ORAL AND TEXTUAL TRADITIONS

In the late 1920s, Milman Parry revised the picture of the epic tradition by showing the Homeric songs to have been constructed according to a mnemonic technique of analogical verse-making which, in the long run, made it possible for large units of narrative to survive by means of oral transmission alone.

Although there is no unanimous view on the matter today, it remains highly probable that the epics did not originate from a single author but resulted from an oral tradition transmitted over generations. The option of writing down these traditions became available when a Greek version of the Phoenician alphabet to which vowels were added came into general use in the ninth century BCE. Some will still claim that the production of written versions only became common as late as in the sixth century, the argument being that there was no need for texts until then.

The immediate background story of the Iliad is a war between Europe and Asia, or more specifically between the Achaeans (synonymous with the Hellenes) and the Trojans. The war was declared by the Achaeans as an answer to the abduction of King Menelaus’s wife, Helen, by the Trojan prince Paris. Aphrodite, the goddess of erotic love, was actually responsible for the deed in so far as she had promised Helen to Paris as a reward for letting her win the “Miss Olympus” contest. Paris at first hesitated to be an arbiter in divine matters, but no mortal can oppose the will of the gods, and even before Aphrodite’s intervention, moira (fate), the eldest and strongest of divine powers, had already played its trick by throwing in the apple of strife.

The war between Hellas and Troy can be regarded as one of the founding myths of the Panhellenic identity, but we should be very careful not to conflate myth with history (as has been done to differing degrees by many, including Graves 1955: 268ff; Bury & Meiggs 1975: 42ff.; Schliemann [1875] 2010).

The written extracts from the cycle, including the epics and the Athenian plays, deliver important source material for the origins and early history of European literature. For the history of religion, however, the structures of tradition, given the conditions of oral transmission, are of equal importance. Cut to the bone, it would be anachronistic to speak of this mythical reservoir as a literary tradition. What we have is a complex of mythos (meaning “story-telling”) stemming from presumably collective, but ultimately untraceable, roots in a dark past. In archaic times, that is, from the eighth to the sixth century BCE according to most scholars, these traditions became personalized.

Around 700 BCE, Hesiod was the acknowledged author of various epics, including the Theogony (“Birth of Gods”) and Works and Days. Whereas the former unfolded as an inspired version of how the pantheon, the hierarchy of the Gods, came into existence, the latter was apparently occasioned rather mundanely by a hereditary arbitration matter between Hesiod and his brother Perses concerning the division of inherited land.² Hesiod used various myths as a background for framing an appeal, beckoning Perses to abstain from craving too much of his due.

Hesiod shared an important aspect with Homer, though, namely the authority of inspired authorship. The Homeric singer acknowledges his inability to keep track of all the Achaean kings and ships assembled at the shore of Troy, but calls for inspiration from the Muses who, contrary to mortal men, are always present and omniscient (pareste te, iste te panta: Iliad 2.485). Hesiod (Theogony 30-32), for his part, presents himself as the one among peasants whom the Muses have granted the laurel branch as a sign of his ability to speak laudably (and truthfully by implication) of the past.

Many have felt inclined to regard inspiration from the Muses as a form of literary convention, a formal introduction. Indeed it may have come to this at some point, but we have no reason to suspect the means of poetic legitimization in archaic times to be any more “conventional” than the formulaic reference to the Olympians (as, for instance, the human guises of Athena or the oneiric metamorphoses of lascivious Zeus).

Only a century and a half later, though, Parmenides referred to a goddess who let him hear the divine truth, recognizing that he was, already, “a knowing man” (eidota phota, Fragment 1, 3). Like Hesiod, Parmenides wrote a poem in the traditional hexameter style, but in so far as it was later regarded as part of the Milesian peri phuseos tradition, dealing philosophically with the origin of “nature” (phusis), it explicitly opposed tales such as those found in the poetry of Homer and Hesiod. Divine inspiration had turned away from providing knowledge of the affairs of gods and men. Instead it provided a “truth” (aletheid) of a different nature, dissolving the fabulous form of myth from within by turning the substantiality of the gods into the spirited substantiality of phusis, a world that could be grasped, seized and mastered by mortals on their own accord.

To comment further on this discursive break (disrupting a polytheistic and heroic frame of traditional storytelling) within a short presentation of Greek religion would bring us too far from our primary subject. However, we must note, if only as a reminder, that polemics against the poetic tradition of Homer and Hesiod existed at least as far back as in the sixth century BCE. It was around this time that Xenophanes (Fragment 15 Lescher) mocked common people for believing in the anthropomorphic gods of Homer inasmuch as it would entail, reductio ad absurdum, that, for horses and oxen, gods came in the form of horses and oxen. Instead Xenophanes (Fragment 23 Lescher) pointed towards one god, greatest among gods and men, who controlled the world, not by any physical intervention, but by the mere power of his thought (Fragment 25 Lescher). Similarly Thales, also of the sixth century, was said to speak of the “world” (kosmos) as an order “animated” (empsuchon)⁵ and penetrated by the “mind” (nous) of “God” (t/zeos) (B 95 DK).

Yet, although critique of traditional tales, and the undermining of the polytheistic universe that went along with it, was done in some quarters (and apparently tolerated to some degree), the majority of the Greeks knew only the Panhellenic traditions of Homer and Hesiod alongside local myths and legends as well as the ritual obligations which related to them in one way or another.