ABSTRACT
Western literature begins with the Homeric poems: the Iliad and the Odyssey. Originally, they were not written literature, but orally transmitted poems, performed by the so-called rhapsodists. To “the Homeric question” many answers have been proposed, especially since the appearance of Friedrich August Wolf’s (1759-1824) landmark work, Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795).1 The continuing dominant conception is that the poems had received their definitive form orally in the 8th century bc.2 Theoretically, it cannot be ruled out that the author of the poems is one and the same person, but this is not very probable, particularly because the Iliad must be considerably older; in any case, “Homer” serves as a collective designation for the Iliad and the Odyssey.3 One can only be sure of the fact that the poems appeared in a final written form, a vulgata or κοινή, during the age of the Pisistratides at the end
1 F.A. Wolf, Prolegomena ad Homerum sive de operum Homericorum prisca et genuina forma variisque mutationibus et probabili ratione emendandi [Introduction to Homer, or, On the Original and Genuine Form of the Homeric Works and their Various Changes and the Correct Manner of Editing Them], first published in Halle, 1795; photographical reprint of the 1884 edition, Hildesheim: Georg Olms 1963. (English translation, F.A. Wolf, Prolegomena to Homer, 1795, with introduction and notes by Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and James E.G. Zetzel, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1985.) Wolf argued that the Iliad and the Odyssey in their modern form are not the work of Homer but the result of an oral transmission of various smaller units, passed down by the rhapsodists, who learned the pieces by heart and performed them; only later were they collected and written down under Pisistratus in Athens around 540 bc. 2 See, for instance, G.S. Kirk, The Songs of Homer, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1962; A Companion to Homer, ed. by Alan J.B. Wace and Frank H. Stubbings, London: Macmillan 1962, Chapter 7 by J.A. Davison. Minna Skafte Jensen, The Homeric Question and the Oral-Formulaic Theory, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press 1980, argues for a final oral composition from as late as the sixth century bc. 3 Some other poems, especially the Homeric Hymns and the Batrachomyomachia, have also been ascribed to Homer. Kierkegaard seems to have been familiar with these texts to
of the 6th century bc, at which time recitations of the poems became a permanent part of the Panathenaic Festival in Athens.
