A new companion to Homer

769 Pages·1997·28.511 MB·English

by  Ian Morris, Barry B. Powell (eds.)

A NEW COMPANION
TO HOMER
EDITED BY
IAN MORRIS and BARRY POWELL
<
BRILL
LEIDEN · NEW YORK ■ KÖLN
1997
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A new companion to Homer / edited by lan Morris and Barry Powell,
p. cm. — {Mnemosyne, bibliotheca classics Batava.
Supplementum, ISSN 0169-8958 ; 163)
Updated ed. of: A companion to Homer. 1962.
Includes index.
ISBN 9004099891 (alk. paper)
1. Homer—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Epic poetry, Greek-
-History and criticism. 3. Epic poetry, Greek—Criticism, Textual.
4. Oral tradition—Greece. 5. Civilization, Homeric. 1, Morris,
Ian, 1960- . II. Powell, Barry B. ΙΠ. Companion to Homer.
IV. Series.
PA4037.N42 1996
883’.01—dc20 96-38925
CIP
Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einhei tsaufhahme
[Mnemosyne / Supplementum]
Mnemosyne : bibliotheca classics Batava. Supplementum. -
Leiden ; New York ; Köln : Brill.
Früher Schriftenreihe
Reihe Supplementum zu: Mnemosyne
163. A new companion to Homer. - 1996
A new companion to Homer / ed. by Ian Morris and Barry
Powell. - Leiden : New York ; Köln : Brill, 1996
(Mnemosyne : Supplementum ; 163)
ISBN 90-04-09989-1
NF,: Morris, Ian [Hrsg.]
ISSN 0169-8958
ISBN 90 04 09989 I
© Copyright 1997 by Komnklgke Brill, Laden, The Netherlands
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PRINTED IN THE NETHERLANDS
In memory of Arthur Adkins
CONTENTS
List of Contributors ...... xi
Editors’ Introduction
Ian Morris and Barry Powell ........................................ xiii
Part One
TRANSMISSION AND HISTORY OF INTERPRETATION
1. Homer and Writing
Barry Powell ........................................................................... 3
2. Homer in Antiquity
Robert Lamberton .................................................................. 33
3. Homeric Papyri and Transmission of the Text
Michael Haslam ....................................................................... 55
4. Homeric Scholia
Gregory Nagy .......................................................................... 101
5. The Homeric Question
Frank Turner ........................................................................... 123
6. Oral Tradition and its Implications
John Foley .................................................................................. 146
7. Neoanalysis
Malcolm Willcock ................................................................. 174
Part Two
HOMER’S LANGUAGE
8. Homer’s Dialect
Geoffrey Horrocks ............................................................... 193
9. Homer’s Meter
Martin West ............................................................................. 218
10. The Formula
Joseph Russo ............................................................................... 238
11. Homeric Style and Oral Poetics’
Mark Edwards .......................................................................... 261
12. The Study of Homeric Discourse
Egbert Barker .............................. 284
Vlll CONTENTS
13. Homer and Narratology
Irene De Jong ........................................................................... 305
14. Quantifying Epic
Ahuvia Kahane ......................................................................... 326
Part Three
HOMER AS LITERATURE
15. The Iliad'. Structure and Interpretation
Seth Schein ................................................................................ 345
16. The Structures of the Odyssey
Stephen Tracy .......................................................................... 360
17. Modem Theoretical Approaches to Homer
John Peradotto ........................................................................ 380
18. Epic as Genre
Andrew Ford ............................................................................ 396
19. Myth in Homer
Lowell Edmunds ................................................................ 415
20. Homer and the Folktale
William Hansen ........................................................................ 442
21. Homer and Hesiod
Ralph Rosen .............................................................................. 463
22. The Homeric Hymns
Jenny Strauss Clay ................................................................. 489
Part Four
HOMER’S WORLDS
23. Homer and the Bronze Age
John Bennet ................................................................................ 511
24. Homer and the Iron Age
Ian Morris .................................................................................. 535
25. Homer and Greek Art
Anthony Snodgrass ................................................................. 560
26. Homer and the Near East
Sarah Morris ............................................................................. 599
27. Homeric Society
Kurt Raaflaub ......................................................................... 624
28. The Homeric Economy
Walter Donlan .................................................................. 649
CONTENTS IX
29. Homeric Warfare
Hans van Wees ......................................................................... 668
30. Homeric Ethics
Arthur Adkins .......................................................................... 694
Select Bibliography ........................................................................ 715
Index ................................................................................................ 747
CONTRIBUTORS
Arthur Adkins was Edward Olson Professor of Greek and Professor
of Philosophy and Early Christian Literature at the University of
Chicago.
Egbert Barker is Assistant Professor of Classics at the Universite de
Montreal.
John Bennet is Associate Professor of Classical Archaeology and Chair
of the Department of Classics at the University of Wisconsin at
Madison.
Irene De Jong is Professor of Classics at the University of Amsterdam.
Walter Donlan is Professor of Classics at the University of California
at Irvine.
Lowell Edmunds is Professor of Classics at Rutgers University.
Mark Edwards is Professor Emeritus of Classics at Stanford Uni­
versity.
John Foley is Byler Professor of English and Classical Studies and
Director of the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition at the Uni­
versity of Missouri at Columbia.
Andrew Ford is Associate Professor of Classics at Princeton Uni­
versity.
W illiam Hansen is Professor of Classics at Indiana University.
Michael Haslam is Professor of Classics at the University of Cali­
fornia at Los Angeles.
Geoffrey Horrocks is Lecturer in Classics at Cambridge Univer­
sity and Fellow of St. John’s College.
Ahuvia Kahane is Assistant Professor of Classics at Northwestern
University.
Robert Lamberton is Associate Professor of Classics at Washington
University.
Ian Morris is Professor of Classics and History and Chair of the
Department of Classics at Stanford University.
Sarah Morris is Professor of Classics at the University of California
at Los Angeles.
Gregory Nagy is Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Litera­
ture, Professor of Comparative Literature, and Chair of the Depart­
ment of Ae Classics at Harvard University.
xii CONTRIBUTORS
John Peradotto is Andrew V. V. Raymond Professor of Classics
and SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor at the State Univer-
sity of New York at Buffalo.
Barry Powell is Halls-Bascom Professor of Classics at the Univer­
sity of Wisconsin-Madison.
Kurt Raaflaub is Professor of Classics at Brown University and
Go-Director of die Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, DC.
Ralph Rosen is Associate Professor of Classics and Chair of the
Classics Department at the University of Pennsylvania.
Joseph Russo is Professor of Classics at Haverford College.
Seth Schein is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University
of California at Davis.
Anthony Snodgrass is Lawrence Professor of Classical Archaeology
at Cambridge University, and Fellow of Clare College.
Jenny Strauss Clay is Professor of Classics at the University of
Virginia.
Stephen Tracy is Professor of Classics at the Ohio State University.
Frank Turner is John Hay Whitney Professor of History at Yale
University.
Hans van Wees is Lecturer in Ancient History at University Col­
lege, London.
Martin West is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.
Malcolm Willcock is Professor Emeritus of Classics at University
College, London.
Ian M orris and Barry B. Powell
EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION
A generation has passed since the publication of Wace and Stub-
bings’ original Campanian to Hamer in 1962. Yet this remains the only
other English-language volume which claims to offer a broad survey
of Homeric scholarship. A third of a century is a long time in the
humanities; as in any field of classical scholarship, new interpreta­
tions and questions have emerged, and new archaeological finds have
accumulated. But our New Companion to Homer is not simply an up­
dated version of Wace and Stubbings. The years since the original
Companion took shape have seen profound shifts in our notions of
what Homeric studies should be.
When Heinrich Schliemann began digging at Troy and Mycenae
in the 1870s, there was general agreement among classicists that
Homeric society and the Trojan war were to all intents and pur­
poses fictions of the eighth century B.C., helpful for understanding
Greek values at the dawn of the Archaic age, but nothing more than
that. Schliemann’s discoveries shattered this orthodoxy, and by the
time Wace began collecting contributions for the original Companion
in the late 1930s, a new attitude dominated scholarship: the Iliad
and Odyssey were basically Bronze Age poems, transmitted more or
less intact across the Dark Age, accurately reflecting the realities of
the Mycenaean world. The main aim of the original Companion was
to give expression to this vision, explicating the poems’ historical setting
by means of the material record. Its first five chapters surveyed meter,
style, composition, language, and Homer’s relationship to other epic
poetry; the next two introduced issues of textual transmission and
the Homeric Question; but the final sixteen chapters—well over half
the book—were devoted to archaeology and history.
The publication of the original Companion was long delayed by the
Second World War and then by the deaths of the editor and his
original assistant. By the time it finally appeared, in 1962, there had
been a revolution in Homeric scholarship. Milman Parry had formu­
lated his theories of oral composition—and had himself met an un­
timely death—in the days when Wace was still planning the Companion;
XIV IAN MORRIS AND BARRY B. POWEU.
but his ideas only really began to gain ground in the 1950s. Further,
in 1952 Michael Ventris announced his decipherment of Linear B,
and in just the same years, archaeologists began imposing order on
the previously confusing material from Iron Age Greece. Taken
together, these developments undermined the older orthodoxy of a
Mycenaean Homeric world, suggesting that the differences between
heroic society and that of the Bronze Age palaces were much greater
than had previously been realized. Some specialists argued that the
society described in the poems accurately reflected the world of the
tenth century B.C.; others, that it belonged in the eighth century;
others still, that it was a poetic conflation of memories spanning a
millennium of Greek prehistory. Some of the chapters in the Com­
panion reflected the new attitudes of the 1950s, but most—and the
overall archaeological-historical focus of the book—remained rooted
in the debates of the 1930s. In fact, we might almost say that it has
been two generations since anyone has tried to put together a com­
prehensive English-language survey of Homeric scholarship.
We can hardly claim to be the first people to have noticed this
peculiar situation. Between 1985 and 1993, Cambridge University
Press published a six-volume commentary on the Iliad, and between
1988 and 1990, Oxford University Press published a three-volume
commentary on the Odyssey (originally published in Italian). And in
1995, three English-language collections of essays on Homer ap­
peared—J.-P. Crielaard’s Homeric Questions and 0. Anderson and
M. Dickie’s Horner’s World developing out of conferences, and J. Carter
and S. P. Morris’ Ages of Homer being a volume in honor of Emily
Vermeule. But the New Companion is different from any of these books.
We make no attempt to compete with the exhaustive coverage of
the Cambridge and Oxford commentaries. There are no line-by-line
analyses or encyclopedic displays of knowledge here. But on the other
hand, the New Companion is far more systematic than the other recent
volumes of articles (and indeed more systematic than the original
Companion).'
Unfettered by the constraints imposed by the genres of confer­
ence-volume or Festschrift, we have reached for the chimera of com­
prehensive coverage of the major questions which dominate current
Homeric scholarship. Yet despite the size of this volume, we are pain-
1 J. Latacz’s excellent Zweihundert Jahre Hemer-Forschung (ed., 1991a) falls some­
where between the English-language conference volumes and this New Campanian in
terms of comprehensiveness, but most of the chapters are written in German.