The Classicist Who Killed Homer

How Milman Parry proved that the Iliad and the Odyssey were not written by a lone genius.

 

By Adam Kirsch

Newyorker

June 7, 2021

 

Recording Yugoslav bards, Milman Parry established epic’s oral origins.Illustration by Julie Benbassat

 

 

he Western tradition has never been more appealingly portrayed than in Rembrandt’s 1653 painting “Aristotle with a Bust of Homer.” Whether you stand in front of it at the Metropolitan Museum or look at it online, the painting turns you into a link in a chain that goes back three thousand years. Here you are in the twenty-first century, contemplating a painting made in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century, which portrays a philosopher who lived in Athens in the fourth century B.C., looking at a poet thought to have lived in the eighth century B.C. Tradition abolishes time, making us all contemporaries.

 

Yet the painting hints that Homer doesn’t quite belong in the same dimension of reality occupied by you, Aristotle, and Rembrandt. Aristotle is portrayed realistically in the dress of Rembrandt’s time—sumptuous white shirt, simple black apron, and broad-brimmed hat. (It wasn’t until the twentieth century that art historians determined that the figure was Aristotle; earlier identifications included a contemporary of Rembrandt’s, the writer Pieter Cornelisz Hooft.) In other words, Aristotle is a human being like us, albeit an extraordinary one. Homer, however, is a white marble bust—a work of art within a work of art.

 

It’s a reminder that, even for Aristotle, Homer was more a legend than a man. In his Poetics, the philosopher credits the poet with inventing epic, drama, and comedy. “It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully,” he writes with evident ambivalence. Herodotus, known as the first historian, saw Homer, along with the poet Hesiod, as having invented Greek mythology, calling them the first to “give the gods their epithets, to allot them their several offices and occupations, and describe their forms.”

 

When it comes to things like when and where Homer lived, however, the earliest sources are already unreliable. According to tradition, the poet was blind and was born on the island of Chios, where a guild of rhapsodes—reciters of epic poetry—later became known as the Homeridae, “children of Homer,” and claimed to be his direct descendants. But there is no evidence for any of these assertions, and some ancient biographies of Homer are obviously fanciful.

 

Herodotus writes that Homer lived “four hundred years before my time,” which would put him in the ninth century B.C., but adds that this is “my own opinion,” with no real proof behind it. Other ancient sources give dates from 1100 to 800 B.C., placing Homer in what historians now call Greece’s Dark Ages, when the kingdoms we read about in the Iliad had collapsed and city-states like Athens and Sparta had not yet arisen. This was long before the development of the literate, urban civilization we think of as “ancient Greece.” There are no written records of this period, a fact that suggests the Greeks of Homer’s time were illiterate. Ultimately, the only evidence that such a person as Homer ever lived is the existence of the Iliad and the Odyssey themselves. Surely someone had to have written them, and, as far back as we can see, that person was called Homer.

 

But in the nineteenth century classicists began to subject the Iliad and the Odyssey to the same kind of critical analysis that was casting new light on the historical origins of the Bible. Tradition held that the five books of Moses were written by their namesake, but research was suggesting that they were a composite of several sources stitched together long after the time they were ostensibly written. A similar debate—known as the Homeric Question—roiled classical scholarship. Were the Iliad and the Odyssey really written by a historical individual named Homer, or were they composites of shorter poems by various people, woven together to form the epics we know? So-called “unitarians” argued that only a single author, with a powerfully imaginative mind, could have produced such monumental poems. “Analysts,” on the other hand, worked on separating the epics into their supposed original components by closely scrutinizing the language and the narrative.

 

Among those who waded into the debate was William Gladstone, the four-time Prime Minister of Britain, who published his three-volume “Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age” in 1858, during a brief stint out of office. Gladstone believed that the Homeric Question had been conclusively settled in favor of the traditional, unitarian view. The poems, he wrote, were “genuine gifts not only of a remote antiquity but of a designing mind.” And Homer, “to whom that mind belonged, has been justly declared by the verdict of all ages to be the patriarch of poets.” As it turned out, the verdict was premature.

 

We may not know when Homer was born, but we can say for certain that he ceased to exist in the early nineteen-thirties, when a young Harvard professor named Milman Parry published two papers, in the journal Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, with the seemingly innocuous title “Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making.” Parry’s thesis was simple but momentous: “It is my own view, as those who have read my studies on Homeric style know, that the nature of Homeric poetry can be grasped only when one has seen that it is composed in a diction which is oral, and so formulaic, and so traditional.” In other words, the Iliad and the Odyssey weren’t written by Homer, because they weren’t written at all. They were products of an oral tradition, performed by generations of anonymous Greek bards who gradually shaped them into the epics we know today. Earlier scholars had advanced this as a hypothesis, but it was Parry who demonstrated it beyond a reasonable doubt.

 

 

When he published his landmark papers, Parry was just thirty years old. Born in Oakland, California, where his father ran an unsuccessful drugstore, he visited Greece only once, for two months. But, as Robert Kanigel shows in the new biography “Hearing Homer’s Song” (Knopf), Parry, as an undergraduate at Berkeley, had been seized by Homer, in much the same way that the deities in the Iliad seize their favorite humans. In that era of American public education, even someone from Parry’s background could master Latin in high school and Greek in college, where the language “became his deep and abiding love,” his sister later recalled. “I think it was the sheer beauty and grandeur of spoken Greek—and the great delight the Greeks found in simply being alive—that attracted him.”

 

Parry’s career as a classicist lasted about fifteen years, from the first Greek courses he took until his sudden death, in 1935, at the age of thirty-three. He published no books and only a few papers. His most important research, undertaken in the last years of his life, involved travelling to remote areas of Yugoslavia to make recordings of local singers, whose improvised songs offered clues about how the Homeric epics might have been performed millennia earlier. These recordings revolutionized the understanding of oral literature, but when Parry died no one had yet listened to them; they were just a pile of thirty-five hundred aluminum disks sitting in a Harvard storage room.

 

The significance of Parry’s work might never have become widely known if it weren’t for another scholar, Albert Lord, who accompanied Parry to Yugoslavia as a research assistant. Lord devoted the rest of his life to preserving and building on his teacher’s research, above all in his classic book on oral poetry, “The Singer of Tales” (1960). As Kanigel writes, for classicists, Parry and Lord are as indivisible as Watson and Crick, the scientists who discovered the structure of DNA.

 

Parry was an unlikely candidate for the task of abolishing Homer, who had been revered as the West’s first great poet for almost three thousand years. But, as great as Parry’s accomplishment was, it’s not obvious that biography is the best genre for taking stock of it. Because he died almost a century ago, there is no one alive for Kanigel to interview, no new sources to unearth. To compensate, he leans on descriptions of the places Parry lived—Oakland at the turn of the century, or Paris in the nineteen-twenties, when he studied for his doctorate at the Sorbonne. Kanigel also devotes much attention to Parry’s marriage, helped by an interview that his widow, Marian, recorded in 1981. The only revelation here, though, is that the Parrys weren’t very close; they married only because Marian got pregnant, when she was twenty-four and Milman twenty-one. “That’s the beginning of the baby and the end of me,” she remembered him saying. They had a son and a daughter.

 

The Parrys’ marriage is primarily of interest because of the manner of Milman’s death. Late in 1935, he took a sudden leave of absence from Harvard to go to California, where Marian was helping her mother deal with a financial crisis. After spending time in the Bay Area, the Parrys headed south to visit Milman’s sister, in San Diego. They were staying overnight in a hotel in downtown Los Angeles when Milman, rummaging through his suitcase, discharged a loaded pistol he had packed, shooting himself in the heart.

 

Naturally, such a shocking death provoked rumor and conjecture about suicide or murder, which Kanigel duly reviews. But nothing in Milman’s life suggested that he was suicidal or that Marian had a motive for killing him. The policemen called to the scene didn’t hesitate to declare the death accidental, and the Parrys’ children later wrote that, given “Milman Parry’s character and the specific circumstances of his death,” an accident was the only reasonable explanation.

 

Certainly Parry doesn’t seem to have been the kind of man to inspire murderous passions. One of his Harvard colleagues recalled, “He had no enemies so far as I know and few friends. Not that he rejected friendship; he did not need it. He had had his idea and he had deliberately prepared himself to follow it up, and this was his life.” It is Parry’s consuming idea that is the real subject of “Hearing Homer’s Song.”

 

Even in antiquity, there were some clues that the authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey might be a complicated affair. The Greek historian Plutarch, who lived in the first century A.D., wrote that the epics owed their existence as complete poems to Lycurgus, an early ruler of Sparta, who encountered them during his travels in Asia Minor:

 

When he saw that the political and disciplinary lessons contained in them were worthy of no less serious attention than the incentives to pleasure and license which they supplied, he eagerly copied and compiled them in order to take them home with him. For these epics already had a certain faint reputation among the Greeks, and a few were in possession of certain portions of them, as the poems were carried here and there by chance; but Lycurgus was the very first to make them really known.

 

Lycurgus was renowned in antiquity for creating the harsh institutions that made Sparta Spartan, such as military training for boys and common mess halls for adult men. Little of this is certain, however. The classicist Gregory Nagy has written, in his book “Homeric Questions” (1996), that “it was a common practice to attribute any major achievement of society, even if this achievement may have been realized only through a lengthy period of social evolution, to the episodic and personal accomplishment of a culture hero.” In other words, a Spartan way of life that gradually took shape was retroactively attributed to a single lawgiver, whose name gave it an almost divine authority. But it’s entirely possible that no such person as Lycurgus ever existed.

 

Could the same be true of Homer? The story about Lycurgus implies that until he came along the Iliad and the Odyssey existed only as fragmentary tales told in various parts of the Hellenic world. In Athens, a similar feat of reconstruction was attributed to a different ruler, Peisistratus, a well-attested historical figure who lived in the sixth century B.C. He was said to be “the first person ever to arrange the books of Homer, previously scattered about, in the order that we have today.” He also instituted a quadrennial competition, the Great Panathenaea, in which the epics were recited in their entirety by a relay of rhapsodes.

 

Nagy observes that many cultures tell stories about an ancient text reduced to scattered fragments, then gathered together to reconstitute the lost original. The national epic of Persia, the Shahnameh (“Book of Kings”), is known to have been written by the poet Ferdowsi, at the end of the tenth century A.D. But in the text Ferdowsi claims that the story was once lost and then reassembled out of fragments by a group of wise men. A story like this, Nagy argues, should be seen not as a literal account of historical events but “as a myth that happens to account for a historical process”: a cluster of tales told in various ways in various places is collected and edited into a single, authoritative version, which is then projected back into the distant past.

 

In 1795, the German philologist Friedrich August Wolf published a book, “Prolegomena to Homer,” arguing that the Iliad and the Odyssey could not have been composed all at once in the form we know them now. “I find it impossible to accept the belief to which we have become accustomed: that these two works of a single genius burst forth suddenly from the darkness in all their brilliance, just as they are, with both the splendor of their parts and the many great virtues of the connected whole,” he wrote. He believed that the epics were edited together out of shorter poems that were composed and transmitted orally during the centuries before literacy came to Greece. In the poems themselves, Wolf noted, no one ever reads or writes.

 

This argument appealed to the new spirit of nationalism in Germany, where a generation of thinkers reacted against the triumphal universalism of the French Revolution by stressing the differences that make nations and cultures unique. If Homer never existed, then the Iliad and the Odyssey could be read as direct expressions of the Greek spirit.

 

Because there’s no reliable external evidence about how the Homeric epics were composed, the text itself had to be coaxed into telling its story. The same is true of the Hebrew Bible, but in that case it’s clear that we are dealing with a collection of books by different authors: they narrate events that took place centuries apart and are written in a wide range of styles, from dry chronicle to visionary verse. The Iliad and the Odyssey, in contrast, could plausibly be the work of a single poet. They use the same verse form throughout—dactylic hexameter, in which every line contains six groups of syllables. One of the most prominent features of Homeric poetry is the use of epithets, fixed descriptions that are applied to people and things again and again: “white-armed Hera,” “swift-footed Achilles,” “wine-dark sea.” This gives the effect of a single poetic style sustained at great length—the Iliad is almost sixteen thousand lines, the Odyssey more than twelve thousand. And, though the epics contain many episodes and characters, each employs a highly focussed narrative framework: the Iliad concentrates on the final year of the Trojan War, and the Odyssey tells of one man’s journey home after the war ends.

 

Still, a close reading of each epic reveals inconsistencies that would be hard to explain if either or both had been written by a single author. Robert Fagles observes, in the introduction to his 1990 translation of the Iliad, that the poem’s Greeks and Trojans fight with weapons made of bronze, the alloy of copper and tin used in the Near East until about 1200 B.C. The Iron Age is evidently only just beginning, since iron is rare and precious: in the funeral games that Achilles stages for his friend Patroclus, in Book XXIII, he offers as a prize “an ingot big enough to keep the winner in iron / for five wheeling years.” Yet in Book IV the Trojan archer Pandarus is described as using iron arrowheads. As Fagles notes, “Arrowheads are not things you expect to get back once you have shot them.” The detail suggests that this part of the epic comes from a time when iron had become so common that archers could afford to throw it away.

 

Another sign, apparent to experts like Fagles and Parry, though invisible to those of us who read Homer in translation, is that Homer’s Greek is an amalgam of dialects from various regions and eras. It includes words and grammatical forms that were already puzzling Athenians in the fifth century B.C., when students had to read Homer in school. As Fagles puts it, Homer’s Greek “is not a language that anyone ever spoke.” So how did the Iliad and the Odyssey come to be written in it?

 

Parry’s stroke of genius was to realize that the answer to this question was hidden in plain sight, in the two most obvious features of Homeric poetry—the meter and the epithets. In his doctoral thesis, Parry showed that these features were directly connected, in a way no one had noticed in millennia of reading. His argument rests on the fact that Greek, unlike English, is an inflected language, where the forms of words and names vary according to their grammatical function: Achilles is Achilleus when he’s the subject of a verb, Achillea when he’s the direct object. These forms have different metrical values, meaning that when they appear in a line of poetry the syllables around them have to be different, too, in order to preserve the pattern of the hexameter.

 

Parry, Kanigel writes, showed that “for each hero, god, or goddess, in each grammatical case, in each position in the hexametric line, there was normally only a single epithet that went with it.” Homer didn’t call the Achaeans “strong-greaved” in one place and “hairy-headed” in another because he thought those adjectives were particularly apt at that moment in the story. Rather, he had a supply of ready-made epithets in different metrical patterns that could be slotted in depending on the needs of the verse, like Tetris blocks. As Parry wrote in one of his papers, “The Homeric language is the work of the Homeric verse,” not the other way around.

 

In his doctoral thesis, Parry demonstrated these patterns with extensive tables and charts. He wasn’t yet ready to take the step of explaining why the epics were composed this way. But, to anyone steeped in the academic wrangling over the Homeric Question, the implications were clear. In a review of Parry’s work, his thesis adviser, the French linguist Antoine Meillet, wrote that “these poems were intended to be recited and that they were based on ancient oral semi-improvisations.”

 

After all, if Homer was a writer sitting at a desk with a reed pen and a piece of papyrus, there was no reason that he had to make his lines from prefabricated elements. He could have filled out the verses any way he liked. But, if the epic was being improvised on the spot by an oral performer, the epithets would have been indispensable, allowing the singer to keep the meter going while he thought about what to say next. This was especially true if the singer could not read or write, and so had no original text to consult and memorize. As Parry wrote, “In a society where there is no reading and writing, the poet, as we know from the study of such peoples in our own time, always makes his verse out of formulas. He can do it in no other way.”

 

It was this theory that took Parry to Yugoslavia, where a living tradition of oral poetry still existed. Kanigel’s chapters on his two trips—a short, unsatisfying one in 1933, followed by a long and fruitful one in 1934-35—form the most absorbing part of “Hearing Homer’s Song,” just as the trips were the most interesting experience of Parry’s life. With the help of an interpreter, Nikola Vujnović, Parry would go from village to village and inquire at the tavern about the best local guslar—a bard who accompanied his recitation with a gusle, a single-stringed instrument made of maple wood, horsehair, and sheep or rabbit skin.

 

Using a purpose-built recording machine with two turntables, Parry could record continuously for hours as the guslar went through his repertoire of tales. These usually had to do with the adventures of legendary Balkan heroes who would not have seemed out of place among Achilles and Hector. “The Captivity of Dulić Ibrahim,” which Parry recorded in several versions by different singers, tells of a Muslim hero, Dulić Ibrahim, whose true love is betrothed to another while he is imprisoned by a Christian prince. When the prince, impressed by the depth of Dulić’s grief, frees him, Dulić makes his way home to win the woman back. As Kanigel points out, the story has some remarkable parallels with the Odyssey, though there is no suggestion of direct influence. When Dulić returns, he defeats “thirty captains and . . . twenty dukes” in combat, much as Odysseus slays the hundred and eight suitors who have been plaguing his abandoned wife, Penelope. Dulić is recognized by his beloved horse, just as Odysseus is recognized by his faithful dog, Argos.

 

No wonder Parry believed that in Yugoslavia he had made contact with the wellspring of epic. Some of the recordings he made, and others made later by Lord, are available for streaming on the Harvard Library Web site. It’s not just the scratchiness that makes them sound ancient; the drone of the gusle and the minor-key speak-singing feel primeval, from a time before poetry and music diverged. “I like to think,” Lord wrote, that in these songs “one is hearing the Odyssey, or ancient songs like it, still alive on the lips of men, ever new, yet ever the same.”

 

Parry’s research showed that, in an oral-performance tradition, it makes no sense to speak of a poem as having an authentic, original text. He found that, when he asked a guslar to perform the same poem on consecutive days, the transcripts could be dramatically different, with lines and whole episodes appearing or disappearing. With the guslar he considered the most gifted, a man in his sixties named Avdo Međedović, Parry tried an experiment: he had Međedović listen to a tale he’d never heard before, performed by a singer from another village, and then asked him to repeat it. After one hearing, Međedović not only could retell the whole thing but made it three times longer, and, in Lord’s recollection, much better: “The ornamentation and richness accumulated, and the human touches of character imparted a depth of feeling that had been missing.”

 

Since Wolf, the Homeric Question had posed a choice between opposites: an individual poet of genius or a series of anonymous folksingers. Through close textual analysis, Parry settled the debate in favor of the latter. In discovering Međedović, however, he glimpsed how the binary might be overcome. Among the generations of ancient Greek bards who told stories about the Trojan War and the adventures of Odysseus, there must have been one or a few who were geniuses themselves—who could hear the formulaic old stories and transform them into epics so vivid and dramatic that people would keep them alive for thousands of years. We don’t know anything about those great storytellers, just as we don’t know the names of most of the architects and masons who created the Gothic cathedrals. But we might as well call them Homer. ♦

 

 

Published in the print edition of the June 14, 2021, issue, with the headline “The Echoing Song.”

 

Adam Kirsch is a poet, a critic, and the author of, most recently, “Who Wants to Be a Jewish Writer?”