Milman parry biography of martin
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Homeric Question
Debate about the identity of Homer and the authorship of the Iliad and Odyssey
The Homeric Question concerns the doubts and consequent debate over the identity of Homer, the authorship of the Iliad and Odyssey, and their historicity (especially concerning the Iliad). The subject has its roots in classical antiquity and the scholarship of the Hellenistic period, but has flourished among Homeric scholars of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.
The main subtopics of the Homeric Question are:
- "Who is Homer?"[1]
- "Are the Iliad and the Odyssey of multiple or single authorship?"[2]
- "By whom, when, where, and under what circumstances were the poems composed?"[3]
To these questions the possibilities of modern textual criticism and archaeological answers have added a few more:
- "How reliable is the tradition embodied in the Homeric poems?"[4]
- "How old are the oldest elements in Homeric poetry which can be dated with certainty?"[5]
Oral tradition
[edit]The very forefathers of text criticism, including Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614), Richard Bentley (1662–1742) and Friedrich August Wolf (1759–1824) already emphasized the fluid-like, oral nature of the Homeric canon.[6]
This perspect
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The Myth of Milman Parry
Oral Tradition, 33/1 (2019):115-142
The Myth of Milman Parry
Oral traditions are creative: they romanticize and sensationalize otherwise mundane events. The memory of a historical but probably minor conflict between the Mycenaeans and Trojans over commercial interests—access to the straits of the Hellespont that connected the Black Sea to the Aegean—evolved over time into an extensive cycle of myth about a ten-year siege of Troy triggered by the abduction of the most beautiful woman in the world. Oral traditions are also fluid. The poet of one version of this mythic cycle, later called the Iliad, took full advantage of this fluidity to make dramatic changes in his inherited material both in small details and in larger themes. He brazenly substitutes the nymph Charis for Aphrodite as Hephaestus’ wife; the crafter of the shield of Achilles could not be married to the matron goddess of Achilles’ dire foes! He adds the motif of hunger to the paradigmatic tale of Niobe thatAchilles relates to Priam; like Niobe, Achilles and Priam must remember to eat, even though they are both worn out with weeping. Contrary to the tradition, he gives the wife of Meleager the name Cleopatra. As a morphemic inversion of the name of one of the