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Concept
Homeric Question
Summary
The Homeric Question concerns the doubts and consequent debate over the identity of Homer, the authorship of the Iliad and Odyssey, and their historicity (especially concerning the Iliad). The subject has its roots in classical antiquity and the scholarship of the Hellenistic period, but has flourished among Homeric scholars of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.
The main subtopics of the Homeric Question are:
"Who is Homer?"
"Are the Iliad and the Odyssey of multiple or single authorship?"
"By whom, when, where, and under what circumstances were the poems composed?"
To these questions the possibilities of modern textual criticism and archaeological answers have added a few more:
"How reliable is the tradition embodied in the Homeric poems?"
"How old are the oldest elements in Homeric poetry which can be dated with certainty?"
The very forefathers of text criticism, including Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614), Richard Bentley (1662–1742) and Friedrich August Wolf (1759–1824) already emphasized the fluid-like, oral nature of the Homeric canon.
This perspective, however, did not receive mainstream recognition until after the seminal work of Milman Parry. Now most classicists agree that, whether or not there was ever such a composer as Homer, the poems attributed to him are to some degree dependent on oral tradition, a generations-old technique that was the collective inheritance of many singer-poets (or ἀοιδοί, aoidoi). An analysis of the structure and vocabulary of the Iliad and Odyssey shows that the poems contain many regular and repeated phrases; indeed, even entire verses are repeated. Thus according to the theory, the Iliad and Odyssey may have been products of oral-formulaic composition, composed on the spot by the poet using a collection of memorized traditional verses and phrases. Milman Parry and Albert Lord have pointed out that such elaborate oral tradition, foreign to today's literate cultures, is typical of epic poetry in an exclusively oral culture. The crucial words here are "oral" and "traditional".
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