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Written texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey achieved an unprecedented degree of standardization after 150 BCE, but what of the earlier history of Homeric texts? This volume draws on scholarship from outside the discipline of classical studies to offer a comprehensive study of Homeric texts from the Archaic to the Hellenistic period.
List of contents
- 0: Introduction
- Part I: Oral Texts and Oral Intertextuality
- 1: Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics
- Introduction
- 1.1: Performance, Oral Texts, and Entextualization
- 1.2: Application to the Homeric Epics
- 1.2.1: The Preexistence of Tales and Songs and the Object-Like Status of Utterances in the Homeric Epics
- 1.2.2: Entextualization in the Character Text I
- 1.2.3: Entextualization in the Character Text II
- 1.2.4: The Poet and Entextualization
- 1.3: Homerists on Texts
- 2: Oral Intertextuality and Mediational Routines in the Homeric Epics
- Introduction
- 2.1: Oral Intertextuality and Mediational Routines
- 2.2: Mediational Routines in the Homeric Epics
- 2.2.1: The Source Text
- 2.2.2: The Target Text
- 2.3: Metapoetic Implications
- Part II: The Emergence of Written Texts
- 3: Textualization: Dictation and Written Versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey
- Introduction
- 3.1: The Dictation Model
- 3.2: A Comparative Approach
- 3.3: The Process of Recording by Hand
- 3.3.1: The Challenges of Manual Transcription
- 3.3.2: Steps to Work around These Challenges and Their Effects
- 3.3.3: The Rare Exceptions
- 3.3.4: Dictated Texts versus Sung Texts
- 3.3.5: What Was Written Down
- 3.3.5.1: The Collector as Gatekeeper
- 3.3.5.2: The Scribal Process
- 3.4: The Collector's Impact on the Oral Text
- 3.4.1: Unwitting Interference (or the Collector's Presence)
- 3.4.2: Purposeful Interference
- 3.5: Editing
- 3.5.1: Field Notes
- 3.5.2: Editorial Work in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
- 3.5.3: Editorial Work from the Second Half of the Twentieth Century until Today
- 3.6: Best Practices
- 3.7: The Collector's Text versus the Performer's Oral Performance
- 3.8: The Formulations in Section 3.1 Reevaluated
- 3.9: The Evolutionary Model's Transcript
- Excursus: The Interventionist Textmaker and Herodotus's Histories
- Part III: Copying Written Texts
- 4: The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics
- Introduction
- 4.1: The Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics
- 4.2: The Nature of the Variation: Not Scribal Error
- 4.3: Accounting for This Variation
- 4.4: The Scribe as Performer
- 4.5: The Scribe as Performer and the Wild Homeric Papyri
- 4.5.1: The Wild Papyri and the Comparanda
- 4.5.2: When?
- 4.5.3: Who?
- 5: Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics
- Introduction
- 5.1: Juxtaposing the Wild Papyri and Helmut van Thiel's Text
- 5.2: Competence and Entextualization
- 5.2.1: Cohesion
- 5.2.2: Coherence
- 5.3: Competence and Completeness
- 5.3.1: Characters Do More Things
- 5.3.2: Nothing Is Assumed
- 5.4: Competence and "Affecting Power"
- 5.4.1: The Emotions
- 5.4.2: The Fulfillment of Expectations and the Groove
- 5.5: Tradition, Traditionalization, and the Intertextual Gap
- 5.6: The Bookroll
- 5.7: The Performing Scribe
- 5.8: Scribal Performance and the Alternatives
- 6: Conclusion
- Endmatter
- Works Cited
- Index
About the author
Jonathan L. Ready is a professor of classical studies at Indiana University. He is the author of Character, Narrator, and Simile in the Iliad (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and The Homeric Simile in Comparative Perspectives: Oral Traditions from Saudi Arabia to Indonesia (Oxford University Press, 2018), as well as numerous articles on Homeric poetry. He is also the co-editor of Homer in Performance: Rhapsodes, Narrators, and Characters (University of Texas Press, 2018) with Christos C. Tsagalis and serves as the co-editor of the annual Yearbook of Ancient Greek Epic (Brill).
Summary
Written texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey achieved an unprecedented degree of standardization after 150 BCE, but what of the earlier history of Homeric texts? This volume draws on scholarship from outside the discipline of classical studies to offer a comprehensive study of Homeric texts from the Archaic to the Hellenistic period.
Additional text
Ready's book can be viewed as a textbook example of how crucial it is to employ a comparative and cross-disciplinary approach, one that collapses the distinction of past and present and that freely crosses geographic, ethnic, or linguistic boundaries, when seeking answers to foundational questions regarding the relation of literature to the realm of oral art forms... Departing from assumptions that others have adopted in the past, Ready rightly emphasizes how distinct the two realms of orality and literacy/textuality are, whether considered from a sociological or from a philological perspective. In particular, he demolishes the assumption that the act of collection involves only a modest impact on the character of a text ... Ready is to be commended, then, for highlighting what he calls 'the messy realities' of textualization.
