The title of this work is marked by the wordQuestions, in the plural. It takes the place of the expected singular, along with a definite article, associated with that familiar phrase, “the Homeric Question.” Today there is no agreement about what the Homeric Question might be. Perhaps the most succinct of many possible formulations is this one: “The Homeric Question is primarily concerned with the composition, authorship, and date of theIliadand theOdyssey.”¹ Not that any one way of formulating the question in the past was ever really sufficient. Who was Homer? When and where did Homer...

Parry and Lord studied oral poetry, and their work provides the key to the primary Homeric question ofperformance, as we are about to see. It can even be said that their work on oral poetry permanently changed the very nature of any Homeric question.

The termoral poetrymay not fully capture the concept behind it, in view of the semantic difficulties conjured up by both individual words,oralandpoetry. Still, the composite termoral poetryhas a historical validity in that both Parry and Lord had used it to designate the overall concept that they were developing....

The massive accumulation of new or newly appreciated comparative evidence about the nature of epic in oral poetry demands application to the ongoing study of individual epic traditions. I propose here to apply some of this evidence, as collected over recent years by a broad variety of experts investigating an array of societies in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and Africa, to the study of Homer in general and the HomericIliadandOdysseyin particular. From the start, I stress the importance of the comparative evidence of the South Slavic tradition of epic in Eastern Europe: though...

In searching for a historical context for the writing down of the Homeric text, the most obvious strategy is to look for a stage in ancient Greek history when the technology of writing could produce a text,in manuscript form, that conferred a level of authority distinct from but equivalent to the authority conferred by an actual performance. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the opportunity for a text to become the equivalent of a performance already exists in the case of early poetic inscriptions from the eighth century b.c.e. onward. But manuscripts as distinct from inscriptions are...

There are questions about the Homericparádeigma, which I translate for the moment by way of Latinexemplum‘example’, following the lead of earlier inquiries.¹ In an influential article on the subject of mythological exempla in Homer, Malcolm Willcock proposes that the contents of myths cited by Homeric characters, with reference to their own situations, are oftentimes a matter of ad hoc personal invention by the poet.² In a follow-up article, arguing specific cases of ad hoc inventions of myth in theIliad, Willcock sums up his position this way: “Homer has a genial habit of inventing mythology for the...

Throughout this work, the central aim was to reintroduce the vitality of performance, of oral tradition in general, to the conceptual framework of the classics. This aim addresses the need to be vigilant over tradition itself, all tradition. Earlier, I had argued that the field of classics, which lends itself to the empirical study of tradition, seems ideally suited to articulate the value of tradition in other societies, whether or not these societies are closely comparable to those of ancient Greece and Rome, given that we live in an era when the living traditions of traditional societies are rapidly becoming...