Homeric Questions

by Gregory Nagy

A Choice Outstanding Academic Book The "Homeric Question" has vexed Classicists for generations. Was the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey a single individual who created the poems at a particular moment in history? Or does the name "Homer" hide the shaping influence of the epic tradition during a long period of oral composition and transmission? In this innovative investigation, Gregory Nagy applies the insights of comparative linguistics and anthropology to offer a new historical model for understanding how, when, where, and why the Iliad and the Odyssey were ultimately preserved as written texts that could be handed down over two millennia. His model draws on the comparative evidence provided by living oral epic traditions, in which each performance of a song often involves a recomposition of the narrative. This evidence suggests that the written texts emerged from an evolutionary process in which composition, performance, and diffusion interacted to create the epics we know as the Iliad and the Odyssey . Sure to challenge orthodox views and provoke lively debate, Nagy's book will be essential reading for all students of oral traditions.

Genres: Classics, History, Greece, Nonfiction, Mythology, Poetry, Classical Studies

180 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Gregory Nagy is an American professor of Classics at Harvard University, specializing in Homer and archaic Greek poetry. Nagy is known for extending Milman Parry and Albert Bates Lord's theories about the oral composition-in-performance of the Iliad and Odyssey.

Reviews

[Kevin Nobel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This could easily have been a much longer work. Chapter 4 seems off topic, though?

[Mac · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've now read several books by Gregory Nagy, and I find him to be an excellent writer. He expresses his intentions and his arguments very clearly. In Homeric Questions he patiently introduces concepts from (for instance) the study of oral poetry throughout the world, and then applies them to Homer.

The traditional "Homeric question" asks whether there was a single poet who wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey. Here Nagy expands the subject to include other related questions, like how were the poems first transmitted and recorded? Nagy gives surprisingly concrete answers to these perplexing questions. To me his reconstruction of the process whereby the poems emerged from traditional oral poetry into the written forms that have come down to us was quite plausible. He draws lessons from Albert Lord, one of his mentors, without verging into Lord's simplistic picture of Homer dictating his epics to a dutiful scribe.

I highly recommend Homeric Questions to anyone interested in this topic. It is interesting and, for a scholarly work, quite accessible.

[L S · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read this book a couple of times and imagine I'll have to read it again at some point. Homeric Questions precedes Nagy's more extreme views on the homeric question and was a decent read.

All in all I recommend it as an informative and enjoyable book.

[Liam Malone · Rating 4 out of 5]

Compares the lower caste of Indian epic singers to ancient Hellenia aiodoi, who would have sung a locally neutral song/poem or fashioned it add praise to the local audience.