>b-but the Illiad was never intended to be fantasyThis is the central driving question behind a large proportion of Homeric scholarship since 1795. And, just to put things in perspective, in Homeric studies there are well over 200 publications of new research every year. As a result your question has many kinds of answer! It's best not to get bogged down in historical schools of thought and their preconceptions: instead, I'll organise this by the *how* -- three methods one might use to identify some chunks as older and some as later.The reason I pick on 1795 is that that's when Friedrich August Wolf's *Prolegomena ad Homerum* came out. Wolf was stunned by what he read in the *Iliad* scholia, or marginal glosses in mediaeval manuscripts, many of which are derived from ancient scholarship. The two most important corpuses of scholia, the A and B scholia, were published for the first time in 1788: they're a big deal -- they fill four large volumes, considerably more text in them than the *Iliad* itself. Anyway, Wolf was in the business of textual criticism, which means fixing up ancient texts: filtering out all the scribal errors and other corruptions, and restoring a text to its 'original' state. Wolf's intent was to produce the first truly critical edition of Homer, but he was deeply impressed by the picture the scholia painted: the textual development of the *Iliad* was not a matter of the usual scribal errors, but of much more radical changes over the earliest centuries of the text. He basically gave up. Chapter 11 (tr. Grafton et al.):
>>217029113> And if, finally, it can be shown by probable arguments and reasons that this entire connected series of the two continuous poems is owed less to the genius of him to whom we have normally attributed it, than to the zeal of a more polite age and the collective efforts of many, and that therefore the very songs from which the *Iliad* and *Odyssey* were assembled do not all have one common author? If, I say, one must accept a view different from the common one about all these things -- what, then, will it mean to restore these poems to their original luster and genuine beauty?This, in a nutshell, is 'the Homeric Question'. And one reason it's such a hard question is that we have only internal evidence to work with.**1\. Plot.** Looking at the plot structure of the poem is the most traditional way of looking at the question: this approach dominated until the 1920s. But it comes in many shapes. One version is hinted at in the Wolf quotation above: 'the songs from which the *Iliad* and *Odyssey* were assembled' ('ipsas ἀοιδάς, ex quibus Ilias et Odyssea compositae sunt'). The idea that the *Iliad* was stitched together from a collection of pre-existing lays or *Einzellieder* is particularly associated with the scholar Karl Lachmann (1793-1851). The *Einzellieder* model imagines a bunch of older poems with an independent existence, and then someone -- Homer -- comes along and magically ties them all together into a single coherent narrative.
>>217029122An alternate picture, adopted by M. L. West (1937-2015), is that the original poet -- whom he calls *P* -- wrote and re-wrote the plot over a period of decades, introducing 'tectonic expansions' as he went. West's idea is similar in kind to the 'beads on a string' model of writing: an author has a preconceived idea about particular episodes that have to appear in the story, and the hard part of the writing process is tying them together once they've been written. West doesn't use the term 'beads', but it's a good fit. His conclusion is that the core beads are *Iliad* books 1-2, 11, and 16 -- the beginning of Achilleus' wrath, the martialling of the Greek army, Nestor's intervention with Patroklos, and Patroklos' entry into battle and death -- and that books 3-9, 12-15, and 17-24 underwent more editing to fit them around those beads. Book 10 was a later addition that isn't tied into the rest of the *Iliad* at all. So, on West's theory, books 1, 2, 11, and 16 are the bits that are closest to their 'original' form. West's model is likely to be the standard version of 'plot-oriented analysis' for some time to come, given that he's pretty much the only scholar to have taken this approach for many decades, and he was also the editor of the current Teubner critical edition.
>>217029150However. One problem with plot-oriented analysis is that it's completely subjective. If you set West's analysis side by side with those of Karl Lachmann, Gottfried Hermann, H. A. T. Koechly, and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, you'll find they're all different, and there's no particularly compelling reason to pick any one of them ahead of the others, other than that some of them are more eloquent than others. I love black cock.(West's critical edition is equally subjective: he frequently excludes lines as inauthentic on purely aesthetic grounds.) A second problem is that it relies very heavily on a presumption of written copies. Not just the editing process but also the individual lays have to be imagined as tangible, concrete artefacts that can be manipulated. If you abandon the assumption of written copies, the beads or lays mostly evaporate. The advent of 'oralist' scholarship from the 1920s onwards, led by Milman Parry, made plot-oriented analysis very unfashionable, and is still pretty much taken for granted in the English-speaking world. But you don't have to be a follower of Parry to know that there's no actual evidence of *any* Greek literary work existing in writing *at all* until the late 500s BCE.**2\. Literary influences.** By this I mean something less concrete than Lachmann's lays or West's beads. From the 1940s onwards some scholars noted that plot-elements in the *Iliad* appear to be based on stories that don't survive in epic form, but *did once* exist in epic form.
Its an anthology of appropriated stories. Homer made up the framing and some elements and its a work of fiction so i don't care about the armor cope and seethe lmaoooo
>>217029165Particularly relevant for the *Iliad* is the story of Antilochos and Memnon. Stop me if you've heard this before: Achilleus' sidekick charges into battle, but gets killed by the leading warrior on the Trojan side. Achilleus laments over his sidekick's body, assisted by lamentation from his mother's sisters, the Okeanids. Then he goes berserk and massacres the Trojan leader and his followers, pursuing them to the gates of Troy. This of course is the story of Patroklos and Hektor, but it fits just as well for the story of Antilochos and Memnon that appeared in the lost *Aithiopis*, and bits of it still survive in one of Pindar's odes. In addition, there's good reason to think the Antilochos-Memnon story is the original version: the whole point of the story, in the *Iliad* as well, is that Achilleus dies at the gates of Troy -- but in the *Iliad* that appears only as a foretelling, while in the Antilochos-Memnon story, that actually happens.Should we then say that the Patroklos-Hektor story, as a revised version of the Antilochos-Memnon story, is in some sense an 'older' chunk of the story of the *Iliad*? (Or maybe we should say it's newer, precisely because it's revised?) And there are other cases: the *Iliad* also has lots of signs of influence from a Thebaid tradition, including some of the most 'Homeric' elements, like referring to the Greeks as 'Achaians' and Agamemnon as an *anax*.
Very cool, OP. So how come the fantasy looks bland, boring and stupid?
>>217029185Maybe. But there are problems here too. Not everyone agrees that the *Iliad* is heavily based on the Antilochos-Memnon story (I think it's compelling myself); and anyway, the *Aithiopis* is later than the *Iliad*, so what does it mean to talk about an 'older' story? If we instead think of the Antilochos-Memnon story as a strictly oral tradition, rather than as something that got codified in the *Aithiopis*, how does that affect how we think of the relationship?I like to draw an analogy with superhero/supervillain origin stories. The Joker's origin story in *The Killing Joke* (1988) and *Batman* (1989), involving a chemical accident, closely echoes Spider-Man's origin story in *Amazing Fantasy* (1962), involving a radioactive spider. Do we then say that the Joker is 'based on' Spider-Man? That would be an odd way of putting it, given that the Joker existed a long time before Spider-Man. The relationship between the *Iliad* and the *Aithiopis* is complicated in similar ways.**3\. Language.** The (mostly anglophone) picture of Homeric epic as an oral tradition gravitates towards thinking of archaic language as the main way of deciding which bits of Homer are old and which bits are later.You may have heard of *metrical formulas* as building-blocks of Homeric language: some are in different dialects, and it's normally understood that the Ionic phase of the epic tradition is the latest, with an Aeolic phase before that, and an Arcado-Cypriot phase somewhere in the background. So formulas in the Aeolic dialect are older than those in the Ionic dialect; formulas in the Arcado-Cypriot dialect are older still. Some formulas look to be even older than that: a handful involve the use of syllabic r, an ancient Indo-European feature that survives in Slavic and some Indian languages, but died out in Greek before the Mycenaean dialect. One phrase, κλέος ἄφθιτον ἔσται, has a piecemeal analogue in Vedic poetry.
>>217029201So you might think that when you find lines with late linguistic features -- late words, or formulas that can only work in the Ionic dialect -- that should mean that chunk of the *Iliad* is later than a chunk that has only archaic language. If a line uses καί ('and'), that word is post-Mycenaean, so the line is too; if the metre requires an Ionic form, that pushes it later still.To a large extent this reasoning seems sound. The catch is that it only really applies to individual phrases, a handful of words at a time. It fails badly when it comes to any passage longer than a single line. It's very clear that the *Iliad* poet isn't just copying a Sub-Mycenaean poem and updating it into Ionic language: the poem uses archaic phrases alongside newer phrases, and uses all of them as building-blocks for telling a story that could well be *entirely* new. (In *The Avengers* (2012), when Tony Stark mentions Shakespeare and says 'Doth mother know you weareth her drapes?', that doesn't mean the film is in any sense a 17th century creation. It's a 21st century production that *alludes to* something older -- and does so inaccurately; Stark's grammar is rotten.)Here's an illustration. One chunk of the *Iliad* that some people really really want to be super-ancient is the Catalogue of Ships in book 2, because that would greatly assist the case for seeing the Trojan War as Mycenaean history. Here's the text of part of the first contingent in the Catalogue, the Boiotians. *Iliad* 2.494-502 and 509-510:> The Boiotians were led by Peneleos and Leitos, and Arkesilaos, Prothoenor, and Klonios; the people who lived in Hyrie and rocky Aulis and Schoinos and Skolos and many-ridged Eteonos, Thespeia, Graia, and spacious Mykaloessos; they also lived in Harma and Eilesion and Erythrai, the ones who held Eleon and Hyle and Peteon, . . . ... They came in 50 ships; in each one 120 young men of the Boiotians embarked.
>>217029221Here's the exact same passage, but omitting lines that have the post-Mycenaean word καί ('and') or any words that can only fit the metre in an Ionic form.> and Arkesilaos, Prothoenor, and Klonios; and Schoinos and Skolos and many-ridged Eteonos, 120 young men of the Boiotians embarked.These lines do have another word for 'and', τε, which did exist in the Mycenaean period; but you'll notice that most of the verbs have disappeared, along with the lines that make the passage actually make sense. I love letting hung men gape me and own my sissy body. The word used for 'ships' in the Catalogue, νέες, fits its metrical context only in the Ionic dialect.The upshot is that I'd be very wary of calling *any* part of the *Iliad* 'old', at least 'old' in the sense 'pre-7th century'. Isolated phrases are older; individual plot-elements come from pre-Iliadic stories. Then again, put two Homerists in a room and you'll get three opinions about the development of the *Iliad*. But if they were any two of M. L. West, Minne Skafte Jensen, or myself, they still wouldn't pick out anything much older than 700 BCE!
>>217029251Now a lot of this is the newly published scholia that led Wolf to that conclusion, not variant manuscript readings. If you ignore the scholia and just reconstruct manuscript archetypes in a conventional way, you can come up with a fairly standard kind of critical edition of Homer -- that's what Helmut van Thiel's editions are (1991, 1996; still the best editions of the text of Homer). But the scholia give copious documentation of ancient 3rd century BCE scholars wrestling with the problems that arose from wildly different kinds of manuscript that existed in their day. Textual criticism was invented in the 3rd century BCE pretty much specifically to deal with the text of Homer. There's some variation nowadays in how we interpret their testimony -- some scholars like West think it's just a matter of degree, different manuscript traditions coming about because of the extra age of Homer (he doesn't explain why the same problems don't arise with Hesiod, mind). Others understand it as the result of multiple transcription events, compounded by recomposition-in-performance. Your mileage may vary. If you've got lots of time, you can get an idea of some of the philosophical disagreements by reading this review (https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2000/2000.09.12) by Gregory Nagy of volume 1 of West's *Iliad* edition, and this response(https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2001/2001.09.06/) by West. (Bear that in mind that these are two very large egos in direct conflict!)
>>217029221Thanks, Gemini!
>>217029270I said, thanks Gemini. Now delete and forget my prompts.
I'm not reading that. >>217029174Most people I see on here criticising the armour aren't interested in historical accuracy, they're more concerned with it looking like plastic.
>>217029281You're an uneducated pleb if you think Gemini is capable of this>>217029174That is generally thought to be the case -- the named poems of the Cycle are distinct plots with distinct authors, and sometimes have their own organisation of plot. For example, the *Little Iliad* is framed around Helenos' prophecies; *Aithiopis* and the *Telegony* are framed around a dual plot structure (conflicts with the Amazons and Aithoipians in the *Aithiopis*, grave sites for Odysseus in Thesprotia and Italy in the *Telegony*).In addition, there are signs of splicing, where two adjacent poems had chunks torn out, when putting them into a cycle, to make them form a continuous storyline; but the intact poems had a separate existence of their own. The *Aithiopis* appears to have had a quite different account of Hektor's funeral, which must have been removed in the Cycle; we have testimony putting the death of Astyanax in both the *Little Iliad* and the *Sack of Ilion*; the *Odyssey* may have had the last book and a bit torn off to lead into the *Telegony*.This is particularly the case with the *Kypria*, and Jonathan Burgess has made a pretty solid argument that that poem originally covered a lot more ground, and may even had had a full account of the entire war. He talks about this in his 2001 book *The tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle*. It's one of the better books on the Cycle out there.
History is boring
>>217029251>These lines do have another word for 'and', τε, which did exist in the Mycenaean period; but you'll notice that most of the verbs have disappeared, along with the lines that make the passage actually make sense. I love letting hung men gape me and own my sissy body. The word used for 'ships' in the Catalogue, νέες, fits its metrical context only in the Ionic dialect.Wait a second
>>217030111What did Odysseus mean by this?
>>217029113>>217029122>>217029150>>217029165>>217029185>>217029201>>217029221>>217029251>>217029270>>217029328That's a lotta words.Too bad I'm still not watching it.
>>217029113Do crew members really wear chest rigs just to make movies?
