Homeric Responsesbuilds on two earlier books,Homeric Questions(1996) andPoetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond(1996), which dealt with respectively earlier and later phases in the evolution of Homeric poetry. By Homeric poetry I mean the poetic system underlying the poetic texts that we know as theIliadand theOdyssey. “Homer” is used throughout this book as a cover term for theIliadandOdysseycombined.¹ This terminology follows that of Aristotle (Poetics23.1459b1–7), who thought of Homer as the author of theIliadandOdysseyto the exclusion of the so-called Epic Cycle.² In comparison...

The terms “synchronic” and “diachronic” stem from a distinction established by a pioneer in the field of linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure.¹ For Saussure, synchrony and diachrony designate respectively a current state of a language and a phase in its evolution.² I draw attention to Saussure’s linking of “diachrony” and “evolution,” a link that proves to be crucial for understanding the medium that is central to this book, Homeric poetry.³

Here I propose to add two restrictions to my use of “synchronic” and “diachronic.” First, I apply these terms consistently from the standpoint of an outsider who is thinking about a...

InOdyssey8.72– 83, the first song of Demodokos, we see a link between the oracular clairvoyance of Apollo and the poetic composition of Homer. Such a link, where the god’s prophecy is equated with the plot of the poet’s narrative, is relevant to the word “responses” in my title, which is meant to capture the meaning of the ancient Greek wordhupokrinesthaias we find it in the language of Homer. This word means more than simply “respond to a question.” It conveys the basic idea ofresponding by way of performing, and this idea links Homeric poetry with...

Throughout this book, I maintain that the traditions of rhapsodic performance are essential for understanding the evolution of Homeric composition. Such an understanding, however, is impeded by various assumptions about rhapsodes as performers of Homer. Here I challenge some of those assumptions by reexamining the very concept of therhapsōidosin terms of Homeric art. For such a reexamination, I invoke the concept of diachronic skewing.

The word “skewing” implies a slanted perspective, as if by way of squinting. The vision is distorted, with one side or direction unduly emphasized over another. The everyday usage of the contemporary English “skew”...

In “oral poetry,” mistakes can and do happen in the process of composition-in-performance. Such mistakes, including major mistakes in narration, are documented in the fieldwork of Milman Parry and Albert Lord on South Slavic oral poetic traditions.¹ For a striking example, we may turn to Lord’s account, inThe Singer of Tales, of a singer who made the same mistake in plot construction when he sang the “same” song in a performance recorded seventeen years after an earlier recording.² In an article entitled “The Homeric Poems as Oral Dictated Texts,” Richard Janko claims to have found such mistakes in the...

Homer critics have begun to interpret the resolution of theIliadin Book 24, at the end of the epic, as a reflection of a new spirit that emerges from the heroic tradition and culminates in the ethos of the city-state or polis.¹ A sign of this ethos is the moment when Achilles, following his mother’s instructions to accept compensation in the form ofapoina‘ransom’ offered by Priam for the killing of Patroklos by Hektor (Iliad24.137), is finally moved to accept the ransom orapoina(24.502).² Consequently, he releases the corpse of Hektor for a proper funeral, thereby...