Uncovering Writing

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was really good, easily 5 stars. It is not a general reader book but is worth the time and effort to explore her arguments. Dué ends the introduction with her main thrust: “Achilles is bound by fate and by narrative tradition, but Achilles’ poem, the Iliad, was not fixed and monolithic in antiquity. It was multiform” (p. 16). She presents examples, discusses possibilities and offers a new way to look at the Homeric works.

One thing she drives home many times, importantly, is that most of our modern editions of Homer are based on medieval texts that “postdate the oral tradition by more than a millennium” (p. 6). “The quotations of the Iliad and the Odyssey that we find in such fourth-century BCE authors as Plato, Demosthenes, and Aeschines likewise present numerous plus verses, minus verses, and other significant variations from the medieval texts of Homer” (p. 46). Plus verses are in Homeric papyri yet missing from medieval manuscripts while minus verses are those in the medieval texts that are missing from the papyri (p. 45). These papyrus fragments “reveal that the texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey were still somewhat fluid even after the Classical period in Athens. It is only starting around 150 BCE that the texts seem to become standardized” (p. 45). Dué also gives credit to some of the ancient Alexandrian editors who “used athetesis marks and did not in most cases remove verses judged to be ‘not by Homer’ from their editions” (p. 139).

Even after studying the Homeric epics for so long, both as a reader and critically, I learned many new things from this work. I recently became aware of the mentioned extra line at the end of the Iliad that talks of the coming of the Amazon warrior Penthesileia (pp. 85-90), but I had never heard several alternative first lines of the Iliad (p. 57-58). I was stunned that I didn’t know the “real” names of Briseis and Chryseis, since these are simply patronyms: “daughter of Brises” and “daughter of Chryses.” There was a scholion in Venetus A that notes Chryseis was Astynome and Briseis was Hippodameia” (p. 108).

I didn’t always agree with her idea “to treat each of the surviving quotations as valid, even if fragmentary, instantiations of the Iliad or the Odyssey in their own right” (p. 80). But, I don’t believe in the existence of an “Ur” text of the Homeric poems so my concern may be unfounded. She made me think, I responded, then I responded to myself again questioning my initial response. That, in my opinion, is good scholarly writing. It’s not just facts but making one think for oneself.

One very minor critique is that I felt like I was reading a series of papers that had been collated into a book and that the flow wasn’t as good as it could have been. For example, information was repeated when it didn’t need to be. Please note that this did not diminish the power of her argument, especially since each chapter could stand on its own, but after it happened several times to me, I thought it worth mentioning. One more editing pass might have smoothed things over.

Finally, what a great time to read this work. We have Emily Wilson’s new translation of the Odyssey and Caroline Alexander’s version of the Iliad. We also have Madeline Miller’s excellent rethinking/retelling/recovering of Briseis from the Iliad and Circe from the Odyssey. And, we have Alice Oswald’s Memorial, a piece that powerfully translates only the deaths of people from the Iliad. I actually thought of Oswald’s work when I was reading “Of the Boeotians Peneleos and Leitos were the leaders” in Chapter 4 (p. 120).