Barry Powell, “Iliad” and “Odyssey” (Oxford, 2014), theorizes that written Greek came into being for the purpose of putting these remarkable oral epics into written form. Some clever people among the seafaring and trading Greeks, and the equally seafaring and trading Phoenicians (who had a consonantal phonetic alphabet), got together to devise a system to represent Greek speech in written form. The details of this can’t be known, but sometime after c.800 BCE, when international business was reawakening, Greek became a written language. Powell notes that all the earliest Greek writings are poetry, and after that, philosophical speculation, history, and drama.
Moses Finley, “The World of Odysseus” (1954, 2002), writes that, “The actual borrowing process can neither be described nor dated very closely: the evidence favors the period 800-750 BC. The one thing that is certain about the operation is its deliberate, rational character, for whoever was responsible did more than imitate. The Phoenician sign system was not simply copied: it was modified radically to the needs of the Greek language, which is unrelated to the Semitic family.” (p.10)
Sheila Muraghan, Introduction to Lombardo, “Iliad” (1997), writes, “First, it is important to recognize the Iliad is itself a work of history, that it represents its story as a recollection of long-past events taking place in a time very different from that in which those events are being recalled. The characters in the story are seen as belonging to a superior, even semidivine breed that no longer exists, and they perform acts that no living person could duplicate.” The way the story is told involved a very distinct type of traditional poetic diction. “Just as the society described in the Homeric epics reflects the centuries-long period during which the Trojan legend evolved, so the poems themselves–in their language, their style, and their modes of narration–also reflect that period and process of evolution. The Iliad is manifestly the product of a long tradition within Greek culture and follows on many tellings of the same legendary material. Beyond that, the poem has roots in the traditions of the ancient Near East, which we can recognize, but not trace precisely.” (xlix, liv)
Unlike the Bible, the Iliad and the Odyssey are both unitary works, each telling a single, if novelistically complex, story. Neither contains ritual prescriptions for hearers to follow, laws, the history of the world or of the Geek people in particular, wisdom, a national covenant with God, or many of the other elements of Hebrew scriptures. They are also not composed from a disparate group of written and oral sources, and compiled to resemble unified books (Van der Toorn, “Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible,” 2007). The two epics show many signs of being the products of a long, orally transmitted, bardic tradition. Lord and Parry, “The Singer of Tales” (1960) is a classic work on this.
Like the Bible, however, “The Iliad and Odyssey were thus inevitably place in a position of very great honor and inspired an awe that must sometimes have jarred uncomfortably against the response demanded by such passages as the deception of Zeus and the song of Ares and Aphrodite. If Homer demanded laughter–even bawdy laughter–tradition demanded that this response somehow made compatible with the dignity of the divine and the respect due the text itself by virtue of its antiquity.” (Lamberton, “Homer, the Theologian,” 1989, p.11)
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