West assumes that the Nikandre inscription is a case of written rather than oral poetics, and he implies that the dating of the Nikandre inscription therefore gives him a terminus ante quem for the writing down of the Iliad. I disagree. The justification for leaving such ν forms in the text is to be found in the internal and comparative evidence of oral poetics, not in the fact that we can find such ν forms in a poetic inscription that West thinks is contemporaneous with the composition of the Iliad. It can be argued that the {58|59} “insertions” of such particles and of morphophonemic elements like movable ν are part of an overall formulaic system and have nothing to do with the technology of writing. For parallels to be found in the living traditions of South Slavic oral poetry as recorded by Parry and Lord, I refer to an interesting discussion of hiatus-breakers (= “bridging consonants”) that prevent the occurrence of glottal stops. [75]
West is eager to cross the fence and move on to that far side, where the wild flowers grow—and far beyond that, far beyond the horizon. He leaves behind whatever we can still see on this side of the fence, the ruins of gardens once teeming with cultivated flowers tended by the Alexandrian editors. As we have already noted, West has not much use for Aristarchus, and even less for Aristophanes of Byzantium; as for Zenodotus of Ephesus, that Alexandrian editor is practically of no use at all. [108] West asks: “why limit our ambition to reconstructing an Alexandrian text, stopping five hundred years short of the originals, when we have at least a modicum of evidence that takes us further back?” [109]
My concluding sentences here about diachrony were used already earlier, in Chapter Two, where I was making the point that Homeric multiformity needs to be viewed diachronically as well as synchronically. The need for a diachronic perspective in analyzing Homeric poetry was the impetus for my developing an evolutionary model for the making of this poetry. As I said in Chapter Two, this model was designed to account for all variations that stem from the performance traditions of Homeric poetry.