 118). For Doane’s use of the term “variance” in preference to “variant,” see 2003: 68. (21) On the possibility that G and S stem from two different “authorial redactions” and do not stem from one initial text, see Altschul 2006: 117 n. 7. (22) Ulrich speaks of two editions of Jeremiah: “the OG of Jeremiah proves to be a faithful translation of a current alternate Hebrew edition of Jeremiah which was secondarily amplified and rearranged to form the edition transmitted in the traditional MT” (2015: 150, cf. 315). The concept of an edition plays a critical role in Ulrich’s model of textual transmission when it comes to Jewish scripture: Page 62 of 64

 

The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics he differentiates between “isolated insertions” and “a new edition of a book,” the latter comprising “a substantial number of coordinated insertions consistently showing the same pattern” (115). In his book-length attack on the idea that editors fashioned (portions of) the Hebrew Bible, Van Seters rejects treating the Old Greek of Jeremiah and the Masoretic Text of Jeremiah as two distinct editions (2006: 328–32). He favors McKane’s notion of a “rolling corpus”: one can speak, not of a purposeful, coordinated editorial effort, but of the “piecemeal character” of the changes evident in the textual transmission of Jeremiah (331, quoting McKane 1986: p. lxxxi), of “a long growth extending into the post-exilic period” (331 n. 110, quoting McKane 1996: p. clxxii). Person’s analysis dovetails with McKane’s and Van Seter’s approach. In this chapter—wherein I interrogate the wild Homeric papyri, which no one, as far as I know, takes as evidence for variant editions—I try to stay away from citing examples from books of the Hebrew Bible or from passages of books of the Hebrew Bible in reference to which scholars debate the applicability of the term “edition.” (23) One also finds “harmonization to context” (Hernández 2006: e.g. 78) that involves variations within lines—an element or elements in a sentence change(s) with the result that the sentence becomes more like a nearby sentence (cf. “the tendency for each copied manuscript to become more like itself” (Dagenais 1994: 132))—in both the wild Homeric papyri (S. West 1967: 57, 155, 183) and in other textual traditions (Dagenais 1994: 132; Hernández 2006: e.g. 78–9; Royse 2008: e.g. 192). (24) In this context I can make sense of Nagy’s assertion: “it is the degree of multiformity in the textual tradition that leads to the conclusion that an oral tradition is at work backstage, as it were” (1996b: 28; cf. 150; 2004: 76). This statement comes at the end of a survey of three studies “that focus on variation in textual transmission as a mark of oral tradition” (1996b: 28). Cf. “some of the Homeric variations attested from the citations of Plato must stem from the performance traditions of rhapsodes” (143). I also see a hint of the idea I am arguing for in di Luzio’s linking the appearance of a “normalized” Homeric text with a decline in oral performance (1969: 151, my translation; cf. T. Allen 1924: 325–6): “Judging from the isomorphism of the traits presented by the variants of the papyri with some characteristic features of the Homeric style, the text of the papyri seems to reflect, on the whole, the stage of the pre-Alexandrian text, not yet normalized and closer to the fluctuating state of the rhapsodic epoch when the transmission and reproduction of the text was still under the influence of recitation. Compared to this type of text, the Alexandrian or vulgate text seems normalized, perhaps even under the influence of aesthetic taste and criticism in an age when reception takes place only through reading and no longer through hearing.”

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The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics (25) Performers in other traditions engage in exegesis: Novetzke discusses Maharastrian (India) performers of the songs of Namdev (2008: 118), and Pettitt, late-medieval singers of ballads (2012a: 435). Ford explores the glossing and interpreting of the Homeric epics in which elites engaged (1999: 236–9, 253–4). See also section 1.1 (pp. 22–3). (26) Classic discussions of the quotations are found in T. Allen 1924: 249–70; Labarbe 1949; Lohse 1964, 1965, 1967; van der Valk 1964: chap. 12. On Plato’s quotations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, see Halliwell 2000; Nagy 2009: 430–47. On the significance of the apparent lack of plus verses in Plato’s quotations from our Homeric epics, see Nagy 1996b: 143–4. (27) At the risk of trying to illuminate the obscure via the yet more obscure, I note the debate among scholars over who copied early Christian texts. HainesEitzen comments on the “Graeco-Roman distance between the scribes who copied texts and the users of texts” (2000: 130) and draws a contrast with scribes of second- and third-century CE Christian texts who as users of the texts “had a particular religious investment in the texts” (130). Accordingly, they shape them in copying (cf. Kruger 2012: 80). Mugridge warns against assuming that only Christians copied Christian texts in the second to fourth centuries CE (2016: 151–4). If Mugridge is right, there must have been instances in which non-Christian copyists altered Christian texts in the same way that HainesEitzen shows Christian copyists altered Christian texts on account of their “religious investment.” Here one would find an example of copyists at ease in another group’s tradition. (28) McDonnell takes Fronto’s describere to mean “cause to be copied” (1996: 482–6). I fail to see how that reading makes sense of what Fronto is saying. He more likely sticks to the proffered parallel between Marcus Aurelius and famous copyists—namely, that they too copied texts as Aurelius did. The idea that Fronto would not use describere to mean “copy oneself” when he had just used manu scripta in that sense (McDonnell 1996: 482; cf. Houston 2014: 13 n. 3) strikes me as special pleading, variatio being an alternative and easier explanation. If one takes describere to mean “copy oneself,” the list of those who copied works of literature by their own hand includes such luminaries as Domitius Balbus, Atticus, and Nepos. To repeat, Jerome writes of copying (descripseram) texts with his own hand (Ad Florentium 5.2.3, cf. 33.1.1).

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Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics

Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An Interdisciplinary Study of Oral Texts, Dictated Texts, and Wild Texts Jonathan L. Ready

Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9780198835066 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198835066.001.0001

Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics Jonathan L. Ready

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198835066.003.0006

Abstract and Keywords This chapter turns to work on performance, especially in linguistic anthropology and folkloristics, in order to flesh out what it meant for the scribe behind the text of a Ptolemaic wild papyrus of the Homeric epics to perform as he copied. Providing close readings of a number of the wild papyri, the chapter first applies the model of entextualization to the papyri and then applies work on how oral performers show their competence by aiming for a maximalist presentation and one that evinces “affecting power.” It then touches on three other dimensions of the scribe’s performance—the scribe as one who perpetuates a tradition, the phenomenon of traditionalization, and the negotiation of an intertextual gap— and considers how the production of a bookroll becomes a performance. Next, it argues that understanding the scribe as a performer can help scholars of scribal activity out of four difficult spots into which they tend to work themselves. The chapter concludes by juxtaposing the model of scribal performance with the alternative proposals surveyed in Chapter 4 for what is going on with these papyri. Keywords:   scribes, scribal performance, wild papyri, oral performance, entextualization, tradition, traditionalization, intertextual gap, bookroll

Introduction Discussing interpolation in the poetry of Juvenal, Ovid, and Seneca, Richard Tarrant posits that certain readers engaged with these poets in the manner of a co-author (1989: 137):

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Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics The reader seems to take on the role of co-author who revises, expands, or varies the text, not because it appears defective or obscure but simply because it allows for further elaboration, because it has not yet exhausted the possibilities of the material. All interpolations of this kind share a quality which might be called “collaborative,” and firm divisions into subtypes are often hard to draw. For purposes of discussion, however, it may be helpful to distinguish three species of collaborative interpolation: those which smooth a transition or fill an apparent ellipse in the argument or narrative; those which extend, amplify, or heighten a point; and those which add emphasis or weight to a conclusion. I single out Tarrant’s contribution for two reasons. First, several types of what he terms “collaborative interpolation” resemble what one finds in the wild papyri of the Homeric epics. There too one can, for example, attribute to the scribe a “desire to amplify and embellish” (144). Second, by casting the agent behind an interpolation as a co-author, Tarrant frames the changes wrought to a preexisting text in a constructive manner instead of writing them off as instances of “forgery and deceit” or as the work of “a few unscrupulous deceivers” (126; cf. 2016: 87–8; Zetzel 2005: 156, 160–1; Goode 2008: 30). Just so, in order to understand what people did when reproducing written texts of the Homeric epics, I suggest reframing the copying activity that produced the texts found in the wild papyri. One should understand it as a performance. Even if the scribe will later publicly perform, the act of copying remains a performance. In this chapter, I explore what that means with the help of research from outside classical studies on performance, especially in linguistic anthropology and folkloristics. The performing scribe seeks to create something for his audience’s immediate use—in other words, for the life of this community (cf. Person 1998: 602), perhaps his own community—just as the performing poet does. This reality—that the text will be used, (p.236) that it is produced in response to a demand—is critical. Users will evaluate the text. After some initial preparatory work in section 5.1 on the rationale behind juxtaposing Helmut van Thiel’s text with the text found in a papyrus fragment, this chapter begins in earnest with an effort to trace how the performing scribe shows his competence by entextualizing (section 5.2), by aiming for completeness (section 5.3), and by seeking to move his audience (section 5.4). In these sections, I focus for the most part on the scribe’s putative departures from his exemplar, looking to variations within lines but giving the lion’s share of attention to plus verses (and one minus verse). I remind the reader (section 4.2) that plus verses can comprise “common” elements (S. West 1967: e.g. 48) or two recognizable hemistichs (half-lines) (e.g. 197), but they are not necessarily formulaic, at least as far as our extant data suggest (e.g. 245). Some are what Page 2 of 75

 

Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics scholars label “concordance interpolations” (12–13; cf. M. L. West 2001: 13), verses appearing elsewhere in a passage of similar content. At the same time, Stephanie West writes of “the large number of lines for which no close parallel can be found” (1967: 13; cf. Apthorp 1980: 111 n. 76), but one should not limit the search for a plus verse’s parallels to those that share diction with it. A plus verse can remind one of a verse found elsewhere even if the two do not overlap completely in the words they use, and, at a more abstract level, plus verses can conform to Homeric usage and style. Many plus verses or their constituent components, then, find analogues or points of correspondence elsewhere in the Homeric poems and sometimes in other archaic Greek hexameter poems, such as the poetry of Hesiod or the Homeric Hymns. One should not imagine a scribe rooting around in other written texts of hexameter poetry in order to find appropriate verses or hemistichs to transplant into the passage he is copying. Rather, the scribe recalls these elements from his previous experiences listening to, reading, and copying Homeric and other archaic Greek hexameter poetry, if he is a copyist, and also performing that poetry, if he is a rhapsode (section 4.3 (p. 203)). So, as I discuss the scribe’s efforts to entextualize, to provide a complete account, and to move his audience, I will also where necessary track, with S. West’s and Aldo di Luzio’s help, the ways in which plus verses (and, where appropriate, variations within lines) present material and structures found elsewhere. Doing so will help me make an essential point in section 5.5: the extent to which the scribe works with the recognizable. Building on the three previous sections, section 5.5 touches on three other dimensions of the scribe’s performance: the scribe as one who perpetuates a tradition, the phenomenon of traditionalization, and the negotiation of an intertextual gap. Section 5.6 considers the performative aspects of the scribe’s production of a bookroll. Section 5.7 argues that understanding the scribe as a performer can help scholars of scribal activity out of four difficult spots into which they tend to work themselves. Finally, section 5.8 juxtaposes the model of scribal performance I put forward with the alternative proposals surveyed in section 4.3 for what is going on with these papyri. One can find granular studies of instances of scribal activity, such as Paulson Pulikottil’s exploration of 1QIsaa (2001), in which several of the items to be discussed in the next sections find counterparts. This chapter, however, represents a new take on (p.237) the model of scribal performance because to date no scholar of scribal performance has applied the work of performance theorists in such a detailed manner. All told, this chapter not only provides a new perspective on the wild papyri but also deepens one’s understanding of what it means to talk about scribal performance in general.

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Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics 5.1. Juxtaposing the Wild Papyri and Helmut van Thiel’s Text I will juxtapose the wild papyri with Helmut van Thiel’s texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Before I can get to this chapter’s main business, I need to defend that move. Justification for the comparison comes in two forms, the second of which will take longer to explain. On the one hand, pairing the text in a papyrus with the “baseline” of van Thiel’s text helps denaturalize the text in the papyrus and prods one to think about why it reads as it does (cf. Epp 2005: p. xxxvi, whence “baseline”; Bird 2010: 85). I think here of comparing two (or more) renditions of an internationally attested folk tale type (cf. Edmunds 2016a). Such a comparison need not imply a genetic relationship between the renditions, and placing them next to one another brings out the workings of each (cf. I. Young 2014: 27). On the other hand, one can posit a genetic relationship of sorts between the texts evidenced in the medieval manuscripts of the Homeric epics and the wild papyri. As I mentioned in subsection 4.5.2, the wild texts appeared after the emergence of a written version of the Iliad and of a written version of the Odyssey that people wanted to copy or to have a copy of—after the emergence of the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Iliad and the Odyssey became ever more popular as the acquisition of written texts became a cultural desideratum, among however small a population, starting in the fifth century BCE. From this starting point until about 150 BCE, each scribe copies that initial text or, rather, copies a copy of that text (or a copy of a copy, etc.). (I pause at 150 BCE first and foremost because most of the wild papyri, the subject of my inquiry, date from before that point and second because in a moment I will go over scholarship’s various views on what happened in the transmission of written texts of the epics around and after 150 BCE.) The initial text provides “the presumed originary center” around which subsequent copies circulate (Dagenais 1994: 130), but no recognized standard text renders any other text deviant or substandard (cf. S. West 1967: 11; Haslam 1997: 85, 87; Maltomini and Pernigotti 1999: 304; Bird 2010: 85). Nevertheless, already at this stage (over the course of the Classical period and the first half of the Hellenistic period), “the textual tradition is basically unitary” (Haslam 2005: 153). The scribe who first generated the text in a wild papyrus was probably copying an exemplar that we would group with the medieval texts. (If he copies from memory—again, a scenario I find unlikely but can tolerate (section 4.3 (p. 203)) —the exemplar in (p.238) his head can be thought of as a text to be grouped with the medieval texts.) I imagine a number of texts overlapping to such a degree as to qualify as the same in a pre-print age (cf. section 4.2; I. Young 2014: 23–4; Grossman 2016: 327–30). These texts closely approximated our medieval texts. I further imagine that such texts accounted for most of the copies in circulation: in other words, “the classical text of the Iliad,” the most common text out there in the Classical period, “must have been close to the medieval Page 4 of 75

 

Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics vulgate” (Graziosi and Haubold 2010: 57); so too must the classical text of the Odyssey, and so too must the texts of the Iliad and of the Odyssey in the first half of the Hellenistic period. That is why they likely served as exemplars for our scribes. To make these claims thrusts one into perennial debates over the written textual transmission of the Homeric epics. What is the relationship between the texts found in medieval manuscripts and the texts of the epics in circulation before 150 BCE? What is the relationship between the medieval texts and the work of the Alexandrian critics, especially Aristarchus? I will review the arguments for the pre-Alexandrian existence of texts to be grouped with our medieval texts— and for the proposition that our scribe was copying a text to be grouped with our medieval texts—without and then with the help of the Alexandrian scholars. Thomas Allen concludes, “The need of accounting for the eventual predominance of the medium text, when the critics are shown to have been incapable of producing it, leads us to assume a medium text or vulgate in existence during the whole time of the hand-transmission of Homer” (1924: 327). Marchinus van der Valk maintains the same stance. At the end of his 1964 volume, he makes explicit what he means by “archaic vulgate” (642): I rather have in mind the text such as it was transmitted…till, let us say, the end of antiquity. So I use the term “archaic vulgate” to denote the text current in antiquity and to distinguish it from the versions and readings of the Alexandrian critics, which, in my opinion, were mainly conjectures. Earlier, he makes explicit that this archaic vulgate matches our medieval vulgate (609): “The koine (i.e. the archaic vulgate) has preserved the authentic text, which text was also transmitted by the vulgate of the medieval mss., because in antiquity the conjectures of the Alexandrian critics were not accepted by it in most cases.” Van Thiel writes, “The chief stream of the textual transmission of Homer, once it was fixed in writing, quickly became so strong that it persisted in keeping all additional influences on the periphery. The text that the Alexandrians knew is none other than ours; they merely appended their deliberations” (1991: p. xxiv).1 One draws two lessons from these (p.239) stalwarts. First, the medieval texts go back to pre-Alexandrian texts. Second, pre-Alexandrian scribes made more texts that we would classify with the medieval texts than they made texts that we would not so classify. These critics offer a number of items in favor of the first point. Most fundamental, because Aristarchus and his ilk had little or no effect on the text evident in the medieval manuscripts (cf. Pellé 2001: 312), the existence of a relatively uniform textual tradition in the medieval manuscripts testifies to the existence of that same relatively uniform textual tradition prior to the activity of the Alexandrian scholars. Page 5 of 75

 

Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics T. Allen also reviews the quotations of Homeric poetry by fifth- and fourthcentury BCE authors: many point to the presence of the “medium” text, the one that eventuated in our medieval texts (1924: 270, cf. 1899b: 40). Subsequent scholarship has endorsed the general idea: some quotations suggest the existence of wild texts (Dué 2001; subsection 4.5.2 (p. 226)), but Classical-era writers also had access to texts that looked very much like our Iliad and Odyssey (Rengakos 1993: 16; Nardelli 2001b: 73–5, with summarizing statistics; Nagy 2009: 446; Graziosi and Haubold 2010: 57; Jensen 2011: 230). Van der Valk emphasizes the overlap between the medieval vulgate and the socalled koinē manuscripts (cf. Rengakos 2011: 170), koinē (and koinai) being a name that ancient commentators, as recorded in the Homeric scholia, applied to some manuscripts of the Homeric epics (see p. 242). He leads into the assertion quoted earlier as follows (1964: 608–9): The eikaiotera or koine in many instances can be identified with the archaic vulgate.… In a great number of instances the text of the koine, etc. is identical with that of our mss. or of the majority of them.…The phenomenon seems to confirm my view…that the koine (i.e. the archaic vulgate) has preserved the authentic text, which text was also transmitted by the vulgate of the medieval mss., because in antiquity the conjectures of the Alexandrian critics were not accepted by it in most cases. Contrast Michael Haslam’s take on the koinē (1997: 71; cf. Pagani and Perrone 2012: 98): It was not the same as our vulgate. At Il. 2.397, for instance, ἡ κοινή had γένηται, while our manuscripts have γένωνται; at Il. 22.478 αἱ κοινότεραι had ἐνὶ οἴκῳ (so does Strabo), while our manuscripts have κατὰ δῶμα; at Il. 24.214 αἱ κοιναί had οὔ τι (so does P14, 2nd cent.), while the medieval tradition is οὔ ἑ. The list of discrepancies is quite long, and becomes longer still if we take αἱ εἰκαιότεραι and αἱ δημώδεις as terms equivalent to the koine, as it appears we should. Little more than half the recorded readings coincide with our vulgate.…The difference between the koine and the subsequent vulgate is not to be elided. In a later piece, Haslam continues in this vein, discussing three koinē readings noted in the margins of P125 (TM 60303), a second-century CE papyrus that covers Od. 15.531–53 (2013). At 15.541, the medieval texts, with one exception, read peithēi (the indicative, “you obey”) whereas the marginal note reports that hē koinē reads peithe’ (the imperative, “obey”). At 15.545, the medieval texts read εἰ γάρ κεν σὺ whereas hē koinē has εἴ περ γάρ κε. At 15.553, the medieval texts read anōsantes (“pushing up”) whereas hē koinē has apōsantes (“pushing off”).

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Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics (p.240) The debate cannot be resolved by counting up the number of differences. Instead, one notes the degree of overlap and identity between the koinē and the medieval texts—“little more than half the recorded readings” (Haslam 1997: 71)—as well as the minimal degree of difference when the koinē and the medieval texts diverge—for instance, ἐνὶ οἴκῳ (eni oikōi) and κατὰ δῶμα (kata dōma) mean the same thing, “in the house.” The medieval textual tradition abounds in variant readings that differ to the same degree. (Not to mention the fact that a koinē reading can itself appear in the medieval texts: the aforementioned peithe’ appears in van Thiel’s manuscript O (Haslam 2013: 204).) For instance, at Il. 13.42, Martin L. West has manuscript support to read pantas aristous (“all the best”), and van Thiel has manuscript support to read pantas Akhaious (“all the Achaeans”). At Od. 3.425, van Thiel reads kelesthō (“order”) with five manuscripts; the rest of the manuscripts read kalesthō (“summon”). At Od. 18.153, the majority of manuscripts read kata dōma, but two read dia dōma and one reads pros dōma. When we see those differences, we downplay them: we take them as attesting to the relative sameness of the medieval manuscripts. We cannot, on the one hand, emphasize the relative uniformity of the medieval texts and, on the other hand, emphasize the distance between the medieval texts and the koinē if the examples used to demonstrate relative uniformity in the former case eerily resemble the examples used to demonstrate distance in the latter case. We cannot have it both ways. In sum, the overarching similarity between ancient and medieval witnesses presents itself even in the lists Haslam assembles of their supposed differences. Van Thiel refers to two papyri as proving “the pre-alexandrian existence of our ‘vulgata’” (1991: p. vi n. 9). I quoted P496 (TM 61239) in section 4.1. He adduces as well P41 (TM 61206), covering portions of Iliad 3, 4, and 5 and dating from between 280 and 240 BCE (S. West 1967: 64–70) or at least before the middle of the second century BCE (Haslam 1997: 65). The reference to P41 is provocative. Whereas Michael Apthorp also stresses the similarities between P41 and our vulgate (1980: 1–2), Haslam rejects van Thiel’s use of it as evidence for the pre-Alexandrian vulgate: “It has a plus-verse, Il. 4.69a, is without 4.89 and 5.527, and has several non-vulgate readings (3.388, 4.57, 88/89, 5.530, 797); it was certainly no vulgate text” (1997: 66). Van Thiel, surely aware of these divergences, must mean that the texts overlap to such an extent that they suggest a written textual transmission with minimal noise, a textual transmission in which texts differ from one another but only slightly. The texts are not identical; rather “these divergences are…small-scale, and do not detract from the general impression of textual unity” (Graziosi and Haubold 2010: 57). On the second point, for these scholars the relatively uniform written textual tradition that eventuated in our medieval texts was also the most common. Hence van Thiel speaks of a “chief stream,” and van der Valk of a “vulgate” and

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Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics a “current” text. T. Allen defines his “medium” text as the “central, average, or vulgate” text (1924: 327). To sum up, I introduce people into this discussion as follows. What survived to become the basis of the medieval textual tradition did so not by chance, being the one exemplar to make it out of antiquity. Copyists more often copied the texts that closely (p.241) resembled one another and that we would group with the medieval texts than they copied the texts that differed from those texts (and from one another). Accordingly, the scribe who produced the text in a wild papyrus likely copied one of those texts that we would group with the medieval texts. Van Thiel’s editions offer the best distillation of the medieval texts and, therefore, provide the closest approximation of the scribe’s exemplar. Some will not like how these scholars slight the Alexandrian critics, above all Aristarchus, the head librarian at the Library of Alexandria in Egypt in the middle of the second century BCE. One can integrate Aristarchus’s work into the argument that the medieval texts get one as close as possible to what the scribe responsible for the text of a wild papyrus copied. I start with the general consensus regarding what Aristarchus did not do. He did not make editions of the Iliad and the Odyssey in the manner of a modern editor, “a new continuous copy bearing his text, the entire text rewritten as he believed was right and correct” (Montanari 1998: 3, emphasis in original; cf. 2002: 120; Nagy 2009: 10, 13; Schironi 2018: 41, 763). In exploring in a manner most relevant to my argument how previous scholarship reconstructs what Aristarchus did do, I make one argument and I review one supposition, a supposition less contested in current scholarship. First, I argue that Aristarchus’s texts (to be defined momentarily) of the Homeric epics closely resembled the texts that our scribes copied. Second, I review the supposition that Aristarchus’s texts (to be defined momentarily) became the sources of our medieval texts. Franco Montanari reconstructs Aristarchus’s activity as follows (1998: 18, emphasis in original; cf. 2002: 126, 2015: 659): Aristarchus began by writing hypomnemata based on the text of Aristophanes; then he devoted himself to his own διόρθωσις and produced an ekdosis of his own, i.e., the copy he had chosen as his base text and containing annotated in the margins all his textual interventions (critical signs and readings) so that it would represent his Homeric text. At this point he wrote new hypomnemata, which were based on his own ekdosis and felt (or defined) to be more in-depth and careful. My chief concern in this reconstruction is with “the copy he had chosen as his base text,” but, before I get to that, let me spend some time unpacking this summary. Page 8 of 75

 

Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics Aristarchus first wrote a commentary (hupomnēma) on the Iliad keyed to the text (the edition) of his predecessor Aristophanes of Byzantium. He then made his own text, his own edition. This was his own ekdosis. Making his own edition meant choosing another text, not Aristophanes’s text, to serve as his base text and marking it up. He produced an ekdosis of both the Iliad and the Odyssey. He then wrote new separate commentaries (hupomnēmata) keyed to those new editions (cf. Montanari 2002: 121, 124–5; 2015: 657). To be clear, the word ekdosis (plural: ekdoseis) meant “a publication” or, more precisely, denoted a text given out—ekdosis derives from the verb ekdidonai—to “be copied freely thereafter” (Gurd 2011: 170). It does not by itself capture the distinguishing features of (p.242) Aristarchus’s own ekdosis, his own edition. Aristarchus decorated with so-called critical signs the margins of the manuscript he marked up (indicating responses of various kinds to the text and directing the reader to a discussion of those responses in his commentary) and he perhaps noted variants in the margins (Schironi 2018: 41, 66). He aimed to provide “scholarly apparatus in attendance on the received text” (Haslam 1997: 85). As I noted a moment ago, he did not make “a new continuous copy bearing his text, the entire text rewritten as he believed was right and correct” (Montanari 1998: 3, emphasis in original). One could call such a rewritten text an ekdosis. An A scholion at Il. 3.10 refers to two of the city texts, the one from Chios and the one from Massalia, as ekdoseis (Erbse 1969: 356 at 10b; cf. Nagy 1996b: 116 n. 46; M. L. West 2001: 67). The city texts likely offered “emended” texts (Janko 1992: 26 n. 29) “composed with some care” (van der Valk 1964: 6). Aristarchus created his ekdosis when engaged in a process of diorthōsis, “corrective editing” (Nagy 2004: 22). This noun encompassed a range of activities (cf. Blum 1991: 65 n. 10, “different degrees of diorthōsis”). It could refer to the process of altering the text in a manuscript by “deleting, adding, replacing, and marking various aspects and features of the text in order to improve it and increase its reliability” (Montanari 2015: 652). Think here of inserting missing words or putting a line through letters deemed incorrect. A scribe could make these adjustments in the process of copying (646–9), or the so-called corrector (diorthōtēs) in a scribal shop might make these sorts of changes (651–2); perhaps they collated the copy against the exemplar or consulted other versions of the work (644). The scribe or the diorthōtēs would present this corrected text as just that, the correct text. For Aristarchus, diorthōsis involved deciding upon and presenting his vision of what Homer, flourishing around 1000 BCE, wrote (Nagy 1996b: 151). He would both come up with his own readings without recourse to manuscript evidence (conjecture) and choose among variants preserved in manuscripts, and he would note those preferences in the margins of his base text by way of critical signs and other annotations and defend those preferences in his commentary (Montanari 2002: 127, 2015: 660–1; Schironi 2018: 20 n. 64, 41–5, 74–5). A revealing and distinctive feature of this brand of diorthōsis was athetesis: using a marginal Page 9 of 75

 

Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics sign, the obelos (–), to indicate doubts about the authenticity of a verse (cf. Montanari 2015: 652, 656; Hunter 2018: 149). What this all means is that the base text in Aristarchus’s edition did not offer the correct text: the correct text was the one you would get once you took into account Aristarchus’s preferences, the ones he noted in the margins and discussed in the commentaries (cf. Nagy 2009: 17, 37, 72). Not every ekdosis manifested diorthōsis. The city texts can be called ekdoseis but are never connected with diorthōsis (M. L. West 2001: 67; cf. Blum 1991: 65 n. 10; Pagani and Perrone 2012: 102), nor was the poet Antimachus of Colophon’s ekdosis of the Iliad said to exhibit diorthōsis (M. L. West 2001: 53; cf. Pagani and Perrone 2012: 101). Or consider the koinai texts, “ordinary or uncorrected copies produced by the book trade” (T. Allen 1924: 282; cf. Rengakos 1993: 15; Nagy 1996b: 116–17, 2004: 21–3, “relatively ‘uncorrected’”). An A scholion to Il. 17.214 refers to hai koinai ekdoseis (Erbse 1975: 371 at 214a; cf. Nagy 1996b: 117 n. 48; M. L. West 2001: 50), and (p.243) marginalia in second- and thirdcentury CE papyri present variant readings and attribute them to hē koinē (McNamee 2007: 269–73, 275, 282; Pagani and Perrone 2012: 113–16; Haslam 2013): one should supply the noun ekdosis (or perhaps anagnōsis or lexis “reading,” a more roundabout way of referring to the same thing as the phrase hē koinē ekdosis because “the common reading” would be found in “the common ekdosis”) (Haslam 1997: 63, 2013: 204). The phrase hē koinē ekdosis does not denote a single manuscript (differently, Pagani and Perrone 2012: 115), such as the Athenian city text (cf. Haslam 1997: 71, 2013: 206). Rather, the phrase hē koinē ekdosis functions as a collective singular, referring to a plurality of texts, the hai koinai ekdoseis, in the singular in order to stress their similarities (cf. T. Allen 1924: 279, 282). That it functions as a collective singular, referring to a plurality of texts, is shown by the fact that it is interchangeable with a reference to a plurality of texts. Where a marginal note in P2 (TM 60571) states ἡ κο(ινὴ) γένηται (“hē koinē ekdosis reads genētai”) in reference to Il. 2.397’s genōntai, an A scholion to this passage assigns genētai to tines (“some” [manuscripts], Erbse 1969: 270 at 397a) (and a bT scholion speaks of hoi aētheis (“the inexperienced, the amateurs,” Erbse 1969: 270 at 397c)) (T. Allen 1924: 277; McNamee 2007: 269; Pagani and Perrone 2012: 116). That it refers to the hai koinai ekdoseis appears in the scholia to Il. 22.468: a T scholion reports that hē koinē read khee (“shed,” Erbse 1977: 351 at 468c2), and an A scholion reports that hai koinai read khee (Erbse 1977: 351 at 468c1). In short, there were some number of hai koinai ekdoseis out in the world, which means there were some number of uncorrected texts called ekdoseis out in the world. Ekdoseis cannot, then, by default be texts subject to a process of “corrective editing,” diorthōsis. One can follow the grammarian Didymus (first century BCE to first century CE) in understanding ekdoseis as the “general word for ‘texts’, including the most ordinary and unpretentious of those current” (M. L. West 2001: 50; cf. Pagani and Perrone 2012: 97). For its part, Aristarchus’s ekdosis did not contain Page 10 of 75

 

Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics columns of text in which Aristarchus offered his preferred readings: he reserved that presentation for the margins and his commentary. Moreover, his ekdosis exhibited diorthōsis, and diorthōsis of a particular sort. Scholars rightly speak about the Alexandrian or the “grammarian’s” ekdosis as its own thing (Apthorp 1980: 77; Montanari 2015: 650; cf. Pagani and Perrone 2012: 102). I come now to Aristarchus’s second base text in Montanari’s reconstruction. It was an already existing copy (Montanari 1998: 6, 10; cf. Haslam 1997: 85; M. L. West 2001: 66 n. 64) of Attic origin (Montanari 2002: 124, 2015: 656). Compared to Zenodotus’s Ionian base text (Montanari 2002: 123; M. L. West 2001: 43–5), it represented “the more widespread and commonly used paradosis” (Montanari 2002: 133). I flesh out the implications here. Aristarchus wanted to make an edition and a commentary that more rather than fewer readers would find useful. So he opted for a base text of the sort to which more rather than fewer readers would have access. For his second base text, Aristarchus picked the most typical text of his day. To the extent that Aristarchus picked the most representative text of his day, he picked a text similar to the text that served as the exemplar for our scribe who produced a wild text. (p.244) Gregory Nagy offers a different understanding of Aristarchus’s second base text, one that seems to split the difference between the approach of T. Allen et al. (to the extent that it postulates a relatively uniform textual tradition) and the approach of Montanari (to the extent that it gives a starring role to Aristarchus). Aristarchus did not choose an already existing copy to serve as his base text. Instead, seeking a base text still more representative and so more useful than that of Aristophanes (cf. Nagy 2009: 16–17), Aristarchus “built” it (Nagy 2009: 9, cf. 2004: 101 n. 118). One infers that he built it from his choosing “what to write in the base text” when the manuscripts he collated (see next paragraph) did not show a clear preference for a given reading (Nagy 2004: 64; cf. 2009: 14, 58), but that he built his base text appears most clearly in the fact that he purposefully excluded some verses from it (contra Montanari 2002: 124, 2015: 656–7). Aristarchus’s base text did not include verses he did not want in it. It did include verses he deemed suspect and marked with the athetizing obelos, but it did not include verses he deleted (Apthorp 1980: pp. xiv–xv; Nagy 2009: 14–15). To make a text that did not have the verses he did not want it to have, Aristarchus must have made a new text. One could remove words with a sponge (Montanari 2015: 651), but are we going to picture Aristarchus or his assistant erasing lines with a sponge? In arguing that Zenodotus fashioned a text that had his preferred readings within each line, that used the obelos to athetize verses, and that excluded the verses he wanted excluded, Antonios Rengakos recognizes that not including deleted lines means making a new text (2012: 250–1). Montanari proposes that Zenodotus, when he wanted to recommend the deletion of a verse in the preexisting copy he used as his base text, could only put some

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Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics sort of marks next to or around it (1998: 6–7, 2002: 121–2, 2015: 654). He too recognizes that actual deletion translates into a new text (2011: 2, 2015: 655). In making this text, Aristarchus used the most “strongly attested” material in a group of “common” or “standard” (koinai) manuscripts (Nagy 2009: 9–21), “mostly commercial copies” (1996b: 190). He could collate this plurality of manuscripts and come out with a single base text because that set of manuscripts exhibited an overarching “consensus,” a “relative uniformity” (2009: 13): they generally had the same number of verses and the same words within each line (14–21). Aristarchus did not so much “establish” the vulgate (Haslam 1997: 85) as make it manifest, bring it “into sharper focus” (Nagy 2009: 446). Nagy proposes “an Athenian ‘City Edition,’ as current in the fourth century” as the archetype for the koinai texts (2004: 21, cf. 2009: 69–70). Yet in Nagy’s system a transcript of a performance made already in the fifth century BCE would likely have been grouped with the koinai texts (see esp. 1996b: 156, 186, 190; 2009: 355–6, 445–6, 462, 475, 544–5, 589; 2010: 334, 355–6). Following Nagy, who links his discussion of the meaning of the term koinē to T. Allen’s discussion of the term (1996b: 188, 195), I return to T. Allen to push the koinai texts back in time and to stress that they constituted the majority of texts. T. Allen understands the scholiastic label koinē to refer to the “usual,” “common,” “central, average” text (1924: 278, 320, 324, 327) in contrast to the “minority” of “sporadic” “longer texts” (326–7). This “medium” (303) text emerged soon after the emergence of the initial text, mystified in T. Allen’s prose as (p.245) that text which when completed “left the Master’s hand” (327). Koinai texts likely represented the majority of what was out there in the fifth century BCE when the earliest of the scribes who concern us went to work, even if “there are sporadic traces of a non-Attic, Ionian line of tradition, reflected particularly in the readings recorded from Zenodotus” (M. L. West 2011a: 77). The scribe probably copied one of these koinai texts. If Aristarchus’s base text represented a distillation of koinai texts and if our scribes copied koinai texts, Aristarchus’s base text closely matched the texts our scribes copied. Francesca Schironi’s intervention in this debate prompts one to envision yet another scenario, one that splits the difference between Montanari’s model (to the extent that it sees Aristarchus selecting one text with which to begin his research) and Nagy’s model (to the extent that it sees Aristarchus collating manuscripts). Aristarchus picked a text, perhaps an Athenian one, “as a base copy” (Schironi 2018: 42). He made this choice after having “inspected many different Homeric manuscripts collected in the Library.” Again, I posit that a desire to find a more representative text than that of Aristophanes prompted this careful deliberation. Aristarchus then collated this base copy against the Library’s other texts of the Iliad or the Odyssey to determine the “scarcely attested lines” in the base copy (42, cf. 73–4). Next, he had a copy made of that Page 12 of 75

 

Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics base copy without the poorly attested lines. That new copy became his “working text,” and it was this object that served as the basis for his edition (his ekdosis). That Aristarchus could decide which verses to eliminate by looking at what was a random sampling of other manuscripts suggests that the textual tradition was sufficiently uniform to bring out the extra verses in any one text. His working text looked like most other texts. His working text closely approximated what our scribe copied. Now I look forward in time to Aristarchus’s subsequent work and the fate of that work. Montanari envisions Aristarchus producing an edition (his ekdosis) and continuing to mark up that same physical artifact—the same bookrolls—as he had “second thoughts and new ideas”; Ammonius, Aristarchus’s successor as head librarian in Alexandria, labeled this further marked up document “reedited” (epekdotheisēs) (2015: 657–60). Schironi deems Montanari’s reconstruction “plausible” but leaves open the possibility that Ammonius’s term epekdotheisa refers to a discrete, second edition: perhaps published by Aristarchus’s pupils, this second Aristarchean edition stood on its own and was not to be found in the same bookrolls as the first edition of Aristarchus (2018: 38, 44–5, cf. 2015: 611). M. L. West endorses the idea that Aristarchus produced two editions, “one original ἔκδοσις and one revision” (2001: 62–3). According to Apthorp, Aristarchus made an edition, and his students made a second edition of this work (1980: 5, 132). Nagy postulates an original ekdosis made by Aristarchus himself and two post-Aristarchean ekdoseis made by Aristarchus’s acolytes (2004: 86, 101; 2009: 21–36). One can sort the ancient testimonia on this issue in various ways (cf. Montana 2015: 132–3; Schironi 2018: 36–41), but the essential point is that the number of verses across these editions fashioned by Aristarchus or his pupils remained almost identical (Nagy 2009: 20). The number of lines in these editions became the standard number in the (p.246) subsequent written textual tradition of the Homeric poems, but Aristarchus’s preferred readings within lines, noted primarily in his commentaries, garnered much less attention (Haslam 1997: 84; Nagy 2004: 64; Schironi 2018: 42–3). This standardization would have taken place first in Egypt and then elsewhere (M. L. West 2001: 72). Aristarchus’s departure from Alexandria in 145/4 BCE might have contributed to the spread of his work (cf. Finkelberg 2006: 246). “The personal initiative of” Ptolemy VIII might have played a role (Finkelberg 2006: 235). Yet accounting for this standardization requires the additional step of constructing a concrete scenario involving the production of copies. Here too scholars diverge. Perhaps transcripts of these editions entered the book trade (Apthorp 1980: e.g. 134, 152; Nagy 2004: 64) or booksellers brought their own copies into conformity with the number of verses in these editions (Apthorp 1980: 10, 40, 133, 157–8; S. West 1988: 47). If booksellers worked with these editions, however, one wonders why Aristarchus’s textual preferences did Page 13 of 75

 

Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics not have a greater impact: after all, the editions were by definition marked up in such a way as to indicate that Aristarchus had preferences (Schironi 2018: 43). An alternative explanation posits that it was not an edition or editions that booksellers acquired. Rather, only Aristarchus’s unannotated “preparatory text (a sort of pre-ekdosis, with no emendations or choices of specific variant readings) circulated beyond the scholarly circle” (Schironi 2018: 43). Recall the shift from a “base copy” to a “working text” in Schironi’s reconstruction. Additional copies of Aristarchus’s working text got out in the world and “impacted the Homeric textual tradition” (43). Aristarchus’s edition (his own ekdosis)—his working text marked up “with critical signs and marginal variants” (44) and so no longer a working text but now his edition—stayed in the “scholarly circle.” That Aristarchus’s text, be it his edition or his working text, proved so agreeable and useful to booksellers suggests that booksellers found it a sufficiently close match with their own texts: Aristarchus had indeed picked or reconstructed the most typical text of his day.2 In any case, Aristarchus’s text became that “from which the subsequent tradition mainly derives” (Haslam 1997: 85–7, quotation from 86; cf. M. L. West 2001: 67, 144; Nagy 2004: 53; Montanari 2002: 124, 2015: 656). The medieval texts go back to Aristarchus’s text. To conclude, Aristarchus’s text looked like the exemplars that the scribes who produced the wild texts were tasked with copying, and Aristarchus’s text became the source for our medieval texts. Connecting these dots, one surmises that the medieval texts approximate the sort of text that the scribe used as his exemplar. The scribe was probably copying something that would read to our eyes like a medieval text. Again, van Thiel’s editions best represent the medieval textual tradition. However one wishes to write this history—whether one starts from, for instance, T. Allen’s position or Schironi’s position—the text the scribe copied would have (p.247) resembled those pre-Aristarchean papyri that match up with or closely resemble medieval texts. I quoted P496 (TM 61239) in section 4.1. One also notes the third-century BCE P410’s (TM 61231) rendition of Il. 6.4–8 that corresponds to that stretch of verse as found in the medieval texts (W. Johnson 2002). The third-century BCE P59 (TM 61234) covers Il. 16.484–9 and matches the medieval texts apart from reading hōs d’ hote (“And as when”) at 487 to introduce a simile where the medieval texts reads ēute (“As”) (S. West 1967: 131). P590 (TM 61245), dating to the third or second century BCE, covers Il. 7.183–95. It presents the same text as the medieval texts but for its reading of the aorist subjunctive dusō (“I don”) in verse 193 where the medieval texts have the present subjunctive duō (“I don”) (Ioannidou 1996: 152). The third-century BCE P662 (TM 65858) covers Il. 19.325–9 and matches the medieval texts apart

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Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics from its presentation of the idea expressed in verse 326: that Neoptolemus is raised at home (perhaps on Scyrus) (Huys 1989). At this point, I have to loop back to subsection 4.5.2. To repeat what I noted there, one need not imagine that all the differences between the text in a given wild papyrus and the medieval texts emerged over the course of one copying event: they could be “the accumulated results of a series of scribes who inserted them at different times for different reasons (and thus a series of isolated insertions)” (Ulrich 2015: 98). For instance, Stephanie West decrees “almost certainly a late interpolation” (1967: 53) the plus verse found in P40 (TM 61203) at Il. 3.302d—“but after he swore and finished the oath.” If one agrees (but see di Luzio 1969: 124), one can envision one scribe adding 302a through 302c and a later scribe adding 302d. In such a case, a scribe responsible for introducing material into the text one sees in the papyrus copied an already wild papyrus, not something that read like the medieval texts. Some will object to the reconstruction proposed here. Francesca Maltomini and Carlo Pernigotti question the scholarly propensity to see “all the differences evidenced in the Ptolemaic papyri as nothing other than modifications made to the Vulgate” (1999: 304, my translation) and to establish a “genetic” relationship between the papyri and the vulgate (304 n. 15). Apthorp rejects talk of an “ancient vulgate”: most pre-Aristarchean texts would have exhibited the plus and minus verses found in the wild papyri or testified to in the scholia (1980: 2; cf. S. West 1967: 26; Haslam 1997: 71). M. L. West denies that Aristarchus collated manuscripts (2001: 36–7; cf. Revermann 1998: 36) and asserts that “our medieval vulgate must descend ultimately from an exemplar of that ‘wild’ era, an exemplar as wild in relation to others as they in relation to it” (2001: 161). Put differently, someone generated a text that became the archetype for the medieval textual tradition, but no one knows when that happened: we cannot claim that the scribe responsible for the text in a wild papyrus copied something that would read from our perspective like a medieval text. Nevertheless, even those whom that claim makes uneasy should concede the value of juxtaposing a papyrus text with van Thiel’s representation of the medieval tradition if we treat van Thiel’s text as a baseline. To repeat, this juxtaposition helps denaturalize the text in the papyrus and prods one to think about why it reads as it does. (p.248) For the purposes of this investigation I construct the following scenario. The scribe who produces the text in the papyrus copies a text that we would group with the medieval texts. Refer to the presentation of Il. 3.302–10 in section 4.1 (p. 190). Imagine as a limit case that the scribe is copying the text (van Thiel’s) in the left-hand column and producing the text in the right-hand column as he does so. (It will not be too obvious for me to note the following. When I speak of the scribe in subsequent sections, I have in mind this scribe who effects these replications and changes. That scribe may not be—and he is not, if he worked in the Classical period (subsection 4.5.2)—the scribe whose Page 15 of 75

 

Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics hand we see on the papyrus we have.) Just as the existing evidence does not enable one to reconstruct the Iliad poet’s or the Odyssey poet’s “original” text (van der Valk 1964: 642; M. L. West 2001: 160; Nagy 2004: 61), one cannot recreate exactly the text that the scribe copied. After all, the written textual tradition that eventuated in our medieval texts will have exhibited some degree of fluidity, as all chirographic traditions do, over the late Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic periods. Still, given the textual history posited here, van Thiel’s representation of the medieval textual tradition will be the best approximation of what he copied. At the very least, one needs something to position opposite the wild text so that one can think about what the scribe who fashioned the wild text was doing.

5.2. Competence and Entextualization An oral performance of verbal art is more than just the presentation of a text (e.g. Bauman and Briggs 1990: 74; Bauman 2004: 10). Just as it was essential to the work of Part I, Richard Bauman’s understanding of performance will influence the remainder of this chapter, most obviously this and the next two sections. Here again is one of his pithy definitions of performance (2004: 9, cf. 2011: 711): I understand performance as a mode of communicative display, in which the performer signals to an audience, in effect, “hey, look at me! I’m on! watch how skillfully and effectively I express myself.” That is to say, performance rests on an assumption of responsibility to an audience for a display of communicative virtuosity, highlighting the way in which an act of discursive production is accomplished, above and beyond the additional multiple functions the communicative act may serve. In this sense of performance, then, the act of expression is itself framed as display: objectified, lifted out to a degree from its contextual surroundings, and opened to interpretive and evaluative scrutiny by an audience both in terms of its intrinsic qualities and its associational resonances.… Performance objectifies acts of expression.3 (p.249) Elsewhere Bauman varies his diction, speaking not of “a display of communicative virtuosity” but of “a display of communicative skill” (1986: 3) or a “display of communicative competence” (1977: 11). I will use the latter term, competence. As “one of the most relative of cultural phenomena” (McDonald 1997: 58), performance can take different forms (cf. Carlson 2004: 206). Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, for instance, writes, “What we see in Hasidic precepts of performance is a studied effort to suppress the aesthetics of virtuosity.… Sincerity, enthusiasm, and depth of feeling are more important than artistic excellence” (1990: 116–17). David Minderhout juxtaposes Bauman’s conception of performance in which the performer strives to meet audience expectations Page 16 of 75

 

Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics with Paulla Ebron’s view of performance “as a device to shape the audience’s perception of the performer” and “to create a mindset for the audience, as well as conform to one” (2006: 261). Nevertheless, Bauman’s model has proven productive for generations of scholars of verbal arts, and I find it most relevant for my endeavor as well.4 An oral performer has a number of ways to display communicative competence. The keys to performance—special codes; figurative language; parallelism; special paralinguistic features; special formulas; appeal to tradition; and disclaimer of performance (Bauman 1977: 16)—can function as displays of excellence (2012: 110). A performer can aim for “greater dynamic tension, formal elegance, surprise value, contrast” (1986: 21); he “makes the tale unusual and endows it with entertainment value” (31). I concentrate on a few of these as well as some other factors and apply them to the copying activity of our scribes. I first return to the concept of entextualization deployed in section 1.1. To review, performers entextualize: they makes “a stretch of discourse into a text,” one that is “bounded off to a degree from its discursive surround (its co-text), internally cohesive (tied together by various formal devices), and coherent (semantically intelligible)” (Bauman 2004: 4; cf. Kuipers 1990: 4). In entextualizing, a performer “knits” together a “textual package” (Bauman 2012: 104, 105; cf. 1986: 73–4, 2004: 147) and that process is subject to evaluation: “the very act of performing entails making oneself accountable for the very sort of structuring, coherence, or memorability we have been calling entextualization” (Wilce 2009a: 34). The scribe heightens the “indices of entextualization” (Bauman and Briggs 1990: 74). I highlight the second and third items in the quotation from Bauman: cohesion (subsection 5.2.1) and coherence (subsection 5.2.2). (p.250) 5.2.1. Cohesion

My inquiry into cohesion focuses on repetition and parallelism. Repetition contributes to cohesion and therefore to entextualization (Bauman 1986: 102; cf. Dagenais 1994: 133–4) and so does parallelism (Bauman and Briggs 1990: 74; cf. Wilce 2009a: 34; Lukin 2014: 120; Frog 2017: 468–70; Frog and Tarkka 2017: 223; Tarkka 2017: 265, 268). Parallelism is a species of repetition: “Parallelism is repetition with systematic variation, the combining of variant and invariant elements in the construction of a poetic work…. Parallel structures may be developed at a range of formal levels: phonological, prosodic, syntactic, semantic, thematic” (Bauman 1986: 96–7; cf. Fabb 2015: 140, 2017: 365; Frog and Tarkka 2017: 206). These parallel structures or sets comprise parallel members (Fabb 2015: 141–4), and parallel members can stand in a relationship of synonymity, analogy, or antithesis (Tarkka 2017: 264; cf. Fabb 2015: 151; Frog and Tarkka 2017: 206–15).

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Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics Some flip this definition around: one can understand repetition as a type of parallelism (Fabb 2015: 140, 162). But not subordinating repetition to parallelism may prove to be necessary in certain contexts or at the very least to expedite analysis (cf. Kaartinen 2017; Kallio 2017: 341–4, 348), and Homerists are so used to speaking of repetition as its own thing (Hutchinson 2017) apart from parallelism that it seems unwise to complicate matters. I start with two repetitions in P31’s presentation of Od. 9.507–22.5 First, at 9.519a, Polyphemus repeats a verse he used a few lines before at 511; second, with the addition of 9.522a, Odysseus introduces his speech to Polyphemus by repeating the two-line speech introduction he used for his immediately preceding speech to Polyphemus at 9.500–1.

Od. 9.500–22

P31 (TM 61238)

ὣς φάσαν, ἀλλ’ οὐ πεῖθον ἐμὸν μεγαλήτορα θυμόν, ἀλλά μιν ἄψορρον προσέφην κεκοτηότι θυμῷ· “Κύκλωψ, αἴ κέν τίς σε καταθνητῶν ἀνθρώπων ὀφθαλμοῦ εἴρηται ἀεικελίην ἀλαωτύν, φάσθαι Ὀδυσσῆα πτολιπόρθιον ἐξαλαῶσαι, υἱὸν Λαέρτεω, Ἰθάκῃ ἔνι οἰκί’ ἔχοντα.” ὣς ἐφάμην, ὃ δέ μ’ οἰμώξας ἠμείβετο μύθῳ· “ὢ πόποι, ἦ μάλα δή με παλαίφατα θέσφαθ’ ἱκάνει.

[“ὢ πόποι, ἦ μάλα δή με παλαίφατα θέσφαθ’ ἱκάν]ε̣ι̣.

ἔσκε τις ἐνθάδε μάντις ἀνὴρ ἠύς τε

[ἔσκε τισ ἐνθάδε μάντισ] ἀνὴρ ἠΰσ

μέγας τε,

τε μέγασ τε,

Τήλεμος Εὐρυμίδης, ὃς μαντοσύνῃ ἐκέκαστο

[Τήλεμοσ Εὐρυμίδησ, ὃσ] μαντοσύνηι ἐκέκαστο

καὶ μαντευόμενος κατεγήρα Κυκλώπεσσιν·

[καὶ μαντευόμενοσ κα]τεγήρα Κυκλώπεσσιν·

ὅς μοι ἔφη τάδε πάντα τελευτήσεσθαι ὀπίσσω,

[ὅσ μοι ἔφη τάδε πάντα] τελευτήσεσθαι ὀπίσσω αντα Μ. 1

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Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics

Od. 9.500–22

P31 (TM 61238)

χειρῶν ἐξ Ὀδυσῆος ἁμαρτήσεσθαι ὀπωπῆς.

[χειρῶν ἐξ Ὀδυσῆοσ ἁμα]ρτήσ⟦εσθαι⟧ ὀπωπῆσ.

ἀλλ’ αἰεί τινα φῶτα μέγαν καὶ καλὸν ἐδέγμην

[ἀλλ’ αἰεί τινα φῶτα μέγαν] καὶ καλὸν ἐδέγμην

ἐνθάδ’ ἐλεύσεσθαι, μεγάλην ἐπιειμένον ἀλκήν·

[ἐνθάδ’ ἐλεύσεσθαι, μεγά]λην ἐπιειμένον ἀλκήν·

νῦν δέ μ’ ἐὼν ὀλίγος τε καὶ οὐτιδανὸς [νῦν δέ μ’ ἐὼν ὀλίγοσ τε καὶ] καὶ ἄκικυς οὐτιδανὸσ καὶ ἄκικυσ ὀφθαλμοῦ ἀλάωσεν, ἐπεί μ’ ἐδαμάσσατο οἴνῳ.

[ὀφθαλμοῦ ἀλάωσασ, ἐπ]εί μ’

ἀλλ’ ἄγε δεῦρ’, Ὀδυσεῦ, ἵνα τοι πὰρ ξείνια θείω,

[ἀλλ’ ἄγε δεῦρ’, Ὀδυσεῦ, ἵν]α τοι πὰρ ξείνια θείω, ὸν Μ. 1   ον Μ. 1

πομπήν τ’ ὀτρύνω δόμεναι κλυτὸν ἐννοσίγαιον·

[πομπήν τ’ ὀ]τρ[ύνω δόμ]εναι κλυτ⟦ῶι⟧ ἐννοσίγαι⟦ωι⟧·

τοῦ γὰρ ἐγὼ πάις εἰμί, πατὴρ δ’ ἐμὸς εὔχεται εἶναι.

[τοῦ γὰρ ἐγὼ π]άϊσ εἰμί, [πα]τὴρ δ’ ἐμὸσ εὔχεται εἶναι,

ἐδαμάσσαο οἴνωι.6

[ὅσ καὶ ἐμοὶ] τάδε πάν[τα] τελευτήσεσθαι ἔφασκεν. αὐτὸς δ’, αἴ κ’ ἐθέλῃσ’, ἰήσεται, οὐδέ τις ἄλλος

[αὐτὸσ δ’, αἴ] κ’ ἐθέληι, ἰή[σετ]αι, οὐδέ τισ ἄλλοσ

οὔτε θεῶν μακάρων οὔτε θνητῶν ἀνθρώπων.”

[οὔτε θεῶν] μακάρων ο[ὔτε θ]νητῶν ἀνθρώπων.” [ὣς ἔφατ’,] αὐτὰρ ἐγώ μι[ν ἀμε]ιβόμενοσ προσέειπον· Μ. 2

ὣς ἔφατ’, αὐτὰρ ἐγώ μιν ἀμειβόμενος προσέειπον·

[ὣς ἔφατ’, ἀλ]λ’ οὐ πεῖθεν [ἐμὸ]ν μεγαλήτορα θυμόν, [ἀλλά μιν ἄψο]ρρον πρ[οσέφη]ν κεκοτηότι θυμῶι· (S. West 1967: 230)

So they spoke, but they did not persuade my greathearted spirit, but once again I addressed him with an angered spirit:

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Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics

Od. 9.500–22

P31 (TM 61238)

“Cyclops, if any mortal man ever asks you about the shameful blinding of your eye, say that Odysseus, sacker of cities, carried out the blinding, son of Laertes and making his home on Ithaka.” So I spoke, and he groaned aloud and declared in response: “Ah now, in truth a prophecy spoken of “Ah now, in truth a prophecy spoken old comes to completion. of old comes to completion. There used to be a prophet here, great There used to be a prophet here, and strong,

great and strong,

Telemus, Eurymus’s son, who for prophecy was pre-eminent

Telemus, Eurymus’s son, who for prophecy was pre-eminent

and grew old as a prophet among the Cyclopes:

and grew old as a prophet among the Cyclopes:

he said that all these things would someday happen to me,

he said that all these things would someday happen to me,

that I would lose the sight of my eye at that I would lose the sight of my eye the hands of Odysseus. at the hands of Odysseus. But always I expected that some tall and handsome man

But always I expected that some tall and handsome man

with great endowment of strength on him, would come here;

with great endowment of strength on him, would come here;

but now although a little man, niddering, feeble,

but now although a little man, niddering, feeble,

he blinded my eye, after he subdued me with wine.

you blinded my eye, after you subdued me with wine.

But come here, Odysseus, so that I may give you a guest gift

But come here, Odysseus, so that I may give you a guest gift

and urge the glorious earthshaker to grant you conveyance home:

and urge the glorious earthshaker to grant you conveyance home:

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Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics

Od. 9.500–22

P31 (TM 61238)

for I am his son, and he declares he is my father.

for I am his son, and he declares he is my father, who also said that all these things would happen to me.

But he himself will heal me, if he wishes, but not any other,

But he himself will heal me, if he wishes, but not any other,

neither of the blessed gods nor of mortal men.”

neither of the blessed gods nor of mortal men.” So he spoke, but I answered and addressed him: M. 2

So he spoke, but I answered him again So he spoke, but he did not persuade and said to him: my greathearted spirit, but once again I addressed him with an angered spirit: (p.251) Taking 519a to mean “he [Poseidon] indeed promised to fulfill my prayer and to give you conveyance,” Aldo di Luzio defends the suitability of the verse: it builds on verses 517 and 518, putting weight behind Polyphemus’s reference to conveyance and a guest gift (1969: 120). Although I disagree with the specifics of di Luzio’s proposal—he does (p.252) not see 519a as repeating 511—I follow him in trying to discern what work 519a does in its context (120– 1). The addition of 519a means that both the individual at the beginning of his speech (Telemus) and at the end (Poseidon) gave Polyphemus the same warning. Yet the repetition sets up a twist: Telemus warned Polyphemus; Poseidon warned Polyphemus, but he also may be able to save him. Next, assume that the addition of 522a rendered 522–2a the same as 500–1, meaning assume that 500–1 in the papyrus did not differ from Helmut van Thiel’s text (cf. S. West 1967: 224). If those conditions obtain, the same pair of verses begins each of Odysseus’s two turns in his four-turn conversation with Polyphemus. Di Luzio is on the right track when he argues that this repetition points up the similarity in the context of Odysseus’s two speeches—in neither case does fear of what may come silence Odysseus—and when he assigns this verse to those that provide “symmetry” and “parallelism” (1969: 126, 140, my translation). This intervention aims at a repetition meant to increase cohesion.7 I come to the second component of my analysis of this passage. (And I will be following this twofold procedure for each passage I analyze in this and the next two sections.) To repeat what I wrote in the introduction to this chapter, I want to track the ways in which plus verses (and, where appropriate, variations within lines) present material and structures found elsewhere. Doing so will help me Page 21 of 75

 

Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics make an essential point in section 5.5: the extent to which the scribe works with the recognizable. It may be otiose to investigate how these plus verses deploy material used elsewhere, given that they repeat verses in the immediate vicinity, but I note the following. Forms of 519a’s panta teleutaō (“to bring to pass all things”) appear five other times in the two Homeric epics (Il. 13.375, 18.328, 19.90; Od. 2.306, 3.62). The two units of 522a appear elsewhere: Od. 9.282 includes ἀλλά μιν ἄψορρον προσέφην (“but once again I addressed him”), and kekotēoti thumōi (“with an angered spirit”) comes up at Il. 21.456 and Od. 19.71, 22.477. I turn to parallelism. Agamemnon sets the terms for the duel between Menelaus and Paris:

Il. 3.280–91

P40 (TM 61203)

ὑμεῖς μάρτυροι ἔστε, φυλάσσετε δ’ ὅρκια πιστά· εἰ μέν κεν Μενέλαον Ἀλέξανδρος καταπέφνῃ, αὐτὸς ἔπειθ’ Ἑλένην ἐχέτω καὶ κτήματα πάντα, ἡμεῖς δ’ ἐν νήεσσι νεώμεθα ποντοπόροισιν· εἰ δέ κ’ Ἀλέξανδρον κτείνῃ ξανθὸς Μενέλαος,

[ὑμεῖσ μάρ]τυρεσ ἔστε, φυλάσσετε δ’ ὅρκια π̣[ιστά· [εἰ μέν κεν] Μ̣ε̣ν̣έ̣λαον Ἀλέξανδροσ κατα[πέφνηι, [αὐτὸσ ἔπειθ’ Ἑ]λένην ἐ̣χ̣έ̣τω καὶ κτή[ματα πάντα, [ἡμεῖσ δ’ ἐν νή]εσσι νεώ̣μεθα κοῦροι Ἀχαιῶ[ν [Ἄργοσ ἐσ ἱππόβοτον κ]α̣ὶ Ἀχαΐδα καλλιγύ[ναικα·

Τρῶας ἔπειθ’ Ἑλένην καὶ κτήματα πάντ’ ἀποδοῦναι, τιμὴν δ’ Ἀργείοις ἀποτινέμεν ἥν τιν’ ἔοικεν, ἥ τε καὶ ἐσσομένοισι μετ’ ἀνθρώποισι πέληται. εἰ δ’ ἂν ἐμοὶ τιμὴν Πρίαμος Πριάμοιό τε παῖδες τίνειν οὐκ ἐθέλωσιν Ἀλεξάνδροιο πεσόντος, αὐτὰρ ἐγὼ καὶ ἔπειτα μαχήσομαι εἵνεκα ποινῆς αὖθι μένων, εἵως κε τέλος πολέμοιο κιχείω.

[εἰ δέ κέ τοι Μενέλαοσ Ἀ]λέξανδρον̣ κατ[απέφνηι, [Τρῶασ ἔπειθ’ Ἑλένην κα]ὶ κτήματ[α πάντ’ ἀποδοῦναι, (S. West 1967: 43)

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Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics

Il. 3.280–91

P40 (TM 61203)

be witnesses, and guard the solemn oaths: if Menelaus Alexander kills (i.e., if Alexander kills Menelaus), then let him keep Helen and all her possessions, and let us depart in our seafaring ships; but if Alexander tawny-haired Menelaus kills (i.e., if Menelaus kills Alexander), then let the Trojans give back Helen and all her possessions, and pay to the Argives a recompense which is suitable,

be witnesses, and guard the solemn oaths: if Menelaus Alexander kills (i.e., if Alexander kills Menelaus), then let him keep Helen and all her possessions; and let us, the sons of the Achaeans, return in our ships to horse nourishing Argos and Achaea of the beautiful women; but if Menelaus Alexander kills (i.e., if Menelaus kills Alexander), then let the Trojans give back Helen and all her possessions,

one that will remain in the minds of men yet to be. But if Priam and the sons of Priam refuse to pay recompense to me after Alexander falls, then I will fight on even then, for the sake of recompense, and will remain here until I find an end of war. (p.253) In van Thiel’s text, Agamemnon structures his speech around a series of parallel “if, then” constructions that contain the following parallel members: if Alexander wins (A),    then he can keep Helen and the possessions he took from Sparta (B),    and the Achaeans will return home (C); if Menelaus wins (A),    then the Trojans are to return Helen and the possessions and pay a suitable penalty in addition (B); if Alexander falls and Priam is not willing to pay that penalty (A),    then Agamemnon will continue to prosecute the war at Troy (C).

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Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics The parallel members alternate in an ABCABAC pattern (cf. Austerlitz 1958: 47– 8; Fabb 2015: 142, 145–6, 155–6, 160). To map this analysis onto the Greek text:

εἰ μέν κεν Μενέλαον Ἀλέξανδρος καταπέφνῃ,

A if clause

αὐτὸς ἔπειθ’ Ἑλένην ἐχέτω καὶ κτήματα πάντα,

B then clause: Trojans

ἡμεῖς δ’ ἐν νήεσσι νεώμεθα ποντοπόροισιν·

C then clause: Achaeans

εἰ δέ κ’ Ἀλέξανδρον κτείνῃ ξανθὸς Μενέλαος,

A if clause

Τρῶας ἔπειθ’ Ἑλένην καὶ κτήματα πάντ’ ἀποδοῦναι, B then clause: Trojans τιμὴν δ’ Ἀργείοις ἀποτινέμεν ἥν τιν’ ἔοικεν,

B then clause: Trojans

ἥ τε καὶ ἐσσομένοισι μετ’ ἀνθρώποισι πέληται.

x

εἰ δ’ ἂν ἐμοὶ τιμὴν Πρίαμος Πριάμοιό τε παῖδες

A if clause

τίνειν οὐκ ἐθέλωσιν Ἀλεξάνδροιο πεσόντος,

A if clause

αὐτὰρ ἐγὼ καὶ ἔπειτα μαχήσομαι εἵνεκα ποινῆς

C then clause: Achaeans

αὖθι μένων, εἵως κε τέλος πολέμοιο κιχείω.

C then clause: Achaeans

The scribe’s addition of verse 283a enhances the parallelism between the members marked C (cf. S. West 1967: 51): it makes each member two verses (cf. Saarinen 2017: 414–15) and, with its focus on place, provides a counterpart to verse 291. I highlight this enhancement in the following reconstruction:

[εἰ μέν κεν] Μ̣ε̣ν̣έ̣λαον Ἀλέξανδροσ κατα[πέφνηι,

A if clause

[αὐτὸσ ἔπειθ’ Ἑ]λένην ἐ̣χ̣έ̣τω καὶ κτή[ματα πάντα,

B then clause: Trojans

[ἡμεῖσ δ’ ἐν νή]εσσι νεώ̣μεθα κοῦροι Ἀχαιῶ[ν

C then clause: Achaeans

[Ἄργοσ ἐσ ἱππόβοτον κ]α̣ὶ Ἀχαΐδα καλλιγύ[ναικα

C then clause: Achaeans/ place

[εἰ δέ κέ τοι Μενέλαοσ Ἀ]λέξανδρον̣ κατ[απέφνηι,

A if clause

[Τρῶασ ἔπειθ’ Ἑλένην κα]ὶ κτήματ[α πάντ’ ἀποδοῦναι,

B then clause: Trojans

τιμὴν δ’ Ἀργείοισ ἀποτινέμεν ἥν τιν’ ἔοικεν,

B then clause: Trojans

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Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics

ἥ τε καὶ ἐσσομένοισι μετ’ ἀνθρώποισι πέληται.

x

εἰ δ’ ἂν ἐμοὶ τιμὴν Πρίαμοσ Πριάμοιό τε παῖδεσ A if clause τίνειν οὐκ ἐθέλωσιν Ἀλεξάνδροιο πεσόντοσ,

A if clause

αὐτὰρ ἐγὼ καὶ ἔπειτα μαχήσομαι εἵνεκα ποινῆσ C then clause: Achaeans αὖθι μένων, εἵωσ κε τέλοσ πολέμοιο κιχείω.

C then clause: Achaeans/ place

(p.254) I review how verse 283a relates to some other verses in the epics. It appears at Il. 3.75 and 3.258, and both instances also depend on the verb neomai in the previous verse (3.74, 3.257) (S. West 1967: 51). Di Luzio observes that talk of the Achaeans’ return often prompts mention of Argos or Achaea and that reference to a specific place often accompanies the verb neomai in the sense of “return” (whereas the verb means “to go away” when used absolutely) (1969: 65). This same passage also shows the scribe’s enhancing the parallelism between different verses by altering a verse in the exemplar. In verse 284, instead of εἰ δέ κ’ Ἀλέξανδρον κτείνῃ ξανθὸς Μενέλαος (“but if Alexander tawny-haired Menelaus kills” (i.e. if Menelaus kills Alexander)), one gets εἰ δέ κέ τοι Μενέλαοσ Ἀ]λέξανδρον κατ[απέφνηι (“but if Menelaus Alexander kills” (i.e. if Menelaus kills Alexander)). The papyrus’s verse 284 thus balances more closely the preceding 281: εἰ μέν κεν Μενέλαον Ἀλέξανδρος καταπέφνῃ (“if Menelaus Alexander kills” (i.e. if Alexander kills Menelaus)) (cf. S. West 1967: 52). Both verses follow the same sequence: Menelaus, Alexander, katapephnēi (cf. Fabb 2015: 147). The scribe behind P30 adds some verses to a speech by Zeus.

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Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics

Od. 5.22–8

P30 (TM 61199)

“τέκνον ἐμόν, ποῖόν σε ἔπος φύγεν ἕρκος ὀδόντων. οὐ γὰρ δὴ τοῦτον μὲν ἐβούλευσας νόον αὐτή, ὡς ἤτοι κείνους Ὀδυσεὺς ἀποτίσεται ἐλθών; Τηλέμαχον δὲ σὺ πέμψον ἐπισταμένως, δύνασαι γάρ, ὥς κε μάλ’ ἀσκηθὴς ἣν πατρίδα γαῖαν ἵκηται, μνηστῆρες δ’ ἐν νηὶ παλιμπετὲς ἀπονέωνται.” ἦ ῥα, καὶ Ἑρμείαν, υἱὸν φίλον, ἀντίον ηὔδα· “My child, what sort of word

[“τέκνον ἐμόν, ποῖό]ν σε ἔποσ φύγεν ἕ̣ρκο[σ ὀ]δ̣[όντων· [οὐ γὰρ δὴ τοῦτον μὲν] ἐβούλευσασ νόον αὐτή, [ὡσ ἦ τοι κείνουσ] Ὀδυσσεὺσ ἀποτε̣ίσεται ἐλ[θών [οἷσιν ἐνὶ μεγάρ]ο̣ισ, ἢ ἀμφαδὸν ἠ[ὲ κρ]υ̣φ[η]δ̣[όν; [Τηλέμαχον δὲ σὺ] π̣έμψον ἐπισ̣[ταμένωσ, δύνασαι γάρ, [ὥς κε μ]άλ’ ἀσκηθ[ὴ]σ̣ [ἣν πατρίδα γαῖαν ἵκηται, [μνησ]τῆρεσ δ’ ἐν ν[ηῒ παλιμπετὲσ ἀπονέωνται [….] ι̣. πρω̣[

escaped the barrier of your teeth. For did not you yourself devise this plan, that Odysseus will surely come and punish those men? Then bring Telemachus home skillfully, for you can do this, so that quite without harm he may come back to his own country while the suitors in their ship sail away back again.” He spoke and then said directly to his beloved son, Hermes:

[ἦ ῥα, κ]αὶ Ἑρμ[είαν, υἱὸν φίλον, ἀντίον ηὔδα· (S. West 1967: 200) “My child, what sort of word escaped the barrier of your teeth: for did not you yourself devise this plan, that Odysseus will surely come and punish those men in his house, either out in the open or secretly? Then bring Telemachus home skillfully, for you can do this, so that quite without harm he may come back to his own country while the suitors in their ship sail away back again … He spoke and then said directly to his beloved son, Hermes:

(p.255) Stephanie West suggests that lines 24a and 27a “were inserted for the sake of symmetry: Zeus is thus made to devote two lines each to Odysseus (24, 24a), Telemachus (25, 26) and the suitors (27, 27a)” (1967: 207). One can also detect three interlocking parallel couplets:

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Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics

24

[ὡσ ἦ τοι κείνουσ] Ὀδυσσεὺσ ἀποτε̣ίσεται ἐλ[θών

A

24a [οἷσιν ἐνὶ μεγάρ]ο̣ισ, ἢ ἀμφαδὸν ἠ[ὲ κρ]υ̣φ[η]δ̣[όν;

B

25

[Τηλέμαχον δὲ σὺ] π̣έμψον ἐπισ̣[ταμένωσ, δύνασαι γάρ,

A

26

[ὥς κε μ]άλ’ ἀσκηθ[ὴ]σ̣ [ἣν πατρίδα γαῖαν ἵκηται,

B

27

[μνησ]τῆρεσ δ’ ἐν ν[ηῒ παλιμπετὲσ ἀπονέωνται

A

27a [….] ι̣. πρω̣[

B

The parallel members alternate in an ABABAB pattern. Each member marked with A specifies the focus of interest and his or their movements: Odysseus returns; Athena escorts Telemachus; the suitors head back. Two of the verses marked with a B—24a and 26—specify location and manner: Odysseus punishes the suitors in his house either openly or secretly; Telemachus returns to Ithaca safely. I would wager that 27a offered similar details about the suitors. Each hemistich of 24a [οἷσιν ἐνὶ μεγάρ]ο̣ισ, ἢ ἀμφαδὸν ἠ[ὲ κρ]υ̣φ[η]δ̣[όν; (“in his house, either out in the open or secretly?”) appears elsewhere: οἷσιν ἐνὶ μεγάροισι at Od. 1.269 and 4.192; ἢ ἀμφαδὸν ἦε κρυφηδόν at Od. 14.330 and 19.299, with dolōi in lieu of kruphēdon at Od. 1.296 and 11.120 (S. West 1967: 207; di Luzio 1969: 67). Citing these passages, Di Luzio notes how these phrases turn up when talk is of Odysseus’s punishing the suitors, like in Zeus’s speech; he points in passing as well to the typicality of specifications of place and manner, especially with a verb of motion (1969: 67). Examples of the latter phenomenon include the just reviewed verse 26 in the passage under discussion (ὥς κε μάλ’ ἀσκηθὴς ἣν πατρίδα γαῖαν ἵκηται “so that all without harm he can come back to his own country”) and the narrator’s description of Paris “as he came out in front of the throng with long strides” (ἐρχόμενον προπάροιθεν ὁμίλου μακρὰ βιβῶντα, Il. 3.22; cf. Il. 5.204–5, 8.12, 10.82, 15.146, 21.64; Od. 2.175–6, 3.306–7). 5.2.2. Coherence

Douglas Moffat finds the Anglo-Saxon scribe’s attempts to “illuminate obscure passages” an essential aspect of his performance (1992: 824–5, quotation from 825). Indeed, a performer does not seek to confuse his audience (Bauman 1986: 66–8; Azuonye 1994: esp. 156–8), or not all of his audience (Hoffman 2007; Thomas 2012). Subsection 3.4.1 demonstrated that this phenomenon emerges clearly when a performer performs for an outsider. One should approach from this perspective the repeated attempts in the papyri to simplify, to obviate perceived obscurities, and to make sure that what is going on is clear (section 4.2). I assign these moves to the scribe’s urge to perform and, more (p.256) specifically, to his goal of coherent entextualization.8 Sections 1.1 and 1.2.2 discussed coherence as a matter of clarity and focused on the speaker’s Page 27 of 75

 

Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics providing only gaps that audiences can fill in as an example of his striving after clarity. In the following discussion I am thinking of clarity in a broad sense and not limiting it to the context of filling gaps. In P12, Il. 22.197 has the name of the sentence’s subject instead of a nominative participle.

Il. 22.197

P12 (TM 61236)

τοσσάκι μιν προπάροιθεν [τοσσάκι μιν προπάροιθεν ἀποστρέψασκε παραφθὰς ἀποστρ]έψασκεν Ἀχιλλεὺ[σ just as often, he would turn him back (S. West 1967: 143, cf. 166) first, anticipating him just as often, Achilles would turn him back first That translators (Lattimore 1951; Wyatt 1999; McCrorie 2012) insert “Achilles” when rendering this verse drives home the fact that the alteration in the papyrus responds to a perceived need for clarification. A desire to ensure clarity also motivates the rendition of Od. 6.256 preserved in P110.

Od. 6.255–6

P110 (TM 61200)

ὄρσεο νῦν, ὦ ξεῖνε, πόλινδ’ ἴμεν, ὄφρα σε πέμψω πατρὸς ἐμοῦ πρὸς δῶμα δαΐφρονος, ἔνθα σε φημὶ Rise up now, stranger, to go to the city, so I may send you to the house of my prudent father, where you I assert

[ὄρσεο νῦν, ὦ ξεῖνε,] πόλινδ’ ἴμεν, ὄφ[ρα σε πέμψω Ἀλκ̣ινόου πρὸσ δῶμα δαΐφρονοσ, ἔν̣[θα σέ φημι (S. West 1967: 220) Rise up now, stranger, to go to the city, so I may send you to the house of prudent Alcinous, where you I assert

The scribe felt it necessary to clarify that Alcinous is Nausicaa’s father. Nausicaa later speaks of the “house of my father, great-hearted Alcinous” (Od. 6.299), and phrases to be translated “the house of Alcinous” appear seven times in the Odyssey (cf. di Luzio 1969: 53). The phrase “daiphrōn Alcinous” appears three times in the Odyssey (8.8, 8.13, 8.56), and in fifty-six of its fifty-nine appearances daiphrōn modifies a proper name (cf. di Luzio 1969: 53). I likewise impute alterations pertaining to matters of syntax to a desire to make sure no reader is confused. At Il. 22.102 in P12, for instance, one finds a different prepositional phrase than appears in Helmut van Thiel’s text.

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Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics

Il. 22.102

P12 (TM 61236)

νύχθ’ ὑπὸ τήνδ’ ὀλοήν, ὅτε τ’ ὤρετο δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς. during the fatal night when brilliant Achilles rose up.

νύκτα ποτὶ δνοφερὴν [ὅτ]ε̣ [τ’ ὤρετο δῖοσ Ἀχιλλεύσ. (S. West 1967: 142) on that dark night when brilliant Achilles rose up.

(p.257) Stephanie West offers an explanation for the alteration: “Probably the construction was found difficult: in only one other place in Homer is ὑπό with the accusative used in a temporal sense:…; the usage was never a common one. With ποτί there is no difficulty” (1967: 163). It is not or not only the scribe’s difficulty that motivates the change: it is his sense that his audience may be confused by the phrase that prompts the shift. For poti with the accusative in a temporal sense, see Od. 17.191—“and soon you will find it colder toward evening (poti hespera)”—and Hesiod Works and Days 552—“and sometimes it rains toward evening (poti hesperon).”

5.3. Competence and Completeness A performer can aim for a maximalist presentation, can seek to tell as complete a tale as possible (Bauman 2004: 115–23; cf. Cosentino 1982: 54). Observing the hesitations of a teller who denies he has the ability to perform when he possesses insufficient knowledge about the exact events in a story, Richard Bauman infers that a maximalist presentation can be one component of displaying communicative competence (2004: 116, 120). Similarly, Chukwuma Azuonye tracks how an Ohafia Igbo bard (southeastern Nigeria) responded to feedback from a rival performer of epic: previously a proponent of a strippeddown style, he began to favor “thematic expansions, the introduction of dialogue, digressions, and ethnohistorical foregrounding” (1994: 141). Joyce Flueckiger shows that what differentiates a professional storyteller in Chhattisgarh, India, from a nonprofessional is the ability to “expand the tale by carefully interweaving new tale types and motifs with the core tale” (1996: 128). Noting how a Kyrgyz performer of the Manas epic presented five additional sections after hearing two competitors perform the first three, Minna Skafte Jensen observes, “Here, then, is a clear criterion for quality, that of knowing most and being able to perform the fullest version” (2011: 98). Discussing Okabou Ojobolo’s performance of the Ozidi saga (of the Ijo in Nigeria), Isidore Okpewho highlights the audience’s demand for “amplitude” and their feeling at one point of having been “cheated of a full performance” (2014: 101–2). When a Finnish narrator, Juho Oksanen, aimed “to try his best,” “‘best’ appeared to him in this situation to mean giving as much detail as possible” (Kaivola-Bregenhøj 1996: 111). A desire for a maximalist presentation also lies behind the decision of performers in the Suzhou chantefable tradition (China) to introduce into their presentation extensive amounts of detail about, for instance, objects used by the characters (Bender 2003: 51, 74, 140–2, 187). This elucidation of the connection Page 29 of 75

 

Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics between competence and completeness provides a constructive analogue for one confronting the wild papyri’s plus verses.9 (p.258) In P40 at Il. 2.855a–b appear two plus verses adding the Caucones and their leader, Ameibus, to the catalogue of Trojan allies.

Il. 2.855–6

P40 (TM 61203)

Κρῶμνάν τ’ Αἰγιαλόν τε καὶ ὑψηλοὺς Ἐρυθίνους. αὐτὰρ Ἁλιζώνων Ὀδίος καὶ Ἐπίστροφος ἦρχον, and Cromna and Aegiales and lofty Erythini. but of the Halizones Odius and Epistrophus were leaders,

… [Κ]α̣ύκω[νασ δ’ αὖτ’ ἦγε Πολυκλέοσ υἱὸσ Ἄμειβοσ, [οἳ] περὶ Πα̣[ρθένιον ποταμὸν κλυτὰ δώματ’ ἔναιον. (S. West 1967: 42) … and in turn Ameibus the son of Polykles led the Caucones, who dwelled in famous homes by the Parthenius river.

The papyrus’s presentation will not have confused ancient readers. The Caucones appear among the ranks of Trojan allies at Il. 10.429, and Poseidon deposits Aeneas among the Caucones after rescuing him from Achilles (Il. 20.329) (S. West 1967: 50; di Luzio 1969: 78). Line 855b, [οἳ] περὶ Πα̣[ρθένιον ποταμὸν κλυτὰ δώματ’ ἔναιον (“who dwelled in famous homes by the Parthenius river”), is almost the same as Il. 2.854: ἀμφί τε Παρθένιον ποταμὸν κλυτὰ δώματ’ ἔναιον (cf. S. West 1967: 50). Stephanie West observes, “The Catalogue has been interpolated elsewhere to make it as complete as possible” (1967: 50; cf. Bolling 1925: 78). More indicative of a maximalist design are the expansions of elements already in the exemplar. I chart how characters are made to do more things (subsection 5.3.1) and how nothing is assumed (subsection 5.3.2). 5.3.1. Characters do More Things

Plus verses can make characters do more things. In P7 at Il. 8.38a, Zeus does not just smile before he responds to Athena: he also takes her hand and calls her by name.

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Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics

Il. 8.38–9

P7 (TM 61237)

τὴν δ’ ἐπιμειδήσας προσέφη νεφεληγερέτα Ζεύς· “θάρσει, Τριτογένεια, φίλον τέκος· οὔ νύ τι θυμῷ Then smiling spoke to her the cloud-gatherer Zeus: “Take heart, Tritogeneia, dear child: not at all with a heart

[ὣσ φάτο, μείδησεν δὲ πα]τ̣[ὴ]ρ ἀνδ̣[ρ]ῶ̣ν̣ τ̣ε θεῶ̣ν̣ τ̣ε̣ [χειρί τε μιν κατέ]ρεξεν ἔποσ τ’ ἔφατ’ ἔκ̣ τ̣’ ὀ̣ν̣ό̣μ[α]ζε· [“θάρσει Τριτο]γ̣ένεια φίλον τέ̣κ̣οσ· οὔ ν̣ύ̣ τ̣ι̣ θ̣υ̣μ̣[ῶ]ι̣ (S. West 1967: 77) So she spoke, and the father of men and gods smiled and stroked her with his hand and spoke a word and called her by name: “Take heart, Tritogeneia, dear child: not at all with a heart

38a, [χειρί τε μιν κατέ]ρεξεν ἔποσ τ’ ἔφατ’ ἔκ̣ τ̣’ ὀ̣ν̣ό̣μ[α]ζε (“and stroked her with his hand and spoke a word and called her by name”), appears four times in the Iliad and two times in the Odyssey (S. West 1967: 81; di Luzio 1969: 125). It also calls to mind the whole verse formula, ἔν τ’ ἄρα οἱ φῦ χειρὶ ἔπος τ’ ἔφατ’ ἔκ τ’ ὀνόμαζε (“and clasped his (p.259) hand and spoke a word and called him by name”), which appears six times in the Iliad and five times in the Odyssey (with moi instead of hoi at Od. 10.280) (di Luzio 1969: 125). These verses arise when a speaker seeks to console someone (di Luzio 1969: 125) or to establish “greater closeness” (Graziosi and Haubold 2010: 150 at 253): Zeus aims at the former in Il. 8.38–40. In P7, Il. 8.199a describes a gesture Hera makes to signal her anger at Hector (S. West 1967: 87).

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Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics

Il. 8.198–200

P7 (TM 61237)

ὣς ἔφατ’ εὐχόμενος, νεμέσησε δὲ πότνια Ἥρη. σείσατο δ’ εἰνὶ θρόνῳ, ἐλέλιξε δὲ μακρὸν Ὄλυμπον, καί ῥα Ποσειδάωνα μέγαν θεὸν ἀντίον ηὔδα· So he spoke, boasting, and queenly Hera was indignant. And she shuddered on her throne and made high Olympus quake, and to the great god Poseidon she spoke in response:

[ὣς ἔφατ’ εὐ]χόμενοσ, νεμ[έσησε δὲ πότνια Ἥρη, […. δ’ ἐν] κλισμῶι, πελέ[μιξε δὲ μακρὸν Ὄλυμπον, [……ἀ]μφοτέραισιν ε[ [καί ῥα Ποσ]ειδάωνα μέγαν [θεὸν ἀντίον ηὔδα· (S. West 1967: 79) So he spoke, boasting, and queenly Hera was indignant, …and on her couch and made high Olympus shake, …with both [hands] and to the great god Poseidon she spoke in response:

199a does not seem to overlap in diction with any other verse in the extant corpus of archaic Greek hexameter poetry. Indeed, ἀμφοτέραισιν with its ending -aisi represents a modernization. But in going through various reconstructions of the verse, Stephanie West lists passages in which characters express their emotions, ranging from frustration to despair to zeal, with a gesture, such as Asius (Il. 12.162), Ares (Il. 15.113–14), Patroclus (Il. 15.397–8), Achilles (Il. 16.124–5), Odysseus (Od. 13.198–9), Patroclus’s and Achilles’s female slaves (Il. 18.30–1), Thetis and the Nereids (Il. 18.50–1), and Odysseus’s companions (Od. 10.567) (1967: 87–8; cf. di Luzio 1969: 96). Aldo di Luzio reminds us that the paratactic presentation of five finite verbs in quick succession over the course of verses 198 to 200 is “an archaic trait and characteristic of epic language” (1969: 96, my translation; cf. Stanley 1993: 6). In P432 at Il. 12.193a, the Trojans Adamas, Thoön, and Oenomaus fall in addition to Menon, Iamenus, and Orestes: either Leonteus kills all six, as the scribe’s correction of the plural form pelasan to the singular form pelasen in verse 194 indicates, or he and Polypoetes kill them jointly (S. West 1967: 103).

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Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics

Il. 12.191–4

P432 (TM 61227)

Ἀντιφάτην μὲν πρῶτον, ἐπαΐξας δι’ ὁμίλου, πλῆξ’ αὐτοσχεδίην· ὃ δ’ ἂρ ὕπτιος οὔδει ἐρείσθη· αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα Μένωνα καὶ Ἰαμενὸν καὶ Ὀρέστην πάντας ἐπασσυτέρους πέλασε χθονὶ πουλυβοτείρῃ.

[Ἀντιφάτην μὲ]μ̣ πρῶ̣το[ν ἐ]π̣[αΐξασ ⌞δι’ ὁμίλου⌟ [πλῆξ’ ἄορι μεγ]ά̣λωι κεφαλὴν ὑ[πέ⌞λυσε⌟δὲ γυῖα· ο [αὐτὰρ ἔπειτ]α̣ Μένωνα καὶ {ε} Ἰαμε[νὸν καὶ Ὀρέστην … [Ἀσιάδην τ’ Ἀ]δ̣ά̣μ̣α̣ντ̣α Θό̣ωνά τ̣[ε Οἰνόμαόν τε ε [πάντασ ἐπασ]συτέρουσ πέλασαν [χθονὶ πουλυβοτείρηι. (Maehler 1995: 147)

Antiphates first, darting on him

Antiphates first, darting on him through

through the throng, he struck close at hand: and he backward on the earth crashed; and then Menon, and Iamenus, and Orestes, all these one after the other he brought down to the bounteous earth.

the throng, he struck with his huge sword on the head and loosened his limbs; and then Menon, and Iamenus, and Orestes, and Adamus, son of Asius, and Thoön and Oenomaus, all these one after the other they/he brought down to the bounteous earth.

(p.260) 193a, [Ἀσιάδην τ’ Ἀ]δ̣ά̣μ̣α̣ντ̣α Θό̣ωνά τ̣[ε Οἰνόμαόν τε (“and Adamus, son of Asius, and Thoön and Oenomaus”), appears at Il. 12.140 (S. West 1967: 103), and the addition of the verse renders the passage more like those several lists, stretching over more than one verse, of fallen warriors presented as bare names without any further information appended (e.g. Il. 8.274–6, 11.301–3, 11.489–91, 16.415–17, 16.694–6; cf. Strasburger 1954: 15, 52–60; Beye 1964). P51 dates from the first century BCE (Fernández Delgado and Pordomingo 2015: 31) but represents a typical pre-Aristarchean wild papyrus, “not an interpolated descendant of the edition of Aristarchus” (Apthorp 1980: 161). A batch of plus verses appear in the description of Achilles’s shield (cf. Revermann 1998; Martin 2005: 169–70). Hephaestus includes more items. At Il. 18.606a appear pipes, a kithara, and flutes, and at Il. 18.608a–d one finds a scene of dolphins hunting in a harbor.

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Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics

Il. 18.603–9

P51 (TM 61124)

πολλὸς δ’ ἱμερόεντα χορὸν > Πολλὸϲ [δ’ ἱμε]ρόεντα χ̣[ο]ρὸν περιίσταθ’ ὅμιλος περιίϲτα̣[θ’ ὅ]μι[λοϲ τερπόμενοι· δοιὼ δὲ κυβιστητῆρε 604–5> τερπόμ̣[ενοι·] δοιὼ δὲ κ̣υ̣[β]ιϲτητῆρε κ[α]τ’ αὐτ̣[οὺϲ κατ’ αὐτούς10 μολπῆς ἐξάρχοντες ἐδίνευον μολπῆ[ϲ ἐξ]άρχοντεϲ ἐδ̣ί̣νευον κατ[ὰ] κατὰ μέσσους. μέϲ[ϲουϲ. ἐν δ’ ἐτίθει ποταμοῖο μέγα — Ἐν δ’ ἔϲ[αν ϲ]ύ̣ριγγε[ϲ, ἔϲ]α̣ν κίθαρίϲ σθένος ’Ωκεανοῖο τ[ε] κ̣αὶ α̣[ὐλοί. ἄντυγα πὰρ πυμάτην σάκεος    · Ἐν δὲ τ̣[ίθει] π̣οταμο̣ῖ̣ο μέγα ϲθένοϲ πύκα ποιητοῖο. ’Ωκε[ανοῖο αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ δὴ τεῦξε σάκος μέγα ἄντυγα πὰρ πυμά̣τ̣η̣ν̣ ϲ̣άκε̣ο̣ϲ πύκα τε στιβαρόν τε, π[οιητοῖο. And a great crowd stood around > Ἐν δὲ λιμὴν ἐτέτυκ̣τ̣[ο] ἑ̣ανοῦ the lovely chorus καϲϲιτέρ[οιο taking joy in it; and two tumblers > κλυζ[ομ]ένωι ἴκε̣[λο]ϲ̣· δοίω δ’ among them, leading the dance, whirled up and down in their midst. On it he set also the great might of the river Oceanus, around the outermost rim of the strong made shield. But after he fashioned the shield, great and sturdy,

ἀναφυϲιόω[ντεϲ > ἀργύρεοι δελφῖνεϲ ἐφοίνεον ἔλλοπαϲ ἰχθῦϲ. > Τοῦ δ̣’ [ὕπ]ο̣ χάλκ̣ε̣[ιοι] τ̣ρ̣έ̣ο̣ν̣ ἰ̣χ̣θ̣ύ̣εϲ· αὐ̣τὰ[ρ ἐπ’ ἀκτῆϲ (Fernández Delgado and Pordomingo 2015: 32) And a great crowd stood around the lovely chorus taking joy in it; and two tumblers among them, leading the dance, whirled up and down in their midst. And there were pipes, and there were a kithara and flutes. On it he set also the great might of the river Oceanus, around the outermost rim of the strong made shield. And on it was wrought a harbor of pliant tin, and it looked as though it were undulating; and two spouting silver dolphins were killing the mute fish. And below him the bronze fish were fleeing in fear; and on the banks

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Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics

Il. 18.603–9

P51 (TM 61124) (for the translation of 608a–d, cf. Most 2007)

(p.261) Taken together, verses 606–6a, μολπῆ[ϲ ἐξ]άρχοντεϲ ἐδ̣ί̣νευον κατ[ὰ] μέϲ[ϲουϲ. / Ἐν δ’ ἔϲ[αν ϲ]ύ̣ριγγε[ϲ, ἔϲ]α̣ν̣ κίθαρίϲ τ[ε] κ̣αὶ α̣[ὐλοί (“leading the dance, whirled up and down in their midst. / And there were pipes, and there were a kithara and flutes”), call to mind the description of the weddings depicted on Achilles’s shield—κοῦροι δ’ ὀρχηστῆρες ἐδίνεον, ἐν δ’ ἄρα τοῖσιν / αὐλοὶ φόρμιγγές τε βοὴν ἔχον (“And young men were whirling in the dance, and among them / flutes and lyres sounded continually,” Il. 18.494–5) (S. West 1967: 135)—and on Heracles’s shield in the Hesiodic Shield of Heracles (278–81; di Luzio 1969: 116): τοὶ μὲν ὑπὸ λιγυρῶν συρίγγων ἵεσαν αὐδὴν ἐξ ἁπαλῶν στομάτων, περὶ δέ σφισιν ἄγνυτο ἠχώ· αἳ δ’ ὑπὸ φορμίγγων ἄναγον χορὸν ἱμερόεντα. ἔνθεν δ’ αὖθ’ ἑτέρωθε νέοι κώμαζον ὑπ’ αὐλοῦ, The men accompanied by shrill pipes sent forth their voices from their soft mouths, and around them spread the echo; and the women accompanied by lyres led the lovely chorus. On the other side from there, young men reveled, accompanied by a flute,11

The collocation of flutes and pipes also appears when Agamemnon hears the Trojans celebrating as they encamp on the plain: “he marveled at the many fires that burned before Ilium, / and at the sound of flutes and pipes (αὐλῶν συρίγγων τ’ ἐνοπὴν)” (Il. 10.12–13). 608a–d intersect with verses 207 to 213 of the Hesiodic Shield of Heracles (S. West 1967: 135; di Luzio 1969: 116–17; Fernández Delgado and Pordomingo 2015: 34–5):

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Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics

> Ἐν δὲ λιμὴν ἐτέτυκ̣τ̣[ο] ἑ̣ανοῦ καϲϲιτέρ[οιο > κλυζ[ομ]ένωι ἴκε̣[λο]ϲ̣· δοίω δ’ ἀναφυϲιόω[ντεϲ > ἀργύρεοι δελφῖνεϲ ἐφοίνεον ἔλλοπαϲ ἰχθῦϲ. > Τοῦ δ̣’ [ὕπ]ο̣ χάλκ̣ε̣[ιοι] τ̣ρ̣έ̣ο̣ν̣ ἰ̣χ̣θ̣ύ̣εϲ· αὐ̣τὰ[ρ ἐπ’ ἀκτῆϲ And on it was wrought a harbor of pliant tin, and it looked as though it were undulating; and two spouting, silver dolphins were killing the mute fish. And below him the bronze fish were fleeing in fear; and on the shore

ἐν δὲ λιμὴν εὔορμος ἀμαιμακέτοιο θαλάσσης κυκλοτερὴς ἐτέτυκτο πανέφθου κασσιτέροιο κλυζομένῳ ἴκελος· πολλοί γε μὲν ἂμ μέσον αὐτοῦ δελφῖνες τῇ καὶ τῇ ἐθύνεον ἰχθυάοντες νηχομένοις ἴκελοι· δοιὼ δ’ ἀναφυσιόωντες ἀργύρεοι δελφῖνες †ἐφοίτων† ἔλλοπας ἰχθῦς. τῶν δ’ ὕπο χάλκειοι τρέον ἰχθύες· αὐτὰρ ἐπ’ ἀκτῆς On it was wrought a good-mooring harbor of the invincible sea, circular, made of fully purified tin, and it looked as though it were undulating; in the middle of it rushed many dolphins here and there, fishing, and they looked as though they were swimming; and two spouting, silver dolphins were †…† the mute fish. And below them the bronze fish were fleeing in fear; and on the shore

(p.262) In addition, the plus verses’ depiction of dolphins pursuing other fish brings to mind the simile comparing the Trojans as they try to hide from Achilles to fish fleeing a dolphin (Il. 21.22–6). In P12 at Il. 23.136a, Achilles holds Patroclus’s head in his hands and tears his hair (if the supplement is right). S. West declares, “The line is obviously absurd: Achilles could not carry Patroclus’ head and tear his hair at the same time” (1967: 176), but Andromache and Hecuba simultaneously hold Hector’s head and tear their hair (Il. 24.710–12): πρῶται τόν γ’ ἄλοχός τε φίλη καὶ πότνια μήτηρ τιλλέσθην, ἐπ’ ἄμαξαν ἐύτροχον ἀίξασαι, ἁπτόμεναι κεφαλῆς· First Hector’s dear wife and queenly mother tore their hair, throwing themselves on the light-running wagon and clasping his head;… Page 36 of 75

 

Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics Be that as it may, the wish to make Achilles do more prevails.

Il. 23.136–7

P12 (TM 61236)

κειρόμενοι· ὄπιθεν δὲ κάρη ἔχε δῖος Ἀχιλλεὺς ἀχνύμενος· ἕταρον γὰρ ἀμύμονα πέμπ’ Ἄιδόσδε. cutting it off; and behind them brilliant Achilles clasped the head, sorrowing: for he sent a blameless companion to the house of Hades.

[κειρόμενοι· ὄπιθεν δὲ κάρη ἔχε δῖοσ Ἀχι]λλεὺσ [ἀμφοτέρηισι δὲ χερσὶ κόμην ηἴσχυν]ε̣ δ̣αΐζ̣ων [ἀχνύμενοσ· ἕταρον γὰρ ἀμύμονα πέμπ’ Ἄ]ϊδόσδε. (S. West 1967: 148) cutting it off; and behind them brilliant Achilles clasped the head and with both hands he tore and marred his hair, sorrowing: for he sent a blameless companion to the house of Hades.

136a almost replicates Il. 18.27, φίλῃσι δὲ χερσὶ κόμην ᾔσχυνε δαΐζων (“and with his own hands he tore and marred his hair”) (S. West 1967: 176). Those stricken by fear or grief tear their hair elsewhere. I already noted Andromache’s and Hecuba’s gestures over the dead Hector. Priam tears his hair upon recounting his vision of what the sack of Troy will entail: “and the gray hairs he plucked with his hands / and tore from his head” (πολιὰς δ’ ἂρ ἀνὰ τρίχας ἕλκετο χερσὶ / τίλλων ἐκ κεφαλῆς, Il. 22.77–8). Hecuba tears her hair (tille komēn) when she sees Achilles dragging Hector behind his chariot (Il. 22.406). In P30 at Od. 5.232a–b, Calypso puts on a krēdemnon (“veil”) in addition to the kaluptrē (“veil, headdress”) likely mentioned in 232 (S. West 1967: 214–15; Haslam 1997: 68 n. 27). I follow those who understand Calypso to don two distinct items (Zumbo 1994). Even if she dons two of the same item—making for a “nonsensical” (S. West 1967: 215) “incoherence” (Haslam 1997: 68)—the desire to make the character do more wins out.

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Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics

Od. 5.230–3

P30 (TM 61199)

αὐτὴ δ’ ἀργύφεον φᾶρος μέγα ἕννυτο νύμφη, λεπτὸν καὶ χαρίεν, περὶ δὲ ζώνην βάλετ’ ἰξυῖ καλὴν χρυσείην, κεφαλῇ δ’ ἐπέθηκε καλύπτρην. καὶ τότ’ Ὀδυσσῆι μεγαλήτορι μήδετο πομπήν· and the nymph herself donned a great white robe fine-woven and lovely, and around her waist she fastened a beautiful golden girdle, and on her head she put a headdress. And then she planned the journey for

     .π̣ [καλ]ὴν χρυσείην, κεφαλῆι̣ δ̣’ εμ̣[ κρ[ηδέ]μνωι δ’ ἐφύπερθε καλύ̣[ψατο δῖα θεάων κα[λ]ῶ̣ι νηγ[ατέωι], τό ῥα οἱ τεθ̣υ̣[ωμένον ἦεν. αὐ̣[τὰρ] Ὀδυσ̣[σῆϊ μ]εγαλήτορι μή̣[δετο πομπήν· (S. West 1967: 204) beautiful golden, and on her head and with a veil did the fair goddess veil herself from above, a veil fair and bright, which smelled fragrantly for her. But she planned the journey for

great-hearted Odysseus.

great-hearted Odysseus;

(p.263) 232a produces a paronomasia as it allows Calypso (dia theaōn), the concealer, to kaluptō, to conceal (cf. Zumbo 1994: 101; Sammons 2010: 44, 47– 8). 232a thereby duplicates the paronomasia already present in 232 wherein Calypso, the concealer, puts on a kaluptrē (again, assuming the presence of a kaluptrē in the papyrus’s 232). 232a and the first hemistich of 232b, κρ[ηδέ]μνωι δ’ ἐφύπερθε καλύ̣[ψατο δῖα θεάων / κα[λ]ῶ̣ι νηγ[ατέωι] (“and with a veil did the fair goddess veil herself from above, / a veil fair and bright”), are identical to Il. 14.184–5, part of Hera’s preparations for her seduction of Zeus; the narrator describes Agamemnon’s tunic as “fair and bright” (kalon nēgateon, Il. 2.43); and the second half of 232b, τό ῥα οἱ τεθ̣υ̣[ωμένον ἦεν (“which smelled fragrantly for her”), occurs at Il. 14.172 and at Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite 63 to describe Hera’s and Aphrodite’s ointment (S. West 1967: 214; di Luzio 1969: 98; D. Collins 2004: 214–15). Furthermore, by adding Calypso’s krēdemnon, the scribe introduces a far more common headdress than the kaluptrē: the former appears fourteen times in the two Homeric epics, whereas the latter only appears three times. Finally, I note that di Luzio stresses the typical structure of the passage in the papyrus (1969: 98): following paratactically upon 232, 232a completes with a second object the action initiated in 232; 232b describes by way of enjambment the object referred to in 232a, providing two attributes in asyndeton and a third attribute in a clause that refers to the possessor. Di Luzio compares this sequence with the run of lines used to describe Hermes’s preparations for travel (Il. 24.339–45 = Od. 5.43–9). In P126, at Od. 16.176a, Athena does not just clean up Odysseus’s complexion and beard. She also makes his hair tumble down from his head like hyacinths. Page 38 of 75

 

Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics

Od. 16.175–6

P126 (TM 61205)

ἂψ δὲ μελαγχροιὴς γένετο, γναθμοὶ δ’ ἐτάνυσθεν, κυάνεαι δ’ ἐγένοντο γενειάδες ἀμφὶ γένειον. His dark color returned to him again, and his jaws grew firm, and the beard that grew about his chin turned black.

[ἂψ δὲ μελα]γχρο̣[ιὴσ γένετο, γναθμοὶ δ’ ἐτάνυσθεν, [κυάνεαι δ’ ἐ]γένοντ[ο γενειάδεσ [οὔλασ] ἧ̣κ̣ε κό̣μασ̣, ὑ̣α[κι]ν̣θίν[ωι ἄνθει ὁμοίασ. (S. West 1967: 264) His dark color returned to him again, and his jaws grew firm, and the beard turned black, and she arranged the curling locks that hung down like hyacinthine petals.

(p.264) 176a appears at Od. 6.231 and 23.158 (S. West 1967: 266). Euphorbus’s hair is said to be “similar to the Graces” (κόμαι Χαρίτεσσιν ὁμοῖαι, Il. 17.51), and Paris, another handsome figure, has good hair too (Il. 3.55). 5.3.2. Nothing is Assumed

The scribe also achieves his aim of a maximalist presentation by not assuming anything. In P480a, two plus verses make Hecuba get a peplos not just from the chamber but from a chest in the chamber.

Il. 6.288–9

P480a (TM 61240)

αὐτὴ δ’ ἐς θάλαμον κατεβήσετο κηώεντα, ἔνθ’ ἔσαν οἱ πέπλοι παμποίκιλοι, ἔργα γυναικῶν But she descended to the sweetsmelling chamber, where she had many-colored robes, the work of women

αὐτὴ δ’ ἐς] θάλαμογ κατεβήσετο κηωίεντα, κέδρινον] ὑψερεφῆ ὃς γλήνη πολλ’ ἐκεκεύθει ] φωριαμοῖσι παρί[στ]ατο δῖα γυνα[ικῶν ἔνθ’ ἔσάν οἱ ]πέπλοι παμπο[ίκι]λοι ἔργα γυν[αικῶν (Bird 2010: 94) But she descended to the sweet-smelling chamber, made of cedar and high-roofed, which held many treasures …fair among women, she stood beside the chests where she had many-colored robes, the work of women

288a, κέδρινον] ὑψερεφῆ ὃς γλήνη πολλ’ ἐκεκεύθει (“made of cedar and highroofed, which held many treasures”) is nearly identical to Il. 24.192’s reference to the same storeroom: κέδρινον ὑψόροφον, ὃς γλήνεα πολλὰ κεχάνδει (“of Page 39 of 75

 

Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics cedar and high of roof, which held many treasures”) (Bird 2010: 96). Menelaus’s house also has a “sweet-smelling chamber” (thamalon…kēōenta) in which “treasures lay” (keimēlia keito) (Od. 15.99, 101), and Penelope retrieves Odysseus’s bow from a chamber (thalamonde) where “treasures lay” (keimēlia keito) (Od. 21.8–9). 288a likewise brings to mind the several references, not explicitly to a house’s storeroom, but to the stocked houses of the wealthy. Menelaos refers to his house as having “held many goods within it” (κεχανδότα πολλὰ καὶ ἐσθλά, Od. 4.96). One learns that “treasures lie” in a house: Adrastus, for instance, declares that “many treasures lie in the house of my wealthy father” (πολλὰ δ’ ἐν ἀφνειοῦ πατρὸς κειμήλια κεῖται, Il. 6.47; cf. Il. 11.132; Od. 4.613 = 15.113, 14.326 = 19.295). Switching gears, I observe that only Priam and Hecuba’s chamber is said to be of cedar, but other chambers (thalamos) are also deemed high-roofed: see hupsērephēs at Il. 9.582, and hupsorophos at Il. 3.423, 24.317; Od. 2.337, 4.121. 288b mentions chests (phōriamoisi) in verse 288’s storeroom (thalamon). One hears of this same storeroom’s chests at Il. 24.228 (phōriamōn), and the thamalos in Menelaus and Helen’s house also has them (phōriamoisin, Od. 15.104; cf. Bird 2010: 96). Clothes are stored in chests (khēloisin) in the storeroom (thalamon) Telemachus visits (Od. 2.337–9) and in chests (khēloi) in the one (thalamon) Penelope visits (Od. 21.42–52). Arete brings a chest (khēlon) from her bedroom (thalamoio) (Od. 8.438–9). Like Hecuba at 288b, Helen stands by (paristato) her treasure chests (Od. 15.104); a female regularly “stands by” someone (e.g. Il. 6.405 (paristato), 18.70 (paristato); Od. 1.335 (parestē), 3.222 (p.265) (paristato)). Lastly, used of four different women, Alcestis, Eurycleia, Helen, and Penelope, 288b’s dia gunaikōn appears four times in the Iliad and eleven times in the Odyssey. P5 evinces relevant alterations. At Il. 11.795b, Nestor likely suggests that Achilles not just send out Patroclus in his stead but remain by the ships himself (S. West 1967: 111). At 11.804a the scribe is not content with 804’s assertion that Nestor roused Patroclus’s thumos. He specifies why: “for (gar) a terrible pain wore at his heart, and he was vexed in his mind.” 11.807a reminds one that the Achaeans’ meeting place is in front of their ships.

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Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics

Il. 11.794–808

P5 (TM 61226)

εἰ δέ τινα φρεσὶν ᾗσι θεοπροπίην ἀλεείνει καί τινά οἱ πὰρ Ζηνὸς ἐπέφραδε πότνια μήτηρ, ἀλλὰ σέ περ προέτω, ἅμα δ’ ἄλλος λαὸς ἑπέσθω Μυρμιδόνων, αἴ κέν τι φόως Δαναοῖσι γένηαι· καί τοι τεύχεα καλὰ δότω πόλεμόνδε φέρεσθαι, αἴ κέ σε τῷ ἴσκοντες ἀπόσχωνται πολέμοιο Τρῶες, ἀναπνεύσωσι δ’ ἀρήιοι υἷες Ἀχαιῶν τειρόμενοι· ὀλίγη δέ τ’

[εἰ δέ τινα φρεσὶν ἧισι θεοπροπίην] ἀλείνει [καί τινά οἱ πὰρ Ζηνὸσ ἐπέφ]ρ̣α̣δε πότνια μήτηρ, [ἀργυρόπεζα Θέτισ θυγάτηρ ἁλί]ο̣ιο γέροντοσ [          ἐν] ἀ̣γ̣ῶνι θοάω̣ν̣ [ἀλλὰ σέ περ προέτω,      λ]αὸν ἀνώχθω [Μυρμιδόνων, αἴ κέν τι φόωσ Δα]ν̣α̣[ο]ῖ̣σ̣ι γένηαι. [              θ]ω̣ρ̣ηχθῆναι [αἴ κέ σε τῶι εἴσκοντεσ ἀπόσχωντ]α̣ι̣ π̣ο̣λ̣έμοιο [Τρῶεσ, ἀναπνεύσωσι δ’ ἀρήιοι υἷεσ Ἀχ]α̣ιῶν

ἀνάπνευσις πολέμοιο. ῥεῖα δέ κ’ ἀκμῆτες κεκμηότας ἄνδρας ἀυτῇ ὤσαισθε προτὶ ἄστυ νεῶν ἄπο καὶ κλισιάων.” ὣς φάτο, τῷ δ’ ἄρα θυμὸν ἐνὶ στήθεσσιν ὄρινε· βῆ δὲ θέειν παρὰ νῆας ἐπ’ Αἰακίδην Ἀχιλῆα. ἀλλ’ ὅτε δὴ κατὰ νῆας Ὀδυσσῆος θείοιο ἷξε θέων Πάτροκλος, ἵνα σφ’ ἀγορή τε θέμις τε ἤην, τῇ δὴ καί σφι θεῶν ἐτετεύχατο βωμοί, But if in his mind he is trying to avoid some oracle

[τειρόμενοι· ὀλίγη δέ τ’ ἀνάπνευσισ π]ο̣λέμοιο. [ῥεῖα δέ κ’ ἀκμῆτεσ κεκμηότασ ἄν]δρασ ἀϋτῆ[ι [ὤσαισθε προτὶ ἄστυ νεῶν ἄπο καὶ κλισ]ιάων.” [ὣσ φάτο, τῶι δ’ ἄρα θυμὸν ἐνὶ στήθ]εσσιν ὄρινε· [τεῖρε γὰρ αἰνὸν ἄχοσ κραδίην, ἀ]κ̣άχησε δὲ θυμ[ὸν· [βῆ δὲ θέειν παρὰ νῆασ ἐπ’ Αἰακίδη]ν̣ Ἀχιλῆια. [              ]νο̣.τ̣αι̣αχ̣α̣[ [ἀλλ’ ὅτε δὴ κατὰ νῆασ Ὀδυσσῆ]οσ θείοιο [ἷξε θέων Πάτροκλοσ, ἵνά σφ’ ἀ]γ̣[ο]ρ̣ή̣ τε θέμισ τε [     προπάροιθε νεῶν ὀρθοκρ]αιράων

and his queenly mother declared to him something from Zeus, well, let him send you out, and with you let the rest of the army of Myrmidons follow, to see if you prove a light of deliverance to the Danaans;

[ἤην, τῆι δὴ καί σφι θεῶν ἐτετ]εύχατο βωμοί, (S. West 1967: 108–9) But if in his mind he is trying to avoid some oracle and his queenly mother declared to him something from Zeus, silver-footed Thetis, daughter of the old man of the sea, …in the gathering place of the swift

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Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics

Il. 11.794–808

P5 (TM 61226)

and let him give you his fair armor to wear into the war, to see if the Trojans take you for him and hold off from war and the warlike sons of the Achaeans catch their breath because they are worn out; for scant is the space to breathe in war. And easily might you, being unwearied, drive men that are wearied with battle back toward the city from the ships and the huts.” So he spoke and roused the heart in his breast;

but let him send you out,…and urge the host of Myrmidons, to see if you prove a light of deliverance to the Danaans. …to put on, to see if the Trojans take you for him and hold off from war and the warlike sons of the Achaeans catch their breath because they are worn out; for scant is the space to breathe in war. And easily might you, being unwearied, drive men that are wearied with battle back toward the city from the ships and the huts.” So he spoke and roused the heart in his

and he went running along the ships to Aeacus’s grandson, Achilles. But when to the ships of godlike Odysseus in his running Patroclus came, where their place of assembly and place of judgment was, where also had been built their altars of the gods,

breast: for a terrible pain wore at his heart, and he was vexed in his mind; and he went running along the ships to Aeacus’s grandson, Achilles. … But when to the ships of godlike Odysseus in his running Patroclus came, where their place of assembly and place of judgment …in front of the ships with tall sterns was, where also had been built their altars of the gods,

(p.266) 795a, [ἀργυρόπεζα Θέτισ θυγάτηρ ἁλί]ο̣ιο γέροντοσ (“silver-footed Thetis, daughter of the old man of the sea”), is found at Il. 1.538 and 1.556 (S. West 1967: 111; di Luzio 1969: 81). 795b perhaps resembled Il. 16.239, αὐτὸς μὲν γὰρ ἐγὼ μενέω νηῶν ἐν ἀγῶνι (“for I myself will remain in the gathering place of the ships”). It uses a standard epithet for a ship or ships, “swift” (thoos): the epithet appears nineteen times in the Iliad and five times in the Odyssey. 804a, [τεῖρε γὰρ αἰνὸν ἄχοσ κραδίην, ἀ]κ̣άχησε δὲ θυμ[ὸν (“for a terrible pain wore at his heart, and he was vexed in his mind”), resonates with ἀλλὰ τόδ’ αἰνὸν ἄχος κραδίην καὶ θυμὸν ἱκάνει (“but this terrible pain comes over heart and mind”) (Il. 8.147, 15.208, 16.52; Od. 18.274). The verse’s depiction of akhos as a motivating force chimes with its uses elsewhere in the Homeric epics (cf. Cook 2003, 2009: 153–9). Finally, the phrase προπάροιθε νεῶν ὀρθοκρ]αιράων

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Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics (“in front of the ships with tall sterns”) found in 807a appears at Il. 18.3 and 19.344 (S. West 1967: 113). In P12 at Il. 21.382a, the Scamander does not just resume flowing but does so along the same path it took before.

Il. 21.382–3

P12 (TM 61236)

ἄψορρον δ’ ἄρα κῦμα κατέσσυτο καλὰ ῥέεθρα. αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ Ξάνθοιο δάμη μένος, οἳ μὲν ἔπειτα and once more the wave rolled along the fair streams. But when the might of Xanthus was subdued, the two then

[ἄ]ψ̣ο̣ρ̣ρ̣ον̣ δ’ ἄρα κῦμ̣α̣ κ̣α̣[τέ]σ̣χ̣ετ̣[ο καλ]ὰ̣ [ῥέεθρα (?) ι M. 1 κ̣[ὰρ] ῥό̣ο̣ν̣, ἧ τὸ πάροιθεν ἵει κ̣[αλλίρροο]ν̣ [ὕ]δ̣ω̣ρ. α̣ὐ̣τὰρ ἐπεὶ Ξάνθοιο̣ δάμ̣η̣ μ̣έ̣[νοσ, οἳ μὲν ἔπειτα (S. West 1967: 139) and once more the wave held to the fair streams, in the channel where before it sent forth the fair-flowing water. But when the might of Xanthus was subdued, the two then

382a appears with two alterations at Il. 12.33—κὰρ ῥόον, ᾗ περ πρόσθεν ἵεν καλλίρροον ὕδωρ (“in the channel where they had earlier sent forth their fairflowing streams”)—wherein one finds per prosthen instead of to paroithen and the plural hien instead of the singular hiei (S. West 1967: 156; di Luzio 1969: 65). In addition to its appearance at Il. 12.33, the phrase kallirroon hudōr also occurs at Il. 2.752, in Hesiod’s Works and Days 737, and in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo 241 and 381. The Axius river “sends forth the most beautiful water” (kalliston hudōr…hiēsin, Il. 21.158). Aldo di Luzio finds that verse 382a joins other redundant or pleonastic descriptions of places: “in my house, in Argos, far from her fatherland” (Il. 1.30); “she had gone to Olympus / to the halls of aegisbearing Zeus among the other gods” (Il. 1.221–2); “on the shore of the gray sea, looking out over the wine-dark deep” (Il. 1.350); “let the others return / to Argos, pastureland of horses, and Achaea, land of fair women” (Il. 3.74–5) (1969: 65). He also notes that the repetition kala rheethra…kallirroon hudōr belongs to a manner of connecting verses found elsewhere in archaic Greek epic (66). Il. 16.160–1 reads, καί τ’ ἀγεληδὸν ἴασιν, ἀπὸ κρήνης μελανύδρου / λάψοντες γλώσσῃσιν ἀραιῇσιν μέλαν ὕδωρ (“and in a pack they go to lap from a spring of black water / with their slender tongues the black water”) (cf. Tsagalis 2017: 205 n. 40). Il. 21.212–13 reads, εἰ μὴ χωσάμενος προσέφη ποταμὸς βαθυδίνης / ἀνέρι εἰσάμενος, βαθέης δ’ ἐκφθέγξατο δίνης (p.267) (“if the deep-eddying river had not grown angry and addressed him / in the likeness of a man and spoke loud and clear from the deep eddy”) (additional examples: Akhaiōn…Akhaious at Il. Page 43 of 75

 

Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics 13.41–2; kēde’ ephēken…kēde’ ethēken at Il. 21.524–5). A repetition, nearly identical to that found in the papyrus, appears in Homeric Hymn to Apollo 240– 1: Κηφισὸν δ’ ἄρ’ ἔπειτα κιχήσαο καλλιρέεθρον, / ὅς τε Λιλαίηθεν προχέει καλλίρροον ὕδωρ (“and you next reached Cephisus of the fair streams, / which pours forth from Lilaia its fair-flowing water”). Likewise, in P12 at Il. 23.93a, Achilles does not just talk to Patroclus’s shade but does so while asleep.

Il. 23.93–4

P12 (TM 61236)

τὸν δ’ ἀπαμειβόμενος προσέφη πόδας ὠκὺς Ἀχιλλεύς· “τίπτέ μοι, ἠθείη κεφαλή, δεῦρ’ εἰλήλουθας In answer spoke to him swiftfooted Achilles: “Why, O head beloved, have you

[τὸν δ’ ἀπαμειβόμενοσ] π̣ρ̣ο̣σέφη πόδασ ὠκὺσ Ἀχιλλεύσ, [ἡδὺ μάλα κνώσσων ἐ]ν ὀνειρείηισι πύληισιν· [“τίπτέ μοι, ἠθείη κεφαλή, δεῦρ’ εἰλή]λ̣[ο]υ̣θ̣[ασ, (S. West 1967: 146)

come here

In answer spoke to him swift-footed Achilles, sleeping very sweetly in the dreams’ gateway: “Why, O head beloved, have you come here

93a occurs at Od. 4.809 (with the feminine form knōssous’ instead of the masculine form knōssōn; S. West 1967: 172; di Luzio 1969: 87). Penelope speaks of the two gates of dreams (pulai…oneirōn, Od. 19.562). Di Luzio finds more abstract templates to which the text in the papyrus adheres: 93a joins those many verses that comprise a participial phrase and flesh out the preceding verse, and 93–93a resemble those one-line speech introductions that specify the manner in which one speaks, such as “smiling,” “angered,” “groaning,” or “standing near” (1969: 87–8). At Od. 9.537a, P31 and P186 add that the rock Polyphemus threw at Odysseus’s ship came from the courtyard of his cave.

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Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics

Od. 9.537–8

P31 (TM 61238)

αὐτὰρ ὅ γ’ ἐξαῦτις πολὺ μείζονα λᾶαν ἀείρας ἧκ’ ἐπιδινήσας, ἐπέρεισε δὲ ἶν’ ἀπέλεθρον· Then for the second time lifting a stone far greater he threw it, whirling around, and he put his vast strength into it;

αὐτὰρ ὅ γ’ ἐξαῦτισ πολὺ μείζονα λᾶ[αν ἀείρασ ἐξ αὐλῆσ ἀνελὼν ὅθι οἱ θυρεὸσ π̣α̣ . οσ ε[.] . [ ιδινησ M. 1 ἧκε π⟦εριστρέψ⟧ας ἐπέρεισε δὲ {δε} ἶν’ ἀπ[έλεθρον· (S. West 1967: 231) P186 (TM 61249) αυταρ ο] γ̣ εξ[αυτιϲ πολυ μειζονα λααν αειραϲ εξ αυληϲ] ανελων[ οθι ο]ι θυρ̣ε̣[οϲ παροϲ εϲκεν ηκ ]ε̣πι̣δ̣[ι]νηϲαϲ̣ επερηϲε δ[ε ιν απελεθρον (Hurst 1986: 225) Then for the second time lifting a stone far greater, having picked it up [or, having selected it: cf. Il. 13.296] from the courtyard where his doorstone [was before] he threw it, whirling around, and he put his vast strength into it;

(p.268) 537a “is not formulaic” (S. West 1967: 245), but its contents are familiar: one hears about Polyphemus’s courtyard (aulē) at Od. 9.184–5, 9.239, 9.338, 9.462 and about the stone he uses as a door (thureon) at Od. 9.240, 9.313, 9.340. Di Luzio prompts one to search for structural analogues as well (1969: 89). 537 and 537a resemble Od. 4.65–6: ὣς φάτο, καί σφιν νῶτα βοὸς παρὰ πίονα θῆκεν / ὄπτ’ ἐν χερσὶν ἑλών, τά ῥά οἱ γέρα πάρθεσαν αὐτῷ (“So he spoke and he set before them the fat loin of beef, / roasted, after taking it in his hands, the very meat that they had set before him as a mark of honor”). Here too the second verse contextualizes the first verse by way of a participial phrase referring to an immediately prior action (en khersin helōn) followed by a relative clause that specifies an earlier state of affairs (τά ῥά οἱ γέρα πάρθεσαν αὐτῷ). Compare as well Od. 5.263–4: τῷ δ’ ἄρα πέμπτῳ πέμπ’ ἀπὸ νήσου δῖα Καλυψώ, / εἵματά τ’ ἀμφιέσασα θυώδεα καὶ λούσασα (“and on the fifth day the fair Calypso sent him from the island / after she had bathed him and dressed him in fragrant clothing”). The second verse, comprising two participial clauses, begins a series of verses that backtrack to review everything Calypso did before the send off referred to in the first verse: in addition to bathing and clothing him, she provided him with food and drink and sent a favorable wind (5.264–8).

5.4. Competence and “Affecting Power” Performance engages emotions and feelings (cf. Cosentino 1982: 6–7; Caton 1990: 159; Scheub 2002: 34–5, 46, 61, 119, 121, 150, 170, 189, 202, 204–6, 221; Shiner 2009: 59; Bauman 2012: 112). Here one finds another component of displaying communicative competence: the performer aims for an “affecting Page 45 of 75

 

Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics power,” for “the intensification and enhancement of experience” (Bauman 2012: 99). In general, the performer seeks to prompt an emotional reaction: “cardinal emotions—of fear, joy, revulsion, attraction, and all of their variations. The storyteller is in trouble if she is not in the process of regularly eliciting such emotions” (Scheub 2002: 189; cf. 175, 206). Subsection 5.4.1 offers some instances in which the scribe seems to take this principle to heart. Subsection 5.4.2 delves deeper. One way in which the performer “‘moves’” an audience is “through the arousal and fulfillment of formal expectations—getting the audience into the ‘groove’” (Bauman 2004: 10; cf. Okpewho 2014: 77–8). As Harold Scheub likewise emphasizes in his work on storytellers (2002: 50, 221; cf. 61, 113, 199, 203, 218), fulfilling audience members’ expectations and getting them into the groove prompt an emotional reaction. Lynn Kozak rightly surmises that hearers of the battle scene at Il. 15.271–389 might take “pleasure” in the poet’s use of “techniques now expected in a battle sequence” (2017: 137). The so-called prediction effect—“confirmation of expected outcomes generally induces a positive emotional response” (Huron 2006: 13)—explains the positive emotional reaction audience members experience upon having their expectations fulfilled: “listeners experience positive feelings (p.269) whenever a future event is successfully predicted” (Huron 2006: 239). Subsection 5.4.2 considers some plus verses from this angle.12 5.4.1. The Emotions

Like others (van der Valk 1964: 557; S. West 1967: 112; Bird 2010: 89), I see efforts in the papyri to increase the emotional valence of a passage. P40 offers a further note on the Trojan Polites’s service as watchman.

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Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics

Il. 2.790–5

P40 (TM 61203)

ἀγχοῦ δ’ ἱσταμένη προσέφη πόδας ὠκέα Ἶρις· εἴσατο δὲ φθογγὴν υἷι Πριάμοιο Πολίτῃ, ὃς Τρώων σκοπὸς ἷζε ποδωκείῃσι πεποιθὼς τύμβῳ ἐπ’ ἀκροτάτῳ Αἰσυήταο γέροντος, δέγμενος ὁππότε ναῦφιν ἀφορμηθεῖεν Ἀχαιοί. τῷ μιν ἐεισαμένη προσέφη πόδας ὠκέα Ἶρις· And swift-footed Iris stood near and spoke to them: and she made her voice resemble that

[δέγμενοσ ὁππό]τ̣ε̣ ν̣α̣[ῦφιν ἀφορμηθεῖεν Ἀχαιοὶ ε̣ἰ̣σ πέδιον Τρώεσσι φόνογ κα[ὶ κῆρα φέροντεσ· [τῶι] μ̣ι̣ν̣ ἄρ’ εἰδομένη προ[σέ]φ̣[η πόδασ ὠκέα Ἶρισ· (S. West 1967: 42) watching for when the Achaeans set out from their ships, bringing to the plain slaughter and death for the Trojans; likening herself to him swift-footed Iris spoke to him [Priam]:

of Polites, son of Priam, who sat as a lookout for the Trojans, trusting in his swiftness of foot, on the top part of the grave mound of the old man Aesyetes, watching for when the Achaeans set out from their ships. Likening herself to him swift-footed Iris spoke to him [Priam]: Polites focalizes 794 (cf. Goodwin 1998: 281, section 698) and 794a. The phrase phonon kai kēra in 794a appears eight times in the two epics: six times in character text; one time in reported speech (Od. 8.513); and one time in the narrator text (Il. 3.6). The association of the phrase with the character text deepens the sense that Polites focalizes the phrase at 794a (cf. de Jong 1988). One learns what Polites thinks awaits his people: slaughter and death. As many examples of embedded focalization do to the extent that they put one inside a character’s head, the plus verse can engage one’s sympathy or even empathy. Stephanie West observes that the line’s “components are common” (1967: 48): it resembles Il. 2.352 = Od. 8.513 (Ἀργεῖοι Τρώεσσι φόνον καὶ κῆρα φέροντες “the Argives bringing slaughter and death for the Trojans”) and Od. 4.273 (Ἀργείων, Τρώεσσι φόνον καὶ κῆρα φέροντες “of the Argives, bringing slaughter and death for the Trojans”) (cf. di Luzio 1969: 64). Taken together, 794 and 794a correspond to other instances in which a (p.270) clause with a participial form of pherō follows a clause based around a verb of motion (di Luzio 1969: 63–4). For example, Hector “strode through the foremost fighters armored in flashing Page 47 of 75

 

Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics bronze, / bringing terror to the Danaans” (βῆ δὲ διὰ προμάχων κεκορυθμένος αἴθοπι χαλκῷ / δεῖμα φέρων Δαναοῖσι, Il. 5.681–2); Nausicaa declares that there is no man “who will come to the land of the Phaeacians / bringing hostility” (ὅς κεν Φαιήκων ἀνδρῶν ἐς γαῖαν ἵκηται / δηιοτῆτα φέρων, Od. 6.202–3). A number of plus verses appear in the description in P7 of the initial stages of a battle.

Il. 8.64–7

P7 (TM 61237)

ἔνθα δ’ ἅμ’ οἰμωγή τε καὶ εὐχωλὴ πέλεν ἀνδρῶν ὀλλύντων τε καὶ ὀλλυμένων, ῥέε δ’ αἵματι γαῖα. ὄφρα μὲν ἠὼς ἦν καὶ ἀέξετο ἱερὸν ἦμαρ,

ἔνθα δ’ [ἅμ’]̣ ο̣ἰ̣μ̣ω[γή τε καὶ εὐχωλὴ πέλεν ἀνδρῶν ὀ̣λ̣λ̣ύντων τ[ε καὶ ὀλλυμένων, ῥέε δ’αἵματι γαῖα· 65a ἐν δ’ Ἔρισ [ἐ]ν δὲ Κ̣[υδοιμὸσ ὁμίλεον, ἐν δ’ ὀλοὴ Κήρ, 65b ἄλλον ζ[ω]{ι̣}ὸ̣ν̣ ἔ̣[χουσα νεούτατον, ἄλλον ἄουτον, 65c ἄλλον τε[θ]ν[ηῶτα κατὰ μόθον ἕλκε ποδοῖιν· 65d ν̣. . [.]τ̣ . [

τόφρα μάλ’ ἀμφοτέρων βέλε’ ἥπτετο, πῖπτε δὲ λαός. Then arose together groaning and the cry of triumph of the slayers and the slain, and the earth flowed with blood. Now as long as it was morning and the holy day was waxing, so long the

............................................. At least 4 lines lost ............................................. ..[ ὄφρ[α] μὲ[ν ἠὼ]σ̣ ἦ̣ν [καὶ ἀέξετο ἱερὸν ἦμαρ,  τόφρα μά[λ’ ἀμφοτέρων βέλε’ ἥπτετο, πῖπτε δὲ λαόσ. (S. West 1967: 78) Then arose together groaning and the cry of triumph of the slayers and the slain, and the earth flowed with blood. 65a And among them Strife and Tumult joined, and destructive Fate, 65b grasping one man alive, fresh-wounded, another without a wound, 65c and another she dragged dead through the melee

missiles of either side reached their mark, and the men fell.

by the feet; … Now as long as it was morning and the holy day was waxing, so long the missiles of either side reached their mark, and the men fell.

The plus verses one can read (65a–c) insert individual, albeit anonymous, warriors into a description of masses of dying men.13 They focus on three warriors seized by Fate, all, one is to understand, doomed: a recently wounded, but still alive, man; an unwounded man; and a dead man. Perhaps these verses divide up among three doomed individuals what usually happens to one doomed Page 48 of 75

 

Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics individual and therefore direct attention to the progression: first one is unwounded; then one is wounded; then one dies. (For instance, Adamas confronts Meriones, tries to flee once his own spearcast proves ineffective, receives a wound right below the navel, gasps for a short time, and then dies (Il. 13.560–75).) This passage joins many others in the Iliad that work to discern the individual amidst numerous fallen warriors and, therefore, to inject a sense of pathos (p.271) into the description of indiscriminate slaughter (Strasburger 1954). These verses were a popular chunk: in addition to their appearance in the description of Achilles’s shield (Il. 18.535–7), they occur in the description of Heracles’s shield in the Hesiodic Shield of Heracles (156–8) (S. West 1967: 84; di Luzio 1969: 114). In P12, Il. 23.222–4 contains a longer version of the simile describing Achilles as he laments for Patroclus.

Il. 23.221–4

P12 (TM 61236)

ψυχὴν κικλήσκων Πατροκλῆος

κ̣ι̣κληίσκων ψυχὴν Πα[τ]ρ̣οκ̣[λου

δειλοῖο. ὡς δὲ πατὴρ οὗ παιδὸς ὀδύρεται ὀστέα καίων, νυμφίου, ὅς τε θανὼν δειλοὺς ἀκάχησε τοκῆας, ὣς Ἀχιλεὺς ἑτάροιο ὀδύρετο ὀστέα καίων, calling repeatedly on the soul of unhappy Patroclus. As a father wails for his son as he burns his bones, a son newly wed whose death brings woe to his unhappy parents, so wailed Achilles for his comrade as he burned his bones,

τεθ]νηῶ̣[τοσ. ..πυζω̣ν παρ[.] π. ρ̣κ̣[ Μ. 2 ὡσ δὲ π̣ατὴρ οὗ π̣α̣[ιδὸσ ὀδύρεται ὀστέα καίων νυμ]φ̣[ίου], ὅσ τε θανὼ̣ν̣ [δειλοὺσ ἀκάχησε τοκῆασ, χήρωσεν δ̣[ὲ γυναῖκα μυχῶι θαλάμοιο νέοιο ἀρητ̣[ὸ]ν̣ δὲ τ̣[οκεῦσι γόον καὶ πένθοσ ἔθηκεν, ὣσ Ἀ[χιλε]ὺσ ἑτ[άροιο ὀδύρετο ὀστέα καίων, (S. West 1967: 150) calling repeatedly on the soul of the dead Patroclus. As a father wails for his son as he burns his bones, a son newly wed whose death brings woe to his unhappy parents, and he made his wife a widow in her new-built bridal chamber and brought grief unspeakable and sorrow to his parents, so wailed Achilles for his comrade as he burned his bones,

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Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics The scribe increases the emotional impact of the passage by expanding the pathos-laden simile that describes Achilles’s sorrow (cf. Haslam 1997: 78). These two verses appear together at Il. 17.36–7, with a change in person from third to second: “and you made his wife a widow in her new-built bridal chamber / and brought grief unspeakable and sorrow to his parents” (χήρωσας δὲ γυναῖκα μυχῷ θαλάμοιο νέοιο, / ἄρρητον δὲ τοκεῦσι γόον καὶ πένθος ἔθηκας). 223b occurs at Il. 24.741, also with ethēkas (“you brought”) instead of ethēken (“he brought”). At Od. 17.361–4, Athena rouses Odysseus to make trial of the suitors and distinguish the just from the unjust. In P128, Od. 17.364 is absent.

Od. 17.363–5

P128 (ΤΜ 61232)

γνοίη θ’ οἵ τινές εἰσιν ἐναίσιμοι οἵ τ’ ἀθέμιστοι· ἀλλ’ οὐδ’ ὥς τιν’ ἔμελλ’ ἀπαλεξήσειν κακότητος.

[γνοίη θ’ οἵ τινέσ εἰσιν ἐναίσιμ]ο̣ι̣ οἵ τε̣ [ἀθέμι]σ̣τ̣[οι. [βῆ δ’ ἴμεν αἰτήσων ἐνδέξια φ]ῶ̣τα [ἕκαστον,

βῆ δ’ ἴμεν αἰτήσων ἐνδέξια φῶτα ἕκαστον, and so learn which of them were fair, which unfair; but not even so was she about to deliver any of them from evil. He went on his way, from left to right, to beg from each man,

(S. West 1967: 267) and so learn which of them were fair, which unfair. He went on his way, from left to right, to beg from each man,

S. West cannot see any “mechanical” reason for the omission in the papyrus and suggests that the absence of the verse in the papyrus may lead one to label it “an interpolation” (1967: 269). Michael Apthorp makes the case for a “purely accidental”—West’s (p.272) “mechanical”—omission: the scribe wrote verse 363 with its mid-verse ΤΙΝΕΣ; when he looked back at his exemplar, his eye went to verse 364 whereupon he saw the mid-verse ΤΙΝΕ and mistakenly thought it the verse he had just copied; so he moved on to verse 365 and dropped verse 364 (1980: 79 with note 130). I set this unanswerable question aside and focus on the effect of the omission (cf. Ehrman 2011: 340): the omission maintains a sense of suspense surrounding any just suitor’s fate. The passages examined in this subsection also reveal that the scribe can display his competence in different ways in the same set of verses. In P40, the plus verse at 794a clarifies, as S. West observes: “Possibly 794 was felt to be ambiguous: ναῦφιν ἀφορμηθεῖεν might be taken to mean ‘depart with their ships’, i.e. leave for home; the interpolated line removes the ambiguity” (1967: 48; pace di Luzio 1969: 63). In P12, the scribe uses 223a to flesh out the

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Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics implication of numphiou, a hapax legomenon in the Homeric epics, rather than leave it implied: the newly wed husband left a newly widowed wife behind. 5.4.2. The Fulfillment of Expectations and the Groove

P40 arms Menelaus with three plus verses at Il. 3.339a–c:

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Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics

Il. 3.330–9

P40 (TM 61203)

κνημῖδας μὲν πρῶτα περὶ κνήμῃσιν ἔθηκε καλάς, ἀργυρέοισιν ἐπισφυρίοις ἀραρυίας· δεύτερον αὖ θώρηκα περὶ στήθεσσιν ἔδυνεν οἷο κασιγνήτοιο Λυκάονος· ἥρμοσε δ’ αὐτῷ· ἀμφὶ δ’ ἂρ ᾽ὤμοισιν βάλετο ξίφος ἀργυρόηλον χάλκεον, αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα σάκος μέγα τε στιβαρόν τε· κρατὶ δ’ ἐπ’ ἰφθίμῳ κυνέην εὔτυκτον ἔθηκεν ἵππουριν· δεινὸν δὲ λόφος

εἵλε̣[το δ’ ἄλκιμα] δοῦρε δύ̣[ω κεκορυθμένα χαλκῶι. ὣς δ’ αὔ̣[τως Μεν]έλαος ἀρήϊα [τεύχε’ ἔδυνεν, ἀσπίδα κ[αὶ πήλη]κα φαεινὴ[ν καὶ δύο δοῦρε καὶ καλὰ[ς κνη]μῖδας ἐπισφ[υρίοις ἀραρυίας, ἀμφὶ δ’ ἄ[ρ’ ὤμοισι]ν βάλετο ξί[φος ἀργυρόηλον (Bird 2010: 90) And he took two stout spears, tipped with bronze. And likewise Menelaus put on his warlike armor,

καθύπερθεν ἔνευεν· εἵλετο δ’ ἄλκιμον ἔγχος, ὅ οἱ παλάμηφιν ἀρήρει. ὣς δ’ αὔτως Μενέλαος ἀρήιος ἔντε’ ἔδυνεν. First he [Paris] put the greaves on his legs, fine ones, fitted with silver anklepieces; second then he put his corselet about his chest, the one from his brother Lycaon; and he fitted it to himself. And about his shoulders he slung his silver-studded sword of bronze and then his shield great and sturdy;

his shield and shining helmet and two spears and beautiful greaves fitted with anklepieces, and about his shoulders he slung his silver-studded sword

and on his mighty head he put a wellmade helmet with horse-hair crest; and terribly the plume nodded from above; and he took a stout spear that fitted his hands. And likewise warlike Menelaus put on his armor.

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Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics (p.273) The scribe works to tap into and to fulfill his audience’s expectations of what a given run of Homeric verses should comprise. Menelaus arms by way of the verb duō (edunen “put on”). This verb appears elsewhere in the same context: the narrator describes a prominent warrior putting on his armor when he is about to fight right away. In such contexts, the verb appears in a description with at least one other step: Paris at Il. 3.329–38; Agamemnon at Il. 11.16–45; Idomeneus at Il. 13.241 (“he put on beautiful armor about his body and grasped two spears”); Patroclus at Il. 16.130–9 (note as well the use of the imperative duseo “put on” by Achilles at 16.129); and Achilles at Il. 19.367–83. (At Od. 14.341–3 Eumaeus is dressed over a series of lines.) I find four exceptions in which the notification of an individual’s arming takes place solely by way of the verb duō, but in each case a mitigating circumstance overrides the impulse to say more: Agamemnon at Il. 2.578, but he will receive his big arming scene later and, in any event, he is not about to engage in combat; Meleager at Il. 9.596, but characters, in this case, Phoinix, tend not to talk at length about arming (cf. e.g. Il. 6.340); Telemachus at Od. 22.113, but he has not proven himself in battle yet; Odysseus at Od. 23.366, but he is heading out to his father’s farm, not preparing to fight straightaway. The other moments in which this verb appears in arming scenes of one line differ from the template in some way: those scenes involve a god (Il. 8.43, 13.25, 15.120) or a nameless individual (Il. 14.382) or a group (of at least two people) (Il. 4.222, 23.131; Od. 22.114, 24.496, 24.498; the verb appears in the dual at Il. 10.254 and 10.272, lines which surround the lengthy description of Diomedes and Odysseus as they arm for their night expedition). The scribe behind P40 aims to give audience members what they have often heard before. He tries to tap into and fulfill expectations associated with a mortal hero’s arming for immediate combat by way of the verb duō. This passage seeks to establish a groove in another way too. The scribe surely arms Paris in the missing lines (cf. S. West 1967: 54–5). Then, instead of arming Menelaus with just one line (as Helmut van Thiel’s text does), he arms him over four lines. When he arms Menelaus over four lines, he returns to the sort of thing he did with Paris. The point comes in the repetition. The text provides one extended arming scene and, when it has the opportunity to expatiate again on the same subject, it does. Once the audience realizes it is about to get what it just got—an arming scene—the audience has a sense of what will now happen, its expectations are raised as to what will follow, and the text then strives to meet those expectations.14 (p.274) I continue with the project of enumerating similarities between what one reads in the papyrus and other moments in the Homeric epics and in archaic Greek hexameter poetry as a whole. 339a, ἀσπίδα κ[αὶ πήλη]κα φαεινὴ[ν καὶ δύο δοῦρε (“his shield and shining helmet and two spears”), resembles Il. 10.76, ἀσπὶς καὶ δύο δοῦρε φαεινή τε τρυφάλεια (“his shield and two spears and gleaming helmet”), as well as Od. 1.256, ἔχων πήληκα καὶ ἀσπίδα καὶ δύο δοῦρε Page 53 of 75

 

Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics (“holding a helmet and a shield and two spears”), and, with its presentation of three tools of war in one verse, exhibits a similar rhythm as Il. 6.322, ἀσπίδα καὶ θώρηκα, καὶ ἀγκύλα τόξ’ ἁφόωντα (“his shield and his corselet and handling his curved bow”) (S. West 1967: 55; Bird 2010: 92 n. 89). 339b, καὶ καλὰ[ς κνη]μῖδας ἐπισφ[υρίοις ἀραρυίας (“and beautiful greaves fitted with ankle pieces”) appears at Il. 18.459, and four other times one hears of greaves that are “beautiful and fitted with silver anklepieces” (καλάς, ἀργυρέοισιν ἐπισφυρίοις ἀραρυίας, Il. 3.331, 11.18, 16.132, 19.370) (S. West 1967: 56; Bird 2010: 92 n. 89). 339c, ἀμφὶ δ’ ἄ[ρ’ ὤμοισι]ν βάλετο ξί[φος ἀργυρόηλον (“and about his shoulders he slung his silver-studded sword”), appears not only four verses earlier at Il. 3.334 but also at Il. 2.45, 16.135, and 19.372 (cf. 11.29) (S. West 1967: 56; Bird 2010: 92 n. 89). Aldo Di Luzio observes that the appositional nature of 339a and 339b vis-à-vis 339 and the paratactic addition of 339c evince a syntactic sequence found throughout archaic Greek epic (1969: 72). I see an attempt to create a groove in P53’s handling of the type scene involving landing a ship. (This papyrus dates from between 50 BCE and 50 CE (cf. Maltomini 2008: 7) but is to be classed with the wild pre-Aristarchean papyri.) Stephanie West reconstructs as follows (claiming “the text has been contaminated with a similar passage in the Homeric hymn to Apollo” (1967: 33), she notes correspondences to the hymn and to other verses in Iliad 1 in the margins):

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Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics

Il. 1.484–7

P53 (TM 61201)

αὐτὰρ ἐπεί ῥ’ ἵκοντο μετὰ στρατὸν εὐρὺν Ἀχαιῶν, νῆα μὲν οἵ γε μέλαιναν ἐπ’ ἠπείροιο ἔρυσσαν ὑψοῦ ἐπὶ ψαμάθοις, ὑπὸ δ’ ἕρματα μακρὰ τάνυσσαν, αὐτοὶ δ’ ἐσκίδναντο κατὰ κλισίας τε νέας τε. But after they came to the wide camp of the Achaeans, they drew the black ship up on the shore, high on the sands, and set in line long props beneath it, and they themselves scattered

[αὐτὰρ ἐπεί ῥ’ ἵκοντο κατὰ στρατὸν εὐρὺν Ἀχαιῶν] [ἱστία μὲν στείλαντο, θέσαν δ’ ἐν νηῒ μελαίνῃ] = 433 Or  [ἱστία μὲν πρῶτον κάθεσαν, λῦσαν δὲ βοείασ] = h. Ap. 503 (?) [ἱστὸν δ’ ἱσ]τ̣ο̣[δόκῃ πέλασαν προτόνοισιν ὑφέντεσ = 434, h. Ap. 504 [ἐκ δὲ] κ̣αὶ αὐ̣τοὶ̣ βάντε̣[σ ἐπὶ ῥηγμῖνι θαλάσσησ cf. 437, h. Ap. 505 [ἐξ ἁλὸ]σ ἤπειρον δὲ θοὴ[ν ἀνὰ νῆ’ ἐρύσαντο cf. h. Ap. 506 [ὑψοῦ] ἐπὶ ψαμάθωι, παρὰ̣ [δ’ ἕρματα μακρὰ τάνυσσαν· cf. h. Ap. 507 [αὐτο]ὶ̣ δὲ σκίδνα̣ντο κατ̣ὰ κ̣[λισίασ τε

among the huts and ships.

νέασ τε. (S. West 1967: 33–4) But after they came to the wide camp of the Achaeans, they furled the sail, and stowed it in the black ship, Or first they slackened the sheets and lowered the sails, and the mast they lowered by the forestays and brought it to the crutch, and themselves stepping out on the shore of the sea from the water they hauled the swift ship up on land, high on the sand, and set a long line of props along its sides; and they themselves scattered among the huts and ships.

(p.275) Francesca Maltomini does not try to guess what came before 484y in the papyrus and proposes a different reading of 484y: ἱϲτία μὲν ϲ]τ̣ε̣[ίλαντο θέϲαν δ’ ἐν νηὶ μελαίνῃ (“they furled the sail and stowed it in the black ship”) (2008: 8).

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Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics

Il. 1.484–7

P53 (TM 61201)

αὐτὰρ ἐπεί ῥ’ ἵκοντο μετὰ στρατὸν εὐρὺν Ἀχαιῶν, νῆα μὲν οἵ γε μέλαιναν ἐπ’ ἠπείροιο ἔρυσσαν ὑψοῦ ἐπὶ ψαμάθοις, ὑπὸ δ’ ἕρματα μακρὰ τάνυσσαν, αὐτοὶ δ’ ἐσκίδναντο κατὰ κλισίας τε νέας τε.

1  ἱϲτία μὲν ϲ]τ̣ε̣[ίλαντο θέϲαν δ’ ἐν νηὶ μελαίνῃ, ] κ̣αι αυ̣τοι βαντε̣[ϲ    αλο]ϲ ηπειρον δε θοη[ν ] επι ψαμαθωι παρα̣ [ αυτο]ι̣ δε ϲκιδνα̣ντο κατ̣α κ̣[λιϲιαϲ     

The scribe presents a landing scene that corresponds to the landing scene a moment earlier at Il. 1.432–7 (cf. di Luzio 1969: 105). Compare P53 with van Thiel’s Il. 1.432–7, noting the verses I set in italics. In S. West’s reconstruction, 484y corresponds to 434 and 484z corresponds to 437, and she suggests that the line in the papyrus after 484 was the same as 433. In Maltomini’s more conservative presentation, the first verse of the papyrus corresponds to 433 and the second verse corresponds to 437.

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Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics

Il. 1.432–7

P53 (TM 61201): S. West

οἳ δ’ ὅτε δὴ λιμένος πολυβενθέος ἐντὸς ἵκοντο, ἱστία μὲν στείλαντο, θέσαν δ’ ἐν νηὶ μελαίνῃ, ἱστὸν δ’ ἱστοδόκῃ πέλασαν προτόνοισιν ὑφέντες καρπαλίμως, τὴν δ’ εἰς ὅρμον προέρεσσαν ἐρετμοῖς. ἐκ δ’ εὐνὰς ἔβαλον, κατὰ δὲ πρυμνήσι’ ἔδησαν· ἐκ δὲ καὶ αὐτοὶ βαῖνον ἐπὶ ῥηγμῖνι θαλάσσης, And when they had entered the deep harbor, they furled the sail and stowed it

[αὐτὰρ ἐπεί ῥ’ ἵκοντο κατὰ στρατὸν εὐρὺν Ἀχαιῶν] [ἱστία μὲν στείλαντο, θέσαν δ’ ἐν νηῒ μελαίνῃ] = 433 Or  [ἱστία μὲν πρῶτον κάθεσαν, λῦσαν δὲ βοείασ] = h. Ap. 503 (?) [ἱστὸν δ’ ἱσ]τ̣ο̣[δόκῃ πέλασαν προτόνοισιν ὑφέντεσ = 434, h. Ap. 504 [ἐκ δὲ] κ̣αὶ αὐ̣τοὶ̣ βάντε̣[σ ἐπὶ ῥηγμῖνι θαλάσσησ cf. 437, h. Ap. 505 [ἐξ ἁλὸ]σ ἤπειρον δὲ θοὴ[ν ἀνὰ νῆ’ ἐρύσαντο cf. h. Ap. 506 [ὑψοῦ] ἐπὶ ψαμάθωι, παρὰ̣ [δ’ ἕρματα μακρὰ τάνυσσαν· cf. h. Ap. 507 [αὐτο]ὶ̣ δὲ σκίδνα̣ντο κατ̣ὰ κ̣[λισίασ τε

in the black ship, and the mast they lowered by the forestays and brought it to the crutch quickly, and they rowed with oars to the place of anchorage. Then they threw out the mooring stones and fastened the stern cables; and they themselves stepped out on the shore of the sea,

νέασ τε. But after they came to the wide camp of the Achaeans, they furled the sail, and stowed it in the black ship, Or  first they slackened the sheets and lowered the sail, and the mast they lowered by the forestays and brought it to the crutch and themselves stepping out on the shore of the sea from the water they hauled the swift ship up on land, high on the sand, and set a long line of props along its sides; and they themselves scattered among the huts and ships.

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Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics

Il. 1.432–7

P53 (TM 61201): Maltomini

οἳ δ’ ὅτε δὴ λιμένος πολυβενθέος ἐντὸς ἵκοντο, ἱστία μὲν στείλαντο, θέσαν δ’ ἐν νηὶ μελαίνῃ, ἱστὸν δ’ ἱστοδόκῃ πέλασαν προτόνοισιν ὑφέντες καρπαλίμως, τὴν δ’ εἰς ὅρμον προέρεσσαν ἐρετμοῖς. ἐκ δ’ εὐνὰς ἔβαλον, κατὰ δὲ πρυμνήσι’ ἔδησαν· ἐκ δὲ καὶ αὐτοὶ βαῖνον ἐπὶ ῥηγμῖνι θαλάσσης,

1 ἱϲτία μὲν ϲ]τ̣ε̣[ίλαντο θέϲαν δ’ ἐν νηὶ μελαίνῃ, ] κ̣αι αυ̣τοι βαντε̣[ϲ   αλο]ϲ ηπειρον δε θοη[ν ] επι ψαμαθωι παρα̣ [ αυτο]ι̣ δε ϲκιδνα̣ντο κατ̣α κ̣[λιϲιαϲ     

The point comes in the repetition (contra S. West 1967: 34), reprises of familiar material of this sort creating what one can call the groove. (p.276) This analysis precludes having to enumerate analogues for the papyrus’s version of the scene. Suffice it to say that the type scene involving landing a ship abounded in archaic Greek hexameter poetry (M. W. Edwards 1992: 313). In all the cases examined in sections 5.2 through 5.4, the scribe strives to perform. Much of the critical discourse surrounding these texts impedes our approaching them from that perspective. To frame P671’s (TM 61254) reading of seietai (“shakes”) in lieu of the medieval tradition’s mainetai (“rages”) at Il. 16.75 as a “banalization” (Haslam 1991: 34) hinders one from thinking productively about what the scribe was trying to do. To figure P51’s rendition of Achilleus’s shield as having been “contaminated” (Fernández Delgado and Pordomingo 2015: 38) by the text of the Hesiodic Shield of Heracles misses the mark (even if contaminatio remains a technical term in the field of textual criticism to describe a species of interaction between different manuscripts (Bird 2010: 14; Schmidt 2013: 494 n. 6)). To speak of P12’s expansion of the simile at Il. 23.222–4 as “natural” (N. Richardson 1993: 196 at 223) is to obscure the real force at work. To assert that “most plus-verses” are “easily explained as a simple case of interpolation” (Nodar 2012: 567) likewise fails to do justice to the scribe’s goals.

5.5. Tradition, Traditionalization, and the Intertextual Gap The challenge for the scribe is, can he produce a text of the Iliad or the Odyssey that someone would want to use? Because we are dealing with traditional poetry, the performing scribe needs to be understood to be doing the work of tradition. He is, to return to that word popular among scholars of the ancient Near East, a tradent (A. Kirk 2008: 220; Kelber 2008: 256, cf. 2010: 120 (“traditionists”)). Dorothy Noyes argues that tradition is a matter of work, a matter of responsibility (2009: 248; cf. Glassie 2006: 170–1; J. Jackson 2008: 4; Bauman Page 58 of 75

 

Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics 2012: 109). The scribe assumes the responsibility of passing on these traditional stories for the community: “He is responsible to that tradition” (Doane 1994a: 435; cf. Assmann 2006: 115; Kelber 2010: 122). Rare is the customer who collates either the text the scribe copies or a third text against the text the scribe creates (cf. McNamee 1981: 254–5, 2007: 2, 15, 26, 37, 47, 73; Machan 1994: 168; Pasternack 1995: 27; Ulrich 1999: 15; Comfort 2004: 38; Wakelin 2014: 45). The scribe has to produce for his audience a text acceptable on its own terms as the traditional story, “an authoritative version of one that existed before, or elsewhere” (Kuipers 1990: 4). He will do that in part by working with the recognizable and doing what I detailed in the second part of my analysis of each passage discussed in the previous sections—above all, introducing plus verses that intersect with verses found elsewhere (be it at the level of diction or on a more abstract plane) and making additional moves that impart a heard-before quality. This material is the stuff that his audiences label Homeric (or on (p.277) occasion assign to the genre of stories about gods and heroes in hexameter verse).15 Thomas Steele provides an elucidating parallel in his discussion of writers of alabados (hymns) sung in New Mexico (2005: 5; cf. Lumpp and Steele 2000: 546): “These transitional poets did not compose orally but contrived to sound oral, for they knew that in order to be accepted, their new productions had to sound like ‘the right stuff,’ have enough of the audible traits of the traditional poetry to assure their prospective audience that it was hearing authentic alabados.” Reveling in the recognizable helps the scribe achieve a perhaps more basic, albeit related, end. By displaying the recognizable he works to create an acceptable text, but displaying the recognizable also helps him position himself as capable of generating such a text. For by deploying material that is familiar, material marked as having been previously performed, the scribe indicates that he has access to past performances. By indicating that he has access to past performances, he legitimates his current presentation. This move is a species of traditionalization, a concept that linguistic anthropologists and folklorists have deployed in various ways (Ready 2018a: 69–70). I cite Richard Bauman’s analysis of an Icelandic teller’s use of the following sentence: “Now Gudrún, his daughter, told my father this story” (2004: 26). Bauman labels this statement a moment of traditionalization and describes it as “an act of authentication” (27): Mr. Norðmann establishes both the genuineness of his story as a reliable account and the legitimacy and strength of his claim to it by locating himself in a direct line of transmission, including lines of descent through kinship, that reaches back to Páll himself, the original speaker of those reportable words that constitute the point of the narrative.

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Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics Narrators around the world use this method of traditionalization (Cashman 2016: 156–8; Ready 2018a: 116; subsection 3.5.2 (p. 146)). I suggest that the scribe traditionalizes—in the sense of aligning his performance with past performances—by reveling in the familiar and thereby authenticates his performance. The scribe does not try to trick his audience. Creating a good text means creating a text that matches his and his audience’s vision of what the text should be. I return to that component of performance discussed in section 2.1: the negotiation of an intertextual gap. Recall that one can speak of the intertextual relationship between successive re-presentations of the same text: “The potential for texts to circulate, to be spoken again”—“the iterability of texts”—“constitutes one of the most powerful bases for the potentiation and production of intertextuality” (Bauman 2004: 4, cf. 8) and, therefore, intertextual gaps of varying degree (e.g. 11, 28, 147, 153, 157–8). I add here that Charles (p.278) Briggs and Bauman allow for the application of this model to the “(re)production of written texts” (1992: 157). The scribe produces a text that cleaves to his vision of what the traditional text should be, a vision shaped to some degree by his understanding of his audience’s sense of the proper text. That vision is informed both by the text in front of him and by his previous encounters with written and oral texts of Homeric poetry (cf. S. West 1967: 223). One may turn here to Lauri Honko’s concept of mental text (1998: 94; cf. Kamppinen and Hakamies 2013: 53): This preexistent module seems to consist of 1) storylines, 2) textual elements, i.e., episodic patterns, images of epic situations, multiforms, etc., and 3) their generic rules of reproduction as well as 4) contextual frames such as remembrances of earlier performances, yet not as a haphazard collection of traditional knowledge but, in the case of distinct epics of the active repertoire, a prearranged set of elements internalised by the individual singer. The scribe is seeking to minimize the gap between the text he creates and that vision of the text. At times, the text in front of him overlaps with that notional intertext, and he can be said to copy the text in front of him; at times, the text in front of him does not overlap with that notional intertext, and he can be said to copy the notional intertext directly. In this way, the scribe fashions a text that he can declare authentic, legitimate, real, and, therefore, useful. I would caution against positing a link between “textual fidelity” and word-forword replication of an exemplar (Zetzel 2005: 160; cf. Liuzza 2000: 155; Parker 2008a: 153), or describing scribal activity as “accurate and responsible” only when the scribe exhibits a “passive subservience” to his exemplar (Orton 2000: 77, cf. 203), or declaring “better” the scribe who produces a “correct” as Page 60 of 75

 

Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics opposed to “incorrect” copy of the exemplar (Jongkind 2008: 53; cf. 35; Comfort 2004: 33, 49; Ehrman 2011: 343; Wehrli 1980: 215, “une copie assez peu correcte”). In doing the work of and assuming responsibility for the tradition, the scribe may aim at fidelity to a different intertext and may conceive of his copy as better in that regard than his exemplar. My argument parallels Tim William Machan’s in his discussion of Middle English texts: “An exemplar, accordingly, would not necessarily be a text but a conception of a work, and it is this conception that might determine the objective of copying fidelity” (1994: 169).16 Likewise, I do not dispute the utility in the series of oppositions Daniel Wakelin constructs in his discussion of English scribal practice from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries CE: “changing” versus “keeping things the same” (2014: 16); “correct copying” versus “rewriting” (50); “exact reproduction” versus “varying” (63). Yet such distinctions can distract one from the following: departure from the exemplar and (p.279) replication of the exemplar may be two ways of getting at the same goal—namely, the reproduction of the notional intertext. Although they do not speak of minimizing an intertextual gap, scholars of Jewish scripture and of early Christian texts provide useful analogues. Paulson Pulikottil comments on the scribe of 1QIsaa, “The scribe was very much concerned with rendering his text as ‘accurate’ as possible, where faithfulness in duplicating [the exemplar] is not what is meant, but being meticulous in the production of a ‘correct’ text of the prophecy” (2001: 73; cf. 87, 116). Sidnie White Crawford finds that in the Second Temple period one set of scribes thought of “the biblical text” as “harmonious and perfect”: scribes removed “perceived imperfections” to ensure that their copies matched their vision of the text (2008: 36–7; cf. 23, 27, 29). David Carr writes, “The tradents believed themselves to be making the Torah yet truer to itself than it was before,” “truer to the tradition than were earlier copies” (2015: 171; cf. Debel 2011: 76). Similarly, scribes of Christian texts engaged with a text when “they held it to be sacred and in need of careful preservation” (Kruger 2012: 80). As Ernest Colwell writes, “The paradox is that the variations came into existence because these were religious books, sacred books, canonical books. The devout scribe felt compelled to correct misstatements [= errors (JR)] which he found in the manuscript he was copying” (1952: 52; cf. Fee 1993: 195–6; Epp 2005: 584; Kruger 2012: 80). The scribe’s maintenance of texts essential to religious practice parallels the scribe’s maintenance of the Homeric tradition: both strive to keep the text the way it should be.17 Franco Montanari seeks to distinguish Greek and Roman scribal activity from the project of Hellenistic-era grammarians. The latter group aims at “the correct and authentic form of the work itself” (2011: 14, cf. 2015: 652–3). I would dissent. In aiming to generate the optimal text in each instance of recopying, the scribe models himself after an oral performer. Honko comments on performers of epic: “Instead of copying an earlier performance, the conscientious singer sets out to Page 61 of 75

 

Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics give (p.280) a maximal, truthful and complete presentation of a story” (1998: 74). Tradition bearers frequently praise such presentations for matching ? alleged archetypal originals? (Roilos 2012: 226). Or take José González’s discussion of how performers respond to the concept of notional fixity in performance (the belief that each performance is the same as previous performances): “Performers themselves will seek to outdo each other not only in technical virtuosity, dramatic force, and vividness, but also in the ‘accuracy’ and ‘comprehensiveness’ of their telling—in other words, in what may be called truthfulness or veracity, in their faithfulness to the notional integrity of the tradition they are singing about” (2013: 176). The oral performer of the Iliad and the Odyssey provides a model for the scribe too. Asking who the “I” of the Homeric narrator text is, Gregory Nagy writes, “This ‘I’ is not a representation of Homer: it is Homer” (1996b: 61, emphasis in original). Each time a rhapsode performs he “re-enacts” (61), “re-creates” (80), and ultimately “is” (61, 86, emphasis in original) the poet Homer. This equation authorizes each performance because each performance brings the great poet and, by implication, his poem before us. Having argued that the poet’s song is “an oral quotation of the Muses’ own song” (2013: 208), González notes that “such a comprehensive accuracy of quoted speech requires the song’s full correspondence to an original.” The performer presents the original, ideal poem each time he performs. When “the locus of authority for the performance [shifts] away from the religious—the Muse, who aids the singer and makes his performance authoritative—and toward the secular—a great and inimitable composer,” the performer “is called to reenact” the composer’s, Homer’s, “original utterance” (235). So too the scribe recreates the optimal text of the Iliad or the Odyssey each time he copies. The discussion so far cannot account for every variant in a given papyrus. Turning to scholarship on performance does not explain why P354’s (TM 61209) rendition of Il. 1.107 reads (S. West 1967: 29): ἀεί τ̣ο̣ι̣ φ̣[ίλ]ο̣ν̣ ἐστι κακ[ὰ φρεσὶ μαντεύεσ]θαι always it is dear to your heart to prophesy evils

whereas the medieval texts read: αἰεί τοι τὰ κάκ’ ἐστὶ φίλα φρεσὶ μαντεύεσθαι always the evil things are dear to your heart to prophesy

It does not explain why at Il. 12.257 P217 (TM 61193) reads rhēxasthai, the aorist middle infinitive of rhēgnumi (“to break”), whereas the medieval texts read rhēgnusthai, the present middle infinitive (S. West 1967: 120; di Luzio 1969: 28). It does not explain why at Od. 12.388 P145a (TM 61253) reads diaraisaimi (“I will dash to pieces”), whereas the medieval texts read balōn keasaimi (“I will strike and break in pieces”) (Renner 1990). One could refer to scholarship on the workings of memory to (p.281) account for these Page 62 of 75

 

Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics discrepancies (cf. S. West 1967: 89, 129; section 4.4 (pp. 205–6)). The next section finds one more way to put the performance frame to productive use.

5.6. The Bookroll To get at the nature of the scribe’s performance, I have been concentrating on the verbal content of the text he produced. Other features of the scribe’s performance merit attention. For instance, Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe stresses the bodily component of his performance and juxtaposes it with the bodily component of the oral performer’s presentation (1998: 53–4), and Alger Doane aligns the “physicality” of the act of writing with the physicality of oral performance (2003: 63).18 In addition, to get at the nature of the scribe’s performance, I have been following precedent in looking to scholarship on oral performance. To move beyond the verbal content of the text and to move beyond scholarship on oral performance, I consider the text created by the Homeric scribe as something to be viewed, not just read. Here too performance comes into play. William Johnson points to the careful columniation evident from the earliest extant Greek texts and the use of scriptio continua (2009: 257–62). As for handwriting, “both documents and literature were generally written in the style of certain inscriptions” in the fourth century BCE (Mugridge 2010: 574). The evidence from the third century BCE and later allows one to speak of “two broad ‘fields’ (book hand and documentary hand)” (Mugridge 2010: 575) and to distinguish between professional hands—including a calligraphic hand and one to be labeled “informal and unexceptional” (Johnson 2004: 161) or “professionally produced (but not ‘calligraphic’)” (Mugridge 2010: 579)—and non-professional hands (Mugridge 2010: 579, 2016: 22) that are “substandard or cursive” (Johnson 2004: 161). Professional hands generate most literary papyri (Johnson 2009: 257; Mugridge 2010: 579, 2016: 147–51). These features make for an object intended in part for visual consumption: “the net effect is designed for clarity and beauty but not for ease of use, much less mass readership.…The bookroll seems, rather, an egregiously elite product intended in its stark beauty and difficulty of access to instantiate what it is to be educated” (Johnson 2009: 262, 263). In presenting his text as he does, the ancient scribe engages in “a well-established artisan craft” (Johnson 2004: 160) with a view to satisfying his customer (2009: 261): The bookroll, here and elsewhere, shows distinct signs of deliberate design and attention to what is stylish, as well as exactness in execution involving both measurement and expert estimation. All of this is consistent—as a general picture—with the conclusion that bookrolls were generally the product of scribes trained for the task, that is, to an artisan (p.282) apprentice trade. The trade clearly also involves a strong sense of cultural demands on the product. The bookroll signaled culture and learning, but Page 63 of 75

 

Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics for a bookroll to qualify as such required a particular look and feel with well-defined traditions of detail. We are not dealing here with accidently preserved ephemera, like, for instance, the clay tablets from the Old Babylonian Period that contain Sumerian narratives written by apprentice scribes (Delnero 2016: 23). The scribal act Johnson presents can be labeled a performance. I make four related points. First, if the Homeric scribe writes in an “epigraphic” style, he appropriates the distinctive aesthetic of the stonemason’s art (Butz 2010; Porter 2010: 466–8). If he writes in a calligraphic or non-calligraphic professional hand, his handwriting stands apart from non-professional, substandard writing. Even a hand that “possesses characteristics lying between those of ‘book hands,’ which are more rigid and formal, and of ‘documentary hands,’ which are less regular and more cursive” can stand out for its “beauty” (Cribiore 1996: 97–8). Whatever the case, in so far as his act of skilled handwriting creates a written text with an arresting visual dimension, that act becomes a performance like that of skilled handwriters in other cultures (cf. Cribiore 1996: 100). Of scribes copying Old English texts, Fred Robinson writes, “Each copying was an individual artistic performance of the work,” and one component of that performance was the scribe’s “displaying his accomplished calligraphy” (1994: 38). Likewise, Haruo Shirane speaks of Japanese calligraphers as performers (2005: 229) and opines that “a poor poem with excellent calligraphy was probably preferable to a good poem with poor calligraphy” (223–4). At the same time, the scribe of a Homeric text does not just write nicely but aims, in Johnson’s words, for a “particular look and feel.” He aims at a certain standard. This attribute of a successful performance by a scribe of a Homeric text can be compared to that of a successful performance by a Japanese calligrapher (J. Carpenter 2007: 157, my emphasis): Just as a member of court circles would discipline his or her body to move in prescribed fashion in the performance of palace etiquette or ritual, a calligrapher would carry out the transcribing of a text, especially a final copy for presentation, according to established conventions. Furthermore, as part of a calligrapher’s training, models were memorized and interiorized in order to expertly carry out the “performance” of a text in a highly polished manner… Second, ponder the indications—the “deliberate design and attention to what is stylish,” the “exactness in execution”—that the Homeric scribe knows his work will be viewed and judged by an audience. The concept of reflexivity, as an “unavoidable” and “crucial” component of performance, becomes pertinent: a performer engages in an interaction with an audience and signals in various

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Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics ways his understanding that he is engaged in an interaction (Berger and Del Negro 2002 (quotations from 68, 79); cf. Oring 2011: 366). Third, flesh out Johnson’s phrase “well-defined traditions of detail.” To the extent that he assumes responsibility for continuing a tradition (however new that tradition may be), the maker (be he a smith, potter, singer, or calligrapher) performs (Glassie 2003: 187–8): (p.283) It begins when the earthen egg of the crucible is cracked, when the lips part, the lump of clay is centered on the wheel. Yusuf Sezer touches black ink to white paper, Peter Flanagan lifts the bow to the strings. They take control, and they are performing when their multiplex responsibilities fuse in the heat of creation. Isolating within performance its valence of historical responsibility, without which it could not be, we have come again upon tradition. The Homeric scribe performs in assuming responsibility for perpetuating “welldefined traditions.” Fourth, consider Johnson’s framing of the scribe as an artisan (cf. J. Alden 2010: 142; Mugridge 2010: 575–7). The artisan, the craftsman, is a performer. Marjorie Hunt discusses the work of the stone carvers who decorated Washington National Cathedral. Analyzing how they “exactly reproduce” (2011: 59) in stone a clay model provided by a sculptor or a drawing provided by an architect, Hunt argues that the “concept of craftsmanship as performance—as ‘cultural behavior for which a person assumes responsibility to an audience’—is crucial to understanding the stone-carving process (Hymes 1975: 18)” (50). The Homeric scribe’s status as an artisan makes him a performer. The performances of the scribes who produced our wild papyri comprised verbal and visual dimensions.

5.7. The Performing Scribe This chapter’s investigation of what a performer does has sought to provide a better sense of what a performing scribe does. Understanding the scribe as a performer and exploring in detail what performance entails can help alleviate some of the anxieties that eat at scholars of scribal activity. I offer four examples. First, Michael Fishbane deems Israelite scribes “the cultural allies of the composers… and so composers in a derivative sense” (1988: 85). Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe finds that the “reading and copying [of Old English poems] have actually become conflated with composing” (1990: 41) and sees the AngloSaxon scribe as a “language-producer,” not just a “visual reproducer,” (67) and Page 65 of 75

 

Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics as “a participant in and a determiner of the text” (191). Alger Doane too characterizes the Anglo-Saxon scribe as “a sort of shadow-scop [shadowpoet]” (1998: 65). Yet such talk makes other scholars nervous. Recall that Michael Haslam does not like the idea of making scribes in ancient Greece into “virtual rhapsodes.” Douglas Moffatt worries that O’Brien O’Keeffe’s book turns Anglo-Saxon scribes into “quasi-poets” (1992: 814). Peter Orton, launching a more vigorous attack against O’Brien O’Keeffe’s thesis, declares “they were not poets” (2000: 199): “in the Anglo-Saxon period the copyist and the poet occupied quite distinct worlds”; the scribe’s “job was a new one, and a world away from that of the oral, traditional poet” (207). A similar back and forth emerges regarding the applicability of the terms “editor” and “author.” Investigating the reproduction in the fifteenth century CE of “a poem like Beves of Hamptoun,” Derek Pearsall writes of “scribal editors” and of “editorial recomposition which is often little different in character or quality from original composition” (1984: 127–8). Writing on the Apocryphon of John, found among (p.284) the Nag Hammadi codices, Karen King states, “Insofar as scribes were free from the constraints of an ideal of verbatim transmission and authorial ‘copyright,’ they were able to function as editors and even authors” (1997: 114). Eugene Ulrich investigates the “editorial work” of Israelite scribes and concludes, “The methods of the late scribes are basically similar to the methods we recognize in the earlier ‘authors’ and tradents who produced the Scriptures” (1999: 61, 77; cf. 107–8, 151; Talmon 1975: 334–5, 380–1). In a chapter on the reproduction of Old English texts by later scribes, Roy Michael Liuzza speaks of scribes “interpreting rather than transcribing; one might even call this work ‘editorial’” (2000: 147, cf. 157). Paulson Pulikottil labels the scribe of 1QIsaa “a careful editor” (2001: 42, cf. 203). Luciano Canfora titles his book Il copista come autore (2002). The Latinist James Zetzel finds situations in which “the work being done by a scribe…is authorial and editorial as much it is purely scribal” (2005: 146). Nadia Altschul, a medievalist, refers to “a measure of scribal modification that may also be termed ‘authorial’, or coauthorial” (2006: 122). Another set of commentators writes of Second Temple scribes, “Each one of them was not only a copyist, but also a potential editor, redactor, interpreter and author” (von Weissenberg et al. 2011: 7; cf. Lemmelijn 2012: 207). Rosamund Allen, commenting on Middle English texts, declares, “Scribes were not ignorant blunderers: they too were editors” (2013: 293). By contrast, in his book on Middle English texts, Tim William Machan objects to “elid[ing] any distinction between vernacular ‘author’ and ‘scribe’” (1994: 175). He writes, “socially and institutionally the distinction between individual composition (dictare) and scribal production (scribere) is maintained throughout the Middle English period.” Ulrich Schmid challenges what he presents as some Second Testament scholars’ efforts to make scribes into “authors and editors” (2008: 8). He resists attributing certain variants to scribes on the grounds that scribes lacked the ability to craft them “just in passing during the Page 66 of 75

 

Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics copying process” or “on the fly” (14–16). He would rather assign these “consciously prepared,” “very well thought through” variants to editors who see to their insertion in the text or to readers whose marginal (and, one assumes, interlinear) comments scribes insert in the text (14–23). Bart Ehrman, one of the targets of Schmid’s critique, fires back, “I do indeed present scribes as authors” (2011: 336). Emanuel Tov, dean of the textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible, prefers to speak of “authors-scribes” and “editors-scribes” in contrast to “copyists-scribes”: “authors and editors created the books during the first stages of their existence” (2012a: 240). Even so, “scribes-copyists gave further shape to the books in transmitting the finished compositions while also inserting occasional changes.” In fact, “there is a large gray area between the activity of copyists-scribes…and that of authors and editors.” Being productively capacious, the model of scribal performance that I have articulated gets one beyond these disagreements. To the extent that performance involves the activities surveyed in sections 5.2 through 5.5 and to the extent that the scribe performs and the composer, poet, author, or editor performs, the scribe resembles the composer, poet, author, or editor. But the performing scribe merits that label because he performs, not because he resembles a composer, poet, author, or editor. Furthermore, evidence of (p.285) changes to the exemplar prompts these debates. Yet, by thinking in terms of performance, one takes on more than changes to the exemplar. I have stressed the various aspects of the scribe’s presentation that qualify him as a performer: they do not all pertain to alterations. Finally (and related to the point just made), I have argued that the scribe is always performing—his performance comprises both those moments in which he replicates what is in his immediate exemplar and when he departs from his immediate exemplar—and I have argued that he is always copying—both when he replicates what is in his exemplar and when he turns to his notional intertext. Approaching scribal activity from this perspective helps one avoid the claim that the scribe is at times not a scribe. For Zetzel, for instance, he departs from his exemplar in his capacity as an author or editor, but as a scribe he replicates it. Better is Sidnie White Crawford’s take on Second Temple scribes: “The two activities, exact transcription and intervention for the purposes of exegesis, were not seen as incompatible, but as two sides of the same scribal coin” (2008: 4; cf. Quinn 2010: 16). I too prefer to let the scribe be a scribe and find that the model of performance I have laid out allows one do so. Second, John Dagenais notes the several studies by medievalists on “‘the scribe as x’”: “‘the scribe as editor,’ ‘the scribe as critic,’ ‘the scribe as reader’” (1994: 116). He questions his colleagues’ need to defend the scribe by making him or her into “something other than a scribe” (116; cf. Moffatt 1992: 827). He writes (117):

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Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics Much as I appreciate the attempt to save scribes through meaning, through “creativity,” I do not think we can afford such a one-sided salvation. We cannot restore the proper balance among scribe, author, and manuscript unless we permit the “uncreative,” “unauthorial” aspects of scribal activity to be a part of the equation as well, the times when they made nonsense as well as the times when they made sense. We cannot just take what we would like the scribes to be; we must recognize that they were, yes, sometimes clever readers and rehandlers, but that they were also often sloppy, inept, ignorant, and unimaginative. By understanding the scribe as a performer, one can accommodate this recommendation. For a performance remains a performance, however many missteps it contains. Milman Parry and Albert Lord’s Bosniac singers made mistakes as they performed (Lord 1954: 342). The Mongolian editors of Tsültmiin Togtool’s textualized oral performances “admit that the stories in his repertory cannot be considered as either rich in vocabulary or satisfactory in composition” (Bawden 1982: p. vii). A Swati bard (South Africa), Mtshophane Mamba, “candidly added that his performances were not always towering successes” (Scheub 2002: 114, cf. 212). Okabou Ojobolo “did not always succeed” in his performance of the Ozidi story: his text has “imperfections” (Okpewho 2014: 67; cf. 34–5, 84). Indeed, “the specter of failure” haunts any performance (Bauman 2004: 126), but even a failed performance is a performance (cf. Flueckiger 1988). Third, David Parker joins Schmid (see p. 284) in wondering when scribes of Christian texts made changes to the texts they copied. Perhaps they took advantage of “a preparatory stage, in which the exemplar was examined and read, errors being corrected and changes proposed, this prepared text then being copied” (2008a: 154; (p.286) cf. 2008b: 180; Millett 2005: p. l). Unlike Schmid and Parker, I have no difficulty envisioning the scribe making changes as he goes (cf. Jongkind 2008: 46). But I can likewise envision a preparatory stage for the scribe’s performance, that stage involving marking up a text and/or taking place in the scribe’s mind (cf. Tov 2008: 211, 216): performers, after all, practice beforehand. Fourth, scholars worry over how cognizant scribes were of what they were doing, both when they reproduced the words in their exemplar and when they departed from their exemplar (cf. Millett 2005: p. liii; Ehrman 2011: 337). Consider the following movement in Daniel Wakelin’s book on scribal correction. In the introduction, he seems to deconstruct this opposition between conscious and unconscious scribal activity: “While not all the things scribes did need be understood as consciously ‘meant’, for some were surely habits, it is pusillanimous not to credit their agency even in what is habitual” (2014: 16). Yet he ultimately defends concentrating on moments when a scribe goes back over the text he has written in order to correct it on the grounds that such activity Page 68 of 75

 

Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics represents the only sort of scribal activity that one can with certainty label conscious (2014: 53–70). Using the performance frame enables one to bypass this debate because the study of performance is not limited to the study of conscious or unconscious actions. Performers operate consciously and they operate unconsciously, as discussions of performers’ “automatic behaviors” make clear (Bozzone 2016).

5.8. Scribal Performance and the Alternatives I pointed in subsection 4.5.2 to quotations of the Iliad and the Odyssey found in the work of Classical-era authors. I observe now how scholars talk about what these authors on occasion do when they quote: “With Homeric phraseology thoroughly interiorized, he [Aristotle] came up with them out of his head, much as a rhapsode might, recomposing in performance” (Haslam 1997: 77; cf. van der Valk 1964: 338, 340). For Athanasios Efstathiou, Aeschines “reworks a text of Homer” in order “to compose an argument in poetic form” (2016: 112, 110; cf. Olding 2007: 160). Classical-era writers produce runs of Homeric poetry that, viewed from the perspective of the medieval texts, resemble the Homeric texts of the Ptolemaic wild papyri, and researchers use the language of performance to talk about what these authors are doing. In this chapter, I have gone a step farther: the scribes who produced the wild texts found in the papyri are to be understood as performing in the act of copying. I juxtapose my discussion of the performing scribe with the previous considerations reviewed in section 4.3 of the forces behind the texts found in the wild papyri. Recall the scholars who assigned the variations to oral performers. Remember how they distinguished between their performers and their notion of what a scribe does. Note now that this move is typical: Homerists regularly separate the oral performer from the scribe. For instance, scholars who think of our Homeric poets as oral poets offer two (p.287) explanations for the verbatim or nearly verbatim repetition of a stretch of verses in the Homeric poems, such as speeches by messengers (subsection 2.2.2), setting aside the explanation that a writing oral poet matched up the passages (Mueller 2009: 157, 162, 173–7). On the one hand, the Homeric oral poet was capable of repeating himself, word-for-word repetition of a run of two or more lines being “one of the characteristic signs of oral style” (Lord 2000: 58; cf. Hainsworth 1970: 92). On the other hand, scribes who wrote to a poet’s live performance or who copied manuscripts could be the sources of the repetitions: taking advantage of the technology of writing, they ensured that putatively repeated passages were truly repeated (Hainsworth 1990: 32; cf. Lord 1991: 5; Mueller 2009: 157). Poet or scribe could be responsible but for different reasons. Another example comes in Margalit Finkelberg’s attempt to distinguish between the multiformity engendered by performers operating in an oral tradition and the multitextuality engendered by scribes (2000: 4):

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Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics This is not to say of course that written transmission preserves the text as entirely fixed and unchangeable: interpolations, corrections, omissions, alternative wordings, and so forth, are well-known characteristics of this form of transmission. But this is another kind of changeability, amply exemplified, for example, in medieval manuscript transmission and having nothing to do with the multiformity characteristic of oral tradition. The causes and effects of these two phenomena are entirely different, and they cannot be accounted for along the same lines. Finkelberg segregates the oral performer from the scribe. Yet one should not distance the act of performance from the act of scribal copying. The texts found in the wild papyri are themselves constituted via performance. On the one hand, if one wants to attribute these texts to copyists, one should not shy away from seeing them as performers. On the other hand, whether or not the individual who copies the text has in the past or will subsequently perform in public, perhaps from his newly created text (in other words, whether one attributes these texts to oral performers or copyists), he performs in the act of copying. Similarly, whereas Martin L. West finds that the writing rhapsode “might well rely on his memory and write it in the form in which he had most recently recited it” (2001: 15), I suggest that he is not simply recording what he last performed. He is performing at that moment of memorial copying. M. L. West attributes the variations either to rhapsodes or to copyists: he speaks of their “casual corruptions” (2001: 28). His phrasing returns me to the second group, those who attribute the variations to copyists. Contra Stephanie West, these performers are neither yielding to a vice nor tampering with the text (cf. George 2003: 429, “tampering”). Contra Minna Skafte Jensen, they are not nonchalantly reproducing the text (see again “hardly bother,” 1980: 108), nor are they simply adding, nor are they making mistakes or being pedantic. Contra M. L. West, they are not, or at least for the most part are not, acting unconsciously, and if they are, it is immaterial to getting at what they are doing (section 5.7 (p. 286)). They are not indulging a sense of “privilege to change what they do not like or understand” (George 2003: 419). They are not (p.288) overseeing the disintegration, decline, or degeneration of the text (see Cerquiglini 1999: 34, 48, 61). They are assuming responsibility for the perpetuation of a tradition and taking on the task of performance to do so. Regardless of which school of thought they belong to, scholars have in effect portrayed our scribe as maximizing the gap between the text he copies and the text he makes. In the past, they have done so to condemn him: they speak of his interpolations and his creation of a wild text; they speak of his vices and his mistakes. More recently, they have done so to praise him: Derek Collins, for example, finds the writer of a wild papyrus playing off and exploiting his Page 70 of 75

 

Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics audience’s knowledge of a fixed text (2004: 176–8, 212–16, 218, 221). These critics focus on the wrong intertext. The intertext the scribe works with is his vision of what the poem should be. He tries to minimize the gap between that intertext and the text he makes. In the end, understanding the scribe as a performer helps one catch a glimpse of an individual behind the text. Performance is dangerous (Bauman 2004: 126): Performance is fraught with risk. As a mode of communicative display, performance makes the performer accountable to an audience; it solicits the close scrutiny of an audience and invites their evaluative judgment. Any performance, then, is shadowed by the specter of failure, of being—or being judged to be—a failure. The scribe takes a gamble. Every performance raises the question of “power in performance” (Bauman 2012: 102): control over the organization and production of performance; control over the meaning and interpretation of performance; and control over the ends or outcomes of performance. The politics of performance, then, pertains to the ways in which these aspects of power are claimed, allocated, authorized, negotiated, contested. In initiating and seeing his performance through, the scribe asserts control over the production of performance. If the scribe does not initiate the performance, if someone else asks or orders him to do it, he still sees his performance through and to that extent asserts control over the production of performance. The scribe stakes a claim. I want to tie off this discussion by returning to the scribal performer encountered in subsections 3.3.5.2 and 3.8 (5). In subsection 3.3.5.2, I discussed some instances in which scribes engaged in their own performances as they manually recorded oral performers. In section 3.8 (5), I used the comparanda to infer that the scribes who took dictation from Homeric poets also engaged in their own performances as they took dictation. I can now specify that these scribal performances were of the kind that has been the focus of Chapters 4 and 5, a blend of replications and departures. If the written textual traditions of our Iliad and Odyssey started from dictated texts—as I think they did—the written textual traditions of our Iliad and Odyssey began with scribal performances of the sort studied here. Some scribes faithfully copied that initial text (sections 4.5.2 (p. 228), 5.1). Some scribes created the wild papyri. Asking whether a verse or passage in the medieval textual tradition results from scribal “interpolation” or if that tradition (p.289) omits “genuine lines” (S. West 1967: 13; Janko 1992: 21 n. 7, 1994: 292–3; M. L. West 2001: 10–14, 2017: 20–1) may leave the impression that some portion of the textual tradition was not subject to scribal mediation. I emphasize not only that the wild papyri passed through the Page 71 of 75

 

Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics scribal filter but also that the text we try to reconstruct—the dictated text—by using for the most part what I just called the faithful copies of the initial text likewise passed through the scribal filter (cf. Dollerup et al. 1984; van der Toorn 2007: 115). The scribes did us a favor. Even when the scribal performer did not write down what the poet said, he wrote down what the poet might have said. (Sure, they made errors, but so did the dictating poets.) The scribes who took dictation from the poets and the scribes who crafted wild texts fashioned texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey that reflected the oral traditional system in which poets composed (cf. Nagy 1996b: 133–5, 146–52; 2004: 14, 36, 59, 70). We owe our gratitude to the scribal performers who produced precious examples of that tradition. Even if gratitude is a bridge too far for some, the fact remains that the scribal performers who wrote to the poets’ dictation and the scribal performers who generated wild texts made the texts of the Homeric epics that people used in antiquity (cf. Haslam 1997: 68; Fish 2007: 76, 80), just as scribal performers who performed in the manner investigated in Chapters 4 and 5 crafted texts of Jewish and Christian scripture and of medieval literature that people used (cf. Dagenais 1994: 114; Ehrman 1995: 361 n. 1, 2011: 349–50; Reiter 1996: 167–9; Ulrich 1999: 15–16, 114–15; Epp 2005: 585; Kelber 2008: 254, 2010: 120; Machan 2011: 294, 296, 303; Lemmelijn 2012: 206–7; Niditch 2015: 15). As students of antiquity, one of our jobs is to investigate the forces and agents behind those texts. And, of course, we base our interpretations on texts of the Homeric poems that originated in instances of scribal performance. Our reliance on those scribes should also prompt us to investigate them. (p.290) Notes:

(1) Schironi provides a balanced overview of van Thiel’s subsequent “eccentric” arguments about Aristarchus’s work (esp. van Thiel 2014), arguments that have so far garnered scant support (2018: 40). For my purposes, the essential point is that in these later studies van Thiel’s ideas about the persistence of the “chief stream” remain the same. It even appears on the back cover of his 2010 edition of the Iliad: “Soon after its written fixation, the stream of tradition acquired such strength that it kept all external influences on the periphery” (my translation). When the Alexandrian critics produced their editions (see pp. 241–5), they marked up texts belonging to this chief stream (van Thiel 2014: 14–15). (2) Compare van Thiel’s assessment of Aristarchus’s impact: his ekdosis may very well have determined the number of verses in the subsequent written textual tradition, but that is likely because it had the same number of verses as contemporary “good exemplars” (2014: 14 n. 3, my translation). (3) From Bauman’s oeuvre I select the following two examples of the “additional multiple functions the communicative act may serve”: “Moore’s central Page 72 of 75

 

Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics rhetorical purpose is to distance himself from dog traders” (1986: 29); “a sea chantey sung on board ship primarily to coordinate a work task may be secondarily presented to and appreciated by the sailors for the skill of the chanteyman’s performance; on the other hand, performance may become paramount if the same singer is featured onstage at a maritime folk festival” (1989: 263). In short, these other functions are “referential, rhetorical, phatic, or any other” (2004: 10). (4) Schechner’s textbook (Performance Studies: An Introduction) finds performance everywhere: “Performance must be construed as a ‘broad spectrum’ or ‘continuum’ of human actions ranging from ritual, play, sports, popular entertainments, the performing arts (theatre, dance, music), and everyday life performances to the enactment of social, professional, gender, race, and class roles, and on to healing (from shamanism to surgery), the media, and the internet” (2006: 2). Performance is “‘showing doing’…pointing to, underlining, and displaying doing” (28). More easily understood as “showingdoing” (Phelan 2012: 73)—note the hyphen—performance occurs when we put our actions, our doings, on display. (5) M. 1 and M. 2 refer to the hands of the scribes who worked on and corrected this document. M. 1 designates the scribe who wrote the main text in the papyrus. See S. West 1967: 223; Maltomini and Pernigotti 1999. (6) S. West favors the third person (1967: 244) while di Luzio defends the papyrus’s second person (1969: 16–17). (7) See also S. West 1967: 208 at 40a–41 on P30 (TM 61199). (8) Doane comments on the efforts of the Beowulf manuscript’s Scribe A to clarify meaning. He argues that this scribe, in contrast to Scribe B, is less “orally inclined and in tune with the tradition” (2003: 66). In other words, Scribe A reveals less competence in the traditional idiomatic register. A desire for clarity by itself, however, cannot indicate a tradent’s lesser competence. (9) As part of delineating a “trash” aesthetic as it pertains to the Hesiodic Shield of Heracles, Martin focuses on the poet’s decision “to go large” (2005: 164–70, quotation on 170). He contrasts both the Iliad’s “expansion aesthetic” (169 n. 42, cf. 1989: 197–230) and the expansions of the wild papyri (170) with the degree of expansion in the Shield of Heracles. (10) Nagy reviews the history of 604–5 and defends Wolf’s decision, following Athenaeus 5.181b, to flesh out the two verses: τερπόμενοι· μετὰ δέ σφιν ἐμέλπετο θεῖος ἀοιδὸς / φορμίζων, δοιὼ δὲ κυβιστητῆρε κατ’ αὐτοὺς (“taking joy in it; and with them a divine singer sang, / playing the lyre, and two tumblers among them”) (2009: 221 n. 68, 223 n. 73). The lengthier version does not appear in the Iliad’s papyri or medieval manuscripts. Monro and Allen print the Page 73 of 75

 

Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics shorter version (1920), as does M. L. West (2000a), whose text I reproduce here. Van Thiel prints the lengthier version but brackets meta…phormizōn (2010). (11) I use Most’s Greek text of the Hesiodic Shield of Heracles (2007b). My translations of passages from that poem look to his. (12) I should acknowledge that in basing the following discussion on the work of the theorists of oral performance cited in this paragraph I do not engage with the subfield known as affect theory (on which see, from different disciplinary perspectives, Wilce 2009b; Figlerowicz 2012; Plantin 2015; Ott 2017; Telò and Mueller 2018). (13) Note the plus verses a moment earlier (54a–54d and 55a–55d) that instead of simply referring to the amassing Achaeans and Trojans, as happens in van Thiel’s text, first focus on Agamemnon as the one around whom the Achaeans muster and then name six leaders of the Trojan cohorts (S. West 1967: 77; cf. di Luzio 1969: 114). (14) Doffman’s examination of the groove in the context of a jazz trio’s performance prompts two comments. First, Doffman speaks of the groove as “the bodily experience of shared timing,” notes that it “is a relational phenomenon; groove occurs between musicians” (2013: 62, emphasis in original), and describes it as “a feeling for how things should be between players” (78). The emphasis on the groove as a shared experience dovetails with the linking of the groove to the fulfillment of expectations, given that fulfilled expectations can indicate shared expectations. Second, I discuss the groove in the context of repetition, but the groove does not require repetition: just because I know what will happen does not mean that what will happen is the same as what has just happened (cf. Doffman 2013: 80–2). (15) Cf. Nagy on “change” in an oral tradition (1996b: 22): If they do recognize change, however, either it must be negative or, if it is to be positive, it must not really be change at all. In other words, positive change must be a “movement” that leads back to something that is known, just as negative change leads forward to something that is unknown, uncertain, unpredictable. And yet, even if positive change is a moving back toward whatever is known, certain, and predictable, all the more will it be deemed to be an ongoing process of improvement, not deterioration, by those who participate in the tradition. In fact, it will an improvement precisely because such positive “movement” aims at the traditional, even the archetypal. (16) This quotation from Machan’s book provides a good place to note that, instead of using the model of intertexts to interrogate the relationship between the scribe’s copy and his exemplar, one could deploy another set of critical Page 74 of 75

 

Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics terms: work, text, and manuscript. Beside Machan’s chapter from which I quote (“Work and Text”), see Driscoll 2010: 93–5; Lied 2015. (17) Writing on the manuscript transmission of Old Norse sagas, Lethbridge sees “conscious alterations to an exemplar” as evidence of a desire to make the copy “conform to an individual copyist’s or potential audience’s sense and expectations of the narrative with regard to its overall coherence, style and/or thematic interest” (2010: 149). In his study of English scribal practice, Wakelin attributes “meaningful” departures from an exemplar to a desire “to correct” (2014: 58–60, quotations from 58) and adds, “Correcting sometimes included a willingness to rewrite what one finds in an exemplar to restore what seems the better text” (69). From here, note the section in Wakelin’s book titled “Seeking a better text” (2014: 145–56): “the person correcting seems to have some sense of the text as an entity which exists despite the accidents of its material transmission. It exists outside the current scribe’s new copy and its errors, which he seeks to remove; sometimes it exists outside his particular exemplars too. This interest in the text beyond the materials at hand…” (145); “it is as though the corrector of The Prick of Conscience thinks that neither exemplar is a complete witness to the text; likewise, the scribe of Agnus castus is aware that his own copy is liable to be incomplete. In this, they register something distinctive about verbal artefacts: that unlike things such as sculptures, texts can exist without ever being written down; they have if not an ideal form at least a conceptual form which transcends any one material form” (155). In both the Old Norse and the English cases, one can envision a scribe’s imagining an intertext different from his exemplar and seeking to align his copy with that notional intertext. (18) On the body in oral performance, see Zumthor 1990: 153–64; section 1.1 (pp. 23–5). On the posture of the scribe in antiquity, see K. Clark 1963; Turner 1980: 5; Gamble 1995: 90; McNamee 2007: 29–30; Royse 2008: 98; Jensen 2011: 385.

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Conclusion

Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An Interdisciplinary Study of Oral Texts, Dictated Texts, and Wild Texts Jonathan L. Ready

Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9780198835066 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198835066.001.0001

Conclusion Jonathan L. Ready

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198835066.003.0007

Abstract and Keywords This concluding chapter reviews the book’s contributions to the understanding of three kinds of Homeric texts: oral texts, dictated texts, and wild texts. It discusses how the book overlaps with scholarship on the intersections between orality and textuality in both classical studies and numerous other disciplines. It ends by suggesting three ways future research into Homeric texts may proceed: one should continue to investigate what factors enable the production of lengthy oral texts, how oral poets can engage intertextually with their peers, and the ways in which writing poets can work in an oral traditional style. Keywords:   oral texts, dictated texts, wild texts, Homeric poetry, orality, textuality

This book explored Homeric texts before the emergence of standardized written texts. I asked three questions. What kinds of texts were out there? Where did written texts come from? What happened when people began to reproduce those written texts? To begin with, I found in the poems themselves an emphasis on the production of oral texts through processes of entextualization and an exploration of how oral texts engage intertextually with other oral texts that present the same material. The agent of some of these intertextual engagements—the mediating messenger —emerges as a performer. These representations license one to imagine two things: one, each of our Homeric poets may see himself as a mediator between the Muse and his audience but he insists on his status as a performer; two, before they got involved in the production of written texts, our Homeric poets produced oral texts, and, in so doing, they interacted with previous and future Page 1 of 3

 

Conclusion renditions of the same story. These interactions involved standing with and standing apart from other Homeric poets (cf. Ready 2018a: 32). Next, I turned to a scenario that likely lies behind the emergence of written versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey: textualization by way of dictation. Looking at textualization events starting in the nineteenth century CE, one learns that the parties involved in the textualization of an oral traditional work—the collector, poet, and scribe—fashion a co-created entity. If one believes, as most do, that written texts of the epics came into existence because people got poets to dictate them, one must acknowledge what that process entailed. The collector and scribe contributed to the final product along with the poet himself. Finally, I considered the evidence of the Ptolemaic wild papyri of the Homeric poems. They testify to a manner of textual reproduction of the written Homeric poems that can best be labeled scribal performance. The scribes who produced the Greek texts in the papyri did so at a time when the oral performance of Homeric poetry thrived. They sought to entextualize, to provide a complete and affecting presentation, to traditionalize, and to negotiate an intertextual gap—all moves scholars associate with oral performers. Moreover, the scribe’s creation of an object for visual consumption should be understood as a performance. This investigation ventured into that vast expanse of borderland in which orality and textuality meet. I have sought to capitalize on the scholarly propensity to query the (p.292) boundaries or points of overlap between what is labeled the oral/orality and literacy/textuality/writing/the written (section 3.7 (p. 162)). These investigations tend to explore how oral performers make use of written texts, how writers respond to oral traditions, and how conceptional orality and literacy interact with medial orality and literacy. Classicists have contributed their fair share to this discussion—one thinks of the several collective volumes in the series Orality and Literacy in the Ancient World published by Brill (from, so far, I. Worthington 1996 to Slater 2017)—but let me draw attention to work in other disciplines. I cite again the three books mentioned in the introduction: Transmitting Jewish Traditions: Orality, Textuality, and Cultural Diffusion (Elman and Gershoni 2000a); Listening up, Writing down, and Looking beyond: Interfaces of the Oral, Written, and Visual (Gingell and Roy 2012); and Orality and Textuality in the Iranian World: Patterns of Interaction across the Centuries (Rubanovich 2015a). The list goes on. Hildegard Tristam’s research project in Freiburg devoted to the Irish epic Táin Bó Cuailnge produced several volumes in the appropriately named ScriptOralia series, such as Text und Zeittiefe (Tristam 1994), which finds “the oral and written impinging on each other in various ways” (Tristam 1998: 11); (Re)Oralisierung (Tristam 1996), which addresses “the long-term transmission of narrative texts between the oral and the written mode” (Tristam 1998: 11); Medialität und mittelalterliche insulare Literatur (Tristam 1992), Page 2 of 3

 

Conclusion which Tristam translates as Medieval Insular Literature between the Oral and the Written I (1998: 10); and Medieval Insular Literature between the Oral and the Written II (Tristam 1997). From among volumes published since 2010, I point to Vibeke Børdahl and Margaret Wan’s The Interplay of the Oral and the Written in Chinese Popular Literature (2010); to Slavica Ranković, Leidulf Melve, Else Mundal’s Along the Oral-Written Continuum: Types of Texts, Relations, and their Implications (2010), which focuses on medieval Scandinavia; to Keith Thor Carlson, Kristina Fagan, and Natalia Khanenko-Friesen’s Orality and Literacy: Reflections across Disciplines (2011a), which ranges from Plato to Salish storytellers in British Columbia, from ancient China to the turn of the twentiethcentury Philippines, to explore “the interaction of orality and literacy” and “the complex power relations between orality and literacy” (Carlson et al. 2011b: 10, 14); and to Luca Degl’Innocenti, Brian Richardson, and Chiara Sbordoni’s Interactions between Orality and Writing in Early Modern Italian Culture (2016). Just as these volumes show the value in studying the relationship between media and even at times breaking down the boundaries between media, so this book has demonstrated the importance of exploring the interactions of orality and textuality for an understanding of Homeric texts. Homerists will have related questions they wish to ask. We should study the forces that lie behind the emergence of long oral texts, including but not limited to long oral traditional epics (Bauman 1986: 106; Azuonye 1994: 157; Brockington 1998: 130–58; Rinchindorji 2001: 389, 399; Honko 2002b: 337; Jensen 2011: 75–6, 193 n. 34, 256–8). We should continue (Bakker 2013; Currie 2016) asking after the oral poet’s ability to cite, allude to, or quote from one specific poem as he performs another (Frog 2012; Tarkka 2013: 93; Danek 2016). As I mentioned at the start of section 3.9, we should (p.293) renew the inquiry into authors who write poems wholly or partly in an oral traditional style (Lord 1954: 8–9, 1995; 226–36; Reichl 1989: 367; Opland 1998: 38–42; Yang 1998; Revel 2001: 420; Zhambei 2001: 283–5; Foley 2002: 50–2; Amodio 2004; Jensen 2011: 175–6, 184–6; Jeffreys 2012: 471; van der Heide 2015: 115, 117; Pavlović 2016: 280–3, 285). The bibliography cited here in parentheses indicates that the Homerist who takes a comparative and/or interdisciplinary approach when investigating these matters will come across an abundance of enlightening material. (p.294)

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Works Cited

Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An Interdisciplinary Study of Oral Texts, Dictated Texts, and Wild Texts Jonathan L. Ready

Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9780198835066 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198835066.001.0001

(p.295) Works Cited Jonathan L. Ready

Bibliography references: Abrahams, R. D., and Foss, G. 1968. Anglo-American Folksong Style. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Abramovich-Gomon, A. 1999. The Nenets’ Song: A Microcosm of a Vanishing Culture. Aldershot: Ashgate. Akrigg, B. 2015. “Metics in Athens.” In C. Taylor and K. Vlassopoulos (eds), Communities and Networks in the Ancient Greek World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 155–73. Alden, J. 2010. Songs, Scribes, and Society: The History and Reception of the Loire Valley Chansonniers. New York: Oxford University Press. Alden, M. J. 2000. Homer beside Himself: Para-Narratives in the Iliad. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Alden, M. J. 2017. Para-Narratives in the Odyssey: Stories in the Frame. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Alexander, E. S. 2006. Transmitting Mishnah: The Shaping Influence of Oral Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Alexiou, M. 2002. The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition. 2nd edn. Rev. D. Yatromanolakis and P. Roilos. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Alieva, A. 1996. “Caucasian Epics: Textualist Principles in Publishing.” Oral Tradition, 11: 154–62. Page 1 of 83

 

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Index of Greek Passages

Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An Interdisciplinary Study of Oral Texts, Dictated Texts, and Wild Texts Jonathan L. Ready

Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9780198835066 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198835066.001.0001

(p.349) Index of Greek Passages Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric 1409a20 229 Athenaeus, Learned Banqueters 16.620b 233–4 16.620d 224 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers 5.36 230 10.10 230 Eustathius, Commentarii ad Homeri Iliadem 1.9.1–4 71 Fronto, Ad Marcum Caesarem 1.7.4 234 Galen, De indolentia (On Avoiding Distress) 19 233 Herodotean Life of Homer 207–8 101 Herodotus, Histories 3.123.1 231 Homer, Iliad 1.107 280 1.396–407 28 1.472–4 30 1.484–7 274 2.7–16 36–9 2.8–15 90–1 2.23–34 90–1 2.156–65 34 2.174–81 34 2.308–19 68 2.317–30 51–2, 55 2.484 80 Page 1 of 7

 

Index of Greek Passages 2.493 80 2.790–5 269 2.855–6 258 3.68–75 34 3.86–94 34 3.116–7 81 3.156–8 58 3.178–80 58 3.200–2 58 3.212 33 3.250–8 81 3.280–91 252–3 3.302–10 190–1 3.330–9 272 3.441–6 61 4.153 64 4.153–4 65 4.192–7 34 4.205–7 34 4.375 29 5.277 67 5.415 67 5.635–9 29 6.86–101 81 6.141 55 6.144–211 30 6.215 54 6.216–21 53 6.269–80 81 6.280–92 191 6.288–9 264 6.460–1 58 7.84–91 52–3 7.89–90 58 7.175 15 7.324 33 7.356–79 40–2 7.361–78 92–3 7.385–97 92–3 7.452–3 53 8.38–9 258 8.64–7 270 8.198–200 259 8.398–412 42–4 8.399–408 88–90 8.411–24 88–90 9.189–91 31 9.524 31 9.650–3 54 Page 2 of 7

 

Index of Greek Passages 11.185–95 44–5 11.186–94 84–5 11.200–9 84–5 11.482 67 11.794–808 7–8, 265 12.10–33 70 12.175–6 70 12.191–4 259–60 12.246–65 188–9 12.257 280 13.42 240 13.135 67 13.281 67 (p.350) 14.91 33 14.294–6 61 14.313–28 60–3 14.315–28 59 15.157–68 45–7 15.158–67 87–8 15.174–83 87–8 17.32 57 17.599 15 17.652–5 81 17.686 81 18.18–19 81 18.50–1 66 18.122–4 66 18.316 64 18.317 65 18.323 64 18.493 30 18.569–72 30 18.603–9 260 19.134–6 55 19.283–6 63–4 19.286 64 19.301 64 19.314 64 19.338 64 20.198 57 20.203–4 28 20.206–7 29 20.246–7 33 21.382–3 266 21.494–5 67 21.567–81 189 22.102 256 22.197 256 22.391–4 30 Page 3 of 7

 

Index of Greek Passages 22.414 65 22.429 64 22.430 64 22.437 64 22.440–1 68 22.476 64 22.515 64 23.93–4 267 23.97–8 65 23.136–7 262 23.221–4 271 23.619 53 24.127 96 24.130–1 96 24.133 96 24.143–59 47–9 24.144–58 86–7 24.171–87 86–7 24.226–7 65 24.234–5 53 24.721 32 24.724 65 24.746 64 24.747 64 24.760 64 24.776 64 Homer, Odyssey 1.298–300 29 1.337–42 28 1.340–1 32 1.350 28 1.352 31 1.421 32 3.94–5 31 3.186–7 31 3.193 29 3.203–4 29, 31, 33 3.425 240 4.324–5 31 4.678 33 5.22–8 254 5.29–42 93–5 5.29–43 49–51 5.97–115 93–5 5.230–3 263 6.255–6 256 8.429 32–3 8.489–91 31 8.492 29 Page 4 of 7

 

Index of Greek Passages 8.499 32 9.19–20 29 9.263–6 29 9.500–22 250–2 9.537–8 267 10.567 66 11.211–12 65 11.235–327 59 11.363–7 54 11.367 33 11.374 33 11.568–626 53 11.580–1 53 12.70 29 12.183–92 31 12.388 280 (p.351) 14.131 33 14.361–5 54 14.508–11 54 15.126 53 15.486–7 54 16.175–6 263 17.363–5 271 18.153 240 18.304 32 19.457 30 19.535–51 55–6 19.555–8 56 21.40 53 22.347 31 22.500–1 62 23.124–5 29 23.133–6 30 23.143–52 30 23.231–2 65 24.192–8 54 24.196–201 29 24.197–8 32 24.316–17 65 24.323 65 24.405 43 Homer, Papyrus Fragments MP3 851.1 (TM 67369) 190 Il. 9.697 194 Il. 9.709 194 MP3 1147.01 (TM 118717) 189 P2 (TM 60571) Il. 2.397 243 P5 (TM 61226) Page 5 of 7

 

Index of Greek Passages Il. 11.794–808 5–7, 265–6 P7 (TM 61237) Il. 8.38–9 258–9 Il. 8.64–7 270–1 Il. 8.198–200 259 P12 (TM 61236) Il. 21.382–3 266–7 Il. 22.102 256–7 Il. 22.197 256 Il. 23.93–4 267 Il. 23.136–7 262 Il. 23.221–4 271, 272, 276 P30 (TM 61199) Od. 5.22–8 254–5 Od. 5.232–3 262–3 P31 (TM 61238) 227 Od. 9.507–522a 250–2 Od. 9.529–48 190 Od. 9.537–8 267–8 Od. 9.548 227 Od. 10.56–80 190 Od. 10.70 194 P40 (TM 61203) Il. 2.794–5 269–70, 272 Il. 2.855a–b 227, 258 Il. 3.280–91 252–4 Il. 3.302–10 190–1 Il. 3.302a–d 227, 247 Il. 3.338–339c 272–4 P41 (TM 61206) 240 P51 (TM 61124) Il. 18.603–608d 260–2, 276 P53 (TM 61201) Il. 1.484–7 274–5 P59 (TM 61234) 247 P99 (TM 61224) Od. 19.218 227 P110 (TM 61200) Od. 6.255–6 256 P125 (TM 60303) 239 P126 (TM 61205) Od. 16.175–176a 263–4 P128 (TM 61232) Od. 17.363–5 271–2 P145a (TM 61253) Od. 12.388 280 P186 (TM 61249) 227 Od. 9.537–8 267–8 P214 (TM 61225) 190 Page 6 of 7

 

Index of Greek Passages Od. 22.423 194 P217 (TM 61193) 226–7 Il. 12.257 280 P354 (TM 61209) Il. 1.107 280 P410 (TM 61231) 247 P432 (TM 61227) 226–7 Il. 12.191–4 259–60 P480a (TM 61240) Il. 6.280–92 191 Il. 6.287–8 215 Il. 6.288–9 264–5 P496 (TM 61239) 240, 247 Il. 12.246–65 188–9 (p.352) P590 (TM 61245) 247 P662 (TM 65858) 247 P671 (TM 61254) Il. 16.75 276 P672 (TM 61215) 233 Homer, Scholia A at Il. 2.397a 243 bT at Il. 2.397c 243 A at Il. 3.10b 242 Ge at Il. 13.281 67 A at Il. 17.214a 242 A at Il. 21.495b 67 A at Il. 22.468c1 243 T at Il. 22.468c2 243 Homeric Hymn to Hermes 54–61 31 Jerome, Ad Florentium 5.2.3 233 Lucian, Adversus indoctum (The Ignorant Book Collector) 4 234 Philo, On the Special Laws 4.160–4 233 Plato, Ion 530c9 71 530d7 71 Plutarch, Convivial Questions 736e 224 Strabo, Geography 12.3.5 227 Xenophon, Symposium 3.5–6 222

Page 7 of 7

 

Index of Terms

Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An Interdisciplinary Study of Oral Texts, Dictated Texts, and Wild Texts Jonathan L. Ready

Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9780198835066 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198835066.001.0001

(p.353) Index of Terms abbreviated narrative 29–30 Abdïrakhmanov, Ïbïrayïm 130, 154 Abu Zayd, Shaykh Taha 160 Achilles 28, 30, 31, 53, 54, 57, 65, 66, 262, 267, 271 Achilles’s shield 260–2 ad-Dindān, ʿAbdallah 153 Aeneas 28, 29, 33 Afzelius, Arvid August 150 Agamemnon 29, 32, 34, 54, 55, 65, 252–4 Agenor 189 Ahong, Jusup 144 Ajax 81 Akunbe, Ebrayin 121, 144 alabado (“hymn”) 277 Alcinous 32, 33, 54 Alieva, Alla 154 Americas: see Bauman, Richard; Boas, Franz; Bush, Howard; Cruikshank, Julie; Dauenhauer, Nora Marks and Dauenhauer, Richard; Harmon, Polly; Henry, Mellinger; Hunt, George; Inyo-kutavêre; Jackson, Bruce; Jacobs, Melville; Kroeber, Alfred; Mato, Daniel; Nãnmla; Ned, Annie; Paul, Gabe; Roberts, Leonard; Sage, Rufus B.; Sapir, Edward; Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe; Speck, Frank; Tahtunga-egoniska; Tedlock, Dennis; toast; Urban, Greg; Wãñpõ Americas, collectors in 141 See also Americas Amīr Arsalān 167 Andromache 64, 65 Antenor 33 Antilochus 81 aoidē (“song”) 32 Arimpil 156 Aristarchus 239, 241–6 Asbjørnsen, Peter Christen 150–1 Page 1 of 10

 

Index of Terms Athena 29, 34, 263–4 Bailey, Clinton 134 Bajgorić, Halil 160 Balkans: see Bajgorić, Halil; Hörmann, Kosta; Jensen, Minna Skafte; Jukić, Ivan Franjo; Karadžić, Vuk; Lord, Albert Bates; Marjanović, Luka; Martić, Grgo; Međedović, Avdo; Murko, Matja; Ndou, Mirash; Parry, Milman; Sarajlija, Simo Milutinović; Scaldaferri, Nicola; Ugljanin, Salih; Vujnović, Nikola Banbera, Tayiru 157–8 Başgöz, İlhan 129 Bauman, Richard 19, 59, 134, 213, 257 Bazarov, Jumabay-jïraw 126 Beck, Brenda 125 Bedouin poetry: see ad-Dindān, ʿAbdallah; Bailey, Clinton; Ḥmēr, ʿAbdallah Bell, John 149 Biebuyck, Daniel 134 Boas, Franz 117, 120, 131, 137, 146 Boelaert, Edmond 155 Bolot uulu, Nazar 133 book history 161 Borenius, Axel August 124 Bosniac poets 127, 160, 285 Brentano, Clemens 150 Briseis 63–4 Bush, Howard 19, 213 Byambyn Rinchen 115 Cajan, Johan Fredrik 136 Calypso 29, 262–3 Camara, Sana 145 Camara, Sirifo 145–6 Carmichael, Alexander 151 Castrén, Matthias Alexander 148 catalogue 59, 60–3, 66–7 Caucones 258 Charlemagne 166 Chhattisgarhi storyteller 257 China: see Fei Li; Jin Dan; Lu Amei; Mamay, Jusup; Suzhou chantfable; Wu epics; Zhuang epic Chodzko, Alexander 167 Chorloo, P. 120, 140 Clark-Bekederemo, John 145 collector, as insider 131 Collins, William A. 69 conceptional literacy 10, 171 Conrad, David 157 copyist non-servile 231–4 servile 229–31 Cruikshank, Julie 153 Dauenhauer, Nora Marks and Dauenhauer, Richard 146 Page 2 of 10

 

Index of Terms Dégh, Linda 121 Delaney, James 115, 131 Democratic Republic of the Congo: see Biebuyck, Daniel; Boelaert, Edmond (p.354) Demodocus 32 Diomedes 53, 54, 55 Diop, Samba 154 diorthōsis (“corrective editing”) 242–3 Dixon, James Henry 149 Djurklou, Nils Gabriel 150 Dream 90–1 Džumanbulbul-Oġlï, Ergaš 145 Egudu, Romanus 134 Egypt: see Abu Zayd, Shaykh Taha; Reynolds, Dwight; Slyomovics, Susan ekdosis (“edition”) 241–3, 245 Elwin, Verrier 128 England and Scotland, collectors in 141 See also Bell, John; Carmichael, Alexander; Dixon, James Henry; Ritson, Joseph enjambment 38–9 entextualization and the body 23–5, 63 and boundaries 18, 23–4, 37, 41, 43, 45, 46, 48, 50, 63–4 and coherence 20–1, 23–4, 38, 41, 43, 45, 46, 48, 50, 66, 255–7 and cohesion 19–20, 23–5, 38–9, 41–2, 42–3, 45, 46–7, 48–9, 50–1, 250–5 definition of 18 and exegesis 22–3, 54–6, 67, 71 and genre 56–63 and object 51–4, 70 and performance 18, 19, 36, 37, 41, 42, 45, 46, 47, 49, 51, 52, 54, 55, 57, 58, 59, 63 and quotation 21–2, 55–7, 70 and textualization 18, 109 See also catalogue; epigram; gnomic statement; lament; mediational routine; oral text; parallelism; reentextualization; ring composition epigram 58 epos (“speech”) 33 Estonia: see Vabarna, Anne; Voolaine, Paulopriit ethnopoetics 159–60 Eumaeus 33, 54 Fei Li 152 Filipino poets 160 See also Philippines Finnish collectors 121–2, 129, 130 See also Borenius, Axel August; Cajan, Johan Fredrik; Castrén, Matthias Alexander; Kalevala-meter poetry; Lönnrot, Elias; Neovius, Adolf; Porthan, Henrik Gabriel; Salminen, Väinö; Väisänen, Armas Otto Francke, August Hermann 118, 125, 167 Germany: see Brentano, Clemens; Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm; Meyer, Gustav Friedrich; von Arnim, Achim; Wisser, Wilhelm Glaucus 30 gnomic statement 57, 58 Gold, Ann 134, 153–4 Golstunskij, K. 116 Goody, Jack 123 Page 3 of 10

 

Index of Terms Greenlandic taletellers 133 Grigor’ev, Aleksandr 135 Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm 141, 164 Grønbech, Kaare 122 Grundtvig, Svend Hersleb 149, 151 Hammershaimb, Venceslaus Ulricus 149 Harmon, Polly 163 Hector 34, 52–3, 58, 81, 188, 190, 256–7 Hecuba 264 Helen 53, 58 Helenus 81 Henry, Mellinger 163 Hephaestus 260 Hera 34, 259 Hermes 31, 49, 94–5 Hess, Linda 153 Hilferding, Aleksandr 118, 120–1 Hispanic ballads 127 Ḥmēr, ʿAbdallah 152–3 Homeridae 176–7 homēristai 104, 198, 202, 224 Honko, Lauri 113, 126 Hörmann, Kosta 143 humnos (“tale”) 32–3 Hunt, George 131, 137 Icelandic taleteller 277 Idaeus 81, 92–3 India, collectors in 156 See also Beck, Brenda; Elwin, Verrier; Francke, August Hermann; Gold, Ann; Hess, Linda; Honko, Lauri; Naika, Gopal; Nath, Madhu; Rajashekhara, P. K.; Rāmacāmi, E. C.; Roghair, Gene Inyo-kutavêre 134 Iran: see Amīr Arsalān; Chodzko, Alexander; Phillott, Douglas Craven Ireland: see Delaney, James; McGrath, Packy Jim; Murphy, Michael J. Iris 84–5, 86–7, 87–8, 88–90 Jackson, Bruce 161 Jacobs, Melville 151 Järv, Risto 161 Jensen, Minna Skafte 126 Jin Dan 155–6 Jukić, Ivan Franjo 142 (p.355) Kalevala-meter poetry 23–4, 68–9, 124, 136–7 See also Finnish collectors; Kieleväinen, Vaassila; Paraske, Larin; Perttunen, Arhippa; Tarasov, Luka Karadžić, Vuk 119, 142 Karalaev, Sayakbay 154 Kieleväinen, Vaassila 148 koinē / koinai (“common”) manuscripts 239–40, 242–3, 244–5 Kolberg, Oskar 115 Korb, Anu 158 Kristensen, Evald Tang 120, 121 Page 4 of 10

 

Index of Terms Kroeber, Alfred 118, 134, 145 Kulish, Panteleimon 143–4 Kyrgyz epic 68, 103–4, 257 See also Abdïrakhmanov, Ïbïrayïm; Ahong, Jusup; Akunbe, Ebrayin; Bolot uulu, Nazar; Karalaev, Sayakbay; Mamay, Balbai; Mamay, Jusup; Miftakov, Kayum; Orozbaqov, Sagïmbay; Radloff, Wilhelm; Valikhanov, Chokan lament 23, 32, 63–6 See also Pritchard, Maureen; Stepanova, Eila Linus song 30 Lobsang 152 Lönnrot, Elias 23–4, 115–16, 120, 129–30, 136, 141, 146–8, 166 Lord, Albert Bates 105, 110, 120, 122, 123, 124, 152, 285 Lu Amei 152 Ly-Tall, Madina 152 McGrath, Packy Jim 18 Madu, Kanku 152 Maksymovych, Mykhailo 143 Mali: see Banbera, Tayiru; Conrad, David; Ly-Tall, Madina; Madu, Kanku Mamay, Balbai 121, 144–5 Mamay, Jusup 115 Mamba, Mtshophane 285 Manuel, E. Arsenio 115, 117, 120, 125, 156, 160 Marjanović, Luka 114, 135–6, 141, 142–3 Markov, Aleksei 144 Martić, Grgo 142 Martynovych, Porfirii 119 Mato, Daniel 158 Međedović, Avdo 68 mediational routine 35, 79–81 source text in 35–51, 82, 96–7 target text in 82–95, 96–7 See also mediator mediator and maximizing intertextual gap 83, 92–3, 95 as performer 79, 80, 82, 83–4, 85, 87, 88, 90, 91, 93, 95, 96–7, 212–13 poet as 80, 97 and reentextualization 83, 86–7, 88, 89, 91, 92, 94–5 and replication 82–3, 85, 86, 87–8, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94 Menelaus 57, 81, 272–3 mental text 278 messenger: see mediational routine; mediator Meyer, Gustav Friedrich 118 Miftakov, Kayum 132, 154 Moe, Jørgen Engebretsen 150–1 Mokrouša, N. G. 156 Mongolia: see Arimpil; Byambyn Rinchen; Chorloo, P.; Grønbech, Kaare; Lobsang; Poppe, Nikolaus; Ramstedt, G. J.; Senijn Bujan; Tsültmiin Togtool; Vladimirtsov, Boris Mulokozi, Mugyabuso 145 Murko, Matja 124 Murphy, Michael J. 131 Naika, Gopal 111, 117, 126 Nãnmla 214 Page 5 of 10

 

Index of Terms Nath, Madhu 134, 153 Nausicaa 256 Ndou, Mirash 126 Ned, Annie 153 Nenets epic 69 Neovius, Adolf 124, 136 Nestor 29, 31, 33, 265 Nevski, Nikolai 128 Nigeria: see Clark-Bekederemo, John; Egudu, Romanus; Ohafia Igbo bard; Ojobolo, Okabou Niles, Don and Rumsey, Alan 129 occasional song 30 Oceania, collectors in 131 See also Niles, Don and Rumsey, Alan Odysseus 29, 30–1, 31, 33, 51–2, 53, 54, 55, 56, 59, 65, 250–2, 271 Ohafia Igbo bard 257 Ojobolo, Okabou 158, 162, 257, 285 Oksanen, Juho 257 Old Norse eddic poetry 123 omen 56 Onchukov, Nikolai 115, 132 oral intertextuality as anticipatory 77, 79, 80, 96, 97 and gaps 79, 80, 82–3, 96 and genre 78 and reiteration 79, 80 See also mediational routine; mediator oral text definition of 17–18 fate of 97 and object 21, 31–3, 67–8 and repetition 26, 120 (p.356) and replication 83 See also entextualization orality definitions of 1–2 and literacy 162–3 Orozbaqov, Sagïmbay 130, 132, 154 Orwin, Michael 161 Pandakan, Blagtas 117, 120 Pápay, József 128 paradigm 54–5 parallelism 68–9 Paraske, Larin 136 Paris 34, 40, 61, 92–3 Parkhomenko, Terentii 116 Parry, Milman 118–19 Patroclus 31 Paul, Gabe 137 Peisistratean recension 164, 176 Penelope 28, 32, 55–6 performance Page 6 of 10

 

Index of Terms definition of 16, 248–9 and reflexivity 282 Perttunen, Arhippa 136 phasi (“they say”) 29 Phemius 31 Philippines: see Manuel, E. Arsenio; Pandakan, Blagtas; Revel, Nicole Phillips, Nigel 123–4, 132–3 Phillott, Douglas Craven 116, 120 Phoenix 31 Pitrè, Giuseppe 121, 149 Polites 269 Polyphemus 250–2, 267 Poppe, Nikolaus 115, 168 Porthan, Henrik Gabriel 148 Poseidon 53 prediction effect 268–9 Priam 40, 53, 65, 92–3, 190 Pritchard, Maureen 64 Ptolemaic wild papyri and affect 268–75 clarity in 255–7, 272 completeness in 257–68 created by copyists 199–200, 203, 221–2, 223, 287–8 created by oral performers 197–9, 200, 203, 221, 223, 286–8 and the intertextual gap 277–80, 288 and the medieval texts 237–48 minus verses in 190, 194, 218, 220, 271–2 parallelism in 252–5 plus verses in 190, 193–4, 218–20, 236 and quotations (indirect tradition) 226, 239, 286 recognizable material in 236, 276–7 repetition in 250–2 as transcripts 197, 198–9, 200, 201–3 variation within lines in 190, 192–3, 194, 215–16 Qvigstad, Just Knud 152 Radloff, Wilhelm 116, 119, 120, 128, 132, 133, 134, 148 Rajashekhara, P. K. 155 Rāmacāmi, E. C. 125 Ramstedt, G. J. 144 Rasmussen, Susan 131 Reguly, Anton 129 Reichl, Karl 126 Reuss, Samuel 141 Revel, Nicole 154 Reynolds, Dwight 158, 160 rhapsodes, and written texts 9, 221–2 Riabinin, T. G. 155 ring composition 10, 68 Rink, Hinrich Johannes 121, 151–2 Page 7 of 10

 

Index of Terms Ritson, Joseph 149 Roberts, Leonard 141 Roghair, Gene 153 Russia, collectors in 122, 135 See also Alieva, Alla; Golstunskij, K.; Grigor’ev, Aleksandr; Hilferding, Aleksandr; Markov, Aleksei; Onchukov, Nikolai; Riabinin, T. G; Rybnikov, Pavel; Siberian performer; Zazubrin, Vladimir Rybnikov, Pavel 119, 120 Sage, Rufus B. 134 Salminen, Väinö 136 Sapir, Edward 151 Sarajlija, Simo Milutinović 149 Scaldaferri, Nicola 124 Scamander 266 Scandinavia: see Asbjørnsen, Peter Christen; Greenlandic taletellers; Grundtvig, Svend Hersleb; Hammershaimb, Venceslaus Ulricus; Kristensen, Evald Tang; Moe, Jørgen Engebretsen; Qvigstad, Just Knud; Rink, Hinrich Johannes; Thiele, Just Mathias Scheub, Harold 20, 24–5, 161 Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe 151 scribal performer as artisan 283 and audiences 212 and composer (poet, author, or editor) 283–4 and conscious action 286 definition of 205 and handwriting 282–3 and marginalia 212 (p.357) as mediator 212–13 and memorization 205–6, 222 and mistakes 285, 288 motivation of 211–12 and oral performer 279–80 and oral tradition 206–11, 222–5 and power 288 and preparation 285–6 and replication 213–14, 285 scribe Akkadian 164, 195, 215, 216, 218 Anatolian 165 Anglo-Saxon 129, 172, 185, 195, 204, 206, 211, 216–17, 219, 220, 255, 282, 283 Arab 209–10 Chinese 165–6 early Christian 196–7, 204–5, 206–8, 219, 220, 279, 283–4, 285, 289 Egyptian 163 Indian 200, 209 Israelite 165, 195–6, 204, 206–7, 210, 211–12, 213, 215–16, 218–20, 223, 228, 236, 279, 283, 284, 285, 289 Japanese 282 Late Middle English 204 Malay 210 Page 8 of 10

 

Index of Terms medieval French 185, 195, 208, 210–11, 218 medieval Irish 195, 204, 206 medieval Jewish 185 medieval Russian 208 medieval Spanish 185, 208, 218 medieval Turkish 208–9 Mesopotamian 195, 204, 212, 219 Middle English 195, 209, 211, 213, 217, 219, 278, 283, 284 Norse 200–1 secretary as 163, 164 Sumerian 163, 164–5 See also scribal performer; typesetter Seitel, Peter 21 Selemani, Habibu 145 Senegal: see Camara, Sana; Camara, Sirifo; Diop, Samba Senijn Bujan 120 Shair, Polkan 149 Siberian performer 161 See also Järv, Risto; Mokrouša, N. G.; Pápay, József; Reguly, Anton; Taube, Erika; Timofeev; Tkačik, N. P.; Vasil’ev, V. N.; Zhamtsarano, Tsyben Sirens 31 Slyomovics, Susan 145 Smith, E. W., and Dale, A. M. 116 Šmits, Pēteris 151 Somali poets 117, 161 See also Orwin, Martin South Africa: see Mamba, Mtshophane; Scheub, Harold Speck, Frank 137 Speranskii, Mikhail 116 Stone, Ruth 145 Stepanova, Eila 64 suitors 32, 33 Sumatra: see Collins, William A.; Phillips, Nigel Sunjata 68 Suzhou chantefable 257 Sweden: see Afzelius, August Arvid; Djurklou, Nils Gabriel; Wigström, Eva Tahtunga-egoniska 134 Talthybius 34 Tanzania: see Mulokozi, Mugyabuso; Seitel, Peter; Selemani, Habibu Tarasov, Luka 79, 136 Taube, Erika 121 Tedlock, Dennis 118, 123 Telemachus 28, 29, 31 textuality, definitions of 2–3, 26 See also oral text textualization, definition of 108–10 Thetis 66, 96 Thiele, Just Mathias 150 Timofeev 120 Timothy I 163 Tkačik, N. P. 156 Tlepolemus 29 toast 161 See also Jackson, Bruce Page 9 of 10

 

Index of Terms Trojan elders 58 Tsültmiin Togtool 285 typesetter 210 Ugljanin, Salih 123 Ukrainian collectors 128, 136, 143, 148 See also Kulish, Panteleimon; Maksymovych, Mykhailo; Martynovych, Porfirii; Parkhomenko, Terentii; Speranskii, Mikhail Urban, Greg 68, 214 Uzbek epic 156 See also Bazarov, Jumabay-jïraw; Džumanbulbul-Oġlï, Ergaš; Reichl, Karl; Shair, Polkan; Yunusov, Ghazi Alim; Zarif, Hodi Vabarna, Anne 111, 122, 127, 138–9 Väisänen, Armas Otto 111, 122–3, 138–9 Valikhanov, Chokan 127, 133, 140, 144 Vasil’ev, V. N. 120 Verschriftlichung and Verschriftung 109–10 Vladimirtsov, Boris 117, 124 von Arnim, Achim 150 (p.358) Voolaine, Paulopriit 139 vulgate, definitions of 186–7 Vujnović, Nikola 130, 160 Wãñpõ 214 Wigström, Eva 149 Willemse, Hein 158 Wisser, Wilhelm 121 Wu epics 137–8, 155 Yoná, Yacob Abraham 149 Yunusov, Ghazi Alim 149 Zarif, Hodi 145, 155 Zazubrin, Vladimir 117 Zeus 36, 42, 44, 45–6, 47, 59, 60, 61, 84–5, 86–7, 87–8, 88–90, 90–1, 94–5, 254–5, 258 Zhamtsarano, Tsyben 114, 116, 121 Zhuang epic 69

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