Homeric Constructions: The Reception of Homeric Authority _______________________________________ A Dissertation Presented to The Faculty of the Graduate School At the University of Missouri-Columbia _______________________________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy _____________________________________________________ by Andrew M Smith Professor David Schenker, Dissertation Advisor December 2014 © Copyright by Andrew M Smith 2014 All Rights Reserved The undersigned, appointed by the dean of the Graduate School, have examined the dissertation entitled Homeric Constructions: The Reception of Homeric Authority Presented by Andrew Smith, A candidate for the degree of doctor of philosophy, And hereby certify that, in their opinion, it is worthy of acceptance. Professor David Schenker Professor Raymond Marks Professor Daniel Hooley Professor Susan Langdon Acknowledgments I would like to thank those faculty members who have assisted me in this project. Without the inspiration of Professor John Miles Foley, I would not have been pressed to imagine the parameters of this project, nor have the apparatus with which to begin it. I sincerely appreciate the organizational assistance of Professor Raymond Marks, whose guidance in the academic craft provided me with the order and schema of this project. I also would like to acknowledge Professor Daniel Hooley, who introduced me to reception theory, and Professor Susan Langdon, who gave me a non-literary perspective on Greek culture which ultimately allowed me to treat literature in a broader cultural and religious perspective. Finally, thanks go to Professor David Schenker, who provided feedback to my project and helped turn a set of thoughts into a coherent argument. ii Table of Contents Acknowledgments: ii Chapter 1: Introduction: 1 Part 1: The Quest for Homeric Authorship: 3 Part 2: Methodological Assumptions: 17 Part 3: Oral Tradition and Ways of Meaning: 30 Part 4: Authority and Identity: 43 Chapter 2: Homer Preconstructed: 53 Part 1: Near Eastern Connections: 55 Section 1: Mycenaean Era Influences: 57 Section 2: Post Mycenaean Era Influences: 72 Part 2: Homeric History and Society: 80 Part 3: Social Structure and Authority In The Homeric Poems: 89 Part 4: The Anax and the Assembly: 93 Part 5: The Aoidos and Speech Power: 103 Chapter 3: Homer Constructed: 106 Part 1: Bardic Episodes: 108 Part 2: Poet, Audience, and Authority: 140 Part 3: Oral Traditional Audiences and Authority: 148 Part 4: The Impact of Competition on Textualization and Stasis: 151 Part 5: Kleos, Sema, and the Shaping of Tradition: 154 Chapter 4: Homer Reconstructed: 175 Part 1: Material Culture and the Invention of the Greek Alphabet: 177 Part 2: Texts and the Homeric Tradition: 192 Part 3: Archaic Receptions: 201 A: The Epic Cycle: 201 B: Pre-Socratic Philosophy: 207 Part 4: Classical Receptions: 211 Part 5: Hellenistic Receptions and Alexandrian Scholarship: 226 Part 6: Conclusions: 235 Bibliography and Works Cited: 239 Vita: 249 Chapter 1: Introduction This project has as its goal an understanding of the way in which the Homeric poems became a source of cultural and literary authority and influence in the archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic periods of Greek history. I have divided this study diachronically into three periods of this cultural construction, which I call the Preconstruction, Construction, and Reconstruction of Homeric authority. In this first chapter I will be analyzing the way that an oral traditional culture can transition to a literary culture, yet retain vestiges of the oral culture in its literary traditions. After surveying the relevant modern scholarship in this quest for Homeric authority, I discuss some of the methodological implications of a study involving oral traditional poetry and its receptions in literature. This chapter will be further broken down into a discussion of the methodological assumptions underlying this discussion of the interaction of oral culture and literary culture, the way an oral tradition creates meaning in context, and the way a traditional culture transmits authority. I also discuss the different types of authority, the related concept of authorship in an oral culture, and the immanence of that authority. Following the methodological chapter, I turn to Homer Preconstructed, which discusses the context of Greece in the Bronze Age 1 during which I find traces of the earliest influences of oral traditions on Greek culture. This chapter deals in part with the historical and cultural influences of the surrounding Aegean, including the Near East on the Greeks. Following the setting of the context for the earliest Greeks, I analyze the ways in which the Homeric poems discuss the implications of speech, society, and authority in order to establish the fact that in both early Greece and the Aegean as well as in the Homeric poems themselves, cultural authority was derived from speech acts. Chapter 3, Homer Constructed discusses specifically the Homeric aoidos and his relationship to society and where he derives his authority. This chapter is focused primarily on both the historical character of the aoidos as well as his depiction by Homer, Hesiod, and later authors as well as comparanda from other cultures. Chapter 4, Homer Reconstructed analyzes the reception and influence of the Homeric poems in archaic, classical, and Hellenistic Greek literature and society. This reception, as I show, illustrates the effect of the immanence of the oral traditional poetry’s influence and authority in the earlier two periods of pre-construction and construction on the literary culture of the third period, where the authority is reconstructed in the literary medium and its prevalence in literary culture. This type of approach builds somewhat on the work of many scholars who have investigated the relationship between an oral Homer and a written Homer in order to set the stage, but differs in that I look 2 not to politics as the main force behind the authority of Homer, but literary culture as well.1 I show through the reception of Homer in the literary medium the evidence of the poetic tradition’s immanence in the identity of Greek culture. Part1: The Quest For Homeric Authorship (A History of Modern Homeric Scholarship) The search for Homer was begun the moment the Iliad, Odyssey, and various poems of the Epic Cycle and the Hymns were attributed to him. Ancient attributions of authorship to Homer may have been a way to ensure the continued readership of poems whose popularity may have been fading.2 In antiquity, Homer is not always even explicitly referenced as the poet, but his authorship is often inferred. This makes an understanding of the ancient reception of Homer in any given period particularly troublesome. Various cities had claimed Homer by the fifth century.3 Homer is often referred to as “a man from Chios”,4 and regardless of any specific geographic location, the composite Greek that is featured in the Homeric poems is Ionic in origin. Much effort has been 1 Gregory Nagy, in Homer the Classic, sets Homer’s lasting influence and status as a “Classic” as a result of the Athenian hegemony in the Aegaean, primarily focusing on the Athenian political influence. Additionally, the Panathenaic nature of religious festivals are seen to further contribute to this authority in his formulation. I find this second element to be a useful element as well, because it combines some political power with the idea of collective approval and identity creation and reinforcement. 2 Burgess 2001. 3 Davison 1962. 4 Acusilaus FGH 2F2, Homeric Hymn to Apollo and many others. 3 spent trying to make Homer stand still in time and place, but for the purposes of this investigation, this is not necessary, as I will explain later. Nevertheless, ancient sources and scholarship were full of inconsistencies which would lead one to believe that for each scholar, city, and festival, there must have been a unique Homer. However, none of these inconsistencies “could shake the faith of antiquity in the artistic unity and high quality of the Homeric poems, or in the historical reality of Homer.”5 In an equally likely scenario to that which Burgess proposes, 6 the poems may have been attributed to Homer simply because he stood symbolically as the oral traditional poet par excellence, a situation echoed in modern South Slavic, Mongolian, and medieval English poems.7 In the latter formulation, Homer metonymically stands for the Greek oral epic tradition itself. In the 18th century F.A. Wolf, in his Prolegomena ad Homerum, asked the “Homeric Question”. This question concerned the ability of a single man to write some 27,000 lines of the Iliad and Odyssey, as well the other early hexameter poetry often attributed to him, in the Early Archaic period of Greece, when literacy appeared extremely limited and in a much different form than it did in the Classical Period. Wolf found it “impossible to accept the belief …that these two works of a single genius 5 Davis 1962 :241. 6 Burgess 2001. 7 E.g. Foley 2005, A.B Lord 1960. 4 burst forth suddenly from the darkness in all their brilliance, just as they are, with both the splendor of their parts and the many great virtues of the connected whole.”8 In the first part of the Prolegomena, Wolf suggested that the Homeric poems were first composed orally in around 950 BCE. He argued that the poems were then handed down by non- literate Greeks for approximately four centuries before being committed to writing. Though Wolf’s argument was extremely radical in the heavily Unitarian academic community9, he was not the first to suggest a lack of literacy on the part of Homer. In the first century AD, Josephus claimed that Homer was illiterate10, making Wolf's theory not the first of its kind. This “Homeric Question” initiated a sort of modern “Homeric Quest” in which Homeric scholars became divided between two academic camps.