An Odyssey: A Father, A Son and an Epic: SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE 2017. Daniel Mendelsohn
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so to speak.
Again my father said, Well, I don’t think he’s such a great hero!
He looked around the table. What kind of leader loses all his men? You call that a hero?!
The students laughed out loud. Then, as if fearful that they’d overstepped some boundary, they peered inquisitively down the length of the seminar table at me. Since I wanted to show them I was a good sport, I smiled broadly.
But what I was thinking was, This is going to be a nightmare.
They came back from the campus cafeteria a little before half past eleven, clutching their coffee cups and stomping the snow off their shoes. After they’d settled back into their seats, I launched into my lecture. I ended up talking for most of the remaining hour.
This is the last time I’m going to talk so much in this course, I began. The point of a seminar is for you to do the talking. They don’t pay me enough to talk so much!
There were a few nervous giggles.
I started with the controversy known as the Homeric Question, a centuries-old debate about how Homer’s epics had come into being—whether they had started as written texts or as oral compositions. It was important for the students to grasp the fundamentals of the debate, since significant questions of interpretation hang on which theory you subscribe to.
The Greeks themselves tended to think that there had been a poet called Homer who wrote down his poems. Herodotus thought that Homer must have lived around 800 B.C., four hundred years before his own time; several centuries after Herodotus, Aristarchus, the head of the Library of Alexandria (the greatest scholarly institution of the ancient world) and a renowned authority on Homer’s texts, surmised that the poet had lived about 1050 B.C., a century and a half after the Trojan War itself was supposed to have taken place. It was generally believed that Homer wrote both the Iliad and the Odyssey; but some ancient scholars, called the Separatists, thought the poems were written by two different people. No fewer than seven cities in ancient times claimed Homer as a son.
That was the received wisdom until, in the late 1700s, a French scholar called Villoisin discovered a tenth-century manuscript of the Iliad moldering away in a library in Venice. This manuscript was unlike others that had circulated over the centuries: along with the Greek text of the epic it included transcriptions of the marginal notes of ancient commentators, from Byzantine sages back to the Librarians of Alexandria themselves, writing in the 200s and 100s B.C. The notes made it clear that those earlier commentators had had access to different and sometimes competing versions of the poem. Seizing upon this revelation, a German scholar who was reviewing Villoisin’s work—none other than Friedrich August Wolf, as it happens, the great advocate of philology, the scientific study of literature—arrived at a revolutionary insight: the texts of the Iliad and Odyssey that we possess could not have been fixed in writing until relatively late in their history. Wolf argued—shockingly, to many of his contemporaries—that Homer himself must have been illiterate. Rather than writing his poems down, as had previously been thought, he had instead composed a series of ballads (known as lays) that were short enough to be memorized and which were transmitted orally for generations, perhaps by guilds of professional reciters. At some point later on, these discrete lays were assembled into the immensely long and complex poems we have today by a sophisticated editor/compiler who, unlike his predecessors, did know how to write.
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