Homeric Epics: A Formula for Genius

Homeric Epics: A Formula for Genius

For centuries the Homeric question has plagued mankind. Who was he? How did he conjure up such poems with out the aid of writing? Were the poems his own or a combination of poems he put together? What type of authorship do we owe Homer? Milman Parry has given us a grounding to help us better understand Homer and his poems. One may come to the conclusion that Parry’s Theory of Oral Composition is likely to be the methodology used in creating the Homeric Epic’s and other oral poems after a study of the progression of thought on the subject by scholarly classicists and a analysis of Homer’s Iliad in conjunction with the formulaic system.

Milman Parry laid the foundation of the oral theory in his 1923 thesis at the University of California at Berkeley. In this opening paragraph, he also relates that the poems are a product of time and tradition.

Jus as the story of the Fall of Troy, the tale of the House of Labdakos, and the other Greek epic legends were not themselves the original fictions of certain authors, but creations of a whole people, passed through one generation to another and gladly given to anyone who wished to tell them, so the style in which they were to be told was not a matter of individual creation, but a poplar tradition, evolved by centuries of poets and audiences, which the composer of heroic verse might follow without thought of plagiarism, indeed, without knowledge that such a thing existed. This does not mean that personal talent had no effect on style, nothing to do with the choice and use of the medium whereby an author undertook to express his ides: Aristotle points out Homer’s superiority to other writers of early epic verse in the organization of his material. It does not mean, though, that there were certain established limits of form to which the play of genius must confine itself. (Foley 20)

Parry is also making the point that the genius of Homer is still plausible with the existence of a poetic form. Early evidence that supports Parry’s belief that the Homeric epics were produced through an oral tradition comes from the Jewish priest, Flavious Joseph (born A.D. 37/38).

Throughout the whole range of Greek literature no undisputed work is found more ancient than the poetry of Homer. His date, however is clearly later than the Trojan war; and even he, they say did not leave his poems in writing . . . but [they say] that the poems (lit., poetic work) were put together just as they were remembered distinctly from songs, and that through this process their many inconsistencies arose. (2)

Of course it is questionable if Joseph’s “they sayer’s” hold any validity. Also, it can be asked whether Homer had created his epics and they were then distorted through time or did Homer merely piece together the oral traditions he was taught and heard? If the oral form is real, it is certainly more likely that Homer created the epics from tradition. The first and one of the most solid arguments for Homer’s orality came from Friedrich Wolf in 1795:

Because of the (1) the structure and the combination typical of the composition, (2) the adaptation of the diction to meter, (3) the addition of ornamental words, and (4) the paratactic method of joining attributive expressions to already completed conceptsвЂ"all of this together inclines toward and forces one to the conclusion that these poems were made not for reading, but rather for hearing. (4)

Robert Wood in 1767 makes the argument that it simply makes more sense that there be some type of form within the oral tradition rather than believing the epics such as The Odyssey and The Iliad were solely created from Homer’s imagination:

As to the difficulty of conceiving how Homer could acquire, retain, and communicate, all he knew without the aid of letters; it is, I own, very striking. And yet, I think, it will not appear insurmountable, if upon comparing the fidelity of oral tradition, and the powers of memory, with the Poet’s knowledge, we find the two first much greater, and the latter much less, than we are apt to imagine. (3)

Parry’s instructor, Antoine Meillet, also believed there was a form to the poems. He wrote:

The Homeric epic is made up entirely of formulas which are transmitted by the poets. If one takes a sample passage, he can quickly recognize that it is composed of verses or parts of verses that are found again in the same textual form in one or more other passages. Even those verses whose constituents one does not find in another passage also have the character of formulas, and no doubt it is only by chance that they are not preserved elsewhere. (9)

Parry further developed Meillet’s argument by defining the formula as “an expression regularly used under the same metrical conditions to express an essential idea” (24). In 1930 he further expounded on his formula by creating the formulaic system, which he defined as “a group of phrases which have the same metrical value and which are enough alike in thought and words to leave no doubt that the poet who used them knew them not only as single formulas, but also as formulas of a certain type” (28).

Parry offers suggestive proof of the formulaic system when compared to other epic poems which were written and not a part of the oral tradition.

Here his basic concern was with the integrity of the single line as a compositional and expressive unit, and his measurements were intended to calculate the extent of which Homeric epic verses followed one of three possibilities: (a) no enjabement, with the thought complete at line-end and no optional continuation; (b) “unpariodic” enjabement, with the thought complete at line-end but optionally continued to the next verse; and (c) “necessary” enjabement, which entailed either the incomplete syntax or division in the middle of a word-group, thus leading to an obligatory continuation in the following line. He found evidence that in Homer almost one-half of the verses show no enjabement whatever, with unperiodic enjabement twice as frequent as in Apollonius and Virgil and necessary enjambement twice as infrequent as in the literary writers of epics. Parry reasoned that these findings constituted further evidence that Homer thought and composed formulaically and paratactically in natural linear units, that he made his epic in the style given him by tradition. (27)

In believing that Homer