A Hermeneutical Profile of the Hypomnemata

CHAPTER 9 A Hermeneutical Profile of the Hypomnemata

This chapter offers a hermeneutical profile of the hypomnemata. This profile is based on the exegetical resources as they were defined in the previous chapter. As we shall see, the notion of Homer as a conscious, individual author and teacher governs interpretations of the Iliad in the hypomnemata. The resources the hypomnema exegetes apply to derive meaning from their base text tie in with this overarching perspective.

1 Perspectivisation

The hypomnema commentators approached the Homeric epics as the works of a single, conscious author and teacher by the name of Homer. For these exegetes, “Homer” referred not just to a collection of literary compositions,1 but to a single, conscious author, who had a name, a biography, and a style.2 Homer not merely composed, but also wrote down the Iliad and the Odyssey.3

1 The extent of Homer’s literary production was discussed in antiquity. Aristotle, for instance, famously attributed the Margites to Homer. Others attributed the Homeric Hymns, or even poetry in general, to Homer. See Rudolf Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship: From the Beginnings to the Hellenistic Age (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), 73–74; Alexander Beecroft, Authorship and Cultural Identity in Early Greece and China: Patterns of Literary Circulation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 61–105. 2 See Dirk M. Schenkeveld, “Aristarchus and ΟΜΗΡΟΣ ΦΙΛΟΤΕΧΝΟΣ: Some Fundamental Ideas of Aristarchus on Homer as a Poet,” Mnemosyne 23 (1970): 162–78; Gregory Nagy, “Early Greek Views of Poets and Poetry,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, ed. George A. Kennedy, 9 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989–2013), 1:1–77 (35–38); George A. Kennedy, “Hellenistic Literary and Philosophical Scholarship,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, 1:200–19 (208); Robert Lamberton, “Homer in Antiquity,” in A New Companion to Homer, ed. Ian Morris and Barry Powell, MnS 163 (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 33–54; Jed Wyrick, The Ascension of Authorship: Attribution and Canon Formation in Jewish, Hellenistic, and Christian Traditions, HSCL 49 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 136–202; Beecroft, Authorship and Cultural Identity. 3 This idea was not universally accepted, as Josephus shows in C.Ap. 12. He writes: “Across the board among the Greeks no authentic writing is to be found older than Homer’s poem, and he clearly lived after the Trojan events; and even he, they say, did not leave his own poem in written form, but it was transmitted by memory and later put together from its re- cital in songs, and for this reason has many internal discrepancies” (trans. John M.G. Barclay,

This conception of Homer as a conscious author and writer did not originate with the Alexandrian scholars responsible for the hypomnemata. Its first ex- pressions must be dated in the 6th century BCE and attributed to a group of rhapsodes known as the Homeridai.4 These rhapsodes developed a biographical tradition which mined the Iliad, the Odyssey, and other writings5 for infor- mation on Homer’s birthplace or biography.6 A popular image is that of Homer as a travelling rhapsode and the embodiment of the pan-Greek ideal. This por- trayal of Homer served the needs of the Homeridai: as guardians of Homer’s writings they sought to accrue the same pan-Greek status that Homer had for themselves. Aristotle later adopted this view on Homer as a conscious author and writer with a biography, and the scholars in the Alexandrian Museum and Library walked in his footsteps. Homer was believed to exhibit a recognisable literary style. Some ancient scholars held that the poet combined dialects and archaic forms to create his own language.7 A related view postulates that Homer’s language is not so much older than, but simply different from the Greek language of later periods.

Against Apion, vol. 10 of Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary, ed. Steve Mason [Leiden: Brill, 2007], 15–16). On Josephus’s position in discussions on the authorship of Homer see Minna S. Jensen, The Homeric Question and the Oral-Formulaic Theory (Viborg: Museum Tusculaneum, 1980), 149–58; Gregory Nagy, “Homeric Scholia,” in A New Companion to Homer, 101–22 (108–10); Wyrick, The Ascension of Authorship, 145–59. 4 On the development of Homer as an author and the role of the Homeridai see Walter Burkert, “The Making of Homer in the Sixth Century b.c.: Rhapsodes versus Stesichoros,” in Papers on the Amasis Painter and His World: Colloquium Sponsored by the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities and Symposium Sponsored by the J. Paul Getty Museum (Malibu, CA: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 1987), 43–62; Martin L. West, “The Invention of Homer,” CQ 49 (1999): 364–82; Barbara Graziosi, Inventing Homer: The Early Reception of Epic, CCS (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 5 A famous case is Hymn. Apoll. 166–75, which is the source for the long-standing tradition that Homer was blind. 6 On this biographical tradition see Graziosi, Inventing Homer; eadem, “The Ancient Reception of Homer,” in A Companion to Classical Receptions, ed. Lorna Hardwick and Christopher Stray (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 26–37; Gregory Nagy, Homer the Preclassic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 29–47; Mary R. Lefkowitz, The Lives of the Greek Poets, 2d ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 14–29; Beecroft, Authorship and Cultural Identity, 61–105; Adrian Kelly, “Biographies of Homer,” HE 129–30. 7 [Plutarch], De hom. 8–14. Cf. Giuseppe Scarpat, I dialetti greci in Omero secondo un gram- matico antico, SGL 2 (Arona: Peideia, 1952); Filippomaria Pontani, “ ‘Only God Knows the Correct Reading!’ The Role of Homer, the Quran and the Bible in the Rise of Philology and Grammar,” in Homer and the Bible in the Eyes of Ancient Interpreters, ed. Maren R. Niehoff, JSRC 16 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 43–83 (47–55).