The Making of the Iliad: Disquisition and Analytical Commentary

514 Pages·2011·3.292 MB·English

by  M.L. West

Title Pages
The Making of the Iliad: Disquisition and
Analytical Commentary
M. L. West
Print publication date: 2011
Print ISBN-13: 9780199590070
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2015
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199590070.001.0001
Title Pages
(p.i) The Making of the Iliad (p.ii)
(p.iii) The Making of the Iliad
(p.iv)
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Title Pages
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© M. L. West 2011
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Page 2 of 2
Preface
The Making of the Iliad: Disquisition and
Analytical Commentary
M. L. West
Print publication date: 2011
Print ISBN-13: 9780199590070
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2015
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199590070.001.0001
(p.v) Preface
In this book I expound the view that I have formed over many years about the
composition of the Iliad. My goal is to persuade everyone that something like
this view, if not all the detail, is necessary and ought to be accepted. I have no
expectation of easy or rapid success: a single individual’s efforts, however
spirited, will hardly suffice to check the momentum of the bandwagon and
redirect it onto a different path. But it may be that some of those who have let
themselves be carried on by it for lack of alternative transport may now take the
opportunity to dismount and reappraise the situation, and with their defection
the vehicle’s inertial mass will diminish.
The hypothesis on which my work is based, and which I hold to be essential for
the understanding of the Iliad, is a simple and straightforward one that ought
not to cause anyone intellectual difficulty. It is that the poet progressively
amplified his work, not just by adding more at the end but by making insertions
in parts already composed. The opposing hypothesis is that, being an oral poet
and not on close terms with the art of writing, he must be supposed to have
produced the whole Iliad sequentially in the order in which we have it. My
hypothesis wins because it is founded on study of the poem and observation of
numerous anomalies and discontinuities in the narrative, which it is able to
account for, whereas the other hypothesis is not so founded and is unable to
account for those features, so that they have to be ignored or their significance
denied.
In the first part of the book, the ‘disquisition’, I discuss the poet’s environment
and the materials available to him from current traditions, and I explain the
main points of my analysis of his composition. I supplement this in the second
part by a commentary on the Iliad episode by episode. It is not meant to be a
general commentary; it does not deal with such matters as the language, metre,
or material culture. Its aim is to explain why the narrative takes the form it does,
Page 1 of 2
Preface
both in its larger outlines and in the detail of individual scenes; what is going on
in the poet’s head, what choices he is making, where he has amplified or
retouched. It is not intended to be a guide to what other scholars have thought,
and I make a minimum of reference to secondary literature, though I attempt to
give credit for insights where it is due. It will be seen that most of the scholars I
cite are ones not generally read nowadays.
Laura Bush, until recently First Lady of the United States, has affirmed that ‘if
you think about something for a year, when you actually write it down it (p.vi)
comes off really great’. That is not a dependable rule; but it worked for the poet
of the Iliad, and I hope it has worked for me, though in my case, and probably in
his, rather more than a year was involved.
M.L.W.
Oxford
New Year, 2010
Page 2 of 2
Abbreviations
The Making of the Iliad: Disquisition and
Analytical Commentary
M. L. West
Print publication date: 2011
Print ISBN-13: 9780199590070
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2015
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199590070.001.0001
(p.viii) Abbreviations
Ach.
Achilles
Ag.
Agamemnon
Apollod.
Apollodorus, Bibliotheca
Apollod. epit.
Apollodorus, Bibliotheca, epitome
Ar. Byz.
Aristophanes of Byzantium
arg.
argument
Carm. conv.
Carmina Convivalia (PMG nos. 884–917)
Cat.
Catalogue of Ships
CEG
P. A. Hansen, Carmina Epigraphica Graeca i–ii, Berlin–New York
1983–9
CPh
Classical Philology
Diom.
Diomedes
ed. Praef.
M.L.W., Homeri Ilias, vol. prius, Stuttgart–Leipzig 1998, Praefatio
EFH
M.L.W., The East Face of Helicon, Oxford 1997
FGrHist
Page 1 of 4
Abbreviations
Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker
HCW
M.L.W., The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, Oxford 1985
Hellan.
Hellanicus
Heracl. Lemb. Polit.
Heraclides Lembus, Excerpta politiarum
Hes. Op. 636 n.
note in M.L.W., Hesiod. Works and Days, Oxford 1978
Hes. Th. 208 n.
note in M.L.W., Hesiod. Theogony, Oxford 1966
Hes. Th.
M.L.W., Hesiod. Theogony, Oxford 1966
Hes. WD
M.L.W., Hesiod. Works and Days, Oxford 1978
H. Hom.
Homeric Hymns
Hom.
Iliad and Odyssey
Hom. Epigr.
Homer, Epigrams
IE
Indo-European
IEPM
M.L.W., Indo-European Poetry and Myth, Oxford 2007
Il.
Iliad
Jb. f. kl. Ph.
Jahrbücher für klassische Philologie
Kl. phil. Schr.
Kleine philologische Schriften (p.ix)
Kl. Schr.
Kleine Schriften
KTU
Die keilalphabetischen Texte aus Ugarit
LIMC
Lexikon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae
Men.
Menelaos
Mus. Helv.
Museum Helveticum
Od.
Odysseus
Od.
Page 2 of 4
Abbreviations
Odyssey
P
the poet of the Iliad
PK
the poet of the Doloneia
POd
the poet of the Odyssey
Patr.
Patroclus
P. Lit. Lond.
H. Milne, Catalogue of the Literary Papyri in the British Museum,
London 1927
PMG
Poetae Melici Graeci (ed. D. L. Page)
PMGF
Poetarum Melicorum Graecorum Fragmenta (ed. M. Davies)
Procl.
Proclus, Chrestomathia
RE
Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft
RV
Rigveda
sch.
scholia (schA, schbT, etc., refer to the different bodies of Homeric
scholia)
Sitz.-Ber. München
Sitzungsberichte der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu
München
SPAW
Sitzungsberichte der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der
Wissenschaften zu Berlin
Studies
M.L.W., Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad, Munich–
Leipzig 2001
Thgn.
Theognidea
Wien. St.
Wiener Studien
VdM
Peter Von der Mühll, Kritisches Hypomnema zur Ilias, Basel 1952
Wil.
Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Die Ilias und Homer, Berlin 1916
Wil. HU
id., Homerische Untersuchungen, Berlin 1884
Page 3 of 4
Abbreviations
Wil. Vorl.
id., Homers Ilias (Vorlesung Winter-Semester 1887/1888 Göttingen),
ed. Paul Dräger, Hildesheim–Zürich–New York 2006
Zen.
Zenodotus
(p.x)
For Greek and Latin authors and works and some major periodicals I have
generally used the same abbreviations as the Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd
ed.).
The Epic Cycle and other fragmentary early epics are cited from my Loeb
edition, Greek Epic Fragments from the Seventh to the Fifth Centuries BC
(Cambridge Mass.–London 2003).
Page 4 of 4
Aims and Assumptions
The Making of the Iliad: Disquisition and
Analytical Commentary
M. L. West
Print publication date: 2011
Print ISBN-13: 9780199590070
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2015
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199590070.001.0001
Aims and Assumptions
M. L. West
DOI:10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199590070.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter begins with a brief discussion of Homeric criticism and how it has
been dominated by the Parry–Lord concept of the oral poet for whom writing is
an alien technique. It addresses the question of how adequately the label of oral
poet serves to characterize Homer; and considers Oralists’ view that Homeric
epics are ‘oral dictated texts’, rather than written texts. The chapter then sets
out five propositions: that the Iliad is (almost entirely) the work of one poet; that
he was not the poet of the Odyssey; that he was not called Homer; that he
composed the Iliad with the aid of writing and over a long period; and that he
did not produce it in a linear progression from Α to Ω.
Keywords:   Homer, Iliad, epics, oral poets, oral dictated texts, Homeric criticism, Oralists
You might think that the longer and more closely one studied the Iliad, the more
little weaknesses and discrepancies one would notice. My experience is the
opposite. The more I examine this greatest of all epics, the more I marvel at its
consistency and coherence and at how thoroughly the poet has thought it
through. But it is not one of those structures that are so perfectly finished that
one cannot begin to see how they were made. My aim in this work is to unravel
and explain in detail the stages by which it was conceived and committed to
writing.
The key to understanding the making of the Iliad is, in my view, the recognition
that its poet (whom I forbear to call Homer, for reasons given below; I shall refer
to him as P) did not proceed in a straight line from the beginning to the end but,
working over many years, made insertions, some of them lengthy, in what he had
Page 1 of 13
Aims and Assumptions
already written. I say written, because I think it probable that he wrote out his
poem himself, though the alternative possibility, that he used an amanuensis or a
series of amanuenses, cannot be excluded. The essential point is that he made
insertions in parts of the poem that were already fixed; and fixed means written,
because if they were only fixed in his head they would naturally have moulded
themselves round the insertions more pliably than they have done.
Homeric criticism in my lifetime has been dominated by the Parry–Lord concept
of the oral poet for whom writing is an alien technique. The work of Milman
Parry and his followers brought a gale of fresh air into Homeric studies, but as is
the way with gales, it blew indiscriminately, causing destruction and confusion
as well as exhilaration. The idea that the Iliad and Odyssey go back to the songs
of illiterate bards was in itself nothing new: it is what everyone believed in the
eighteenth century and many in the nineteenth. Nor was the comparison with
the modern oral poetry of the Balkans a novelty. Parry’s achievement was to
explore the formulaic language of epic more fully and to demonstrate its
systematic character, its extension and economy. He inferred that it could not
have been the creation of one man (had anyone imagined it was?) but must have
been the product of a long tradition of oral poetry.
(p.4) Everyone accepts this, together with the view that P was a poet trained in
the traditional manner of composition and using a traditional language that had
evolved over many centuries, bearing signs of its history in its many archaic
features and its mixed dialect. He was familiar with a range of traditional
narratives set in the heroic age and based his own compositions on traditional
material. He was accustomed to present them in oral performance,
accompanying himself on the phorminx like the bards described in the Odyssey.
All this is undisputed. But the question remains how adequately the label of oral
poet serves to characterize him.
One danger is that it distracts attention from his creativity. Oralists have
sometimes given the impression that poems more or less compose themselves in
the singers’ mouths.1 They used to speak of the singers’ ‘improvising’, though it
is now recognized that oral poets do not improvise their songs in performance
but meditate them well beforehand.2 P drew on a rich oral tradition, and I shall
be concerned to identify traditional material and motifs that he used. But he was
a master craftsman who built up his epic with great skill and control, employing
his own design strategies. In this regard there is no gulf separating him from the
epic poet of later ages or the novelist for whom oral performance plays no role.
But the chief defect of the Oralists’ approach is that in their delight with the
vision vouchsafed them by Parry and Lord they do not take sufficient account of
the fact that our Iliad and Odyssey are written texts, and fail to engage seriously
with the question of how this came about. Most written texts come into
existence because their authors write them down. But the Oralists are not happy
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