The evolving nature of Homer’s audience through the centuries

  1. The dissemination of Homeric epic broadly comes in three phases:
    • composition and recomposition in oral performance
    • popularisation, geographic distribution, and becoming an icon
    • standardised texts widely distributed in libraries and book collections
  2. These phases overlap, come at different times in different places, with some surprises here and there (e.g. the earliest material evidence for a standardised form of the Odyssey comes from late 7th century Etruria, not from Greece). Two key questions. First: where do scrolls — transcription into physical copies — fit into this schema?

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