Adam Parry's article ‘Have We Homer's Iliad?’ (Yale Classical Studies xx (1966), 177–216) is one of the most readable of recent discussions of Homer. As it happens, I disagree with much of it—but that is not surprising, since much of it is taken up with disagreeing with me. In the pages that follow I shall be primarily concerned to question the validity of some of the author's detailed arguments and to probe some of his underlying assumptions.

First we should note the general position that Adam Parry, by the end of his study, occupies. It is the apparently old-fashioned one that Homer wrote down, or had someone else write down, virtually every word of the Iliad (and presumably also the Odyssey) as we have it. Yet it differs from extreme Unitarianism, and takes account of Milman Parry, by accepting that Homer belonged to an oral tradition and composed his poetry, at least at the detailed level, by traditional means. He did not construct his verses like a fully literate poet, but used the new technique of alphabetic writing for the development of traditional, unlettered poetry into the extended form and complex texture of an Iliad.