Archaeology and the Homeric Epic

183 Pages·2016·6.85 MB·English

by  Susan Sherratt

Archaeology
and Homeric Epic
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SHEFFIELD STUDIES IN AEGEAN ARCHAEOLOGY
ADVISORY EDITORIAL PANEL
Professor Stelios ANDREOU, University of Thessaloniki, Greece
Professor John BARRETT, University of Sheffi eld, England
Professor John BENNET, University of Sheffi eld, England
Professor Keith BRANIGAN, University of Sheffi eld, England
Professor Jack DAVIS, University of Cincinnati, USA
Professor Peter DAY, University of Sheffi eld, England
Dr Roger DOONAN, University of Sheffi eld, England
Professor Paul HALSTEAD, University of Sheffi eld, England
Professor Caroline JACKSON, University of Sheffi eld, England
Dr Jane REMPEL, University of Sheffi eld, England
Dr Susan SHERRATT, University of Sheffi eld, England
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SHEFFIELD STUDIES IN
AEGEAN ARCHAEOLOGY
Archaeology
and Homeric Epic
edited by
Susan Sherratt and John Bennet
Oxford & Philadelphia
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Published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by
OXBOW BOOKS
The Old Music Hall, 106–108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JE
and in the United States by
OXBOW BOOKS
1950 Lawrence Road, Havertown, PA 19083
© Oxbow Books and the individual contributors 2017
Paperback Edition: ISBN 978-1-78570-295-2
Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-78570-296-9 (epub)
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sherratt, Susan, editor. | Bennet, John, editor.
Title: Archaeology and Homeric epic / edited by Susan Sherratt and John
Bennet.
Description: Oxford & Philadelphia : Oxbow Books, 2016. | Series: Sheffi eld
studies in Aegean archaeology | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifi ers: LCCN 2016040020 (print) | LCCN 2016044861 (ebook) | ISBN
9781785702952 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781785702969 (epub) | ISBN 9781785702976
(mobi) | ISBN 9781785702983 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Archaeology--Greece. | Homer--Infl uence. | Epic poetry,
Greek--History and criticism. | Civilization, Homeric.
Classifi cation: LCC DF78 .A644 2016 (print) | LCC DF78 (ebook) | DDC 938--dc23 LC record available at
https://lccn.loc.gov/2016040020
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
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and retrieval system, without permission from the publisher in writing.
Printed in the United Kingdom by Hobbs the Printers Ltd
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Front cover: Reconstruction by Piet de Jong of battle scene in Hall 64 at Pylos (Lang 1969: col. pl. M). Courtesy of
The Department of Classics, University of Cincinnati and American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Pylos
Archive, Piet de Jong Collection of Watercolors. Photo Jennifer F. Stephens and Arthur E. Stephens.
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Contents
List of Contributors .............................................................................................................vii
Introduction .........................................................................................................................viii
1. Homer, the Moving Target ............................................................................................1
Anthony Snodgrass
2. The Will to Believe: Why Homer Cannot be ‘True’
in any Meaningful Sense..............................................................................................10
Oliver Dickinson
3. Dream and Reality in the Work of Heinrich Schliemann
and Manfred Korfmann................................................................................................20
Johannes Haubold
4. Homeric Epic and Contexts of Bardic Creation .......................................................35
Susan Sherratt
5. Remembering and Forgetting Nestor: Pylian Pasts Pluperfect? ...........................53
Jack L. Davis and Kathleen M. Lynch, with a contribution by Susanne Hofstra
6. In the Grip of their Past? Tracing Mycenaean Memoria .........................................74
Diamantis Panagiotopoulos
7. Heroes in Early Iron Age Greece and the Homeric Epics .....................................101
Alexander Mazarakis Ainian
8. Gilgamesh and Heroes at Troy: Myth, History and Education
in the Invention of Tradition ....................................................................................116
Stephanie Dalley
9. History and the Making of South Slavic Epic.........................................................135
Margaret H. Beissinger
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vi Contents
1 0. ‘The National Epic of the Modern Greeks’? – Digenis Akritis, the Homeric
Question, and the Making of a Modern Myth ........................................................156
Roderick Beaton
Ο Γκιλγκαμές στην Τροία/Gilgamesh at Troy (a very short epic) ......................164
Paul Halstead
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List of Contributors
RODERICK BEATON JOHANNES HAUBOLD
Centre of Hellenic Studies, King’s College Department of Classics and Ancient History,
London University of Durham
JOHN BENNET SUSANNE HOFSTRA
Department of Archaeology, University of Minneapolis, MN
Sheffi eld
KATHLEEN M. LYNCH
MARGARET H. BEISSINGER Department of Classics,
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Cincinnati
Princeton University
ALEXANDER MAZARAKIS AINIAN
STEPHANIE DALLEY Department of History, Archaeology and Social
Oriental Institute, University of Oxford Anthropology, University of Thessaly
JACK L. DAVIS DIAMANTIS PANAGIOTOPOULOS
Department of Classics, University of Cincinnati Institut für Klassische Archäologie,
Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg
OLIVER DICKINSON
Department of Classics and Ancient History, SUSAN SHERRATT
University of Durham Department of Archaeology,
University of Sheffi eld
PAUL HALSTEAD
Department of Archaeology, University of ANTHONY SNODGRASS
Sheffi eld Clare College, Cambridge
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Introduction
Susan Sherratt and John Bennet
The relationship between the Homeric epics and archaeology has suffered
mixed fortunes over the course of the last century and a half, swinging between
‘fundamentalist’ attempts to use archaeology in order to demonstrate the essential
historicity of the epics and their background at one extreme, and outright rejection
of the idea that archaeology is capable of contributing anything at all to our
understanding and appreciation of the epics at the other. Although narrow questions
of historicity, particularly in relation to the Homeric Trojan War theme, have been
revived in recent years (see especially Latacz 2004), we have chosen in this volume
to concentrate rather on exploring a variety of other, perhaps sometimes more
oblique, ways in which we can use archaeology, and also philology, anthropology
and social history, to help off er insights into the epics, the contexts of their possibly
prolonged creation (cf. Snodgrass, chapter 1), aspects of their ‘prehistory’ (Sherratt,
Panagiotopoulos, Mazarakis-Ainian, chapters 4, 6–7), and what they may have stood
for at various times in their long oral and written history (Dickinson and Davis and
Lynch, chapters 2 and 5). The eff ects of the Homeric epics on the history and popular
reception of archaeology, especially in the particular context of modern Germany, is
also a theme that is explored here (Haubold, chapter 3).
We have thus, on the whole, attempted to move beyond the old dichotomies
between historicity and irrelevance and to bring a multi-disciplinary approach to
the Homeric epics (and in some cases other epics both ancient and more modern —
see the contributions by Dalley, Beissinger and Beaton, chapters 8–10) by exploring
not only their varied relationships to the archaeological record and the practice of
archaeology, but also a variety of other issues, either explicitly or implicitly. These
include such diverse questions as the relationships between visual and verbal imagery
and the role of both of these in refl ecting or enhancing elements of social and political
ideology, the social contexts of epic (or sub-epic) creation or re-creation, the roles of
bards and their relationships to diff erent types of patrons and audiences, the ability
of story-patterns, ideological elements and linguistic formulae to cross linguistic and/
or cultural boundaries in general (and Near Eastern contributions to Homeric epic
in particular), the construction and uses of ‘history’ as traceable through both epic
and archaeology, the nature of ‘historical memory’ and its manipulation, linguistic
and material-cultural stratigraphy as detectable in epic, composition-in-performance
of oral history and its transmission and transformation, the relationship between
‘prehistoric’ (oral) and ‘historical’ (recorded in writing) periods, and the history of
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Introduction ix
‘Homeric archaeology’ and other ‘epic archaeologies’ in general. Throughout, our
emphasis is above all on context and its relevance to the creation, transmission, re-
creation and manipulation of epic in the present (or near-present) as well as in the
ancient Greek past.
The Dating of Homer’s Epics: Late 8th Century BC and Later
For long it was received wisdom among Classical scholars that the Homeric epics,
whatever their earlier ‘prehistory’ (see below), were created, or at least emerged or
crystallised in a more or less recognisable form, sometime around 700 BC, give or
take a few decades on either side. This was despite the knowledge that the texts, as
we know them, were divided into books and heavily edited by Alexandrian scholars.
In recent decades, however, this view has been challenged - for example, by Minna
Jensen (1980), who argued that the epics did not take on any recognisable form
until they were written down in Athens in the Peisistratid period of the later sixth
century BC, and by Gregory Nagy (e.g. 1995; 1996: 29–64), who sees the epics, as John
Myres (1930) saw the Greeks themselves, as ‘ever in the process of becoming’ through
several distinct stages of formation, from the Bronze Age right down to the Hellenistic
period. The question of writing is often brought into this debate. There are some who
believe that writing was essential for the ‘crystallisation’ of the epics, and that, if
they were products of the late eighth century, they must have been written down at
the fi rst opportunity. Indeed, Barry Powell (1991) has argued that the Greek alphabet
was adopted and adapted specifi cally to write down the Homeric epics in the later
8th century. Others (e.g. Kirk [1962]), by contrast, believe that it is not impossible
to conceive of the epics being transmitted orally in comparatively stable form by
rhapsodes for a couple of centuries before being committed to writing. In this volume,
Snodgrass (‘Homer, the moving target’, chapter 1) argues that nothing recognisable
as defi nitively ‘Homeric’ is likely to have emerged by the end of the eighth century,
even if cycles of epic poetry, including some story-patterns of the sort familiar from
the Homeric epics, were already in circulation. Fully accepting Nagy’s long-term
evolutionary model for the epics and its implications of a long period of fl uidity of
creation and re-creation, at least before commitment to writing in the sixth century
BC, he suggests that looking for chronological correlates in the archaeological record
for particular passages is the equivalent of shooting at a moving target over a very
long run, in which widely separated chronological circumstances may have produced
similar archaeological eff ects, particularly since many Homeric descriptions can in
eff ect be interpreted in a variety of diff erent ways. Nevertheless, the target (or rather,
perhaps, a whole series of diff erent targets) is an important one, and for individual
passages or elements of these we should not give up the search to fi nd some context
or contexts that might explain what gave rise to these and their inclusion. This, in
Snodgrass’s words, may turn out to be a much more stimulating sport than tackling
the ‘stationary’ target of an assumed late eighth century ‘Homer’.
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