to the view that Ionic bards took over and adapted to new circumstances and a new
audience material that they had inherited from the past. The oldest linguistic elements
are probably what have come to be known as the ‘traditional epithets’ like ‘cloud-
gathering’ Zeus, or ‘ox-eyed’ Hera, some of which perplexed the Greeks themselves.
Their presence can be accounted for by the technique of formulaic composition
employed in the poems. Formulae may be short phrases like ‘winged words’ or ‘rosy-
fingered dawn’, or extend to longer passages describing repeated actions such as
arming for battle, the preparation of a meal or the ritual of sacrifice. They are
convenient units that can be readily committed to memory and are therefore an aid
to improvisation in a pre-literate world where the poet is wholly dependent upon
memory. About one-third of the lines in the poems are repeated wholly or in part in
the course of the poem. Equally, one-third is made up of phrases and formulae that
are not repeated elsewhere. It is clear that the traditional inheritance was constantly
being added to, to meet contemporary needs and the requirements of different tales.
In the twentieth century the pioneering work of the American scholar Milman Parry
showed how sophisticated the deployment of the formulaic technique in Homer is,
and from a comparative study involving modern oral poets in the Balkans Parry
showed how this technique is fundamental to both the composition and transmission
of oral poets. Homer’s language therefore had been purposely developed for poetic
recitation; it was never a spoken language. Nor did such a development any more
than the tales themselves originate with one genius. There is a consensus of scholarly
opinion that the language of the Homeric poems evolved over many centuries and
that its sophisticated technique of formulaic diction goes back to the Mycenaean age,
from which it was doubtless transmitted by practising bards like Demodocus and
Phemius in the Odyssey.
The Homeric poems are generally regarded by most modern scholars as having
been substantially composed long after the aristocratic culture of the heroes they
represent had passed away, probably in the early or mid-eighth century, by which
time the city-state is beginning to develop. This is also the time, at the end of the dark
age, at which it is thought that the Greeks adapted a Phoenician system of signs to
create the Greek alphabet, a momentous innovation making possible the art of
writing, the first examples of which date from c.740. However, there is no consensus
about the extent to which writing might have been involved in their composition and
transmission.
The Greeks agree on the name of Homer but otherwise there is no consistent
tradition about the poet in the later literature of Greece. Different views are recorded
concerning his date and time. According to some accounts he had been a contem-
porary witness of the Trojan War; according to others the poems were composed
some time after the fall of Troy, an event, which, in any case, was for the Greek his-
torians shrouded in the mists of prehistory.
14 THE GREEKS