Response to Paul D. from the Demosthenes thread

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Qimmik
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Response to Paul D. from the Demosthenes thread

Post by Qimmik »

Paul D. wrote the following in the thread on Demosthenes' De Corona:
The gap between the preserved text and the speech as actually delivered is a interesting question. Isn't it similar in many respects to the question of how the Homeric epics were written down? (Personally, I don't believe that the Homeric epics are somehow magically different from all the other ancient texts, just because they were "oral". As if everything weren't more or less "oral" back then... The big difference, as far I see, is that the Homeric epics are much longer than any speech; I don't think they existed in the form we have them before someone wrote them down. What is left to us is not "performance", even if it originally stems from a performative tradition.)
The more I read about the Homeric poems the less confidence I have that anyone knows with any degree of assurance, or that anyone will be ever able to know, how, when, why, through whose agency or in what form they originated or circulated before the third century or so. So much has been written about this; yet there is still no consensus, and the various views are still wildly divergent. The only evidence we have is early papyri and quotations. As far as I can tell, those don't necessarily confirm that the poems were circulating "in the form we have them" before about the middle of the second century.

But what's so troubling about that? Why not just accept that we have a version of the poems that has to some degree or other been shaped by Alexandrian scholars--a version in which more than two millenia of readers, Greek, Roman and barbarian, have known them--and that the evidence just isn't sufficient to allow us to draw firm conclusions about the form in which the texts existed, or how they circulated, before then? The poems are no less miraculous regardless of how they reached the form in which we have them.

Embracing the uncertainty after so many years of anxiety has made my life much happier, and I promise it will do the same for you, too!

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Paul Derouda
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Re: Response to Paul D. from the Demosthenes thread

Post by Paul Derouda »

Here we go again... :) Anyway, my point was just that I don't think the Homeric poems are so completely different than everything else. It seems to me that the same problem of whether we have "oral" or "literary" texts concerns many if not most early texts from the Antiquity, not just Homer. It's true we know little or nothing of the context where the Epics were created, but that doesn't mean we should think it must be something totally different from anything else we have.

The early papyri give some sort of idea of what the texts were like before the Alexandrian scholars, and they are, in my opinion, clearly against the "crystallization theory" as argued by Nagy et al.; there is simply not enough "multiformity" to support that, rather a great number of very diverse inorganic lines (mostly rhapsodic interpolations?) in diverse manuscripts. This doesn't mean the texts couldn't have been drastically changed after the first textualization, but that must have been at a comparatively early stage, because we don't really have competing versions to speak of. I wrote "in the form we have them", but I agree that it's possible that the texts have changed after the first textualization – my point was that the textualization must have been the event that gave them "a" definitive form, even if that "definitive" form may have changed thereafter in the early stage. I think it's naive to imagine "Homer" had the Iliad and/or the Odyssey complete in his head and then just wrote or dictated them without changing a word. No, the moment when these epics were created was when they were written down, and if there had been Iliads and Odysseys before that, they were not the same.

So although I rather confidently (arrogantly...?) reject some current theories on the origin of the Homeric poems, I count myself as a sceptic and an agnostic in these matters. I find it strange that so many scholars, especially of the oralist school, don't problematize the textualization process itself, but just assume that any irregularity they find tells us about the nature of oral performance. I agree that we can never be sure " how, when, why, through whose agency" they first came about, but to claim anything about the origin of the text without questioning the textualization process is even more absurd.

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Scribo
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Re: Response to Paul D. from the Demosthenes thread

Post by Scribo »

Guide to American Homeric Criticism:

Is there a variant?
No = Evidence for crystalisation
Yes = Oral tradition!

Is there a "textual error"?
No = the integrity of the oral tradition!
Yes = The vivacity of the oral tradition!

et cetera, et cetera ad astra

No, I joke and have nothing to add since we've had these discussions before and my personal opinion tends to be "don't care lol" but I felt the need to recommend the article on Homeric text and transmission in the New Brill Companion which is a bit of a monster (like 60 pages? gods alone know) but one of the best things written on the "shape of the text" throughout time. Saved my arse a few times as a student. Oh its followed by a good article on the scholia too (good in that it talks about the texts, tells us sod all nearly on the scholia tbh). I know it's not the easiest book to get hold of, but still.
(Occasionally) Working on the following tutorials:

(P)Aristotle, Theophrastus and Peripatetic Greek
Intro Greek Poetry
Latin Historical Prose

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