Homerica
Overview

Leaving aside for the moment the Homeric Hymns and the clearly related Hesiodic corpus, we are here concerned with just two texts, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Both are the results of growth; in the case of the Iliad, growth over several centuries.. Our timeline for the two looks something like this:

1. Yes, Virginia, there was a Trojan war, or at any rate a Trojan Confrontation, more than a raid, but less than a ten-year conflict. It corresponds to what the archaeologists call Troy VI, where massive destruction occurred in about 01050.

2. In the Ionian Islands and the nearby mainland, there grew up a tradition of hero stories: aristeiae. These were exploit narratives of people like Agamemnon or Diomedes, and perhaps also Hector and Sarpedon. They were recited by people who lived from day to day by reciting them, probably to small audiences (households, bandit camps, towns on market days), some of them sympathetic to the Greek side, and some perhaps to the Trojan side.

3. There came to be a guild of such reciters, those who were later called the Homeridae. They cooperated in various ways, and evolved among themselves a standard style of presentation, including the hexameter poetic texture and self-accompaniment by a lyre. In the common repertoire of this group were variants of several stories; different (and even conflicting) portrayals of the same character, who was turned to different expressive account by different poets. These multiple and sometime conflicting accounts included such minor figures as Teucros or Melanippos, and such major ones as Aias. These lays (to use Lachmann's term) lasted about 20 minutes, and typically concluded with a mischance which ends the hero's exploit. And it had to end; otherwise, he would go on to conquer all, and the story would be over. It was essential to the art of the reciter - the livelihood of the reciter - that the story NOT be over; "Troy" was a perpetually renewable supply of tellable stories - and thus, of perpetually workable one-night stands. The one early lay that can be convincingly salvaged from our present text is that of Agamemnon. In these tales, military prowess is the supreme virtue, and the splendor of the warrior's arms and armor comes in for much attention. So do the various wounds that may be sustained in battle. In these episodes, the gods are familiar, but on the whole distant. They do not take part in the battles.

Some time passed this way, the stories multiplying, and the medium of their telling becoming stylized. Their increasing similarity was the condition for the next phase, where they were drawn on for the creation of something new.

4. At some later point, when public psychology had changed, and the terms of engagement between a reciter and his audience had shifted from the martial to the personalistic, a poet of considerable ability (there is no harm in calling him Homer) adapted all or parts of several lays from the common repertoire, and added many of his own, to create a new repertoire of 24 episodes (and, yes that design implies knowledge of the 24-character alphabet). This new repertoire centered on the hero Achilles: not his prowess (though much is made of this, when he finally goes out to fight), but rather his feelings: all derives from his insult by the leader Agamemnon, its personal cost in the death of Patroclus, and his resumption of combat, ending with what amounts to a foreseen final Greek victory. Major episodes got left out (schoolchildren still expect to hear about the Trojan Horse, but they don't), in the interest of a story at least narratively complete, ending with the death of Hector and the mourning of Andromache - itself highly personalistic; one of the most touching moments in literature.

The episodes in this new composite work averaged about 50 minutes each, about twice as long as the early lays,. This implies a more leisured audience than before, and one which savored the personal elements in the story over the merely heroic ones. The gods too were treated personally. And sometimes with comic effect, which would have been unthinkable in the previous milieu. (This levity was much criticized in later times). Achilles' divine mother Thetis, whose feelings also are minutely explored, becomes a significant figure in the narrative.

5. The guilds continued to be the mainstay of the tradition, but it was now a complex tradition, far more widespread than just Ionia. In a Western location, perhaps Sicily, a counterpoem to the Iliad was put together. (Butler's case for Nausicaa as the author is remarkably convincing; the complaints of later critics about the slow pace of the Odyssey are merely their failure to understand its pervasively feminine sensibility). The Odyssey centered on the nonviolent but rather ingenious hero Odysseus, but its central figure is actually the no less ingenious Penelope, and its message is not victory in war, but the persistence of domestic relations. The Odyssey adopted the 24-book structure of the Iliad, but its recitation units tended to be shorter. Unlike the Iliad, which sits unevenly on its 24-book structure, the Odyssey beautifully fits that structure, and easily arranges itself as six units of four books each. It is likely that the leisured Athenian matrons would hire a noted reciter to render one of these four-book units form them as a series, perhaps the highlight of a week.

7. The new psychology of peace affected the Western guilds also, and whole segments were added to the Iliad, most strikingly Iliad 23-24, which conclude the story not with the satisfaction of Achilles' feeling of personal outrage, but with what amounts to the end of the conflict, Greeks and Trojans being reconciled when Priam is allowed to reclaim the body of Hector, and give it a dignified burial. Those two chapters required adjustment elsewhere to preserve the important number 24. These were made by combining some episodes as one (these places are easily recognized by their being twice the usual episode length).

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