Homer the Preclassic

Part I: A Preclassical Homer from the Dark Age

Part I A Preclassical Homer from the Dark Age This page intentionally left blank Thinking my way backward from the classical period of the fifth century b.c.e., I confront a preclassical period that I divide into two ages, the Dark Age and the Bronze Age. I start here in Part I with the Dark Age. Then, in Part II, I will proceed to the Bronze Age. The term Dark Age refers to discontinuities, real or perceived, after the time of the Bronze Age, which comes to an end sometime around the eleventh century b.c.e. There is much speculation about the nature of such discontinuities and about their causes. Such speculation, however, is not relevant to what I am about to do, which is, to offer a working redefinition of a Dark Age viewed exclusively in terms of the study of Homer. Here in Part I, the Dark Age is the Dark Age of Homer. For those who specialize in Homer, there is a chronological chasm separating the era of historical events in the classical period of the fifth and the fourth century b.c.e. from the prehistoric era of events like the Capture of Troy, which is the single most important point of reference for Homeric narrative—and which coincides roughly with the end of the Bronze Age as archaeologists define it. We are left in the dark, as it were, about Homer for a vast stretch of time. We experience a strong sense of discontinuity with a past not recorded in writing. Denied access to any Homeric texts that could date back to the life and times of Homer, we feel cut off from this Homer. We cannot even have any direct way of knowing when the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey were first written down.1 5 1. HTL 3–24. The question of dating the earliest phases of written texts recording what we know as the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey cannot be answered by way of comparing the surviving evidence about epigrams, attested already in the earliest phases of ancient Greek alphabetic literacy. The genre of the From the standpoint of surviving written evidence, if we work our way forward in time from the Bronze Age, all we can say is that the Dark Age of Homer stays dark until we reach the beginnings of a span of time marked by the fifth century b.c.e. So my working definition of the Dark Age of Homer is: a length of time extending from the end of the Bronze Age all the way to the fifth century b.c.e.— that is, all the way to the beginnings of recorded history, as represented by Herodotus and Thucydides. The perspectives of these two historians, I will argue, provide a glimpse into such a Dark Age of Homer—to the extent that both Herodotus and Thucydides searched for realities that predated their own times. In the course of their search, as we will see, both these early historians relied in significant ways on the authority of what we know as Homer. The Dark Age of Homer, then, is delimited on both sides by objective dating criteria . On the far side, the eleventh century b.c.e. marks the end of the Bronze Age as defined by the evidence of archaeology. On the near side, the fifth century b.c.e. marks the beginnings of direct reportage about history and prehistory. Here in Part I of Homer the Preclassic, I propose to build a model that accounts for the continuity of Homeric poetry during the Dark Age—despite the discontinuities posited by some historians. As I will argue, this continuity depends on the oral traditions that culminated in the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey as performed at the festival of the Panathenaia in Athens in the classical period, during the fifth century b.c.e.2 (Here and hereafter, I use the term Panathenaia primarily with reference to the quadrennial or Great Panathenaia, as distinct from the annual or Lesser Panathenaia.)3 Already at the beginning of my inquiry into the Dark Age of Homer, the question arises: What could be the antecedent of such a classical Homer as performed in the fifth century? For an answer, I concentrate on the era of the Peisistratidai, a dynasty of turannoi ‘tyrants’ who ruled Athens from 546 to 510 b.c.e. As we will see, a...