[HPFGU-OTChatter] Re: Aliteracy - something that doesn't apply to any of us...

[Jen Faulkner]

On Mon, 14 May 2001, Amy Z wrote:

> Amber pointed out:
> 
> > I'd say that people who've studied the Odyssey professionally and
> have
> > written loads of papers on it could. Of course, those people are
> > probably few and far inbetween.

Sections of it, certainly.  But most Classicists can't do more than
recite a few favorite parts by memory.  A few (particularly in the
19th c.) actually apparently did have most of Classical literature
from memory, but as far as I'm aware, there aren't any now living who
can do that.  Happy to be corrected on this, though.

> > I wonder how many people "back then" could recite the Odyssey
> without
> > reading it. I was under the impression that being a storyteller was
> a
> > specific "occupation". Not everyone did it.

Being an epic poet (of the sort who would've composed/performed the
Iliad or the Odyssey) was indeed a specific occupation, but the
culture as a whole was an oral one, which means that most people
would've known, from what we can tell, large amounts of their
literature from memory.  The epics were used as basic school texts,
and children would undoubtedly have known then by heart, if not every
bit in its entirety.  One must also remember that there were many
different versions of these poems, that they could be expanded or
contracted as performative circumstances dictated, that there was no
definitive 'text' of, say, the Odyssey during the Archaic age, and
maybe on into the Classical period.  Later writers, from poets to
Plato, quote the epics, and there seems little doubt, to me anyway,
that such quotation was from memory, not from looking up the quote in
a text.

> Can one of the classicists on the list (hello Jen F) tell me if I'm
> perpetuating a myth?  Weren't there storytellers in ancient Greece who
> retold entire epics (not, of course, word for word, but with changes,
> omissions and embellishments)?

Indeed there were!  The Homeric epics, in the form we have them, were
the result of centuries (if not millennia...) of oral tradition, of
telling and re-telling, of composition-in-performance.  The poems
which have come down to us under the name of Homer, as well as other
epics which are extant only in small fragments or in later summaries,
were born of a lively oral tradition with Indo-European roots.  Other
forms of poetry, solo lyric or choral poems, were also meant to be
performed and not read, in some cases by professionals, but also by
'amateurs' such as participants in religious festivals or diners (or
courtesans) at symposia (drinking parties).  Ancient Greece was a
highly oral, performative culture.  

Chances are that there was never such a person as 'Homer', but even if
there were to have been a poet by that name, the biographical details
(that he was a blind bard from Chios, or what have you) are undoubtedly
a fiction (as are most biographies of Archaic poets, such as Sappho or
Archilocus).

During the Classical period and the Hellenistic period (5th c. - 1st
c. BCEish) the epics were recited by performers known as rhapsodes,
who were supposed to be following an established version, though it's
highly likely there was still variation in performance due to the
nature of oral poetry.  However, the epics were certainly written down
by this time, and the discipline of textual criticism (which some of
us are still practicing 2,000+ years later! *g*) was born,
particularly at the library of Alexandria, where scholars such as
Zenodotus worked to produce the 'most correct' version of these poems,
marking passages as interpellations, offering better readings, and so
on.

I'm also inclined to think that the texts were known in a written form
during the Roman period -- but this may still not have been the
primary form by which they were popular.  In the Empire, we have a
description of a group of players who would act out scenes from Homer in
Petronius' *Satyricon*.  Poetry *recitation*, rather than silent
reading, was in antiquity the dominant mode by which it was brought to
an audience.  Educated Romans were literate, certainly, as had Greeks
been, but they still had slaves who would read to them (Pliny describes
this practice in his *Letters*) or take notes for them.  For the
uneducated, oral performance, as of dramas, was always essential.

--jen :)

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