831: Oral Poetry, Homer, and the Historians

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8/31 Oral Poetry, Homer, and the Historians
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Oral Poetry

• What is oral poetry? It is a performance art,
  consisting of words, gesture, music, interaction
  between the poet and his/her audience.
• Oral poetry has an ancient heritage written
  poetry is a relatively recent phenomenon.

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History of Media, Pt. 1
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History of Media, Pt. 2
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Where can we find oral poetry?

• The greater part of the world today still
  composes uses oral poetry as a staple of social
  life.
• The four examples that follow show the wide
  variety of cultures that still use oral poetry.

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Tibetan Paper Singer

• Sings epic tales, reaching tens of thousands of
  lines, surpassing the Homeric poems in length and
  elaboration.
• Performer stares at a sheet of white paper as he
  chants, which may have writing on it. However, he
  is in fact illiterate. The text is a talisman
  only.

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American Slam Poet

• Poets mount stages in clubs to speak their poetry
  aloud, with all the power and bravado they can
  muster.
• They compete for prizes and titles.
• Judges decide whose making of reality is most
  persuasive, forceful, and irresistible as
  performance.

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Techniques of Oral Poetics

• Slam poets make brilliant use of the acoustic and
  expressive effects that define oral poetics
  worldwide
• Complex arrays of rhyme, alliteration, and other
  sound-play
• Formulaic patterns of speech and intonation
• Coded gestures of all sorts
• Continuous exchange between poet audience

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South African Praise Poets

• Create and maintain the reputation of the tribal
  chief via oral poetry.
• Have a political role - praise but also criticize
  chiefs.
• Use idiomatic language of praise/blame.

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Ancient Greek Aoidoi

• Illiterate oral poets operating within a long
  tradition.
• Entertain small groups usually at banquets of the
  elite.
• Accompanied by music (lyre, kithara).
• Used music, facial expressions, gestures,
  emphasis interplay between poet audience.

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Homer and Oral Poetry

• Powell asked, What is a Homeric text?
• Explained modern orthography, stemming from the
  19th c.
• We decode texts with our eyes, the ancient Greek
  reader did so with his/her ears.

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Modern Greek Text

• Iliad, lines 1-7 as we find it in modern
  orthography.

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Archaic Greek Text

• Reconstruction of Iliad, lines 1-5, as it may
  have appeared on papyrus.

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Editions of Homeric Epic

• The Byzantine vellum manuscript, Venetus A (a
  codex) is the earliest surviving text.
• Earlier texts would have been papyrus rolls.
• Powell thinks the epics were transferred to codex
  in 2nd-3rd c. AD.

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History of the Homeric Question

• This is tied to the history of writing.
• Friedrich Wolf (1759-1824) analyzed Homer via
  contemporary theories re the origin of the Hebrew
  Bible through editorial redaction of existing
  manuscripts.

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Wolfs Conclusion

• While Homeric poems exist in writing, no
  descriptions of writing appear in the poems.
• In the poems, everything is arranged for hearing,
  with repeated invocations of the Muses, goddesses
  of both creativity and memory.
• The poems were memorized as short songs, then
  written down after writing was invented.

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How did the poems get the form in which we have
them?

• Cicero (Roman orator and politician) claimed that
  Peisistratos (tyrant of Athens in the 6th c. BCE)
  first put the books together in the order that we
  have them, which before were mixed up.
• Seems to indicate that they circulated
  independently and could be recited in any order
  up until then.

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Milman Parry Oral-Formulaic Theory

• Investigated the fixed epithet
• Noticed that they changed according to the place
  of the name within the meter, not according to
  narrative context.
• Dactylic hexameter

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Serbo-Croation Guslari

• Parry and Lord went to Balkans in the earlyl
  1930s, to record heroic oral poetry.
• Guslari are illiterate peasant poets.
• One guslar sang for recording by dictation a song
  as long as the Odyssey.

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Homer and Writing

• If Homer was an illiterate aoidos, when was
  writing invented, and how did his poems come to
  be written down?
• Two spheres of ancient writing
• clay-using Mesopotamians
• papyrus-using Egyptians

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Writing and the Greeks

• Phoenician syllabary adapted by to express vowels
  - creation of the Greek alphabetic system, circa
  800 BCE.
• Earliest extant Greek alphabetic inscriptions
  date from 775 BCE.
• Powell compares what the first line of the Iliad
  would look like in the two different
  technologies
• Phoenician MNNDTPLDKLS
• Greek MENIN AEIDE THEA PELEIADEO AKHILEOS.

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Early Greek Alphabetic Inscriptions

• Apart from early inscriptions of names, the
  earliest inscriptions are of hexameter poetry,
  scratched on pottery.
• The Dipylon Vase inscription is one such.

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Nestors Cup Inscription

• Dated c. 740 BCE, the same time as the Dipylon
  Vase inscription
• 1 line prose, 2 lines dactylic hexameter
• Excites because it seems to reference Iliad
  11.632-5.

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From Oral Song to Text

• The form and length of poems depends on the
  unique circumstances of the creation of the
  texts.
• Parry/Lord have shown that the very process of
  dictation encouraged longer and more elaborate
  poems (than perhaps audiences could have sat
  still for).

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Date of Homers Texts

• Early 8th c. BCE.
• Determined by looking at various factors
• Homers texts cannot predate the Greek
  alphabet.
• No object described postdates 700 BCE.
• The Cup of Nestor inscription may refer to
  the Iliad.
• The social historical conditions reflected in
  the poems.

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Invention of the Greek Alphabet

• Powells theory
• A bilingual Euboean, Palamedes.
• The dictation of Homeric epic - an insane
  ambition.
• Cost of papyrus high, dictation laborious.

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Homer and History

• Homers relationship to the Bronze Age remains
  problematic.
• Schliemann discovered the Greek Bronze Age, after
  which Homers stories seemed based on fact.

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Bronze Age Elements in Homer

• The war itself
• Bronze weapons
• Boars tusk helmets
• Shields like a wall

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Discrepancies

• Homer has no knowledge of Mycenaean social
  structures, architecture
• Iron age elements exist, also.
• Elements from Homers own time exist (Shield of
  Achilles)

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Modern Views Blegen Morris

• Blegen as archaeologist, excavator Trojan war an
  historical fact, Homeric epic based on real
  people events
• Morris as historian epics as artifacts generated
  in 8th c. BC