Scholarship, Memory, and the Singer

Your Homer essay for the week, on thinking about what will survive, and why.

Scholarship, Memory, and the Singer

We are not done studying Homer. As I read daily, I encounter the basic parts of the Homer curriculum that most undergraduate students encounter. I sometimes go further into articles and theses, or heavier commentaries. We read that there are some formulaic consistencies in the text, that this that or the other can be accorded to an older morphological basis that helps us date the Iliad as older than the Odyssey, that poetic consistencies help us define major Homeric Questions, etc.; the fruits of scholars that have done the hard part for us, which is actually corralling the physical copies of the manuscript tradition that has led us to where we are today, and connect big dots of data.

If we believe we have something more to say, I think it is time for us to take a serious look at this manuscript tradition’s safety for us to receive it better, and for us to be realistic about the outcome of the safeguards we have put in place to keep the light of all these wonderful Homer scholars’ work alive for thousands of years.

For one, we have many physical copies that speak to the manifestation of the work. These are books, but books are not guaranteed to last that long. Especially the new printing quality at the OUP. Then, there are the physical manuscripts themselves, which for so long have languished in heaps of parchment or vellum bound mysteries in monasteries and church libraries. It is, in my opinion, doubtful that these will survive if the people that go to church stop going to church, which is the case now, and they too suffer from a materials issue, in that changing weather will cause things to break down and disintegrate in ways that we would not anticipate.

Then there are the digital copies of things. But do these really exist? The only useful issuance of classical texts so far on the internet have been three sources: the tor library of SciLib etc. which provides for the texts that you cannot get in person, the Perseus digital library’s first system of cataloguing, and the MIT Classics’ collection of translations. I do not include Loeb, TLG, TLL, JSTOR, etc., because by the time we run into problems with digital curation, the ability to even make these servers unlocked for the general public will no longer be there. They have bad obsolescence habits (technical debt) curated by a desire to gatekeep what I think should be public knowledge.

There is also the github with classical texts as they were ~ossified with Perseus, above. I would be willing to bet the reader that, 25 years from now, all the other websites I list above will not be around.

What is the Homeric bard to do?

Material, popularity, and the dispersion of ideas is something that we have lost the flame for, especially as the tumor-like procession of administrative bloat has stopped the passion projects of scholars who are middling, but care. In years before, they would pursue the corners of the classical world that you and I would not want to go, or could not go, out of boredom or because they do not provide bases for funding. I speak of the University of (State School) Professor who publishes exclusively on Dry Topic that Will Never Get Funding, who should not be a celebrity, but rather should be supported because they genuinely love researching things. These types still survive in corners of Europe. They contrast with the artisans of today’s scholarly landscape, who are not planning 100 years in the future.

The work that shows up in our journals today are artful. They are beautiful: they have such great conclusions and work around wonderful problems.

Here the metaphor arrives at the Homeric performance, in that we only ever hear of Homer’s name in the seventh century B.C. (Callinus fr. 6 West), over a hundred years after he ‘lived,’ and he is only confidently dated in references found in the final third of the sixth. We have no fragments of Theagenes of Rhegium, the first ancient scholar, who began defending Homer in his lifetime, also around the sixth. He loved Homeric allegory. If Homer really was many different people, then really, the spirit of defending the allegory of Homer’s literal descriptions no longer bearing fruit after the birth of philosophy is a project or reevaluating ideas that would well embody the Margites and Battle of Frogs and Mice: playful, perhaps instinctual, and decidedly not anchored in history.

We may yet remember scholarship of our day the same way. The beautiful extent to which we have combined mediaeval manuscripts with papyri and the science of performance through musical theory of the ancients gives us our best Homer yet, in my opinion, just like opera can be said to have perhaps come close to being its own thing in comparison to the Greek tragedy it takes after.

In this way too then, I think that the act of skimming scholarship and taking all readers seriously is a fact of life for the practical singer. The amount of information that one can find on Book XII of the Iliad is immense, for instance. But for most of us, it is going to be most impactful to hear it out loud, and to keep puzzling over why Homer had such a great hold on the other philosophers of his day (Homer himself being a philosopher, of course; see Ahrensdorf’s 2022 book on the idea).

I find that in my performance of Homer I come ever yet closer to creating natural hexameters of my own. I can improvise rough pentameters when inspiration strikes me, or longer lines when I want to say something in particular with a word I’ve found:

ὡς νιφάδες πῖπτον ἔτι θηρῶντες τάχα γαῖαν.

I made this when I was thinking of the snowflakes, and how we’ll have them coming soon; “So the snowflakes fall, still hunting quickly for the Earth.” In a like manner, may we keep hoping for new insights and love of the apparitions that make their way into the Homeric text, and wishing for them to take the form of something inspired that will outlast the melt that must eventually come once they have landed. For them we only have memory to aid us.