A question of “reception”: how could Homer ever outlive his own moments of performance?

2021.08.30, rewritten 2024.05.05, further rewritten 2025.07.22 | By Gregory Nagy

[This pre-edited standalone essay, rewritten for online publication in Classical Continuum, and then further rewritten—extensively so—in 2025.07.22, originally appeared in Classical Inquiries 2021.08.30. My rewritten version here supersedes the original version, partly because my online contributions to Classical Inquiries, extending from 2015.02.14 to 2021.10.13, are at present not being curated by the Center for Hellenic Studies. More important, this version also supersedes the rewritten version of 2024.05.05, which was presented at a conference titled “The Poet of the Greeks: The Genesis and Reception of Homer in Archaic and Classical Greece,” University of Basel, 05-07 June 2024, organized by Anton Bierl, Alexandra Trachsel, Lars Hübner, Johannes Bernhardt. The new version here has been improved, I hope, thanks to further dialogues with the collegial organizers.]

This essay is about an understanding of Homer. It is intended for a readership that includes experts in ancient Greek language and literature—literature that includes, of course, the poetry of Homer himself, who, for a dominant Greek thinker like Plato in the fourth century BCE, was the Poet, poiētēs, that is, the definitive ‘Maker’ of poetry. This essay is also intended for readers who are experts in related aspects of ancient Greek civilization, including archaeologists. art historians, and historians pure and simple—all of whom have a stake in coming to terms with an understanding of Homer. Likewise to be included among the readers of this essay, I hope, are non-experts who are curious, in any which way, about Homer.

First, a word to non-experts from someone like me, who aims at expertise in the language of Homer—I was initially trained as a linguist who hopes to appreciate the understanding of experts in archaeology, art history, and history itself…  From my own experience, I can predict for my non-expert readers that no one who claims expertise in the study of Homer will ever have the last word on Homer. I also predict, though, that those who do aspire to expertise in Homer will continue to strive for cumulative formulations of their own expertise. In my case, I offer here such a formulation, anchored in my present time and place. What I do offer, however, is hardly a “last word” about Homer. It is merely my own “latest word.”

Next, a word of reassurance to all experts… In this essay, I try to avoid overwhelming my readers with bibliographical references to my own Homeric research. So, from the start, I note simply that most of this work is available online, gratis. In the case of my relevant books, the link is https://chs.harvard.edu. In the case of further relevant research of mine, I cite the online journal Classical Continuum, sometimes mistaken for a “blog,” the link for which is https://continuum.fas.harvard.edu. In this essay, I will try to be sparing with interspersed references to relevant studies published by me and by other “Homerists” at those two sites. Further references are keyed to an extensive Bibliography below, where I also include comments on the relevance of some important works by experts other than myself.

§0. That said, I can now begin in earnest. To start off, I show a painting, which is the featured image that I have chosen for this essay. As we see in the image, a painter is picturing Homer at a moment of performance. Or, I could even say that we see Homer here in a moment of performance—not just at a moment of performance. Homer sings, accompanying himself on his lyre. Viewing him and listening to him most attentively, in the imagination of our painter, are poets from Homer’s future “reception.” Most visible is old Dante himself, and, further away, we can spot a middle-aged Shakespeare, and, off to the side, a youngish Goethe is looking on. But these three canonical poets, representing an imagined “reception” of Homer in future times far removed from the Homeric past, are not reading Homer here. No, they are pictured as actually hearing and even seeing that poet in a very special moment: they are witnessing Homer in the very act of his creating his own poetry. And that is actually how the ancient Greeks, in earlier periods of their prehistory and history, imagined Homer’s very own moments of poetic creation. In such earlier periods, Homer’s poetry-in-the-making was not a written text that was meant to be read. No, his poetry was an oral performance that was meant to be heard—and seen as well. In other words, the very idea of Homer in such earlier periods of the ancient Greek world was linked to Homer’s oral performance, which was imagined as a composition-in-performance. But how could such a Homeric performance, as imagined in the ancient Greek world, outlive the life and times of a prototypical Homer? Or, to ask the question in a more fanciful way, how could Homer ever outlive his own moments of performance?

The “Homeric Question,” viewed in terms of such words as “oral” and “orality”

§1. I have just now used the word oral for the first time in this essay. This word, as also a term I personally dislike, orality, is commonly used in ethnographic descriptions of traditions that do not require the technology of writing. But opinions differ about oral traditions—and about oral poetry in particular. For me, the definitive work on oral poetry—including the oral poetics of Homer—is a book by Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (1960; posthumous 2nd ed. 2000, with new introduction by Stephen Mitchell and myself; 3rd ed. 2019 by David F. Elmer). This book documents the pioneering work of Milman Parry on oral traditions in the former Yugoslavia, 1933–35 (collected papers, Parry 1971). Parry died in 1935, at the beginning of his academic career, before he could publish the results of his research on living oral traditions. His publications are limited mostly to his earlier research, which was based on the textual evidence of Homeric poetry. Parry was a professor of ancient Greek at Harvard University, seeking new answers to the so-called “Homeric Question,” which centered on the historical circumstances that led to the composition of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey. Basically, the “question” came down to this: were the Homeric poems composed with or without the aid of writing? Parry’s project, the comparing of Homeric poetry with the living oral traditions of South Slavic heroic poetry, led him to conclude that the Homeric texts were indeed the products of oral composition. Parry’s research was continued after his death in 1935 by his student, Albert Lord, who conducted his own fieldwork in the former Yugoslavia (especially 1950-51). Lord’s Singer of Tales represents the legacy of their combined efforts.

§2. The cumulative work of Parry and Lord is generally considered to be the single most successful solution to the “Homeric Question,” though the debate among Classicists continues concerning the historical contingencies of Homeric composition. The ultimate success of Parry and Lord, however, can best be measured by tracking the applicability of their methods to a wide range of literatures and pre-literatures beyond the original focus on ancient Greek literature. In what follows, I draw on an earlier attempt of mine at such tracking (Nagy 2001).

Beyond Lord’s Singer of Tales

§3. In the case of pre-literatures, Lord’s Singer of Tales has become a foundational work for the ethnographic study of oral traditions in all their many varieties, and the range of living oral traditions is world-wide: Scottish ballads, folk-preaching in the American South, Xhosa praise poetry, and the list can be extended to hundreds of other examples (bibliography in Foley 1985; the journal Oral Tradition, founded by John M. Foley in 1986, gives an idea of the vast range).

§4. In the case of literatures, the application of the Parry-Lord method to ancient Greek traditions was extended by Lord to medieval traditions in Old English and Old French, and it has been further extended by other scholars to Old Norse, Middle English, Middle High German, Irish, Welsh, and other medieval European traditions. Even further, the Parry-Lord method has been applied to a vast variety of non-European literatures, including classical Arabic and Persian, Indic, and Chinese traditions (there is a survey in Mitchell and Nagy 2000).

§5. In effect, then, the methodology of Parry and Lord has transcended the “Homeric Question.” Their work has led to an essential idea that goes far beyond the historical context of Homeric poetry or of any other tradition. That idea, as formulated by Parry and Lord, is that oral traditions formed the basis of literary traditions.

A brief sketch of earlier views about the “Homeric Question”

§6. This is not to say that such thinking about oral poetry was without precedent. In fact, theories about oral poetry evolved ultimately from far earlier phases of debate among Classicists focusing on the “Homeric Question.” Prototypical versions of the idea can be found in the Homeric theorizing of François Hédelin, Abbé d’Aubignac (already as of 1664; posthumous publication 1715), Thomas Blackwell (1735), Giambattista Vico (1744), and Robert Wood (private publication 1767; posthumous edition 1769). The evolving idea reached a decisive phase in the work of two of history’s most influential editors of Homer, Jean Baptiste Gaspard d’Ansse de Villoison (Prolegomena to his edition of the codex “Venetus A” of the Iliad, 1788) and Friedrich August Wolf (Prolegomena, 1795, to his editions of the Iliad, 1804, and Odyssey, 1807). Both of these Classicists posited a prehistory of oral poetry in the evolution of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey. The notion of such a preliterate phase in the history of ancient Greek epic is also at work in the 1802 Iliad commentary of another major figure in the Classics, Christian Gottlob Heyne. The impact of such notions encouraged a romantic view of oral poetry, as exemplified most prominently by Johann Gottfried Herder, who compared the preliterate phases of Homeric poetry with Germanic folk traditions (Homer, ein Günstling der Zeit, 1795). Romantic views of oral poetry led to the creation of literary folkloristic syntheses like Elias Lönnrot’s Kalevala (1849; first ed. 1835), based on genuine Finnish oral traditions. The romantic literary appropriation of oral traditions could easily lead to excesses: some such literary productions were of disputable ethnographic value, as in the case of James Macpherson’s re-creations of Scottish highlands folklore in The Complete Works of Ossian (1765).

How are Parry and Lord different from their predecessors?

§7. Given all these precedents, we may well ask: why, then, is it Parry and Lord who are primarily credited with the definitive formulation of the general idea that oral traditions formed the basis of literary traditions? The answer is straightforward: Parry and Lord were the first to perfect a systematic way of comparing the internal evidence of living oral traditions, as observed in their “fieldwork,” with the internal evidence of literary traditions. It is primarily their methodology that we see reflected in the ongoing academic usage of such terms as orality and oral theory. (On the pitfalls of using the term oral theory, I stand by my negative comments in Nagy 1996b:19–20, and I will have even more to say about such pitfalls in what follws).

§8. The systematic comparatism of Parry and Lord required rigorous empiricism in analyzing the internal evidence of the living oral traditions—in their case, the South Slavic evidence—which was to be compared with the textual evidence of Homer. To be sure, there have also been other models of internal analysis: an outstanding example is the ethnographic research of Matija Murko on the epics of South Slavic Muslim peoples in the regions of Bosnia and Hercegovina (1913; see especially Lord 1960.280-281n1). Another distinguished forerunner was Wilhelm Radloff, who investigated the Kara Kirghiz oral poetic traditions of Central Asia (1887; see Lord 1960.281n4). Such projects, however, were primarily descriptive, not comparative. In the case of Central Asian epics, for example, the systematic application of comparative methodology, as evident in the work of Karl Reichl (2000), is founded directly on the work of Parry and Lord.

§9. What primarily distinguishes Parry and Lord from their predecessors, then, is their development of a systematic comparative approach to the study of oral traditions. The point of departure for their comparative work, which happened to be primarily the Muslim epic traditions of the former Yugoslavia, gave them an opportunity to test the living interactions of oral and literary traditions. They observed that the prestige of writing as a technology, and of the culture of literacy that it fostered, tended to destabilize the culture of oral traditions—in the historical context that they were studying.

A misleading polarity: “orality” and “literacy”

§10. What Parry and Lord observed about oral poetry was strictly a point of comparison with other possible test cases, not some kind of universalizing formulation (Mitchell and Nagy 2000.xiii; pace Finnegan 1976). For example, Lord himself makes it clear in his later work that there exist many cultures where literary traditions do not cause the destabilization of oral traditions and can even coexist with them (Lord 1991; see also especially Lord 1986b). In general, the textualization or Verschriftung of any given oral tradition needs to be distinguished from Verschriftlichung—that is, from the evolution of any given culture of literacy, any given Schriftlichkeit (Oesterreicher 1993). Thus Mündlichkeit or “orality” and Schriftlichkeit or “literacy” are not polar opposites.

§11. For Parry and Lord, the opposition of literacy and orality—of Schriftlichkeit and Mündlichkeit—is a cultural variable, not a universal. Further, their fieldwork experiments led them to think of literacy and orality as cognitive variables as well (Mitchell and Nagy 2000.xiv). Even further, just as orality defies universalization, so also does literacy. The mechanics and even the concepts of reading and writing vary from culture to culture (Nagy 1998; cf. Svenbro 1988/1993). A striking case in point is the cultural variability of such phenomena as scriptio continua and “silent reading” (Nagy 2000, Gavrilov 1997).

§12. For Parry and Lord, the histories of literary and oral traditions, of literatures and pre-literatures, were interrelated. To underline his observation that the mechanics and esthetics of oral and literary traditions are historically linked, Lord would even speak of “oral literature” (Lord 1995, especially chapter 8). Further, Lord developed the comparative study of oral and literary traditions into a new branch of Comparative Literature (Guillén 1985/1993:173–179). It is no accident that Lord’s Singer of Tales was originally published in a Comparative Literature monograph series, and that the author of the Preface of 1960 was Harry Levin, who at the time figured as the doyen of the relatively new field of Comparative Literature—and who had actually taken part in Lord’s thesis defense (Mitchell and Nagy 2000.xvii).

§13. Despite this stance of Parry and Lord, it has been claimed—many times and in many ways—that the Parry-Lord “theory” is founded on a hard-and-fast distinction between orality and literacy. These claims stem from unfamiliarity with the ethnographic dimension of Parry’s and Lord’s work, and, more generally, from ignorance about the observable mechanics and esthetics of oral traditions. Such unfamiliarity fuels prejudices, as reflected in the criticism directed at Lord for even attempting to undertake a comparison of South Slavic oral traditions with the literary traditions represented by the high cultures of the Classical and medieval civilizations of Western Europe. The implicit presupposition, that oral traditions are inferior to the esthetic standards of Western literature, is tied to romanticized notions about distinctions between literacy and orality (Mitchell and Nagy 2000.xiv):

Much of this kind of criticism, as Lord documents in his later books [1991 and 1995], has been shaped also by an overall ignorance of the historical facts concerning literacy and its cultural implications in the Balkans. Besides this additional obstacle, there is yet another closely related one: many Western scholars romanticize literacy itself as if it were some kind of uniform and even universal phenomenon—exempt from the historical contingencies of cultural and even cognitive variations. Such romanticism, combined with an ignorance of the ideological implications of literacy in the South Slavic world, have led to a variety of deadly prejudices against any and all kinds of oral traditions. In some cases, these prejudices have gone hand in hand with a resolute blindness to the potential ideological agenda of literacy in its historical contexts.

§14. Thus the danger of romanticism is two-sided: much as some humanists of the nineteenth century romanticized oral tradition as if it were some kind of universal phenomenon in and of itself, humanists today may be tempted to romanticize literacy as the key to “literature,” often equated with “high” culture (on empirical approaches to distinctions between “high” and “low” culture, as occasionally formalized in distinctions between oral and written traditions, see Bausinger 1980).

§15. And yet, the only universal distinction between oral and literary traditions is the historical anteriority of the first to the second. Beyond this obvious observation, it is pointless to insist on any universalizing definitions for the “oral” of “oral tradition.” “Oral tradition” and “oral poetry” are terms that depend on the concepts of “written tradition” and “written poetry.” In cultures that do not depend on the technology of writing, the concept of orality is meaningless (Lord 1995:105n26). From the standpoint of comparative ethnography, “Written is not something that is not oral; rather it is something in addition to being oral, and that additional something varies from society to society” (Nagy 1990:8). The absence of this technology has nothing to do with whether there can or cannot be poetics or rhetoric. Poetics and rhetoric exist without writing.

§16. A common misconception about oral traditions is that they are marked by a lack of organization, cohesiveness, unity. The problem here, again, is a general unfamiliarity with the ethnographic evidence from living oral traditions, which can be used to document a wide variety of poetics and rhetoric (see especially Lord 1995). The verbal art or Kunstsprache of oral traditions can reach levels of virtuosity that are indirectly or sometimes even directly comparable to what is admired in the classics of script and print cultures. In some cultural contexts, the Kunstsprache of oral traditions can be even more precise than that of counterparts in literary traditions, because the genres of oral poetics and rhetoric tend to be more regularly observed (Smith 1974, Ben-Amos 1976, Slatkin 1987). In the history of literature, genres can become irregular through a striving for individual greatness: if we follow the perspective of Benedetto Croce (1902), a literary work is great because it defies genres, because it is sui generis.

§17. By contrast, the forms of genres in oral traditions are sustained by the forms of everyday speech in everyday life. Thus the Kunstsprache of oral tradition allows its participants to “connect,” even in modern times (Martin 1993.227): “Modern hearers of a traditional epic in cultures where the song making survives are observed to comment appreciatively on the smallest verbal changes, not in the way a three-year-old demands the exact words of a bedtime text, but with a full knowledge of the dozens of ways the teller could have spun out a line at a given point in the narrative. In a living oral tradition, people are exposed to verbal art constantly, not just on specific entertainment occasions, which can happen every night in certain seasons. When they work, eat, drink, and do other social small-group activities, myth, song, and saying are always woven into their talk. Consequently, it is not inaccurate to describe them as bilingual, fluent in their natural language but also in the Kunstsprache of their local verbal art forms.”

Homer’s oral poetry as composition-in-performance

§18. So far, I have been arguing in general that the very idea of Homer, in earlier periods of the ancient Greek world, was linked to Homer’s oral poetry. This argument can be linked with an even more general argument made by both Parry and Lord, which is, that the oral poetry of Homer was a matter of composition-in-performance. But how could such Homeric performance, as it existed in the ancient Greek world, outlive the life and times of a performing Homer? Or, to ask the question in a more fanciful way, how could Homer ever outlive his own moments of performance?

§19. Before I attempt to address such a question, I must emphasize that the “reception” of Homer, grounded in the realities of ancient Greek history, was different from what is usually also called the “reception” of Homer in later times, when the poetry of Homer was no longer heard in oral performance. Contradicting the fantasy pictured in the painting that I showed at the beginning of this essay, where canonical poets who lived in far later times could still get a chance to hear and to see an exquisite moment of composition-in-performance by Homer himself, the grim reality of Homeric “reception” in the poetic worlds of a Dante or a Shakespeare or a Goethe was a simple historical fact: the oral tradition of Homeric poetry was dead, and had been dead for a long time. In fact, Homeric oral poetry was already dying in the later periods of ancient Greek history. And, for the longest time by now, Homeric poetry has survived only as a written text to be read by its readers—sometimes in the original or, in most cases, in translations or in paraphrases. And here I return to my fanciful question: how, then, could Homer ever outlive his moments of in-person performance?

Rethinking the term “reception”

§20. My question, as I just posed it again, can best be answered, I suggest, if we rethink the term “reception,” which I have so far been treating with indifference, isolating it within quotation-marks. As I have already implied, however, a distinction needs to be made. For me, there are two different kinds of reception, and I will focus on the earlier kind. The later kind is all too familiar, corresponding to the use of the term reception in conventional literary criticism today, where it refers to the responses of readers to the written text of a given literary production. But here I introduce a different and defamiliarizing use of the term, focusing on an earlier kind of reception, referring to a “literary” production that is oral. In any given oral tradition of verbal art, the reception of this tradition by its audience—or, to say it better, by the society in which the oral tradition was generated—is not just incidental. It is essential. The reception of a textual tradition, if it gets neglected over time or even if it dies altogether, can still be brought back to life—however imperfectly—if any texts have survived. By contrast, death for the reception of an oral tradition signals death for such a tradition. An oral tradition cannot survive without reception. Even if some transcript of oral traditional performance survives, such a text cannot, of and by itself, bring back to life the structural realities of the oral tradition, and any new reception of such a text could now become simply a textual reception, even if the text imitates an oral performance or, better, serves as a script for such a would-be oral performance.

§21. With this distinction between oral and textual reception in place, I am ready to restate more clearly, I hope, an obvious historical fact: the oral reception of Homeric poetry is dead, and it died a very long time ago. But how long ago? It is difficult to give a precise answer, since only the textual reception survives, and it is only by studying the history of that reception that we have any hope of reconstructing, at least in broad outlines, the history—or, better, prehistory—of an earlier oral reception.

§22. About the point I just made… I go out of my way here, with reference to my use of the term “prehistory,” to praise one of the organizers of the conference where I originally presented a shorter version of my essay here. He is Lars Hübner, whom I very much admire for his methodological thoroughness in considering, from a historicist’s point of view, the prehistory as well as the history of Homeric reception. I cite especially two most relevant works of his (Hübner 2019 and 2022), where he analyzes a stretch of time that extends from oral to textual phases in the reception of Homeric poetry. In what follows, it will be clear that I mostly agree with his interpretations, which I value even in moments of possible disagreement. I also signal here the relevant work of Anton Bierl 2015a and 2015b.

About the prehistory and the history of Homeric reception

§23. That said, I proceed with my own attempt at interpreting both the prehistory and the history of Homeric reception. I start by citing a set of twin books I have produced on the subject of Homeric poetry, Homer the Classic (2009|2008) and Homer the Preclassic (2010|2009). In these two books, I have attempted to reconstruct the overall reception of this poetry, going backward in time, and thus showing that the relatively later phases of Homeric reception became merely textual, while the earlier phases were still oral. In two earlier twin books on the same subject of Homeric poetry, Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond (1996a) and Homeric Questions (1996b), I had attempted a different kind of reconstruction, going forward as well as backward in time.

§24. This kind of two-way reconstructing in the four books I just cited was an exercise in describing the periodizations of Homeric poetry not only by way of approaches familiar to historians. I also applied approaches that can best be described as exercises in diachronic as well as synchronic analysis. When I say “synchronic” and “diachronic” here, I am following the terminology of Ferdinand de Saussure (1916:117), and I draw special attention to the fact that, for Saussure, the term “diachronic” was synonymous with the term “evolutionary.” I should add here my view (argued at length in another essay (Nagy 2011 §§13–16), that the word “diachronic” should not be used as a synonym of the word “historical.” I offer here merely a brief epitome of this view:

It is a mistake to equate the term diachronic with the familiar term historical, as is often done. Diachrony refers to the potential for evolution in a structure, whereas history is not restricted to phenomena that are structurally predictable. We can build synchronic models to describe and explain the workings of a structure as we see it attested in a given historical context. We can likewise build diachronic models to describe and explain how that given structure may have evolved from one of its phases into other phases. What we have built, however, is a set of models to be tested on historical realities. The models are not the same thing as the realities themselves. And the realities of history as a process are not dependent on such models. History may either confirm or upset any or all aspects of our models, since the contingencies of history do not need to follow the rules of existing structures.

§25. Accordingly, in my two earlier twin-books, I referred to my reconstruction of Homeric periodizations as an evolutionary model, not a historical model, even though my modeling relied heavily on the few historical facts that do survive.

Summarizing an evolutionary model for reconstructing the prehistory and history of Homeric poetry

§26. I will now summarize such a model, as posited in my books Poetry as Performance (1996a:110) and Homeric Questions (1996b:42) and as refined in two later books of mine, Homer the Classic (2009|2008) and Homer the Preclassic (2010|2009). For further citations of these four books I will hereafter to them simply as “PP,” “HQ,”, “HC,” and “HPC” plus the relevant page-numbers.

§27. In terms of my evolutionary model, I reconstruct five consecutive “periods” for the prehistory and eventual history of “Homer,” where the evolution extends from prehistoric to historical times. Here is an outline (based on HC 4–6 = P §§11–14, with revisions based especially on a review-article, Nagy 2014a):

Period 1 of Homer was a relatively most fluid period, with no written texts, extending from the early second millennium BCE to the middle of the eighth century in the first millennium BCE. When I say that this period was most fluid, I mean that the epic traditions that evolved into what eventually became the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey could not yet be distinguishable from other epic traditions that evolved into what eventually became known as the Epic Cycle. Relevant is the name of Homer, the etymology of which is related to the meaning of kuklos, translated by Classicists as ‘Cycle’ with reference to the Epic Cycle. I explain more fully in HPC (255–256 = II §331), but I can offer an epitome here:

The name of Homer, Homēros (Ὅμηρος) is a “speaking name” or nomen loquens. Etymologically, the form Homēros is a compound *hom-āros meaning ‘he who fits / joins together’, composed of the prefix homo- ‘together’ and the root of the verb arariskein (ἀρ-αρ-ίσκειν) ‘fit, join’ (Chantraine DELG under the entry ἀραρίσκω). So, Homēros is ‘he who fits [the song] together’. Relevant is the idea of the epic Cycle or kuklos in its earlier sense of referring to all poetry composed by Homer (on this earlier sense of kuklos with reference to all poetry composed by Homer, see Pfeiffer 1968:73, also HQ 38). This meaning of kuklos as the sum total of Homeric poetry goes back to a metaphorical use of kuklos in the sense of ‘chariot wheel’ (Iliad XXIII 340, plural kukla at V 722). The metaphor of comparing a well-composed song to a well-crafted chariot wheel is explicitly articulated in the poetic traditions of Indo-European languages (as in Rig-Veda 1.130.6); more generally in the Greek poetic traditions, there is a metaphor comparing the craft of the tektōn ‘joiner, master carpenter’ to the art of the poet (as in Pindar Pythian 3.112–114; commentary, with further documentation, in Nagy 1979/1999: 297–300). So the etymology of Homēros, in the sense of ‘fitting together’, is an aspect of this metaphor: a master poet ‘fits together’ pieces of poetry that are made ready to be parts of an integrated whole just as a master carpenter or joiner ‘fits together’ or ‘joins’ pieces of wood that are made ready to be parts of a chariot wheel (PP 74–75).

Moreover as I argue further, this etymology of Homer’s name is compatible in meaning with the etymology of the noun homēros (ὅμηρος) in the sense of ‘hostage’, which derives from the same compound *hom-āros meaning ‘he who fits / joins together’ (HPC 254–264 = II §§327–351, a section titled “Homer the Federal Hostage”).

Period 2 of Homer was a more formative or Panhellenic period, still without written texts, extending from the middle of the eighth century BCE to the middle of the sixth. On the term Panhellenic, see HQ 39-42. Within this period I reconstruct two sub-periods, 2a and 2b (as outlined in Nagy 2014a):

Sub-period 2b extends from the early seventh century to the middle of the sixth. During this sub-period, the center of gravity shifts from festival of the Panionia, which had united the twelve Ionian cities of the Ionian Dodecapolis, to the earliest phases of a festival in the city-state of Athens, situated on the European side of the Aegean Sea, in the city-state of Athens. This Athenian festival, known as the Panathenaia, eventually became so important as to validate the mythologized claim of Athens to be the mētropolis or ‘mother city’ of the Ionians (HPC 10-12 = I §§15-23). Parallel to my earlier use of the term Panionic Homer, I now use the term Panathenaic Homer in referring to the tradition of performing the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey as these epics were taking shape at the festival of the Panathenaia from the late seventh century into the middle of the sixth century BCE. To be contrasted are other epic traditions, eventually known as the Epic Cycle, which could still be performed at the Panathenaia in this Period 2 but which had already become obsolete by the time we reach Period 3. In Period 2, however, there was still a tenuous coexistence of the Cycle with the eventually free-standing set of the two mutually interacting epics that evolved into the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey of Period 3.

Period 3 of Homer was a far more definitive period, centralized in Athens, and extending from the middle of the sixth century BCE to the later part of the fourth. It is in this period that Homeric poetry begins to approximate what has come down to our time as the textual tradition of “our” Iliad and Odyssey. In this period, the textualization of these two epics was becoming a reality, and I refer to potential texts in this period as transcripts.

Somewhere near the beginning of this period, in the middle of the sixth century BCE, performance traditions of Homeric poetry in Athens became definitive in the historical context of reforms undertaken by the Peisistratidai, an aristocratic family that dominated Athens at the time. These reforms, centering on the reorganization of the Athenian state festival of the Panathenaia, culminated in the official adoption of the Panionic tradition of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey, which as we have seen had been shaped in Period 2a, back in the eighth and seventh century BCE. By the time of Period 2b, in the sixth century BCE, this Panionic transmission of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey was mediated primarily by the Homēridai ‘sons of Homer’, a lineage of rhapsodes originating from the Ionian island-state of Chios (HPC 20-28 = I §§35–54, 57 = I §138, 59-78 = I §§141–187). As we have already seen, the state of Chios had been a member of the Ionian Dodecapolis, and so the Chiote transmission of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey can be traced as far back as Period 2a, which marks the Panionic phase of these epics as they took shape in the historical context of the Panionia, the festival of the Ionian Dodecapolis (HPC 28 = I §§52–53). But then, toward the end of the sixth century BCE, this mediation of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey by the Homēridai of Chios shifted from Chios to Athens. According to an ancient source (“Plato” Hipparkhos 228b-c), Hipparkhos the son of Peisistratos introduced in Athens a law that required rhapsodes competing at the quadrennially recurring Panathenaia to perform the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey in relay; by having to take turns in performing these epics in the sequence required by the narration, the performers had to collaborate as well as compete with each other in the performances of these two epics (HPC 21-26 = I §§36–46). The most likely occasion for the first such performance in Athens was the celebration of the festival of the Panathenaia in 522 BCE (HPC 20-21 = I §35). This is not to say that the Panionic tradition of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey would have been unknown in Athens before 522 BCE: it is only to say that the tradition of performing these epics in relay was not officially institutionalized in Athens before this time (HPC 67–69 = I §§164–167). In terms of this reconstruction, the new tradition of performing the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey in relay at the Panathenaia stems from an older tradition of performing these epics in relay at the Panionia, and, as we have seen, the mediators between these two traditions were the Homēridai ‘sons of Homer’, originating from Chios (again, HPC 67–69 = I §§164–167).

In terms of this reconstruction, the Panionic tradition of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey stemming from the Ionian Dodecapolis in period 2a lasted through Period 2b in Chios. Then, in Period 3, the Chiote form of the Panionic tradition was adopted in Athens.

This period is linked with mythological narratives that retell how Peisistratos of Athens collected the poetry of Homer, which was left scattered throughout Asia Minor after the poet’s death, and how he reintegrated this poetry as a totality in his own city (Greek Anthology 11.442; further documentation in HPC 314-318 = E §§11–22). Such an act of integration, commonly known today as the Peisistratean Recension, is interpreted by some as a historical fact and by others as an antiquarian invention (survey in HQ 93-105). In terms of a diachronic model, however, the interpretation is different: the basic narrative about the Peisistratean Recension is a charter myth, a totalizing narrative that is meant to explain the unity of Homeric poetry as performed in the city of Athens: in terms of the myth, grounded in this city, Peisistratos unified Homeric poetry by reintegrating what had become disintegrated in a multiplicity of performances throughout the other cities of the Greek-speaking world, particularly in Asia Minor (HPC 315 = E §13). There is no need to insist, however, that the entire Iliad and the entire Odyssey were performed on each and every occasion of the Panathenaia. Comparative ethnographic evidence shows that a given group attending a given festival may conceptualize the performance of an epic as a notional totality that fits the occasion, even if only a part of the given epic is actually performed (Nagy 2003:15n74). I will have more to say later about this concept of notional totality.

During Period 3, the transmitters of a set of epics known as the Epic Cycle were already starting to gravitate away from the tendency of attributing these epics to Homer (HPC 25 = I §44, 69-70 = I §169). According to some ancient sources, for example, the epics known as the Aithiopis and the Iliou Persis (or Destruction of Troy) could be attributed to a poet known as Arctinus of Miletus (Proclus summary p. 105.21-22 and p. 107.16-17 ed. Allen); correspondingly, the Little Iliad could be attributed to another poet, Lesches of Lesbos (p. 106.19-20). Such epics of the epic Cycle continued to be performed in Athens during this period, as we can see from signs of Athenian accretions in the content (HPC 320 = E §31). At the festival of the Panionia at the Panionion of the Ionian Dodecapolis in Asia Minor, on the other hand, such a differentiation between Homer and the poets of the epic Cycle may have been taking place far earlier—as early as the late eighth and early seventh century BCE (HPC 69–70 = I §169, 95–96 = I §230, 319-320 = E §29).

Period 4 of Homer was a standardizing period, with texts in the sense of transcripts or even scripts, extending from the later part of the fourth century BCE to the middle of the second. Somewhere near the start of this period, between the years 317 and 307, there was another reform of Homeric performance traditions in Athens, initiated by a dominant figure in the politics of the city at that time, Demetrius of Phaleron: by that time, there existed an “Athenian State Script” of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey, established for the regulation of performances at the festival of the Panatheania (details in PP chapter 6: “Homer as Script”).

Period 5 of Homer was a relatively most rigid period, with texts as “scripture,” from the middle of the second century BCE onward. This period starts with the completion of the editorial work of Aristarchus of Samothrace on the Homeric texts, not long after 150 BCE or so (details in PP chapter 7: “Homer as Scripture”).

§28. In this sequence of five periods, we see the intervention of what I call written texts, starting at period 3. The term written text, however, is too imprecise for my purposes, and I have introduced the more precise terms transcript, script, “scripture.” By transcript I mean the broadest possible category of written text: a transcript can be a record of performance, even an aid for performance, but not the equivalent of performance (HQ 34-36, 65-69). We must distinguish a transcript from an inscription, which can traditionally refer to itself in the archaic period as just that, an equivalent of performance (HQ 34–36). As for script, I mean a narrower category, where the written text is a prerequisite for performance (PP 153–186, HQ 32–34). By “scripture” I mean the narrowest category of them all, where the written text need not even presuppose performance (187–206).

A clarification of the term transcript as applied to Period 3

§29. As I look back on this evolutionary model as I have just summarized it, I now see that some clarification is needed with regard to my thinking about what I call Period 3, which is a wide time-frame that extends, by my reckoning, from the middle of the sixth century BCE to the later part of the fourth. In my overall reconstruction, covering five “periods” in the evolution of Homeric poetry, I view this Period 3 as transitional—to the extent that my model allows for the possibility that scribes within this time-frame could and perhaps did make copies or “transcripts” of Homeric poetry. But I emphasize that the existence of such “transcripts,” in terms of my posited reconstruction, would not have killed the oral reception of this poetry during this period..

§30. At this point I need to make a clarification, since my use of this word “transcript” in this context has been criticized as inconsistent. Such a criticism is made, for example, in a book by Jonathan Ready (2019), with whose work on Homeric poetry I generally agree. But here I must engage in some friendly disagreement concerning his relevant criticism (especially at his p. 178).

§31. Although I state, at one point (HQ 65), that a transcript could be used “to record any given composition and to control the circumstances of any given performance,” this statement does not contradict a more general statement I make at a later point (HQ 67), where I speak not about a transcript used as a “control” but simply as “an aid to performance.” I see no inconsistency here, since my point all along (starting at HQ 65) was that a transcript could potentially be used as an aid to performance—but not necessarily so. As for the “aid,” it could take the form of actual “control” over content, but that kind of “aid” would be an extreme case, and I left room for an opposite extreme, that is, in cases where a transcript, even if it exists, is not used at all as any kind of “aid” for performance.

§32. Accordingly, I also see no inconsistency in another relevant statement I made in another publication (Nagy 2014a:100), where I say that my use of the term transcript “makes it clear that a transcript has no influence on performance.” If this statement (as quoted by Ready p. 178) is taken out of context, then, yes, I would have to restate by saying “a transcript does not necessarily have any influence on performance,” but this same statement, if it were to be read in context, would make such a restatement unnecessary. When I was saying that a transcript, of and by itself, has “no influence” on performance, I was responding to a mis-statement of my views in the work of another Homerist, Minna Skafte Jensen (2011:217), with whom I otherwise also generally agree. In this case, I disagree with her claim that “Nagy’s hypothesis attributes to the written transmission features that are characteristic of oral composition and transmission.” Contesting this mis-statement, I went on to say (Nagy 2014a:100): “In fact, my point is just the opposite: period 3 is a time of oral transmission, not written transmission, and that is why I use the word transcript with reference to any possibility of existing texts.” In the same context, Jensen (2011:217) refers to “the dogma concerning the interaction between the two media [that is, the medium of oral performance and the medium of writing a text].” I quote again from my response (Nagy 2014:100): “But I posit no such ‘interaction’, and that is the point of my using the term ‘transcript’.” Also, just as a “transcript” in period 3 does not necessarily influence the oral reception, the same can be said even about a “script,” in the later “period 4,” which I dated as extending from the later part of the fourth century BCE to the middle of the second. Even a “script,” though it could potentially exert more control over a given performance, would not necessarily interfere with the oral reception of Homeric poetry—at least, not in the long run.

A word about bibliographical challenges

§33. The preceding paragraphs, which are tediously specific with bibliographical citations, have been an exception, so far, to a plan that I signaled at the beginning of my essay, which was, to avoid, to avoid any overly detailed citations. My excuse, however, for specificity in the present case is simply this: I need here to defend a central thesis that pervades my argumentation in all my work on Homer. That thesis, to sum up what I have argued here as well, is that the reception of Homeric poetry in earlier phases of its evolution depended on the oral tradition of this poetry by contrast with later phases that depended purely on textual transmission of this poetry.

§34. Wherever I formulate solutions to Homeric questions that do not depend on secondary bibliography, that is, on published work of experts who had confronted the same questions but whose solutions were unsuccessful, at least in my opinion, the approach I prefer to take is to avoid entering into detailed debates with such experts and to concentrate instead on trying to consolidate my various solutions by integrating them into what I have described, at the very start of my essay here, as cumulative formulations. In taking such an approach, however, I have been faced with bibliographical challenges: for example, what about situations where evidence was lacking, and where I had only a partial solution to a given Homeric question? In such situations, I try to cite secondary bibliography, yes, but without losing sight of the partial solution that I had already figured out for the given question. That is what I mean when I speak of “bibliographical challenges”: how do I keep track of a partial solution without getting bogged down in secondary bibliography? In this essay, I concentrate on one such challenge, the question of “transcripts.”This question, I will now argue, is linked to the historical reality of Homeric performances by professional reciters called rhapsōidoi ‘rhapsodes’ at the seasonally recurring festival of the Panathenaia in Athens.

On rhapsodes at the Panathenaia

§35. On historical facts about rhapsodes at the Panathenaia, I recommend here two most relevant books. The first of these, by José M. González, was published in 2013, while the second of the two, edited by Jonathan Ready and Christos Tsagalis, appeared in 2018. In a recent essay (Nagy 2025.06.04), I have already commented in detail about them, and I offer an epitome here, which will help me stay on track.

§36. In the case of the 2013 book by González, which I will hereafter abbreviate as JMG, I highlight not only his balanced argumentation concerning the art of the rhapsodes but also his critical survey of secondary bibliography. The thoroughness of the work done by JMG has I think strengthened exponentially my own previous work on rhapsodes, especially with regard to arguments I have made in twin books, already mentioned, titled Homer the Classic and Homer the Preclassic, which I continue to abbreviate as HC and HPC, against the specific idea that Homeric rhapsodes were simply memorizers of a Homeric text and against the general idea of assuming the existence of some kind of a stark contrast between a poetically creative aoidos ‘singer’, as represented by Homer, and a supposedly non-creative rhapsōidos ‘rhapsode’. At stake here in particular is my cumulative interpretation, as best presented at HC (373–386 = 3 §§47–76), concerning Plato’s metaphor in the Ion (536a–c) comparing divine poetic inspiration to a magnet. The logic of this Platonic metaphor, as I have argued (in HC and in earlier work), fits my overall diachronic reconstruction of the rhapsodic art. But my reconstruction, which was achieved independently of Plato’s metaphor, can be badly misinterpreted if you think of it merely as an extrapolation that supposedly depends on that metaphor. (JMG at 8.3.2 analyzes a glaring example of such a misinterpretation, with further analysis at 10.1. Given the thoroughness of JMG, however, I see no point in exhuming here the grim remains of defective interpretations that JMG has already laid to rest.)

§37. Next I turn to the 2018 book edited by Ready and Tsagalis, which I will hereafter abbreviate as R&T. I see here a major step forward in explorations of the available evidence, however fragmentary, about the Homeric performances of rhapsodes at the Panathenaia in Athens. Both editors contribute chapters. Also contributing is Sheramy D. Bundrick, whose Chapter 2 presents an exhaustive analysis of the relevant iconographical evidence revealed in Athenian vase paintings. A salient example of a pictured rhapsode is a painting that I had once chosen for the illustration that appeared on the cover of my 2003 book, Homeric Responses. Here is the basic information about that painting: it is a black-figure pseudo-Panathenaic amphora, probably from Orvieto. Pictured is a rhapsode standing on a bēma ‘platform’, wearing a wreath and holding a curved staff, flanked by two listeners. Ca. 520–500 BCE. Stadtmuseum Oldenburg, XII.8250.2. Relevant here is a pioneering article by Alan Shapiro (1993).

§38. Beyond my remarks so far, I now offer a brief inventory of pages in this book edited by R&T that provide further background on rhapsodes:

51–52: a critical analysis of various scenarios for reconstructing rhapsodic performances of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey at the Panathenaia.

52: on the Odeum of Pericles as a possible venue for such performances.

72n38, also at p. 95n10: on the rhapsode (or aulode) pictured on a Panathenaic amphora by the Kleophrades Painter.

72n39: on the notional totality of epic performance by rhapsodes; see also Nagy 2018.11.22. In my essay here, I will have more to say later about this idea of notional totality.

72n41: on arguments against the notion of a prototypical standard written text of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey, to be followed verbatim by the rhapsodes.

80 Figure 2.4: pseudo-Panathenaic amphora, showing a rhapsode on the reverse, ca. 520 BCE; Oldenburg, Stadtmuseum.

82 Figure 2.6: calyx krater, showing apparently a rhapsode ascending a bēma ‘platform’; Pantoxena Painter, ca. 440 BCE; Tarquinia.

90: on the so-called Panathenaic Regulation concerning rhapsodic performance of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey.

91: on the Pantoxena Painter’s “rhapsodic scene,” as shown in Figure 2.6 at p. 82, noted above.

91–92: on the Odeum of Pericles as a possible venue for rhapsodic performances of Homeric poetry.

92: on the rhapsode and the bēma ‘platform’, as represented by the Pantoxena Painter. Bundrick notes that “it is reasonable to imagine” the scene as taking place inside the Odeum. She adds: “A bēma would certainly have helped with any visibility issues arising from the apparent forest of columns.” On the term “forest of columns” as applied to the interior of the Odeum, I refer to my observations in HC (545 = 4 §178). For more on the columns inside the Odeum, I refer to the remarks of Bundrick p. 97n33.

329: on the poetics of relay performance in Iliad 9.190–191; reference here to JMG 10.2.3.2.

330: on the poetics of continuity, metaphorized as fabric-work in Odyssey 8.429; reference here to HC (227–232 = 2 §§82–96) and to JMG 10.2.3.6.

More on rhapsodes

§39. In the twin books Homer the Classic and Homer the Preclassic, which I continue to abbreviate as HC and HPC, I paid special attention to the Athenian customary law, nowadays known as the Panathenaic “Rule” or “Regulation,” which required rhapsodes to perform the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey in their proper narrative sequence. The clearest attestation of this regulation comes from the fourth century BCE: the relevant text is Lycurgus Against Leokrates 102 (as analyzed especially in HPC 23–26 = I §§43–46). As I argue about this “rule,” such continuity in narration made it necessary for the rhapsodes to perform the Iliad and Odyssey in relay, which involved cooperation as well as competition. By way of this argument, I offered a possible solution to one of the biggest of all Homeric problems, which boils down to this basic question: how to explain the narrative unity of the Iliad and Odyssey? In terms of my solution, a so-called “unitarian” understanding of Homeric poetry could be explained in terms of an ongoing need, over a lengthy period of evolution in the medium of epic, to sequence the narrative by way of cooperation in the act of narration—that is, in the performance of the narrative.

§40. But this solution was not complete. What made it incomplete is the fact that we have no evidence about the duration of Homeric performance by rhapsodes in the historical context of the Panathenaia. And here is where I address the bibliographical challenge of tracking the many different attempts at reconstructing such a historical context. In doing so, I restrict myself (as I have already done in HPC 26 = I §46 n65) to citing just one secondary bibliographical source, an article by Jonathan Burgess, published in 2004. I have two reasons for such a narrow citation. First, this article by Burgess provided what was already then, to my mind, the broadest available survey of attempted explanations of the historical context. And, second, the explanation offered by Burgess himself was for me the most persuasive of them all, even though I did not fully agree with it.

§41. In a general book on Homer published later, in 2015, Burgess recapitulates his explanation at p. 73:

A notable opportunity for performance of epic was at the Panathenaic festival at Athens, held every fourth year. Some testimony from the fourth century BCE reports regulation for sequential performance of ‘Homer’ at this event. […] Homerists are naturally eager to suppose that all of the Iliad and Odyssey were thus performed, with the regulation perhaps based on authentic texts of them; this is optimistic; it is questionable whether there was enough time to perform both epics […].

§42. I agree with Burgess—to the extent that there has been, I think, even as I write this now, no plausible reconstruction of the events at the Panathenaia that would allow for a complete performance of the entire Iliad and Odyssey as we know these two epics.

§43. I also agree with Burgess (2004, especially pp. 17–18) when he argues that the ultimate solution for understanding the regulation of sequencing in rhapsodic performance can be found by way of broadening our understanding of the process of sequencing itself in oral poetics. In this regard, Burgess (p. 17n68) cites the relevant arguments of Erwin Cook 1999 (especially p. 159n29). I too have cited these arguments of Cook (in HC 124 = 1 §99, n106).

§44. But I go further (as I have already done in HPC, especially at pp. 68–69, 79–80, 96 = I §§167, 188, 231) by tracing the principle of sequencing in the performance of Homeric poetry at the Panathenaia back to an earlier pattern of sequencing at the festival of the Panionia in the late eighth and early seventh centuries BCE, as analyzed by Douglas Frame (2009 Part 4).

§45. Still further, I argue (as already in HPC) that the so-called Epic Cycle, which was also part of the epic repertoire in earlier phases of the Panathenaia, shows a less continuous kind of narratological sequencing than does the epic of the Iliad and Odyssey. With regard to the Cycle, I stress here its eventual obsolescence in the epic repertoire of the Panathenaia—though this obsolescence may have to be downdated even further down than what I have formulated in the past (as in HPC 320–321 = E §32).

§46. The problem remains: is there any way to imagine the performance of the Iliad and Odyssey in their entirety at the Panathenaia by the time we reach the fifth and the fourth centuries BCE? If we accept the arguments we read in the article of Burgess (2004), then it is more likely that only selections of the entire narrative sequence were performed by that time. But such selections, I would maintain, would have to operate on the same principle of narratological sequencing that had led to the evolution of an Iliad and Odyssey into epics containing over 15,000 and 12,000 lines respectively. And such sequencing was a matter of notional totality.

Notional totality in oral performance

§47. Here I epitomize my arguments about notional totality (drawing especially on my formulations in Nagy 2006 §§37–40).

§48. In the archaic era of the Panathenaia, that is, in the sixth century BCE, the idea of an Epic Cycle, as inherited from earlier phases of Homeric poetry in my reconstruction of Period 1 and Period 2 above, was simply the idea of epic as a comprehensive whole: the term ‘Cycle’ or kuklos was sustained by metaphors of artistic comprehensiveness.

§49. Later on, however, in the “classical” era of the Panathenaia, that is, in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, newer ideas of comprehensiveness had replaced the older idea. These newer ideas were now being determined by the artistic measure of tragedy. Aristotle says explicitly that only the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey are comparable to tragedy because only these epics show a comprehensive and unified structure, unlike the epics of the Cycle (Poetics 1459a37–b16). In Plato as well, the standards of tragedy are evident in descriptions of Homer as a proto-tragedian in his own right. For Plato and Aristotle, the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey measured up to the standards of tragedy, whereas the epics of the Cycle did not.

§50. Thus the criteria of epic comprehensiveness vary from age to age—from the archaic notion of the Epic Cycle to the “classical” notion of Homer the tragedian. What remains an invariable, however, is the basic institutional context in which the very idea of epic comprehensiveness took shape: that context is the festival. In the case of epic as performed in Athens, that context remained the festival of the Panathenaia. In its archaic phase, to repeat, the Panathenaia featured the Epic Cycle, including the repertoire of what we know as the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey. In its “classical” phase, however, this same festival of the Panathenaia featured only the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey, excluding the repertoire of the Epic Cycle. Even the term ‘Cycle’ was no longer appropriate, since the Epic Cycle no longer embodied the notion of epic as a comprehensive totality.

§51. A typological comparandum for the notion of epic as a comprehensive totality is the case of heroic epics and dramas at festivals in latter-day India: the measure of totality in the performing of these epics and dramas is determined by the ideologies of the festivals that serve as the historical contexts for such performances. Outside observers of actual performances of epics at festivals in latter-day India have found that there are different degrees of involvement for the insiders who attend such performances, even though there is general agreement, on the part of such “insiders,” about what I call the notional totality of these epics. But the problem is, the “outsiders” who attempt to observe empirically the involvement of the “insiders” are mistaken in thinking of these insiders as “audiences,” since the insiders themselves think of themselves not as passive audiences but as active participants in the performances—even if their individual roles in the performances are minimal, limited to hearing and seeing, not even singing along and dancing along. There is a most acute description by Joyce Flueckiger 1996:133–134), who concludes (p. 134): “although scholars have spent considerable energy recording epic stories ‘from beginning to end’, counting the number of hours and pages required to do so, this is not how the epic is received by indigenous audiences.” The word “received” here is most telling, since it captures the idea of oral reception by indigenous audiences who are not really thinking of themselves as passive audiences but as active participants, even if their actual activity in attending, as I just said, may be minimal. The actual process of oral reception by those attending a performance, as the description of Flueckiger shows, may seem like a variable for the outside observer, but the very idea of participating in a performance by way of attending it can be perceived by the “indigenous” participants as an absolute—even despite any documented differences in their participation. So, the performance that is attended can be perceived as an absolute totality by those who attend the performance even if the absolutism of a totality is based merely on an overall consensus of participation.

§52. I conclude, then, that the notional totality of an oral performance reveals a mentality that I describe as oral reception in the case of Homeric poetry as I reconstruct it for Period 1 and Period 2 in my evolutionary model. But then the next question is, how is such oral reception distinct from textual reception? The beginnings of such an alternative scenario, I think, can be situated in Period 3 of my model.

Oral reception and textual reception

§53. One thing is for sure: oral reception depends on performance, whereas textual reception can be independent of performance—independent even of oral tradition. A definite example of such independence is my modeling of “Homer” as “scripture” in Period 5 of my evolutionary model. As for the example of “Homer” as “script,” however, which is what I posit for Period 4, the Athenian “State Script” of Homer could in this case still depend, I think, on oral as well as textual reception. Even in the case of Period 3, I leave open the possibility of interdependence between performance and transcript, where the transcript could occasionally be utilized as a script for performance. But I also leave open the possibility that the beginnings of textual reception can be traced back to Period 3.

§54. Such a scenario of potential interdependence between performance and text, which as I say is a possibility I leave open for Period 3, is not all that far removed from a theory developed by researchers who share my interest in studying oral traditions by combining the disciplines of linguistics and anthropology. The theory can be summarized this way: oral performance can become an “oral text.” The very idea of such an “oral text”—which, to my mind at least, is simply a metaphor—is perhaps best expressed in the cross-cultural formulation of Karin Barber (2007:1–2), who describes such an “oral text” as an oral performance that is “woven together in order to attract attention and outlast the moment.” The theory of such an “oral text,” which Barber (again, pp. 1–2) describes as a process of “entextualization” (as an example of other such formulations, I cite Bauman and Briggs 1990:73), has been re-applied in the book by Jonathan Ready (2019), already cited, on Homeric “orality” and “textuality.” In that work of Ready, I highlight one particular formulation of his (p. 18): “So performers make an oral text: they impart textuality, the attributes of an utterance capable of outliving the moment, to a verbal act.” This formulation comes close to what I think is happening in Homeric reception as I reconstruct it for Period 3: such reception, to borrow the wording of Ready who in turn borrows from Barber, would be “capable of outliving the moment.”

§55. This mentality of “outliving the moment” in Homeric performance is encoded, I think, in the mythological framework of traditional narratives that I have described in earlier work as “Life of Homer” narratives. In surviving texts of such “Lives” of Homer, Homeric poetry as oral performance is alive because Homer, the performer, is still alive—that is, he is still an active performer in terms of the narrative. But how does such performance stay alive after Homer’s poetry is no longer performed by Homer? The answer, I think, is to be found in what the “Lives” actually narrate about Homer’s moments of performance.

Homer as brought to life in the “Lives” of Homer

§56. In a detailed essay where I sum up my overall work on the “Lives” of Homer (Nagy 2015.12.18), I offer a formula that can help explain why the genre of these “Lives” can keep Homer himself “alive” as the ultimate master of oral performance, just as the Provençal genre of the vida, as I showed in another essay (Nagy 2021.08.23), can keep alive memories of the life and times of a generic troubadour. In what follows, I epitomize from the first of the two essays I just cited, while leaving out the details that I have collected there.

§57. In that essay, I analyze the surviving texts of “Life of Homer” narrative traditions, to which I will refer hereafter simply as Lives of Homer. I offer the following system for referring to these Lives, as printed by Allen 1912:

V1        = Vita Herodotea, pp. 192–218
V2        = Certamen, pp. 225–238
V3a      = Plutarchean Vita, pp. 238–244
V3b      = Plutarchean Vita, pp. 244–245
V4        = Vita quarta, pp. 245–246
V5        = Vita quinta, pp. 247–250
V6        = Vita sexta (the ‘Roman Life’), pp. 250–253
V7        = Vita septima, by way of Eustathius, pp. 253–254
V8        = Vita by way of Tzetzes, pp. 254–255
V9        = Vita by way of Eustathius (on Iliad IV 17), p. 255
V10      = Vita by way of the Suda, pp. 256–268
V11      = Vita by way of Proclus, pp. 99–102

§58. These Lives, I argue, can be read as sources of historical information about the reception of Homeric poetry. The information is varied and layered, requiring diachronic as well as synchronic analysis. As before, my use of these terms follows the formulation of Saussure (1916:117). In this context, I must also emphasize again my view that “diachronic” analysis is not the same thing as “historical” analysis.

§59. The Lives portray the reception of Homeric poetry by narrating a series of events featuring “live” performances by Homer himself. In the narratives of the Lives, Homeric composition is consistently being situated in contexts of oral performance. In effect, the Lives explore the shaping power of positive and even negative responses by the audiences of Homeric poetry in ad hoc situations of oral performance.

§60. The narrative strategy of each of the Lives can be described as a staging of Homer’s reception. This staging takes the form of narrating a wide variety of occasions for Homeric performance. In my detailed survey, I note with particular interest the varied occasions of performance, ranging from small-scale micro-events such as localized gatherings at leskhai or ‘men’s clubs’ all the way to such large-scale macro-events as the centripetal assembling of diverse populations at seasonally recurring festivals.

§61. The Lives of Homer, especially as represented by the Herodotean Vita (= ‘V1’) and by the Certamen (‘The Contest of Homer and Hesiod’ = ‘V2’), are narratives that have much to say about performances by Homer at occasional events, but I am particularly interested in references to seasonally recurrent events, as exemplified especially by festivals that become so large-scale as to be aspirationally “Panhellenic.” I use this term in the sense that I already indicated in my sketch, above, of Period 2. In my research, I link such Panhellenism with the prestige of performing what became known as Homeric poetry. To appreciate more fully such prestige, I concentrate on the testimony of the Lives concerning the reception of Homer in two geographical areas: (1) the Aeolian and Ionian cities of Asia Minor together with major outlying islands, and (2) the Ionian island of Delos, retrospectively figured as the notional center of the future Athenian Empire.

§62. The reception of Homer in these two geographical areas has to be understood in the context of the seasonally recurring festivals where Homeric poetry was performed. Here I introduce the term “aetiology” as a way of backing up the point I have just made about Panhellenic festivals as a most prestigious occasion of Homeric performance. By “aetiology,” I mean a myth that directly motivates a ritual (Nagy 1999:279). And two most relevant examples of ritual in this case are (1) the very idea of a festival and (2) the more basic idea of a sacrifice. Both ideas, sacrifice and festival, are conveyed by the Greek word thusiā, which means not only ‘sacrifice’ but also, metonymically, ‘festival’. The second meaning is clearly attested in Plato’s Timaeus (26e), where thusiā actually refers to a Panhellenic festival: in this case, the referent is none other than the premier festival of Athens, the Panathenaia. I make this argument at p. 83 of my book about the Panathenaia, Plato’s Rhapsody and Homer’s Music: The Poetics of the Panathenaic Festival in Classical Athens (Nagy 2002, also published online, 2021.10.01). In the days of Plato, it was on this occasion, the Feast of the Panathenaia, that the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey were formally performed in Athens (Nagy 2002:9–22). I signal here the relevance of the Panathenaia and, more generally, of the word thusiā, to my overall argument.

§63. I argue that the Lives of Homer functioned as aetiologies for festive occasions where Homeric poetry was seasonally performed and that they must be viewed as myths, not historical facts, about Homer. To say that we are dealing with myths, however, is not at all to say that there is no history to be learned from the Lives. Even though the various Homers of various Lives are evidently mythical constructs, the actual constructing of myths about Homer can be seen as historical  fact (Nagy 1999:ix paragraph 7, with note). The claims made about Homer in the Lives can be analyzed as evidence for the various different ways in which Homeric poetry was appropriated by various different cultural and political centers throughout the ancient Greek-speaking world.

§64. Here I need to highlight again my main point about the Lives: all the claims about Homer, in all their varieties, specifically picture Homeric poetry as a medium of oral performance, featuring Homer himself as the master performer.

§65. For analyzing diachronically as well as synchronically the reception of Homer as reflected in the Lives, I propose to build a model for the periodization of this reception. Such a model needs to account for the accretive layering of narrative traditions contained within the final textual versions of these Lives. I posit three periods of ongoing reception: pre-Panathenaic, Panathenaic, and post-Panathenaic. By ‘post-Panathenaic’, I mean a period of Homeric reception marked by the usage of graphein ‘write’ in referring to Homer as an author. This usage needs to be distinguished from the usage of the Panathenaic and pre-Panathenaic periods, when Homer is said to poieîn ‘make’ whatever he composes, not to graphein ‘write’ it.

§66. The post-Panathenaic period is exemplified by sources like Plutarch and Pausanias, in whose writings Homer is already seen as an author who ‘writes’, graphei, whatever he composes. I cite a few examples: Plutarch De amore prolis 496d, Quaestiones convivales 668d; Pausanias 3.24.11, 8.29.2. The Panathenaic period, by contrast, is exemplified by Plato and Aristotle, in whose writings we still see Homer as an artisan who ‘makes’, poieî, and who is never pictured as one who ‘writes’, graphei. For examples of expressions involving ‘Homer’ as the subject and poieîn as the verb of that subject, I start with Aristotle De anima 404a, Nicomachean Ethics 3.1116a and 7.1145a, De generatione animalium 785a, Poetics 1448a, Politics 3.1278a and 8.1338a, Rhetoric 1.1370b. I cite also Plato Phaedo 94d, Hippias Minor 371a, Republic 2.378d, Ion 531c–d. I note with special interest the usage, here in the Ion and elsewhere, of poiēsis as the inner object of poieîn. Of related interest are collocations of poieîn with generic ho poiētēs ‘the maker’ (= the Poet) as subject, referring by default to Homer—as I already noted at the very beginning of this essay. The many examples of such usage include Plato Republic 3.392e (ὁ ποιητής φησι) and Aristotle De mundo 400a (ὥσπερ ἔφη καὶ ὁ ποιητής).

§67. I translate poieîn as ‘make’ in order to underline the fact that the direct object of this verb is not restricted to any particular product to be made by the subject—if the subject of the verb refers to an artisan. In other words, poieîn can convey the producing of any artifact as the product of any artisan. It is not restricted to the concept of the song / poem as artifact or of the songmaker / poet as artisan. To cite an early example: in Iliad VII 222, the artisan Tukhios epoiēsen ‘made’ the shield of Ajax. By contrast with the verb poieîn, the derivative nouns poiētēs and poiēsis are restricted, already in the earliest attestations, to the production of songs / poems. I stress the exclusion of artifacts other than songs / poems or of artisans other than songmakers / poets. The noun poiēma has likewise been restricted, though not completely; in the usage of Herodotus, for example, poiēma still designates artifacts other than song / poetry (1.25.1, 2.135.3, 4.5.3, 7.85.1). As for the compound noun formant ‑poios, it is not at all restricted to song or to poetry.

§68. This Greek word poiēma, the earlier meaning of which is ‘artifact’ and the later meaning of which is simply ‘poem’, brings me back to the description, by Karin Barber (2007:1–2), of an “oral text” as an oral performance that is “woven together in order to attract attention and outlast the moment.” Barber’s metaphor, “woven together,” reminds me of the etymology of the word “text,” the metaphorical meaning of which is a “web” that is “woven” (Latin textus)—an artifact that is ever attracting attention, ever outlasting the moment.

The web of Homer

§69. But it is not enough to say that the idea of a woven web can be connected, by way of metaphor, with the text of Homer. It can even be said, I argue, that this same idea of a woven web is actually connected, by way of ritual practice, with the performance of Homer. The historical context for this connection was the seasonally recurring festival known as the Great Panathenaia, celebrating the birthday of Athena, goddess of Athens. At this festival, the people of Athens presented to the goddess a real web that was woven for her to wear, which was a sacred robe called the Peplos, and this presentation took place at the same festival that featured the public performances of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey. What is essential about this connectivity is that there was a new Peplos that was woven for each recurrence of the Great Panathenaia, just as there was also, for each recurrence, a new performance of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey. In terms of its seasonal recurrence, this festival was the occasion for the reweaving of the Peplos and for the reperforming of Homeric poetry. This ritualized parallelism between reweaving the Peplos and reperforming Homeric poetry is clearly articulated in Plato’s Timaeus, as I argued in a book already cited, Plato’s Rhapsody and Homer’s Music: The Poetics of the Panathenaic Festival in Classical Athens (Nagy 2002, online 2021.10.01). It is the recurrence of Homeric poetry in performance that makes it possible for this kind of oral poetry to outlast its moment, to outlive the life of Homer.

§70. The point I have just made about Homeric recurrence helps explain the overall poetics of Odyssey viii. As I have argued at length in the book Homer the Preclassic (Nagy 2011|2010), the performances of the blind singer Demodokos, especially his first and third songs, are morphological re-enactments of songs stemming from the Epic Cycle, the poetics of which are clearly divergent from the poetics of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey. The overall pattern of divergence has been well demonstrated in the pathfinding work of Jonathan Burgess (2001 and 2009). And there are even further signs of divergence in the case of Demodokos. As I also argued in Homer the Preclassic, the second song of Demodokos diverges from epic models in general and converges with hymnic models as still attested in the Homeric Hymns. To go one step further, I would venture to say that even the overall occasion for the performances of Demodokos seems non-Homeric, even pre-Homeric. Or, to say it another way, the occasion seems non-Athenian, even pre-Athenian. Just as the poetry of the Epic Cycle—as also the poetry of the Homeric Hymns—occasionally reveals non-Athenian contexts for performance, so too the poetry of Demodokos seems to be distancing itself from Athenian contexts. But despite such divergences between Homeric poetry in general and the poetry of Demodokos in Odyssey viii, there is one remarkable convergence, and it is most telling. In Plato’s Timaeus, we saw that the festive occasion for Homeric performance, which is the premier festival of the Athenians, could be stylized as a thusiā, that is, as a sacrificial feast. And now we are about to see that the festive occasion for the performances of Demodokos is stylized at viii 429 as a dais, that is, again, as a feast, and the overall context of Odyssey viii shows that this feast is inaugurated by way of sacrifice. The convergence here, as I say, is most telling: in both cases, a feast is being stylized as a festival. But the difference is, feasts in Homeric narrative are presented as one-time events, whereas festivals “in real life” are seasonally recurrent events. In Odyssey viii, the description of a festival as a feast is a stylization, just as we saw in the case of the word thusiā in Plato’s Timaeus (26e): this word means ‘sacrificial feast’, but Plato uses it with reference to the overall festival of the Great Panathenaia in Athens. And I can say in general about Homeric poetry that it regularly stylizes seasonally recurrent occasions as if they were prototypical occasions, that is, single one-time occasions for the ages. For the most obvious example, I cite the athletic competitions known as “Funeral Games for Patroklos” as narrated in Iliad XXIII. Even though this athletic event is morphologically parallel to historically attested athletic events, the Homeric event is narrated as if it were a singular event for the ages, not as a recurrent event, as in the case of historically attested athletic competitions like the Olympic Games, which were of course seasonally recurrent.

§71. Another example of such athletic competitions, as I argued in a book titled The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours (Nagy 2013 Hour 8), took place at the festival of the Great Panathenaia. The athletic competitions there, known as the Panathenaic Games, had rivaled in prestige even the Olympic Games. Most significantly, as I show in the same book, one of the athletic events featured at this festival was a form of chariot racing that re-enacted, most pointedly, feats of chariot warfare described in the Homeric Iliad, so that the re-performance of narratives about such chariot warfare in Homeric poetry was matched by actual re-enactment in athletic competition.

§72. To end here, I return to the formulation of Karin Barber (2007:1–2): an “oral text” is an oral performance that is “woven together in order to attract attention and outlast the moment.” What makes the “oral text” of Homeric poetry “outlast the moment” is the prestige of a seasonally recurrent festival, the Great Panathenaia of Athens, where each seasonal recurrence brings with it not only a re-weaving of the woven web of Athena but also a re-performance of Homer himself, giving him, with each recurrence, a life renewed.

Bibliography

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Finnegan, R. 1970. Oral Literature in Africa. Oxford.

Finnegan, R. 1977. Oral Poetry: Its Nature, Significance, and Social Context. Cambridge.

Flueckiger, J. B. 1996. Gender and Genre in the Folklore of Middle India. Ithaca, NY.

Foley, J. M. 1985. Oral-Formulaic Theory and Research: An Introduction and Annotated Bibliography. New York. The editor’s Introduction offers a general survey of a wide range of oral traditions throughout the world, with extensive bibliography of ongoing research applying the methods of Parry, Lord, and others.

Foley, J. M., ed., 1986. Oral Tradition in Literature: Interpretation in Context. Columbia, MO.

Frame, D. 2009. Hippota Nestor. Hellenic Studies 34. Cambridge, MA, and Washington, DC. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Frame.Hippota_Nestor.2009.

Gavrilov, A. K. 1997. “Techniques of Reading in Classical Antiquity.” Classical Quarterly 47:56-73. Investigates the cultural and cognitive variables of “silent reading” and reading out loud; concludes that a mutually exclusive dichotomy is untenable.

González, J. M. 2013. The Epic Rhapsode and His Craft: Homeric Performance in a Diachronic Perspective. Hellenic Studies Series 47. Washington, DC, https://chs.harvard.edu/book/gonzalez-jose-the-epic-rhapsode-and-his-craft-homeric-performance-in-a-diachronic-perspective/.

Goody, J., and Watt, I. 1968. “The Consequences of Literacy.” In Literacy in Traditional Societies, ed. J. Goody, 27-68. Cambridge. Argues that literacy produces measurable differences in cognitive capacity; the argument is weakened by a lack of descriptive specificity in considering the forms of oral traditions in any given historical context.

Guillén, C. 1985. Entre lo uno y lo diverso. Introducción a la literatura comparada. Barcelona. = 1993. The Challenge of Comparative Literature. Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature 42. Cambridge, MA. Situates the study of oral traditions within the academic discipline of Comparative Literature.

Hübner, L. 2019. Homer in cultural memory: An intentional history of archaic Homer reception. HSGKV 5. Stuttgart.

Hübner, L. 2022. “Tyrannical and civic Reception of Homer: A Problem of Sources.” In From Solon to Homer: Continuity and Change in Archaic Greece, ed. J. C. Bernhardt and M. Canevaro, 330–362. Mnemosyne Supplement 454. Leiden and Boston.

Jensen, M. S. 1980. The Homeric Question and the Oral-Formulaic Theory. Copenhagen.

Jensen, M. S. 2011. Writing Homer: A study based on results from modern fieldwork. Copenhagen.

Johnson, J. W. 1980. “Yes, Virginia, There Is an Epic in Africa.” Research in African Literatures 11:308-326. A spirited polemic concerning the application of universalizing criteria in describing the genres of oral traditions.

Lord, A. B. 1953. “Homer’s Originality: Oral Dictated Texts.” Transactions of the American Philological Association94:124-134. Rewritten, with minimal changes, in Lord 1991:38-48 (with an “Addendum 1990” at pp. 47-48). An engaging attempt to reconcile the transmitted text of the Homeric poems, as a historical given, with empirical observations about the process of composition-in-performance as found in living oral traditions.

Lord, A. B. 1960 / 2000 [/ 2019]. The Singer of Tales. Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature 24. Cambridge, MA; 2nd  ed., with new Introduction, by S. Mitchell and G. Nagy 2000; [3rd ed. 2019 by D. F. Elmer, Hellenic Studies 77, Publications of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature 4]. This book remains the most definitive introduction to the pioneering research of Parry and Lord. The first part documents their findings in the course of their ethnographic research on the living oral traditions that they recorded in the former Yugoslavia; the second part applies these findings as points of comparison with the textual evidence of ancient Greek and medieval European epic.

Lord, A. B. 1974. “Perspectives on Recent Work on Oral Literature.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 10:1-21. A bibliographical essay surveying the ongoing research on oral traditions throughout the world. A vital supplement to the abbreviated bibliography given here.

Lord, A. B. 1986a. “Perspectives on Recent Work on the Oral Traditional Formula.” Oral Tradition 1:467-503. Continuation of the bibliographical survey in Lord 1974. Another vital supplement.

Lord, A. B. 1986b. “The Merging of Two Worlds: Oral and Written Poetry as Carriers of Ancient Values.” Oral Tradition in Literature: Interpretation in Context, ed. J. M. Foley, 19-64. Columbia, MO. A seminal study of historical coextensiveness between the poetry performed in the coffee houses, as observed by Parry and Lord, and the poetry of the court poets in the “good old days” of Ottoman rule.

Lord, A. B. 1991. Epic Singers and Oral Tradition. Ithaca, NY. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_LordA.Epic_Singers_and_Oral_Tradition.1991. Explores oral “lyric” as well as “epic.” In-depth reassessments of debates over orality and literacy.

Lord, A. B. 1995. The Singer Resumes the Tale (ed. M. L. Lord). Ithaca, NY. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_LordA.The_Singer_Resumes_the_Tale.1995. A posthumous publication, originally intended as a direct continuation of Singer of Tales. Sustained rebuttal of critics who insist on the inferiority of “orality” to literacy.

Martin, R. P. 1989. The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the Iliad. Ithaca, NY. A case study of oral poetic sub-genres embedded within the “super-genre” of epic, with special attention to applications of “speech-act” theory.

Martin, R. P. 1993. “Telemachus and the Last Hero Song.” Colby Quarterly 29:222-240. Recast in Martin 2020:359–382. A critical reassessment of epic as the essential genre of “heroic” poetry.

Martin, R. P. 2020. Mythologizing Performance. Ithaca, NY.

Mitchell, S., and G. Nagy. 2000. “Introduction to the Second Edition.” In: Lord 2000:vii-xxix. Offers historical background on the evolution of Lord’s work and on its connections to the earlier work of Parry. Summarizes the impact of Parry’s and Lord’s combined legacy on such fields as Classics, Comparative Literature, and folklore studies.

Nagy, G. 1979/1999. The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry. Baltimore. Revised ed. with new introduction 1999, http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_NagyG.The_Best_of_the_Achaeans.1999.

Nagy, G. 1990. Pindar’s Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past. Baltimore. Revised paperback version 1994. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Nagy.Pindars_Homer.1990. Examines the interactions of theme / formula / meter in both “epic” and “lyric” traditions, with special reference to the historical context of archaic Greece.

Nagy, G. 1996a. Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond. Cambridge. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Nagy.Poetry_as_Performance.1996.

Nagy, G. 1996b. Homeric Questions. Austin, TX. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Nagy.Homeric_Questions.1996. Addresses ten basic “misreadings” of Parry and Lord; provides explanatory models for the historical contingencies of transition from oral to written traditions.

Nagy, G. 1998. “Homer as ‘Text’ and the Poetics of Cross-Reference.” In Verschriftung und Verschriftlichung: Aspekte des Medienwechsels in verschiedenen Kulturen und Epochen, ed. C. Ehler and U. Schaefer, 78-87. ScriptOralia 94. Tübingen.

Nagy, G. 2000. “Reading Greek Poetry Aloud: Evidence from the Bacchylides Papyri.” Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica 64:7-28. Examines phenomena of literacy that defy universalization, such as the practice of scriptio continua in archaic, classical, and post-classical Greek, to be contrasted with the practice of leaving spaces for word-boundaries, as in the traditions of writing Hebrew.

Nagy, G. 2001. “Orality and Literacy.” Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, ed. T. O. Sloane, 532–538. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hlnc.essay:Nagy.Orality_and_Literacy.2001.

Nagy, G. 2002. Plato’s Rhapsody and Homer’s Music: The Poetics of the Panathenaic Festival in Classical Athens. Cambridge, MA, and Athens.

Nagy, G. 2003. Homeric Responses. Austin, TX. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Nagy.Homeric_Responses.2003.

Nagy, G. 2004. “L’aède épique en auteur: la tradition des Vies d’Homère.” In Identités d’auteur dans l’Antiquité et la tradition européenne, ed. C. Calame and R. Chartier, 41–67. Grenoble.

Nagy, G. 2005. “The Epic Hero.” A Companion to Ancient Epic, ed. J. M. Foley, 71–89. Malden and Oxford. For an expanded version, see Nagy 2006.

Nagy, G. 2006. “The Epic Hero.” Expanded version of Nagy 2005. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hlnc.essay:Nagy.The_Epic_Hero.2005.

Nagy, G. 2009|2008. Homer the Classic. Printed | Online version. Hellenic Studies 36. Cambridge, MA, and Washington, DC. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Nagy.Homer_the_Classic.2008.

Nagy, G. 2010|2009. Homer the Preclassic. Printed | Online version. Berkeley and Los Angeles. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Nagy.Homer_the_Preclassic.2009.

Nagy, G. 2011. “Diachrony and the Case of Aesop.” Classics@9: Defense Mechanisms in Interdisciplinary Approaches to Classical Studies and Beyond. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hlnc.essay:Nagy.Diachrony_and_the_Case_of_Aesop.2011.

Nagy, G. 2013. The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours. Cambridge, MA. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_NagyG.The_Ancient_Greek_Hero_in_24_Hours.2013.

Nagy, G. 2014a. Review of Jensen 2011. Gnomon 86:97–101.

Nagy, G. 2014b. “Homeric cross-referencing to a Cyclic tradition of performance.” In Studies on the Greek Epic Cycle, ed. G. Scafoglio. Philologia Antiqua 7 (2014) 15–31. Pisa/Roma. Rewritten as Essay II of Nagy 2021.11.22.

Nagy, G. 2015. “Oral traditions, written texts, and questions of authorship.” In The Greek Epic Cycle and its ancient reception: A companion, ed. M. Fantuzzi and Ch. Tsagalis, 59–77. Cambridge. https://chs.harvard.edu/curated-article/gregory-nagy-oral-traditions-written-texts-and-questions-of-authorship/. Rewritten as Essay I of Nagy 2021.11.22

Nagy, G. 2015.12.24. “Pindar’s Homer is not ‘our’ Homer.” Classical Inquiries. http://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/pindars-homer-is-not-our-homer/.

Nagy, G. 2016.02.18. “Just to look at all the shining bronze here, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven: Seeing bronze in the ancient Greek world.” Classical Inquiries. http://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/just-to-look-at-all-the-shining-bronze-here-i-thought-id-died-and-gone-to-heaven-seeing-bronze-in-the-ancient-greek-world/.

Nagy, G. 2016.02.25. “A variation on the idea of a gleam that blinded Homer.” Classical Inquiries. http://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/a-variation-on-the-idea-of-a-gleam-that-blinded-homer/.

Nagy, G. 2016.09.23. “On the paraphrase of Iliad 1.012–042 in Plato’s Republic 3.393d–394a.” Classical Inquiries. https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/on-the-paraphrase-of-iliad-1-012-042-in-platos-republic-3-393d-394a/.

Nagy, G. 2017.01.26, with K. DeStone and L. Koelle. “Disintegration and Reintegration.” Classical Inquiries. https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/disintegration-and-reintegration/. Archived 2025.05.30 in Classical Continuum. https://continuum.fas.harvard.edu/disintegration-and-reintegration/.

Nagy, G. 2018.11.22, rewritten 2024.05.18. “Homeric problems and bibliographical challenges, Part 1: On the performances of rhapsodes at the festival of the Panathenaia.” Classical Inquiries. Rewritten in Classical Continuum. https://continuum.fas.harvard.edu/homeric-problems-and-bibliographical-challenges-part-1-on-the-performances-of-rhapsodes-at-the-festival-of-the-panathenaia/.

Nagy, G. 2018.11.30, rewritten 2024.05.19. “Homeric problems and bibliographical challenges, Part 2: More on the performances of rhapsodes at the festival of the Panathenaia.” Classical Inquiries. Rewritten in Classical Continuum. https://continuum.fas.harvard.edu/homeric-problems-and-bibliographical-challenges-part-2-more-on-the-performances-of-rhapsodes-at-the-festival-of-the-panathenaia/.

Nagy, G. 2020. Second edition, online version, of Nagy 2002. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Nagy.Platos_Rhapsody_and_Homers_Music.2020.

Nagy, G. 2020. 2021.08.23, rewritten 2024.05.20. “Jaufré Rudel, his ‘distant love’, and the death of the distant lover in his vida.” Classical Inquiries. Rewritten in Classical Continuum. https://continuum.fas.harvard.edu/jaufre-rudel-his-distant-love-and-the-death-of-the-distant-lover-in-his-vida/.

Nagy, G. 2021.10.01. Third edition, online version, of Nagy 2002. Classical Continuum.https://continuum.fas.harvard.edu/platos-rhapsody-and-homers-music-the-poetics-of-the-panathenaic-festival-in-classical-athens/.

Nagy, G. 2021.10.11, rewritten 2024.05.21. With O. M. Davidson, co-author. “On the problem of envisioning Homeric composition: A co-authored essay highlighting some relevant comparative observations.” Classical Continuum. https://continuum.fas.harvard.edu/on-the-problem-of-envisioning-homeric-composition-a-co-authored-essay-highlighting-some-relevant-comparative-observations/. This is a pre-print and pre-edited version. The printed version appeared in Philologia Antiqua 16 (2023) 15–25.

Nagy, G. 2021.11.22. “Two essays about about the Epic Cycle. Classical Continuum. https://continuum.fas.harvard.edu/two-essays-about-the-epic-cycle/.

Nagy, G. 2025.05.31. “Essays on oral traditions: Homer and beyond. Introduction.” Classical Continuum. https://continuum.fas.harvard.edu/essays-on-oral-tradition-introduction-2025-05-31/.

Nagy, G. 2025.06.01. “Essays on oral traditions: Homer and beyond. One.” Classical Continuum.https://continuum.fas.harvard.edu/essays-on-oral-traditions-homer-and-beyond-one/.

Nagy, G. 2025.06.02. “Essays on oral traditions: Homer and beyond. Two.” Classical Continuum.https://continuum.fas.harvard.edu/essays-on-oral-traditions-homer-and-beyond-two/.

Nagy, G. 2025.06.03. “Essays on oral traditions: Homer and beyond. Three.” Classical Continuum.https://continuum.fas.harvard.edu/essays-on-oral-traditions-homer-and-beyond-three/.

Nagy, G. 2025.06.04. “Essays on oral traditions: Homer and beyond. Four.” Classical Continuum.https://continuum.fas.harvard.edu/essays-on-oral-traditions-homer-and-beyond-four/.

Nagy, J. F. 1986. “Orality in Medieval Irish Narrative.” Oral Tradition 1:272-301. A detailed survey of evidence provided by the contents and the conventions of the narratives themselves.

Nagy, J. F. 1997. “How the Táin Was Lost.” Zeitschrift für Celtische Philologie 49–50:603–609.

Niditch, S. 1996. Oral World and Written Word: Ancient Israelite Literature. Library of ancient Israel. Louisville, KY. A lively confrontation of scripture, as the ultimate written word, with the rhetoric of the spoken word.

Oesterreicher, W. 1993. “Verschriftung und Verschriftlichung im Kontext medialer und konzeptioneller Schriftlichkeit.” In Schriftlichkeit im frühen Mittelalter, ed. U. Schaefer, 267-292. Tübingen. Shows that the historical circumstances of transformations from non-literate to literate societies are notable for their diversity.

Okpewho, I. 1979. The Epic in Africa: Toward a Poetics of the Oral Performance. New York. A sound ethnographic and literary survey, leading to a critical reassessment of epic as a genre.

Opland, J. 1989. “Xhosa: The Structure of Xhosa Eulogy and the Relation of Eulogy to Epic.” In Traditions of Heroic and Epic Poetry II: Characteristics and Techniques, ed. J. B. Hainsworth and A. T. Hatto, 121-143. London. This study describes a distinct genre, the praise poetry of the Xhosa, and then proceeds to compare it with the ancient Greek genre of epic. By recognizing praise poetry as distinct from epic, this work avoids the imposition of external models on the internal evidence of the oral tradition being examined.

Parry, M. [1971]. The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry (ed. A. Parry). Oxford. The first part contains Parry’s work on the Homeric texts, before he undertook his fieldwork research in the former Yugoslavia. The second part combines his experience in fieldwork with his expertise in the organization of Homeric poetry.

Parry, M. 1928a. L’épithète traditionnelle dans Homère: Essai sur un problème de style homérique. Paris. Translation in Parry 1971:1–190. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_Parry.LEpithete_Traditionnelle_dans_Homere.1928.

Parry, M. 1928b. Les formules et la métrique d’Homère. Paris. Translation in Parry 1971:191–234. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_ParryM.Les_Formules_et_la_Metrique_d_Homere.1928.

Parry, M. 1930. “Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making: I. Homer and Homeric Style.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 41:73–148. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hlnc.essay:ParryM.Studies_in_the_Epic_Technique_of_Oral_Verse-Making1.1930.

Parry, M. 1932. “Studies in the epic technique of oral verse-making. II: The Homeric language as the language of an oral poetry.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 43:1–50. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hlnc.essay:ParryM.Studies_in_the_Epic_Technique_of_Oral_Verse-Making2.1932.

Radloff, W. 1885. Proben der Volksliteratur der nördlichen türkischen Stämme V: Der Dialekt der Kara-Kirgisen. St. Petersburg. A distinguished prototype of research in the “field,” with a focus on the oral traditions of Central Asia.

Ready, J. L. 2019. Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An Interdisciplinary Study of Oral Texts, Dictated Texts, and Wild Texts. Oxford.

Ready, J. L., and Tsagalis, Ch. C. 2018. Homer in Performance: Rhapsodes, Narrators, and Characters. Austin, TX.

Reichl, K. 2000. Singing the Past: Turkic and Medieval Poetry. Ithaca, NY. Continues where Radloff left off, a century later. Centers on typological parallels to the oral traditions studied by Parry and Lord.

Saussure, F. de. 1916. Cours de linguistique générale. Paris. Critical ed. 1972 by T. de Mauro.

Shapiro, H. A. 1993. “Hipparchos and the Rhapsodes.” In Cultural Poetics in Archaic Greece, ed. C. Dougherty and L. Kurke, 92–107. Cambridge.

Slatkin, L. M. 1987. “Genre and Generation in the Odyssey.” METIS: Revue d’Anthropologie du Monde Grec Ancien 1:259-268. Views genres in oral traditions as neatly complementary to each other, diachronically as well as synchronically.

Smith, P. 1974. “Des genres et des hommes.” Poétique 19:294-312. Acute synchronic perspectives on the complementarity of genres in oral traditions.

Svenbro, J. 1988. Phrasikleia: Anthropologie de la lecture en Grèce ancienne. Paris. = 1993. Phrasikleia: An Anthropology of Reading in Ancient Greece. Translation by J. Lloyd. Ithaca, NY. Disputes universalist definitions of reading as a cognitive activity. Examines the mentality of equating the activity of reading out loud with the act of lending one’s voice to the letters being processed by one’s eyes.

Toelken, J. B. 1967. “An Oral Canon for the Child Ballads: Construction and Application.” Journal of the Folklore Institute 5:75-101. Vigorous application of comparative ethnographic evidence to the text of a collection shaped by Child’s text-bound criteria.

Zumthor, P. 1984. La Poésie de la Voix dans la civilisation médiévale. Paris. Uses the textual evidence of medieval literature to highlight the dynamics of oral traditions as revealed by the variability or mouvance inherent in the textual transmission.

Zwettler, M. J. 1978. The Oral Tradition of Classical Arabic Poetry. Columbus, OH. Studies the rich documentation of variant readings in the textual history of Arabic poetry as a reflex of variations in oral poetry.