From lockyert@mweb.co.za Sun Apr 1 17:14:52 2001 Received: from mxu3.u.washington.edu (mxu3.u.washington.edu [140.142.33.7]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.11.2+UW01.01/8.11.2+UW01.03) with ESMTP id f320Ep218302 for ; Sun, 1 Apr 2001 17:14:52 -0700 Received: from jhb-imta.mweb.co.za (jhb-imta.mweb.co.za [196.2.48.244]) by mxu3.u.washington.edu (8.11.2+UW01.01/8.11.2+UW01.03) with ESMTP id f320Elb26304 for ; Sun, 1 Apr 2001 17:14:49 -0700 Received: from default ([196.31.177.120]) by jhb-imta.mweb.co.za (Sun Internet Mail Server sims.3.5.2000.03.23.18.03.p10) with SMTP id <0GB500D1U1UKUS@jhb-imta.mweb.co.za> for classics@u.washington.edu; Mon, 2 Apr 2001 02:11:11 +0200 (GMT-2) Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2001 02:12:12 +0200 From: Terrence Lockyer Subject: Re: Dates of Homer and Hesiod Pt 1 To: Classics List Reply-to: Terrence Lockyer Message-id: <004901c0bb09$b67e3c80$efe81ec4@default> MIME-version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2314.1300 Content-type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2314.1300 X-Priority: 3 On Sat, 31 Mar 2001, John Evan wrote: : >How exactly does one gauge the date of : >appearance 'of literature bearing the marks : >of [Homer's] influence', ... : : For a brief indication, I quote the Britannica: : 'Implicit references to Homer and quotations from : the poems date to the middle of the 7th century BC. : Archilochus, Alcman, Tyrtaeus and Callinus in the : 7th century and Sappho and others in the early 6th : adapted Homeric phraseology and metre to their own : purposes and rhythms.' Of course, and my question was not intended to dispute this; but, unless I am very much mistaken, not one of these poets survives in anything like his or her original entirety, even as regards extant works, and what does survive is often what later authors found it useful to quote for various purposes. We can have no real idea as to the extent or nature of what else from the period may have been lost. My point was that to accept the date of extant works showing Homeric influence as that of its first occurrence *may* be to rely rather too heavily on the textual evidence left to us by the accidents of transmission. As I understand it, the survival of a work into modern times would rely on (1) the original author's or some one of his audience's deciding to write it down, (2) there being sufficient interest for these original text(s) to be preserved and transmitted in ancient times, either in part or in whole, whether or not the work was widely circulated at any point, and (3) there being sufficient interest for the text(s) to be copied and thereby preserved into modern times. Considering that this process relies so heavily on the judgements of particular people at particular times, and that it has failed to preserve works such as the *Telephos* of Euripides that we know were sufficiently widely known within a particular society to be referred to with an expectation of recognition within their author's own lifetime, it seems unwise to assume that extant literary evidence is ever necessarily representative, especially of so early a period. JE wrote further: : Re the oral tradition, this is in my opinion reasonably well : established, ... : But even accepting that the works originated as part of an : oral tradition, one should avoid going too far and being : overly impersonal and a-temporal with regard to creation : within that tradition. Nor did I intend to. My point in referring to the oral tradition was that, if we accept its existence and the place of the Homeric poems within it, we must surely accept also the possibility (perhaps even the likelihood) that Homer's first imitators (in the non-pejorative sense) also composed in that tradition, and may not have found a sufficiently wide, interested, or literate audience for their productions ever to be preserved as written texts. This is a further sense in which the process of transmission may weight the evidence. : The appropriateness of the analogy with the Beatles was : also questioned. This reference was intended to highlight : not the speed of diffusion of the work but the immediacy : of response on the part of the audience. The Homeric epics : would take much longer to reach the majority of their : audience (for some this would mean years instead of : seconds/minutes/days or whatever); however, I beleive : that once having got to the ears of its destined public the : responses of imitating artists would be in a similar : time-frame. I am not sure that the relative rapidity of transmission is decidable at all, given that we know nothing of the circumstances of composition. As for immediacy of response, we again come up against the problem of evidence. I grant that it seems likely that members of the audience of the Homeric poems began to imitate them or refer to them quite soon after coming into contact with them, but I don't believe that we should necessarily identify Homer's first imitators with his first extant ones. One factor, aside from those mentioned above, is the question of genre. In the case of The Beatles, we are dealing with one representative of a particular musical tradition at a particular time, and with responses that are within that same ongoing tradition. In the case of Homer, we are dealng with hexameter heroic epic, and with responses in poems that are now collectively called lyric, but that actually belong to a variety of genres that are metrically and otherwise distinct from the hexameter epic. Presumably these genres, like the epic, must have had a pre-history, and, if the Homeric poems were as widely and readily appreciated as they appear to have been, and as JE himself takes them to have been, it seems entirely possible that there was a tradition (whether written or not) of referring to them in existence before the earliest extant lyricists ever composed, and that these poets simply continued that tradition into the genres they have come to define. If so, the dates of their poems would give no indication of the date of the Homeric epics, except a rather imprecise terminus ante quem. : As regards to the lack of evidence and the possibility (or : rather certainty) of lost works, what can one do but agree? : However, one might also add, in practical terms what can : one do but use the evidence that IS available, until further : materials come to light to help us modify our views? Of course one can work only with the evidence one has, and sometimes that will mean that it is simply impossible to decide things one way or another, interesting and worthwhile though it may be to debate the various possibilities. : As far as I know, there is no evidence of lost Homerically- : influenced works from pre-650 BC. I am not sure exactly what such evidence, either positive or negative, would look like, especially if such works happened to have been orally composed. : And given the extant evidence, I believe the proffered : scenario a reasonable approximation. I have not sought to deny that it may be a reasonable theory (among other reasonable theories); only to raise certain questions about the nature of the evidence that I think need to be borne in mind. Incidentally, I note from a brief survey of the handbooks I have to hand that JE's original citation from Britannica.com [1] is not quite representative of recent opinions that classical scholars have seen fit to express to a non-specialist audience. OCD3 (1996), it is true, favours the second half of the 8th C, placing the Iliad c. 750 and the Odyssey c. 725, which matches exactly one part of the entry JE cites. OCD2 (1970) placed both 'before 700'. K. J. Dover (ed.), *Ancient Greek Literature* (OUP 1980) p. 177 has Hesiod c. 700 and Homer c. 675, but notes that the co-authors (Dover, E. L. Bowie, Jasper Griffin & M. L. West) do not agree on the relative dates of the two. Jasper Griffin, *Homer* (1980) p. 6 places the Iliad c. 725 and the Odyssey a generation later, so presumably c. 700 or 690. W. A. Camps, *Introduction to Homer* (OUP 1980) n. 3, pp. 66-7 suggests that even a date in the sixth century for the poems as we have them is not impossible, but states that the general opinion would put the Iliad near the end of the 8th C and the Odyssey a little later. It would therefore seem that the dates have been edging downward a little. Terrence Lockyer Johannesburg, South Africa [1] On Thu, 29 Mar 2001, JE wrote that : Brittanica.com still states that 'it seems...plausible to : conclude that the period of composition of the large- : scale epics...was the 9th or 8th century, with several : features pointing more clearly to the 8th. The Odyssey : may belong near the end of this century, the Iliad closer : to its middle.' .