Homer's Allusive Art by Bruno Currie (review)

"[This] is bound to be a controversial book," writes Currie in his preface; he is bound to be right. Addressing the topic of intertextuality in an environment of oral poetry, he stakes out what many readers will regard as an extreme position: that Homer, and other archaic poets, operated with a technique of allusion that is in many ways as sophisticated as that of Hellenistic and Roman poets. Moreover, the poets of the ancient Near East were already playing this game millennia before, and Greek poets may have been aware of their allusive methods. Those inclined to dismiss the thesis out of hand will need to think again, for few books have presented their cases more fully and cogently. Methodology and criteria are laid out with commendable clarity and thoroughness, and the reasoning is watertight; where certainty is not possible, Currie says so and builds his case accordingly. His knowledge of primary texts, secondary literature and issues is profound. He offers a vigorous vindication of Neoanalysis, and a powerful challenge to conventional oralist understandings of Homer. Even an intermediate position, a "soft" Neoanalysis as it were, whereby some plot-specific scenes in the oral tradition were more distinctive than typical scenes such as the donning of armour, so that bards could allude to them in a meaningful and perceptible way without, however, alluding to specific poems, is argued to be inadequate to the phenomena. As one who (upon a time) tended to dismiss Neoanalysis out of hand, then slowly began to find it more and more persuasive, I confess my conversion has been completed by this book: the onus is now on those who would deny it, in my view.

The dominant idea about how Greek epic "texts" related to one another is, I suppose, John Miles Foley's "traditional referentiality," the resonant interaction of formulae and typical elements with the tradition as a whole rather than any one instantiation of it, the latter being on an oralist understanding a matter of composition-in-performance and insufficiently stable to be the source-text of an allusion. "Text" in this perspective is itself a problematic word. Neoanalysis presumes texts of sufficient fixity (though not necessarily written) that they could be known as such, and alluded to. Near the beginning of his book, Currie gives his reasons for thinking that our texts do go back to archaic originals of such fixity; to my mind the arguments are decisive. That being so, the main question becomes whether and how such texts knew about and evoked one another. How do allusions actually work when the environment remains indisputably oral? That is, even if poets had a (written or oral) script to work from, these had to be scripts for performance (which can be flexible up to a point), not (immutable) scriptures for a reading public. (This linguistic distinction, used to profitable effect by Alessandro Vatri in his recent book Orality and Performance in Classical Attic Prose (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2017), is useful also in considering the history of Greek epic.) The poetics and aesthetics of performance must determine one's assessment of allusion. This is not the same as saying that only those allusions exist that could be taken in by an audience (all of the audience? 51% of the audience? the person of meanest understanding in the audience? and given that "the audience" must normally be projected from how one understands the working of the text in the first place, appeals to what the audience could understand are usually circular); but it is to acknowledge that, even if techniques such as opposition in imitation or the signalling of allusions turn out to be basically the same in Homer as in Virgil, a picture of readers poring over texts and assessing allusions word by word is anachronistic. Currie believes that "there is virtually no limit … to the sophistication and self-consciousness that we are entitled to find in Homeric epic" (38), but elsewhere he does admit that there have to...