The Composition and Transmission of the Homeric Poems: A Summary. Issue 45 (2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Moran, Jerome
• Is Part Of: Journal of classics teaching. Volume 23:Issue 45(2022)
• Page Start: 33
• Page End: 34
• Publication Date: 2022
• Subjects: Homeric poems -- oral composition -- transmission -- writing -- papyri -- manuscripts; 480.07
• DOI: 10.1017/S2058631021000416
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2058-6310

Abstract

Abstract : If the modern oral hypothesis, beginning in the 1920s (see 17 below), about the composition of early Greek epic poetry is correct (a 'paradigm shift' in Homeric studies according to Casey Dué), there were many poets who over centuries, beginning perhaps in the middle-to-late Bronze Age, composed in performance many different versions of epic poems, including poems about the Trojan War, and including the subject matter of the Iliad and the Odyssey, vestiges of which survive on papyrus fragments and in the manuscripts of later authors. But the versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey that we have were not the work of many poets but, for the most part, of a single poet. The overall unity of the poems cannot be explained, or explained away, by any theory that posits multiple, successive authorship spanning many years.