Editing Homer (section)

=== Modern ===
[[File:Page from the first printed edition (editio princeps) of collected works by Homer.jpg|thumb|Page from the first printed edition ([[editio princeps]]) of collected works by Homer edited by [[Demetrios Chalkokondyles]], Florence, 1489, {{lang|fr|[[Bibliothèque Nationale de France]]|italic=no}}]]

In 1488, the Greek scholar [[Demetrios Chalkokondyles]] published in [[Florence]] the ''[[editio princeps]]'' of the Homeric poems.<ref name="Lamberton2010"/><ref>{{Cite web |title=Homer Editio Princeps |url=https://library.chethams.com/collections/101-treasures-of-chethams/homer-editio-princeps/ |access-date=7 January 2021 |website=library.chethams.com}}</ref> The earliest modern Homeric scholars started with the same basic approaches towards the Homeric poems as scholars in antiquity.<ref name="Lamberton2010"/><ref name="West2011"/><ref name="Dickey2012"/> The allegorical interpretation of the Homeric poems that had been so prevalent in antiquity returned to become the prevailing view of the [[Renaissance]].<ref name="Lamberton2010"/> Renaissance humanists praised Homer as the archetypically wise poet, whose writings contain hidden wisdom, disguised through allegory.<ref name="Lamberton2010"/> In western Europe during the [[Renaissance]], [[Virgil]] was more widely read than Homer and Homer was often seen through a Virgilian lens.<ref>{{harvc|last=Heiden|first=Bruce|chapter=Scholarship, Renaissance through 17th Century|in=Finkelberg|year=2012}} {{doi|10.1002/9781444350302.wbhe1310}}</ref>

In 1664, contradicting the widespread praise of Homer as the epitome of wisdom, [[François Hédelin, abbé d'Aubignac]] wrote a scathing attack on the Homeric poems, declaring that they were incoherent, immoral, tasteless, and without style, that Homer never existed, and that the poems were hastily cobbled together by incompetent editors from unrelated oral songs.<ref name="West2011"/> Fifty years later, the English scholar [[Richard Bentley]] concluded that Homer did exist but that he was an obscure, prehistoric oral poet whose compositions bear little relation to the ''Iliad'' and the ''Odyssey'' as they have been passed down.<ref name="West2011"/> According to Bentley, Homer "wrote a Sequel of Songs and Rhapsodies, to be sung by himself for small Earnings and good Cheer at Festivals and other Days of Merriment; the ''Ilias'' he wrote for men, and the ''Odysseis'' for the other Sex. These loose songs were not collected together in the Form of an epic Poem till [[Pisistratus]]' time, about 500 Years after".<ref name="West2011"/>

[[Giambattista Vico]] analysed Homer and other ancient writings in his philological treatise [[The New Science]] (1744), and concluded that Homer was not one man, but many, or an amalgum of other writers. Vico writes "he was a purely ideal poet who never existed as a particular man" and that "Homer was an idea or a heroic character of Grecian men insofar as they told their histories in song".<ref>Vico, Giambattista, ''The New Science'', Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1986, orig. 1744, page 323, §873</ref>

[[Friedrich August Wolf]]'s ''Prolegomena ad Homerum'', published in 1795, argued that much of the material later incorporated into the ''Iliad'' and the ''Odyssey'' was originally composed in the tenth century BC in the form of short, separate oral songs,<ref name="Heiden18thcenturyscholarship">{{harvc|last=Heiden|first=Bruce|chapter=Scholarship, 18th Century|in=Finkelberg|year=2012}} {{doi|10.1002/9781444350302.wbhe1311}}</ref><ref name="Heidennineteenth century scholarship">{{harvc|last=Heiden|first=Bruce|chapter=Scholarship, 19th Century|in=Finkelberg|year=2012}} {{doi|10.1002/9781444350302.wbhe1312}}</ref><ref name="West2011"/> which passed through oral tradition for roughly four hundred years before being assembled into prototypical versions of the ''Iliad'' and the ''Odyssey'' in the sixth century BC by literate authors.<ref name="Heiden18thcenturyscholarship"/><ref name="Heidennineteenth century scholarship"/><ref name="West2011"/> After being written down, Wolf maintained that the two poems were extensively edited, modernized, and eventually shaped into their present state as artistic unities.<ref name="Heiden18thcenturyscholarship"/><ref name="Heidennineteenth century scholarship"/><ref name="West2011"/> Wolf and the "Analyst" school, which led the field in the nineteenth century, sought to recover the original, authentic poems which were thought to be concealed by later excrescences.<ref name="Heiden18thcenturyscholarship"/><ref name="Heidennineteenth century scholarship"/><ref name="West2011"/><ref name="Taplin1986">{{cite book |last=Taplin |first=Oliver |author-link=Oliver Taplin |date=1986 |chapter=2: Homer |title=The Oxford History of the Classical World |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=7EloAAAAMAAJ&q=Homer |editor1-last=Boardman |editor1-first=John |editor2-last=Griffin |editor2-first=Jasper |editor3-last=Murray |editor3-first=Oswyn |location=Oxford, England |publisher=[[Oxford University Press]] |isbn=978-0198721123 |pages=50–77 |url=https://archive.org/details/oxfordhistoryofc00john/page/50}}</ref>

Within the Analyst school were two camps: proponents of the "lay theory", which held that the ''Iliad'' and the ''Odyssey'' were put together from a large number of short, independent songs,<ref name="West2011"/> and proponents of the "nucleus theory", which held that Homer had originally composed shorter versions of the ''Iliad'' and the ''Odyssey'', which later poets expanded and revised.<ref name="West2011"/> A small group of scholars opposed to the Analysts, dubbed "Unitarians", saw the later additions as superior, the work of a single inspired poet.<ref name="Heiden18thcenturyscholarship"/><ref name="Heidennineteenth century scholarship"/><ref name="West2011"/> By around 1830, the central preoccupations of Homeric scholars, dealing with whether or not "Homer" actually existed, when and how the Homeric poems originated, how they were transmitted, when and how they were finally written down, and their overall unity, had been dubbed "the Homeric Question".<ref name="West2011"/>

Following [[World War I]], the Analyst school began to fall out of favor among Homeric scholars.<ref name="West2011"/> It did not die out entirely, but it came to be increasingly seen as a discredited dead end.<ref name="West2011"/> Starting in around 1928, [[Milman Parry]] and [[Albert Lord]], after their studies of folk bards in the Balkans, developed the "Oral-Formulaic Theory" that the Homeric poems were originally composed through improvised oral performances, which relied on traditional epithets and poetic formulas.<ref name="Foley1988">{{cite book |last1=Foley |first1=John Miles |title=The Theory of Oral Composition: History and Methodology |date=1988 |publisher=[[Indiana University Press]] |isbn=978-0253342607 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Zo-665SEuqsC |language=en}}</ref><ref name="Taplin1986"/><ref name="West2011"/> This theory found very wide scholarly acceptance<ref name="Foley1988"/><ref name="Taplin1986"/><ref name="West2011"/> and explained many previously puzzling features of the Homeric poems, including their unusually archaic language, their extensive use of stock epithets, and their other "repetitive" features.<ref name="Taplin1986"/> Many scholars concluded that the "Homeric Question" had finally been answered.<ref name="West2011"/>

Meanwhile, the "Neoanalysts" sought to bridge the gap between the "Analysts" and "Unitarians".<ref>{{harvc|last=Heiden|first=Bruce|chapter=Scholarship, 20th Century|in=Finkelberg|year=2012}} {{doi|10.1002/9781444350302.wbhe1313}}</ref><ref>{{harvc|last=Edwards|first=Mark W.|chapter=Neoanalysis|in=Finkelberg|year=2012}} {{doi|10.1002/9781444350302.wbhe0968}}</ref> The Neoanalysts sought to trace the relationships between the Homeric poems and other epic poems, which have now been lost, but of which modern scholars do possess some patchy knowledge.<ref name="West2011"/> Neoanalysts hold that knowledge of earlier versions of the epics can be derived from anomalies of structure and detail in the surviving versions of the ''Iliad'' and ''Odyssey''. These anomalies point to earlier versions of the ''Iliad'' in which Ajax played a more prominent role, in which the Achaean embassy to Achilles comprised different characters, and in which Patroclus was actually mistaken for Achilles by the Trojans. They point to earlier versions of the ''Odyssey'' in which Telemachus went in search of news of his father not to Menelaus in Sparta but to Idomeneus in Crete, in which Telemachus met up with his father in Crete and conspired with him to return to Ithaca disguised as the soothsayer Theoclymenus, and in which Penelope recognized Odysseus much earlier in the narrative and conspired with him in the destruction of the suitors.<ref>Reece, Steve; "The Cretan Odyssey: A Lie Truer than Truth", ''American Journal of Philology'', 115, 1994, 157–173. [https://www.academia.edu/30641542/The_Cretan_Odyssey_A_Lie_Truer_Than_Truth The_Cretan_Odyssey]</ref>