The Grain of Greek Voices
Richard P. Martin
Oral tradition in Greece before the mid-fifth century BCE? Law, ritual, myth, education-through-dance (khoreia), invective, games, wisdom, praise, lament—almost every verbal institution imaginable employed stylized language, formulaic diction, characteristic rhythms, or time-honored performance habits. They were transmitted wholly, or partly, without writing. At the same time, such institutions—some reaching back millennia—were open to new interpretations and refashionings. As in many oral cultures, to innovate was in fact "traditional." My working assumption is that all facets of early Greek social life need to be evaluated when one investigatesa given "oral tradition." But we have to avoid lumping all such institutions together, as if their shared "orality" were the primary point of interest. Affiliations and nuances of social context and contestation surrounded each and demand respect.
When the creative analyses of Milman Parry and Albert Lord turned attention first to the traditional nature—and by extrapolation to the "orality"—of Homeric poetry, they also opened new perspectives on the many other forms of Greek verbal culture. Reimagining not just the technical conventions but the social conditions under which Homeric poetry arose brought about a total re-examination of Greek culture. In this reappraisal, comparative evidence came to play a major role as a suggestive analogy and a useful heuristic device.
Interesting new directions? First, the expansion and refining of
comparative studies. John Foley has led the way both by his writings
(e.g., 2002) and by his establishment of effective clearinghouses for
sharing work. Increasingly sophisticated folkloristics (see, e.g.,
Reynolds 1995, Honko 1998) open up new questions about performance
in context. Second, an urge to explore the varied mutual relations of
"performance" genres within the seventh-fifth centuries BCE. W. Robert
Connor inspired a social-historical approach that took account of the
poetics of specific social "genres." His influence has been great on
many younger scholars whose works incorporate "oralist" perspectives
whether the subject is Greek lyric, proverb use,
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Delphic oracles, or colonization stories. Recognizing "performance" as
an overarching social-poetic concept is the deeper urge at work here,
with profound effects on the field: it is hard to name a single American
Hellenist untouched.1 Finally, an evolutionary, multilevel perspective has
begun to replace New Critical attitudes that prized texts as objects,
technique as primary, and Homeric verse as a culmination. A guiding
light is the work of Gregory Nagy, from his pathbreaking studies in
cultural semantics (1979) to his magisterial Pindar's Homer (1990). His
more recent studies on the crystallization of the Homeric text from the
eighth to the first centuries BCE illustrate how a New Diachrony (if
one can call it that) is able not just to describe the system of Greek
poetics but to motivate and track changes within it.2 He has taken up
the challenges adumbrated in Albert Lord's later work (1991 and 1995),
where "oral" and "written" are no longer divided by a deep gulf. The
historically grounded, fine-grain analyses of the reception-history
of Homer point to new vistas in the understanding of oral-derived and
transitional texts.
Richard P. Martin is the Antony and Isabelle Raubitschek Professor of Classics at Stanford University. His interests include early Greek poetry (especially Homer), Greek myth and religion, modern Greek studies, medieval Irish literature, and ethnopoetics. His latest book, Rhapsoidia, will appear in 2004.
© by Richard P. Martin.
References
Connor 2000
W. R. Connor. "Tribes, Festivals and Processions: Civic
Ceremonial and Political Manipulation in Archaic Greece." In Oxford
Readings in Greek Religion. Ed. by Richard Buxton. Oxford: Oxford
University Press. pp. 56-75.
Dougherty and Kurke 1993
Carol Dougherty and Leslie Kurke,
eds. Cultural Poetics in Ancient Greece: Cult, Performance,
Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Foley 2002
John Miles Foley. How to Read an Oral Poem. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press. E-companion at www.oraltradition.org.
Honko 1998
Lauri Honko.. Helsinki: Academia
Scientiarum Fennica.
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Lord 1991
Albert Lord. Epic Singers and Oral Tradition. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press.
Lord 1995
.—— The Singer Resumes the Tale. Ed. by Mary Louise
Lord. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Nagy 1979
Gregory Nagy. The Best of the Achaeans. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press. 2nd rev. ed., 1999.
Nagy 1990
.—— Pindar's Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic
Past. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Reynolds 1995
Dwight F. Reynolds. Heroic Poets, Poetic Heroes: The
Ethnography of Performance in an Arabic Oral Epic Tradition. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press.
Footnotes
1. See, e.g., Connor 2000 (a seminal article); for his influence, cf. Dougherty and Kurke 1993.
2. See Nagy's contribution to this collection.
