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The antiquity of the Greek epic tradition: some new evidence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2013

G.C. Horrocks
G.C. Horrocks
Affiliation:
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
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Extract

Since the decipherment of Linear B a number of scholars have argued, on the basis of supposed Mycenaean survivals in the Homeric poems, that the Greek legendary poetic tradition ran continuously from the Bronze Age through the Dark Age down to the singers of the Ionian towns in the ninth and eighth centuries. However, the directness of the connection between the narrative poetry of the Mycenaean Age, if indeed such existed, and the subsequent development of the Epic in Greece has been called into question. Thus Shipp, for example, has argued that most of the items listed by Chadwick in his article Mycenaean elements in the Homeric dialect in fact left their mark for a time at least on forms of Greek other than that of the Epic, and so could well have entered this tradition in post-Mycenaean times and in some other way than through a direct poetical current from the Bronze Age. A similar conclusion has been reached by Kirk, who has expressed his views forcefully in a series of publications. Consider the following:

The two objective criteria for dating elements within the Homeric poems, namely archaeology and language, require careful handling and reveal less than is generally claimed for them. They enable certain elements to be recognized as having existed as early as the late Bronze Age, but do not necessarily prove that these all passed into the Ionian Epic tradition by the medium of late Bronze Age poetry.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society (Second Series) , Volume 26 , 1980 , pp. 1 - 11
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s). Published online by Cambridge University Press 1980

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References

NOTES

1. For example: Chadwick, J., ‘Mycenaean elements in the Homeric dialect’, Minoica: Festschrift für Johannes Sundwall (1958) 116–22Google Scholar; Householder, F.W. and Nagy, G., Greek, a survey of recent work (1972) 19–23Google Scholar; Page, D.L., History and the Homeric Iliad (1959) ch. 6Google Scholar; Ruijgh, C.J., L'élément achéen dans la langue épique (1957)Google Scholar.

2. See n. 1.

3. Shipp, G.P., ‘Mycenaean evidence for the Homeric dialect?’, Essays in Mycenaean and Homeric Greek (1961) 1–14Google Scholar.

4. Kirk, G.S., ‘Objective dating criteria in Homer’, Mus. Helv. 17 (1960) 205Google Scholar.

5. Kirk, G.S., Homer and the oral tradition (1976) 39Google Scholar.

6. A few other types also occur, most notably that involving post-verbal position for the particle (see Table 2 below).

7. Watkins, C., ‘Preliminaries to the reconstruction of Indo-European sentence structure’, Proceedings of the ninth international congress of linguists (1964) 1035–42Google Scholar.

8. Watkins (n. 7) 1040.

9. I.e. it cliticises onto the following word.

10. For example: Chadwick, J., ‘The Greek dialects and Greek pre-history’, Greece and Rome n.s. 3 (1956) 38–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Risch, E., ‘Die Gliederung der griechischen Dialekte in neuer Sicht’, Mus. Helv. 12 (1955) 61–76Google Scholar; García-Ramón, J.L., Les origines postmycéniennes du groupe dialectal éolien (1975)Google Scholar.

11. Chadwick, J., ‘Who were the Dorians?’, La Parola del Passato 166 (1976) 103–117Google Scholar.

12. The Parry-Lord theory of oral composition is assumed here without further comment.

13. Hainsworth, J.B., The flexibility of the Homeric formula (1968)Google Scholar.

14. This formed the centrepiece of Parry's early work, and is taken up, for example, by Kirk, G.S., The songs of Homer (1962)Google Scholar.

15. Though epithets are, of course, highly standardised for many familiar objects too.

16. See Hainsworth (n. 13) 62–9, 77–9, 92–8.

17. The tetracolonic division of the line into metrical (and rhetorical?) segments is that of Fränkel, H., ‘Der Kallimachische und der Homerische Hexameter’, Wege und Formen frühgriechischen Denkens (1955) 100–56Google Scholar.

18. Consider, for example, the following from the Rig Veda:

19. On the question of the formula in xxxviii) see Allen, W.S., Accent and rhythm (1973) 215–16Google Scholar. On the reflexes of original--in Mycenaean see Ruijgh, C.J., Lingua 25 (1970) 302CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Heubeck, A., ‘Syllabic in Mycenaean Greek?’, Acta Mycenaea 2 (1972) 55Google Scholar.

20. See n. 1.