Studies in Antiquity
Homer and Others:
Enjoying the Odyssey
E Bruce Brooks and Keith L Yoder
First, there were the bards, singing their hero tales in return for supper and a night's lodging, up and down the isles and towns of Ionia.
Then came the poet we may agree to call Homer, who drew on those tales, and added new material of his own, to make a poem which he himself called the Menis: The Rage of Achilles. It had a single story line: an insult to Achilles, its resolution, and its conclusion in Achilles' slaying of Hector. It omitted many traditional tales (high school students who think they are going to read about the Trojan Horse are invariably disappointed), but it does give a version of the war, and posterity has called it the Iliad. To that poem were later added several scenes and episodes, to further embroider the basic story. The final version was regularly performed at Athens. It became Greece's textbook of itself, sold in bookstores and annotated by schoolmasters.
Somewhere along the line, there appeared another long poem, not about heroes, but about the wanderings of resourceful Odysseus and the fidelity of his wife Penelope. It was a complement to the older Iliad. It never achieved the national status of the Iliad (only war can unify a nation, or a group of states), but it was part of the Homeric repertoire, and the two poems influenced each other, becoming more compatible as parts of that single repertoire. The Odyssey became more violent than it had been at first, and this had echoes in the Iliad too. This book shows how the songs evolved in response to the changing sensibility of their audiences, as Greece emerged from the Dark Ages into the Age of Cities.
This literary history needs to be dug out of hints embedded in the present texts. The performance aspect, in particular, when adequately considered, creates a new basis for the understanding of the poems. Hence this book. It picks up on the observations of many over the years, and adds further suggestions, some of them based on a new type of stylistic analysis. It shows how some early songs were combined with new material to make the ambitious Menis; how the Odyssey arose later, from a different impulse; how the two influenced each other; how Athens took them over, and how, with some last-minute help from the schoolmasters, they became the Odyssey and the Iliad which we now have.
Front Matter
Cover
*Uses the BIRD stylistic difference test which was introduced in the Prolegomena
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