Orality Essay

When reading the Iliad a number of features are immediately recognisable as being distinctive to the work, even when compared with other ancient epic poems, such as Virgil or Ovid. This is related to the way it was first composed, along with the Odyssey, at some point in the eighth century. The society that Homer lived in had primarily an oral culture: although the Mycenaean Greeks had previously developed the writing system of Linear B, this died out during the Dark Ages. It was not until the end of the fifth century that writing began again to be used in a widespread way, and even then the society still relied on many oral practices. This means that the Iliad, and other poetry of the time, was composed for oral performance and not for reading or studying as a written text. This has unavoidable consequences for how we are to interpret the text.

There are many features of the Iliad that are linked to the way that it was composed. The poem is very repetitive on many levels – characters are often described with the same adjectives or groups of adjectives (‘epithets’), lines and even whole passages are repeated word for word, and scenes such as feasting or putting on armour are described in a very similar way (‘type-scenes’). For example, Agamemnon is often described as ‘Agamemnon lord of men’ and Achilles as ‘swift-footed Achilles’; each of these stock phrases occurs over thirty times throughout the poem. The ways in which first Paris in Book III, then Agamemnon in Book XI, Patroclus in Book XVI, and finally Achilles in Book XIX put on their armour is described in a fixed pattern: after an introduction, their greaves and breastplate are described, then their sword, then shield, then helmet, and finally their spear. The sequence of events, and often exact groups of words or even whole lines are identical on all four occasions.

Earlier commentators tried to suggest reasons for these repetitions: some tried to speculate, for example, that when a line was repeated, one instance was an original composition by Homer and other lines were interpolations and additions from later times. They then tried to work out which lines and passages were original and which were not, so as to remove the offending passages. However the nature of the Iliad is such that the repetitions are in fact integral to the work and if removed, only a bare framework remains.

Commentators also disagreed over how the work was composed: they were divided into ‘analytics’ and ‘unitarians’. The former believed that the Iliad was a patchwork of earlier songs woven together by Homer, and so tried to analyse different strata within the poem, while the latter believed it was composed by a single talented author.

Research done by Milman Parry, and later his assistant Albert Lord in the 1930s resulted in the emergence of another theory: that the Iliad was an orally derived work, composed in a tradition of formulaic language. The features that are so distinctive to the epic were in fact to aid the poet in his composition and performance of the text, and are reflective of the culture that he was living in. With no writing, any text that can be conserved or transmitted must be composed in a way that in makes it easy to remember. This also explains why many such works are composed in a metre, as the rhythm of the words acts as a memory aid.

Parry and Lord analysed the famous noun and epithet combinations (such as ‘swift-footed Achilles’) in relationship to the metre of the poems. The Iliad is written in dactylic hexameter, where lines are made up of six feet, the first five of which are normally dactyls, but can be replaced by spondees. There is also a system of inner metrics, where each line tends to be divided by caesurae into four cola. The most important caesura is the B Caesura, which breaks the line into two uneven cola after the first syllable of the third foot. It is sometimes marked by punctuation, and often separates the line along divisions of sense. The C Caesura is later in the line, after the first syllable of the fourth foot, or between the fourth and fifth foot and there is also an A Caesura possible earlier in the line. This produces a system of various different cola possible, depending on where exactly the caesurae fall. It was found that the repeated words or phrases tended to fit one of these cola.

For example, when a character makes a speech there is often an introductory line announcing it, in two parts, divided by the B Caesura: first ‘τον δαὐτε προσεειπε’ and then the name of the speaker, with their stock epithet, which exactly fits the second half of the line. Examples of these include ‘ἀναξ ἀνδρων Ἀγαμεμνων’ or ‘πολυτλας διος Ὀδυσσευς’. There is also normally no more than one formula¹ that is metrically equivalent for a particular name. Each name has a series of epithets that it can be described by, according to the position that it needs to be in in the line. Hence whether Odysseus is described as ‘πολυτλας διος’ or ‘πολυμητις Ὀδυσσευς’ is dependent not on whether at that particular moment he is being more or less crafty or enduring but on what best fits the metre of the line. This also explains why some of the epithets may seem irrelevant to their circumstance – for example the mother of the beggar Iros is described as ‘queenly’ (XVIII.5-6).

Parry and Lord later carried out fieldwork among the South Slavic singer-poets in 1933-35 with the help of Matija Murko, a Slovenian philologist. They travelled to Yugoslavia to listen to and observe bards in a modern oral culture, producing a substantial archive of recordings. They used this to prove that the techniques used by the South Slavic poets were in many ways similar to those that they were proposing for Homer. These preliterate singers were composing epic songs similar to the Iliad using the same kinds of repetitions and formulas. Since that time, many other cultures in modern times have been studied, which do not use reading and writing. Many of them also...

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