The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle by Jonathan S. Burgess (review)

368 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 found abandoned and have kept for years with a feeling of nostalgia for an unknown past. It may not be as unfathomable as I have always presumed. (PETER SRAMEK) Jonathan S. Burgess. The Tradition of the Trojan War in Homer and the Epic Cycle Johns Hopkins University Press. xvi, 296. US $47.00 Jonathan S. Burgess=s subject is meta-history, the prehistory of a story. The story is the transmission of the tale of Troy in the archaic and classical periods of Greece. Partly based on a doctoral dissertation, the book has retained much of the thoroughness and detail of that genre. Parts of it indeed have the quality of a first-rate work of reference, especially the wellillustrated survey of Trojan scenes in archaic art. Its argument is original and audacious, and spreads itself far beyond its primary thesis. Prehistory is mostly raw data, and in this case the data are not plentiful. How much do we know, as opposed to what we might be tempted to infer, about the tradition of this ancient saga? We have the testimonies of the two Homeric epics and what purport to be summaries of six poems, the epic cycle of the title, plus a handful of comments by the poets of the archaic age and a few illustrations by vase painters of the same period, which may or may not be independent of our principle sources. Where so little is known, much may be inferred, or rather conjectured. In so far as there is anything approaching a scholarly consensus concerning this part of literary prehistory, we might infer from the language and diction of Homer that the tale of Troy had evolved over a long period, and from the content of Homer and the cycle that it had grown to an unwieldy length. Its telling was by episodes, the singer taking up the tale >from such and such a point.= From this material the magnificent expansive epics were created. To locate them within the tale of Troy, the rest of the story was preserved by the unpretentious chronicles of the cycle. Nothing of this is beyond dispute, but the last point, that the cyclic poems existing in classical times were composed in the shadow of the Homeric epics, has seemed to many from ancient times onwards to be among the least disputable. For Burgess, on the other hand, the supposed dependence of the cycle on the epics is very much to be disputed, and indeed a certain degree of scepticism is appropriate in a field where a strong will to believe is pervasive. >Dispute,= however, is scarcely the right word for the comprehensive assault launched by him on this notion. In the first place we must understand that the summaries attributed to Proclus, a scholar of the fifth century CE, are not what they seem: a neatly ordered sequence. Look further and we find that their content and authorship are variously reported. Burgess imagines a ruthless editorial hand in Hellenistic times trimming off the duplications, and conjectures that in their original composition the humanities 369 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 poems were independent of each other and a fortiori of the Iliad and Odyssey. Perhaps they already existed as poems alongside the Homeric epics. He is cautious about chronology, however, and reasonably so, for reputable scholars have recently assigned Homer both to the early eighth century and to the late seventh. Powell discerns an allusion to >Nestor=s cup= in a graffito on a mid-eighth-century artifact; West relies on the secure representation of Homeric scenes from the late seventh century and their questionable appearance earlier, when scenes from the cycle were in favour. Burgess stresses this point strongly to the extent of giving none of the iconographic evidence the benefit of the doubt. His response to Powell exemplifies his argumentation: >Nestor=s cup could have exited in mythology independently of Homer.= Of course, it could have. This subjunctive mood B might/could/would/must have been B dominates his discourse. That is inevitable B and honest B...