Orality Textuality and The Homeric Epics An Interdisciplinary Study of Oral Texts Dictated Texts and Wild Texts Jonathan L Ready Full Chapter

Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric
Epics: An Interdisciplinary Study of

Oral Texts, Dictated Texts, and Wild
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Title Pages
Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An

Interdisciplinary Study of Oral Texts, Dictated
Texts, and Wild Texts
Jonathan L. Ready
Print publication date: 2019

Print ISBN-13: 9780198835066
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2019
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198835066.001.0001
Title Pages
Jonathan L. Ready
(p.i) Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics (p.ii)
(p.iii) Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics
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Page 2 of 2
Dedication

Jonathan L. Ready

Print ISBN-13: 9780198835066
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198835066.001.0001
(p.v) Dedication
Jonathan L. Ready
For Ruthie
That ain’t no storm, Captain.
That’s just my hammer in the air, Lord, Lord.
That’s just my hammer in the air.
(Ballad of John Henry, traditional)
(p.vi)
Page 1 of 1
Preface

Jonathan L. Ready

Print ISBN-13: 9780198835066
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198835066.001.0001
(p.vii) Preface
Jonathan L. Ready
The heroic world depicted in the Iliad and the Odyssey is one of constant
competition, and my first book, Character, Narrator, and Simile in the Iliad
(Ready 2011), places similes in that agonistic setting. The book engages
extensively with similes spoken by characters but also shows how similes
presented by the Iliad’s narrator evince competitive dynamics. On occasion, I
refer in that book to similes in modern oral traditions. My second book, The
Homeric Simile in Comparative Perspectives: Oral Traditions from Saudi Arabia
to Indonesia (Ready 2018a), takes up that challenge, investigating the Homeric
simile from neglected comparative perspectives. In the first part of that volume,
I consider similes in five modern oral poetries—Rajasthani epic, South Sumatran
epic, Kyrgyz epic, Bosniac epic, and Najdi lyric poems from Saudi Arabia—and I
review folkloristic scholarship on successful performances by other verbal
artists, such as Egyptian singers of epic and African American singers of blues.
By applying the results of those inquiries to the Homeric epics in the second
part, I put forward a new take on how our Homeric poets crafted their similes,
and I alter our understanding of how they displayed their competence as
performers of verbal art.
Reading all those textualized versions of oral traditional works led me to explore
what goes into making a written version of an oral performer’s presentation.
Deep down in the history of folklore collecting, it occurred to me that I could use
my findings to address the vexed matter of how the Iliad and the Odyssey came
to be, and I published “The Textualization of Homeric Epic by Means of
Dictation” in the journal TAPA (Ready 2015). This book’s Part II (Chapter 3) is a
revised, expanded, and more accessible version of that article. Looking into the
history of the textualization of oral traditional works and seeing the roles played
by scribes in those events prompted me to think more about scribal activity. I
Page 1 of 3
Preface
found illuminating work on scribal activity in the fields of medieval studies and
religious studies: those scholars speak of the scribe as a performer. Tasked with
learning about performance, I turned to linguistic anthropology. Parts I and III of
this book represent the outcome of that research. Part I (Chapters 1 and 2)
applies linguistic anthropology’s concepts of oral textuality and oral
intertextuality to the Homeric epics. Chapter 1 offers a revised and expanded
presentation of some of the issues I broach in “Performance, Oral Texts, and
Entextualization in Homeric Epic” (Ready 2018b), a chapter in a volume I co-
edited with Christos Tsagalis (Ready and Tsagalis 2018a). Part III (Chapters 4
and 5) argues for understanding as performers the scribes responsible for the
texts in the so-called wild papyri of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Early on in The Homeric Simile in Comparative Perspectives, I establish a

nomenclature that I adhere to in this book as well (Ready 2018a: 6–8). I do not
use the proper noun “Homer” except when quoting or paraphrasing scholars
who do use that name. Instead I refer to the Iliad poet or the Odyssey poet (or
the poet of the Iliad or the poet (p.viii) of the Odyssey). Both these poets are to
be labeled Homeric poets: I call them “our Homeric poets.” They represent the
tradition of the oral performance of Homeric poetry. Countless Homeric poets
perpetuated that tradition of Homeric poetry, performing the Iliad and the
Odyssey orally many, many times before the emergence of written texts of the
Iliad and the Odyssey and continuing to perform the Iliad and the Odyssey orally
afterward. I imagine that the Iliad poet dictated his version of the Iliad to a
scribe and that the Odyssey poet dictated his version of the Odyssey to a scribe.
Those dictated poems—that Iliad and that Odyssey—served as the archetypes for
the subsequent written textual tradition of the Iliad and of the Odyssey. The Iliad
and the Odyssey are “the Homeric epics (or poems).” The Iliad is not the Iliad;
the Odyssey is not the Odyssey. Rather, the roman font—the Iliad, the Odyssey—
signals that one is dealing with a tradition in which performers present what
they think of as the same story, not with specific written texts. When John D.
Smith speaks of “the epic of Pābūjī” (1991), or Lauri Honko of “the Siri
epic” (1998), or Aditya Malik of “the oral narrative of Devnārāyaṇ” (2005), or
Nienke van der Heide of “the Manas epic” (2015), none uses italics. Homerists
address this phenomenon in their own way. Andrew Ford refers to poets “who
handed over their Iliads and Odysseys to alphabets” (1992: 137). Jim Marks
speaks of the “‘Odyssey-tradition’” as “the notional, though irrecoverable,
sequence of compositions-in-performance through which the Homeric text
evolved” and “‘the Odyssey’” as “the text as we have it” (2008: 12–13). José
González speaks of “recognizable Iliadic and Odyssean traditions” (2013: 418).
Ultimately, the term “Homeric poetry” embraces the Iliad and the Odyssey
(which, to be precise, really means the ancient and medieval written copies of
the Iliad and the Odyssey) as well as all those performances of the Iliad and the
Odyssey (or sections thereof) that were not written down.
Page 2 of 3
Preface
In some ways, what follows in this book represents an attempt to continue this
project of definition. In this case I want to look into the various agents and
entities involved in and relevant to the oral performance of the Iliad and the
Odyssey, to the creation of written versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey via a
process of dictation, and to the written textual transmission of the Iliad and the
Odyssey.
Page 3 of 3
Acknowledgments

Jonathan L. Ready

Print ISBN-13: 9780198835066
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198835066.001.0001
(p.ix) Acknowledgments
Jonathan L. Ready
I am grateful to Richard Bauman and Raymond Person for reading a draft of this
book; to Karin Barber, Richard Martin, and Christos Tsagalis for reviewing early
attempts at some of the arguments presented in Part I; and to Francesca
Schironi for critiquing section 5.1. Audiences at conferences in Atlanta,
Bloomington, Chicago, and New Orleans helped with Part III, and the Orality and
Literacy group helped with Part I at the 2016 meeting in Lausanne. I thank
Indiana University’s College Arts and Humanities Institute and Harvard
University’s Loeb Classical Library Foundation for their support of this project in
its later stages. In a remarkable act of intellectual generosity, one of the
anonymous readers for Oxford University Press returned ten single-spaced
pages of comments, saving me from numerous errors and infelicities. The other
reader was more laconic but just as helpful. Once again it has been a privilege to
work with Charlotte Loveridge and Georgie Leighton at the Press. As always, I
owe my greatest debt to Margaret Foster for her encouragement and assistance.
I thank the University of Texas Press for permission to reuse in Chapter 1

material from the following book chapter:
Ready, J. L. 2018b. “Performance, Oral Texts, and Entextualization in Homeric

Epic,” in J. L. Ready and C. C. Tsagalis (eds), Homer in Performance: Rhapsodes,
Narrators, and Characters. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 320–50. ©
University of Texas Press, 2018. (p.x)
Page 1 of 1
Introduction

Jonathan L. Ready

Print ISBN-13: 9780198835066
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198835066.001.0001
Introduction
Jonathan L. Ready
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198835066.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords

This chapter first situates this project in the context of current discussions about
the definitions of the terms “orality” and “textuality,” both of which have medial
and conceptional senses. It then lays out three lessons from work on orality and
textuality from outside the field of classical studies—from linguistic
anthropology to folkloristics to medieval studies to religious studies—and
reviews how the subsequent chapters apply these lessons to the study of
Homeric poetry. It concludes by positioning this study in relation to previous
work in Homeric studies and by suggesting which parts of the book readers from
outside classical studies will find most valuable.
Keywords: orality, textuality, linguistic anthropology, folkloristics, medieval studies, religious studies,
Homeric studies
Scholars use the phrase “the Homeric text” all the time. Yet one could not find
this Homeric text (singular) in the library stacks or in digital form: rather one
would come upon several Homeric texts (plural) (cf. Gurd 2005: 9). Helmut van
Thiel’s text of the Iliad (2010) differs from, for instance, Martin L. West’s (1998a,
2000a). Thomas Allen’s text of the Odyssey (1917, 1919) differs from, for
instance, Peter von der Mühll’s (1946). I merely scratch the surface in citing
those four. Alex Lee surveys thirty-three printed Greek texts of poems attributed
to Homer (2013), from Demetrius Chalcondylas’s 1488 Ἡ τοῦ Ὁμήρου ποίησις
ἅπασα to Eduard Schwartz’s 1923 edition of the Iliad and 1924 edition of the
Odyssey. Even if each edition aims to be definitive, the existence of competing
editions reveals the protean nature of the modern Homeric text. That the
Homeric text remains a dynamic entity finds a neat parallel in the renewed
Page 1 of 12
Introduction
production of distinct English translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey (McCrorie
2012; B. Powell 2014; P. Green 2015; E. Wilson 2018; cf. P. Young 2003: 84–158;
Moser 2013: 99–206).
I leave it to others to critique the modern printed editions (Apthorp 1980: pp.
xviii–xix; Nagy 2004: 15–17; Graziosi and Haubold 2015: 5–6) but will continue
to take apart the phrase “the Homeric text.” This book’s five chapters query
from three different angles—hence the book’s division into three parts—what it
means to speak of Homeric poetry together with the word “text.” Scholarship
from outside the discipline of classical studies motivates and undergirds the
project. This research has deepened our understanding of the word “text”—
above all, of what the fashioning of a text can involve—by exploring the
relationship between orality and textuality. Let me first contemplate these two
words.
Investigators from various fields define or employ these words—orality and

textuality—in various ways. Egbert Bakker reminds the Homerist of two
meanings scholars give to the words “oral” and “orality.” One often uses them
“in a medial sense, meaning simply that something is spoken and as such is a
matter of sound and the voice of the speaker” (1997a: 7, emphasis in original).
Seeing a title like Oral Epics from Africa: Vibrant Voices from a Vast Continent
(Johnson et al. 1997), one thinks of oral performance, of oral in the medial sense.
The medievalist and expert in Turkic oral epic Karl Reichl has medial orality in
mind when he states flatly, “A poem is oral…simply because it is oral.…A poem is
oral because of the way it has been composed, transmitted and/or
performed” (2003: 255). In a book on the oral performance (p.2) in North India
of poetry attributed to Kabir, Linda Hess writes, “I use the term ‘oral’…only for
live, embodied performance”; “the orality I speak of requires the presence
together of physical bodies, and the production and communication of
sound” (2015: 78, 232; cf. 211; Niles 1999: 53; Finnegan 2015: 25, 81–2). For
the Africanist Harold Scheub, an oral poem “loses its identity”—it can no longer
be said to be oral—“when it is frozen in memory or writing” (2002: 83).
At the same time, these words “may also be a matter of conception” (Bakker
1997a: 8, emphasis in original). The linguist Wulf Oesterreicher defines orality
as a matter of “style” and of “conception,” not medium: he chooses “the term
language of immediacy (Sprache der Nähe) to designate the informal/oral type
of linguistic conception” (1997: 191, 193–4; cf. Bakker 1997b: 287). Additional
complexities emerge if one wishes to distinguish between the style evident in an
oral traditional work, be it an epic poem or a folktale, and the style evident in
everyday talk (DuBois 2012: 206; cf. Saussy 2016: 47). Once one stops thinking
in terms of medium one finds that “a discourse that is conceptionally oral (such
as a conversational narrative) is often medially oral as well, but it is also possible
for such a discourse to be written” (Bakker 1997a: 8, emphasis in original; cf.
Shuman 1986: 95–6, 112–13, 117, 176; Andersen 1991: 49–50; Assmann 2006:
Page 2 of 12
Introduction
111). Oesterreicher can offer “a typology of orality in written texts” (1997: 190),
and the folklorist Lauri Honko can state, “It is not the medium as such but the
oral style and written style which are at stake. Both media can accommodate
both styles,…” (2002a: 20; cf. Alexander 2006: 17; Schellenberg 2015: 293; S.
Miller 2017: 95). Another illustrative effort to get away from a focus on medium
comes from the comparatist Haun Saussy. He defines “oral tradition as a poetic
technology marked by collective composition, modularity, iterability, and
virtuality” (2016: 72). That it can be voiced is “incidental”: “indeed many of the
same features can be found in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary avant-
gardes” (73). This twofold understanding of orality goes some way toward
mitigating the desire to toss out the term tout court (e.g. Scollon and Scollon
1995; cf. Finnegan 2015: 81–3).
To this nuanced understanding of orality can be added a nuanced understanding

of textuality. Consider the titles of three collections of essays and their editors’
introductory comments. The editors of Transmitting Jewish Traditions: Orality,
Textuality, and Cultural Diffusion note, “The larger part of this volume will focus
on the ways in which oral and written transmission of these cultural elements
interact within a context in which written transmission is more or less readily
available” (Elman and Gershoni 2000b: 1). The editors of Listening up, Writing
down, and Looking beyond: Interfaces of the Oral, Written, and Visual refer to
“the process of moving from embodied performance to a textual form, be it
manuscript, print…” and identify as “text” “what is produced when orature is
lifted out of the discursive environment where it lived” (Gingell with Roy 2012:
13–14).1 The editor of Orality and Textuality (p.3) in the Iranian World: Patterns
of Interaction across the Centuries speaks of “orality and its patterns of
intersection and interaction with the written word” and writes, “Each of the
contributions provides important evidence of textual culture’s intimate,
extensive, and ongoing interaction with the realm of orality” (Rubanovich 2015b:
3–4, 13). In these volumes, textuality refers to written texts and what goes on in
written texts.
Others use text and textuality differently. A text can be “a species of social
action” (Barber and Moraes Farias 1989: 3), and one can treat “social action as
text” (Becker and Mannheim 1995: 239; cf. Titon 2003: 80; Assmann 2006: 123)
or “any humanly constructed object” as text (Titon 2003: 76). I remain in the
realm of language use. Textuality can indicate the presence of attributes that
render an instance of language use a text irrespective of medium. One can speak
of, for instance, oral or written or inscribed or printed texts. The anthropologist
Karin Barber, who focuses on African praise poetry, stresses the continuities
between the textuality evident in oral and written texts: “writing is not what
confers textuality. Rather, what does [confer textuality] is the quality of being
joined together and given a recognisable existence as a form”; “text…is
utterance (oral or written) that is woven together in order to attract attention
and to outlast the moment” (2007: 1–2). Carol Pasternack, who studies Old
Page 3 of 12
Introduction
English poetry, distinguishes the textuality of texts in various media. The

textuality of the Old English texts preserved in manuscripts differs from the
textuality “of both oral and printed compositions” as well as “written” texts
(1995: 2). She uses the term “inscribed” to label the textuality of the poetry in
the corpus she investigates “since they inherit significant elements of vocality
from their oral forebears and yet address the reader from the pages of
manuscripts” (2). The folklorist Amy Shuman would distinguish between
“written and spoken texts” by looking to the “relationships between texts and
contexts” (1986: 184).
I toggle back and forth between these various positions over the course of this
book. So, with these distinctions in mind, I pick out three lessons from work on
orality and textuality from outside the field of classical studies. First, one learns
what goes into the production of oral texts, utterances capable of outlasting the
moment, and how oral texts engage intertextually with other oral texts. Second,
one learns what textualization entails—the creation of a written version of an
oral traditional work via a process that starts either with a scribe’s writing down
a performer’s words or a collector’s using a recording device to a capture a
performer’s words. Third, one learns what happens when scribes, living in a
world in which the oral performance of traditional works thrives, copy written
texts of those and/or related works. By applying these findings to the study of
Homeric poetry, this book brings out the complexities involved in speaking about
Homeric poetry and text in the same breath.
This interdisciplinary and comparative approach enables an investigation into

Homeric texts from the Archaic through the Hellenistic periods. Written texts of
the Iliad and the Odyssey achieved an unprecedented degree of standardization
after 150 BCE (Haslam 1997: 56, 63–4; Lamberton 1997: 44; Jensen 2011: 218;
Schironi 2018: 42–3). Although not identical, our medieval manuscripts of the
Homeric epics reflect that development. This book examines the Homeric
tradition before that process of (p.4) standardization. By looking at oral texts,
dictated texts, and wild texts, it illuminates the intricate history of Homeric texts
long before the emergence of standardized written texts.
Part I, made up of Chapters 1 and 2, explores the oral composition in

performance of Homeric poetry. To say that Homeric poets composed in oral
performance is to say that they worked with a toolkit of formulae, type-scenes,
middle-range structures, and plots to fashion their poem in the act of performing
before an audience (e.g. Edwards 1992; Louden 1999, 2006; Minchin 2001; M.
Clark 2004; W. Hansen 2011; Kahane 2018). Memorization might have played a
part when it came to certain segments of the poem, but the poets did not engage
in wholesale prior composition, as other oral poets do (Ready 2018a: 22), only
presenting the poem after they had memorized the whole thing. Similarly, some
Homeric poets might have made use of written texts before or even during a
performance, but the usual depiction of Homeric poets composing in
Page 4 of 12
Introduction
performance does not portray them as dependent upon written texts. As for a
timeframe, when talking about the oral composition in performance of Homeric
poetry, the majority of Homerists have in mind the Homeric poets of, at the very
least, the early Archaic period. I stand with those who have in mind the poets of
the entire Archaic period as well as the Classical and Hellenistic periods.
Whatever one’s stance on this matter, one looks especially to the Iliad and the
Odyssey themselves to reconstruct what those poets did in oral performance.
Part I argues that one should think about texts and textuality when considering
the oral composition in performance of Homeric poetry—that is, irrespective of
the presence of written texts. Linguistic anthropology teaches that oral
performers generate oral texts through processes of entextualization—the
“art” (Barber 2007: 93) of shaping utterances capable of outlasting the moment.
Moreover, oral texts engage intertextually with other oral texts. They look
backward and forward as they interact with past and future texts, and
performers negotiate an intertextual gap, meaning the relationship their own
text has to other texts. Starting from that research, Chapters 1 and 2 consider
how these two phenomena pertain to the Homeric epics.
Chapter 1 delves into a range of material, from the speeches Zeus entrusts to
messengers to public laments over fallen warriors, from the narrator’s
catalogues to moments in which the text engages in its own exegesis. I thereby
explore the ways in which the Homeric characters talk about and craft oral texts
and consider how the narrator text and the poem as a whole deploy mechanisms
of entextualization. I conclude that our Homeric poets fashioned an utterance
capable of outlasting the moment each time they performed, and that conclusion
prompts revisions to how Homerists talk about texts.
Chapter 2 returns to episodes involving messengers in the epics. I touch on the

anticipatory intertextuality evident in such episodes and then launch a detailed
exploration of the messenger’s performance. I focus on how, as mediators,
messengers negotiate the intertextual gap between the speech they are tasked
with relaying and their own speech. This investigation reveals still more about
the portrayal of oral texts in the world depicted in the epics, especially what can
happen to oral texts in that (p.5) world, and sheds light on the representation
of mediators in the poems. As I do in Chapter 1, I conclude with some inferences
about the Iliad poet and the Odyssey poet. The poet characterizes himself as a
mediator, but critically, as one who performs in his capacity as a mediator, and
the poet seeks to craft an oral text that engages in particular ways with past and
future presentations of the same story. By introducing the concept of oral
textuality to Homeric studies and by working with a more precise model of oral
intertextuality than Homerists have used heretofore, Part I illuminates both the
verbal and oratorical landscape our Homeric poets fashion in their epics and
what the poets were actually doing when they performed.
Page 5 of 12
Introduction
Part II comprises Chapter 3. Scholars argue over how written texts of the work
of Homeric poets, oral traditional poets, came into existence and, to be more
specific, they argue over how and when written texts emerged that provided
exemplars for the written textual traditions of the Iliad and the Odyssey that one
reads today. One theory, customarily termed the “dictation model,” envisions a
poet, customarily placed in the Archaic period, dictating to a scribe. Another
theory, Gregory Nagy’s evolutionary model, also involves poets dictating to
scribes, starting around 550 BCE. These two models—the dictation model and
the evolutionary model—differ from a third model, best articulated by M. L.
West: Archaic-era poets wrote the poems down themselves. Dictation plays a
part in two out of the three explanations, however much the two strive to
distinguish themselves from one another, for how written texts came into
existence.
One should query what it would have meant for a poet to dictate to a scribe. To
do so, I focus on the numerous modern instances of the textualization of an oral
traditional work. My investigation relies especially on the testimony of folklorists
and ethnographers who engage in and study textualization. It emerges that the
textualization of a modern oral traditional work by a collector results in a text
that is the co-creation of the performer, collector, and scribe (if a discrete third
party). I conclude that a written text resulting from a process that began when a
collector had a poet dictate his version of the Iliad or the Odyssey to a scribe
was likely such a co-creation (see the preface for the use of roman font). An
excursus on the collector of oral traditional works as depicted in Herodotus’s
Histories and on Herodotus’s own practices as a textualizer bolsters this
conclusion. Previous investigations of the creation of written versions of the Iliad
and the Odyssey by way of dictation have obscured the contributions of other
parties involved in the textualization event beside the poet.
Finally, the Iliad and the Odyssey emerged, be it through the collaborative
process of textualization by way of dictation or from the hand of a writing oral
poet. The question becomes, what did the people who made copies of those
written texts do when they copied? Part III (Chapters 4 and 5) considers some of
those copies as preserved in the so-called wild papyri of the Homeric epics from
the Ptolemaic period.
As an example of one of the texts I investigate, I quote from papyrus 5 (TM

61226), dating from between 299 and 200 BCE and preserving what we label Il.
11.788–848 and 12.1–9. In this selection, which corresponds to what we label Il.
11.794–808, Nestor urges Patroclus to enter the battle wearing Achilles’s armor
(S. West 1967: 108–9). (p.6) Stephanie West, whose edition of the papyrus
fragment I reproduce here, uses “the Oxford Classical Text” to supplement
lacunae (1967: 10), which I take to mean T. Allen’s 1931 edition.
[εἰ δέ τινα φρεσὶν ἧισι θεοπροπίην] ἀλείνει
Page 6 of 12
Introduction
[καί τινά οἱ πὰρ Ζηνὸσ ἐπέφ]ρ̣α̣δε πότνια μήτηρ

[ἀργυρόπεζα Θέτισ θυγάτηρ ἁλί]ο̣ιο γέροντοσ
[ ἐν] ἀ̣γ̣ῶνι θοάω̣ν̣
[ἀλλὰ σέ περ προέτω, λ]αὸν ἀνώχθω
[Μυρμιδόνων, αἴ κέν τι φόωσ Δα]ν̣α̣[ο]ῖ̣σ̣ι γένηαι.
[ θ]ω̣ρ̣ηχθῆναι
[αἴ κέ σε τῶι εἴσκοντεσ ἀπόσχωντ]α̣ι̣ π̣ο̣λ̣έμοιο
[Τρῶεσ, ἀναπνεύσωσι δ’ ἀρήιοι υἷεσ Ἀχ]α̣ιῶν
[τειρόμενοι· ὀλίγη δέ τ’ ἀνάπνευσισ π]ο̣λέμοιο.
[ῥεῖα δέ κ’ ἀκμῆτεσ κεκμηότασ ἄν]δρασ ἀϋτῆ[ι
[ὤσαισθε προτὶ ἄστυ νεῶν ἄπο καὶ κλισ]ιάων.”
[ὣσ φάτο, τῶι δ’ ἄρα θυμὸν ἐνὶ στήθ]εσσιν ὄρινε·
[τεῖρε γὰρ αἰνὸν ἄχοσ κραδίην, ἀ]κ̣άχησε δὲ θυμ[ὸν·
[βῆ δὲ θέειν παρὰ νῆασ ἐπ’ Αἰακίδη]ν̣ Ἀχιλῆια.
[ ]νο̣.τ̣αι̣αχ̣α̣[
[ἀλλ’ ὅτε δὴ κατὰ νῆασ Ὀδυσσῆ]οσ θείοιο
[ἷξε θέων Πάτροκλοσ, ἵνά σφ’ ἀ]γ̣[ο]ρ̣ή̣ τε θέμισ τε
[ προπάροιθε νεῶν ὀρθοκρ]αιράων
[ἤην, τῆι δὴ καί σφι θεῶν ἐτετ]εύχατο βωμοί,
But if in his mind he is trying to avoid some oracle
and his queenly mother declared to him something from Zeus,
silver-footed Thetis, daughter of the old man of the sea,
…in the gathering place of the swift
but let him send you out,…and urge the host
of Myrmidons, to see if you prove a light of deliverance to the
Danaans.
…to put on,
to see if the Trojans take you for him and hold off from war
and the warlike sons of the Achaeans catch their breath
because they are worn out; for scant is the space to breathe in war.
And easily might you, being unwearied, drive men that are wearied
with battle
back toward the city from the ships and the huts.”
So he spoke and roused the heart in his breast:
for a terrible pain wore at his heart, and he was vexed in his mind;
and he went running along the ships to Aeacus’s grandson, Achilles.
…
But when to the ships of godlike Odysseus
in his running Patroclus came, where their place of assembly and
place of judgment
(p.7) …in front of the ships with tall sterns
was, where also had been built their altars of the gods,2
The verses followed by a letter, known as plus verses, do not appear in the
standard critical editions of the Iliad and provide the clearest evidence for how
the texts in the wild papyri come in and out of contact with those standard
editions. Compare van Thiel’s version of these lines:
εἰ δέ τινα φρεσὶν ᾗσι θεοπροπίην ἀλεείνει

Page 7 of 12
Introduction
καί τινά οἱ πὰρ Ζηνὸς ἐπέφραδε πότνια μήτηρ,

ἀλλὰ σέ περ προέτω, ἅμα δ’ ἄλλος λαὸς ἑπέσθω
Μυρμιδόνων, αἴ κέν τι φόως Δαναοῖσι γένηαι·
καί τοι τεύχεα καλὰ δότω πόλεμόνδε φέρεσθαι,
αἴ κέ σε τῷ ἴσκοντες ἀπόσχωνται πολέμοιο
Τρῶες, ἀναπνεύσωσι δ’ ἀρήιοι υἷες Ἀχαιῶν
τειρόμενοι· ὀλίγη δέ τ’ ἀνάπνευσις πολέμοιο.
ῥεῖα δέ κ’ ἀκμῆτες κεκμηότας ἄνδρας ἀυτῇ
ὤσαισθε προτὶ ἄστυ νεῶν ἄπο καὶ κλισιάων.”
ὣς φάτο, τῷ δ’ ἄρα θυμὸν ἐνὶ στήθεσσιν ὄρινε·
βῆ δὲ θέειν παρὰ νῆας ἐπ’ Αἰακίδην Ἀχιλῆα.
ἀλλ’ ὅτε δὴ κατὰ νῆας Ὀδυσσῆος θείοιο
ἷξε θέων Πάτροκλος, ἵνά σφ’ ἀγορή τε θέμις τε
ἤην, τῇ δὴ καί σφι θεῶν ἐτετεύχατο βωμοί,
But if in his mind he is trying to avoid some oracle
and his queenly mother declared to him something from Zeus,
well, let him send you out, and with you let the rest of the army
of Myrmidons follow, to see if you prove a light of deliverance to the
Danaans;
and let him give you his fair armor to wear into the war,
to see if the Trojans take you for him and hold off from war
and the warlike sons of the Achaeans catch their breath
because they are worn out; for scant is the space to breathe in war.
And easily might you, being unwearied, drive men that are wearied
with battle
back toward the city from the ships and the huts.”
So he spoke and roused the heart in his breast;
(p.8) and he went running along the ships to Aeacus’s grandson,
Achilles.
But when to the ships of godlike Odysseus
in his running Patroclus came, where their place of assembly and
place of judgment
was, where also had been built their altars of the gods,3
Much previous scholarship uses these papyri to establish the putatively original
written texts of the Homeric epics. I encourage researchers to think about these
papyri in their own right because they reveal the sorts of written texts that many
people in the Classical and Hellenistic periods likely used. To think about these
papyri in their own right requires not mischaracterizing the copyists’ work or
unproductively disparaging it.
In order to provide a new way to think about the scribal activity that produced
the texts one sees in the wild papyri, I seek guidance, as I do in Parts I and II,
from outside classical studies. After reviewing previous research in Homeric
studies on these texts, Chapter 4 introduces the model of the scribe as performer
put to work by students of several literatures, such as Anglo-Saxon and Israelite
texts. Per this model, the scribe performs in the act of copying, due in large part
to the fact that he operates in a time when performers orally perform the work
Page 8 of 12
Introduction
he copies, or orally perform using other related written texts, or orally perform
related oral traditional works. I demonstrate the model’s relevance to the study
of the wild Homeric papyri and consider at what point in time people capable of
generating the texts one finds in the papyri would most likely have been around
—much rests on the extent of the oral performance of Homeric poetry in the
Classical and Hellenistic periods—and who these capable people might have
been.
Deploying scholarship on performance, especially that of linguistic

anthropologists and folklorists, Chapter 5 fleshes out what it meant for the
scribe behind the text of a wild papyrus to perform as he copied. Offering close
readings of a number of the wild papyri, the chapter first applies the model of
entextualization, familiar from Part I, to the papyri and then applies work on how
oral performers show their competence by aiming for a maximalist presentation
and one that evinces “affecting power.” Next, it considers three other
components of the scribe’s performance: it touches on the scribe as an agent of
tradition, introduces and applies the concept of traditionalization—the linking of
one’s performance to other performances of the same tale—and goes back to the
phenomenon of the intertextual gap broached in Chapter 2. Switching gears, the
chapter then explores how the production of a bookroll becomes a performance.
The penultimate section rehearses the benefits of understanding the scribe as a
performer for students of scribal activity, and the concluding section juxtaposes
the model of (p.9) scribal performance with the alternative accounts surveyed
in Chapter 4 for the distinct features of the wild Homeric papyri.
In brief, the book’s three parts argue that considering together the phenomena
of orality and textuality clarifies the history of Homeric texts before the
standardization of the written textual tradition after 150 BCE and the
contributions of various agents to that history.
In summarizing my project design and the contours of my argument and

findings, I have pointed out some of the ways in which each part differs from
previous scholarship in Homeric studies. I hasten to add that Homerists have
investigated the interactions between orality and textuality before, although one
could think otherwise upon reading M. L. West’s admonishment “to shake the
oralists off our backs” (2003a: 14). For instance, as we will see in Chapter 2,
Homerists consider the phenomenon of oral intertextuality. By contrast, I set
aside at the outset two other queries common in Homeric studies.
To begin with, students of oral traditions continue to explore how oral

performers interact with written texts (Jensen 2011: 187–94, 2017; Fox 2016:
368; cf. Broude 2011), and Homerists often focus on that question when they
examine the interactions between orality and textuality. For example, Nagy
envisions written texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey appearing after 550 BCE
(e.g. 2014). At first, they served as transcripts that could be used as aids for an
Page 9 of 12
Introduction
oral performance. Beginning in the later part of the fourth century BCE, written
texts began to function as scripts that were mandatory for a successful
performance. Investigating this shift from transcript to script, José González
argues that “the cultural pressures that brought about the growing dependence
of orators on the memorization of written speeches were also at work among
rhapsodes” (2013: 7). Minna Skafte Jensen wonders how oral performers of the
epics would have made use of written texts (2011: 216):
If we hypothesize that written texts were accessible to the rhapsodes and

gave rise to new versions when they integrated them into their oral
repertoires, this situation leads to the next question: How could these new
versions make their way back into written texts as they must have done if
their influence is found in the transmitted text of the two epics? Did the
rhapsodes own manuscripts that they revised whenever they had a new
good idea? That would have been a cumbersome and expensive process
demanding frequent erasure and rewriting. In the case of a papyrus
manuscript the relatively fragile material would allow for only a limited
amount of changes. If, instead, the rhapsodes preferred waxed tablets, any
number of changes would have been physically possible; but in that case
the piles of tablets necessary for containing the two poems would pose
other problems.
Jensen makes plain her doubts that performers of the Iliad and the Odyssey ever
memorized written texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey: “The Iliad and the Odyssey
had no further life in oral tradition, I submit. They were not memorised by their
two poets or by others and not reperformed in full or in part” (2011: 246; cf.
164–5; 2017). I will give my own thoughts on this matter when my presentation
requires it (introduction to Chapter 3 (pp. 103–4); section 4.3 (p. 202)), but I will
not mount a systematic inquiry.
(p.10) I also stay out of the following. Like students of Rabbinic literature
(Elman 1999: 58; Jaffee 1999: 12), Homerists ask, granted that Homeric poets
orally performed, do our poems exhibit features that only the use of writing can
explain? Do they reflect in whole or in part what linguists call conceptional
literacy (Oesterreicher 1997: 194–5; Schroeder 2016: 82–3)? Take the discussion
of ring composition among scholars of the Homeric epics. After an exhaustive
investigation of the structure of the Iliad, especially its use of ring composition,
Keith Stanley concludes that, although the Iliad was orally performed (1993:
265, 280), it cannot be attributed “to an oral poet dependent solely on oral
technique” (282). Rather, it evinces “recursive structures of a complexity foreign
to extemporized poetry,” and “a more relevant model for Homeric artistry can be
found in the conscious literary parataxis of archaic and classical lyric and in
fifth-century drama and historiography” (268). Others disagree and assert that
one need not attribute even the most elaborate ring structures in the Homeric
epics to conceptional literacy (cf. Arft 2017: 9–12). Starting from the premise
Page 10 of 12
Introduction
that the Homeric epics “reflect the compositional practices of oral poetry the
world over” and endorsing the view that ring composition can operate at “any
scale of narrative” (2014: 75, 81), Erwin Cook argues that the Odyssey is
constructed via a series of rings. The subtext of his article is that this
pronounced narrative pattern would have allowed a trained singer to learn the
story of the Odyssey quite easily.
Both these subjects merit continued study, but the story of the interactions
between orality and textuality in the case of Homeric poetry involves much more
than if or how rhapsodes used written texts and involves much more than if the
poems we have, be they the product of an oral performance or intended for oral
performance or both, contain features attributable solely to conceptional
literacy. This book tells three parts of that story.
At the same time, Homerists will find themselves on some recognizable terrain.
They will be comfortable with one of the book’s main topics: the nature of oral
performance. Richard Martin’s The Language of Heroes: Speech and
Performance in the Iliad (1989) and John Miles Foley’s The Singer of Tales in
Performance (1995a) showed the value of applying research on oral performance
to archaic Greek epic poetry. Parts I and III of this book renew that endeavor.
Above all, they apply to the Homeric tradition work in linguistic anthropology on
how oral performers display their skill through, for instance, entextualizing,
offering a maximalist presentation, moving their audiences, traditionalizing, and
negotiating an intertextual gap. The application of this research to the scribes
behind the wild Homeric papyri is a first, as is the application of research on
scribal activity in other traditions to the wild papyri. But in general this book’s
comparative and interdisciplinary orientation will feel familiar. In Part I, I join
those who adopt comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives to illuminate the
oral performances of the Homeric characters (e.g. Martin 1989; Lardinois 1997)
or the oral performances of the Homeric bards (e.g. Bakker 1997a; Minchin
2001; Scodel 2002; Ready 2018a). In Part II, I join Jensen (2011) in taking a
comparative and interdisciplinary approach to the question of the creation of
written versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey by way of dictation.
(p.11) I have written this book from my perch in classical studies and have
framed it so as to address issues of concern to Homerists and their fellow
travelers in classical studies. Researchers in other disciplines will find the book
useful too. Linguistic anthropologists will benefit from Part I’s discussions of
entextualization and oral intertextuality. Folklorists and other scholars of
modern oral traditions will benefit from Part II’s exploration of modern instances
of the textualization of oral traditional works. Finally, students of scribal activity
in other cultures will benefit from Part III’s systematic application of research in
performance to the work of scribes. (p.12)
Page 11 of 12
Introduction
Notes:
(1) The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms defines orature as follows (Baldick
2008): “a portmanteau term coined by the Kenyan novelist and playwright Ngugi
wa Thiong’o to denote imaginative works of the oral tradition usually referred to
as ‘oral literature’. The point of the coinage is to avoid suggesting that oral
compositions belong to a lesser or derivative category.”
(2) My translations of passages from the Homeric papyri look for the most part
to Lattimore 1951 and 1965, Wyatt 1999, M. L. West 2003b, and Most 2007b. I
aim to Latinize all proper nouns in all my translations.
Some authority has assigned each papyrus a number (Bird 2010: 62). The
numbers used for the papyri discussed in this book are those recognized by
these authorities. For the most part, I can refer to a papyrus by its Allen-Sutton
or Allen-Sutton-West or West number. On the two occasions when such a number
does not exist, I use the Mertens-Pack3 number (MP3) (http://
cipl93.philo.ulg.ac.be/Cedopal/MP3/dbsearch%5Fen.aspx). I also give the
Trismegistos number (TM) in parentheses (cf. Depauw and Gheldof 2014): that
online database provides the papyrus’s location and its inventory number as well
as a link to the papyrus’s entry in the Leuven Database of Ancient Books that
lists scholarly work on the papyrus.
(3) Throughout this book I use van Thiel’s editions of the Iliad (2010) and the
Odyssey (1991), although I do not reproduce his lunate sigmas. For the most
part, translations of passages from the Iliad look to Wyatt 1999, with frequent
glances at Lattimore 1951, and translations of passages from the Odyssey look to
Lattimore 1965. When I do not make such specifications in regard to other texts,
the translations are my own.
Page 12 of 12
Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics

Jonathan L. Ready

Print ISBN-13: 9780198835066
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198835066.001.0001
Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric

Epics
Jonathan L. Ready
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198835066.003.0002
Abstract and Keywords

This chapter introduces to Homeric studies the concepts of oral texts—
utterances capable of spiting the power of time—and entextualization—the
process of making an oral text. It delves into a range of material, from the
speeches Zeus entrusts to messengers to public laments over fallen warriors,
from the narrator’s catalogues to moments in which the text engages in its own
exegesis. It thereby explores the ways in which the Homeric characters talk
about and craft oral texts and considers how the narrator text and the poem as a
whole deploy mechanisms of entextualization. It concludes that our Homeric
poets fashioned an utterance capable of outlasting the moment each time they
performed, and that conclusion prompts revisions to how Homerists talk about
texts.
Keywords: oral texts, entextualization, speeches, character text, Homeric poets, text, oral performance
Introduction
Most discussions of writing in the Homeric epics point to two verses as the sole
reference to the phenomenon: Proteus sent Bellerephon to Lycia, “and he gave
him baneful signs, / having inscribed (sēmata lugra / grapsas) many life-
destroying things in a folded tablet” (Il. 6.168–9) (Scodel 1992: 58; Bassi 1997:
325; Aloni 1998: 78; Jensen 2011: 197 n. 49; B. Powell 2011). Haun Saussy casts
a wider net. In order to find writing in the Homeric epics, he “rework[s]” the
concept and applies it to, for example, moments of scratching—Polydamas’s
spear scratches (grapsen) Peneleos (Il. 17.599)—and incising—each Achaean
Page 1 of 69
champion puts a mark (esēmēnanto) on his token for the lottery to determine
who will fight Hector (Il. 7.175) (1996: 300–6, cf. 2016: 84). From this
perspective, one can also “give the name of writing…to Odysseus’ identifying
scar” (1996: 305). When a search of over 28,000 lines of poetry yields two verses
or when scratching and incising become writing, one discerns how hard scholars
work to detect writing in the poems.
That one must strain to see these instances of writing does not imply that the
world depicted in the epics lacks texts or a concept of textuality. Rather, one
comes across an abundance of texts in the poems if one follows the lead of
linguistic anthropologists who investigate “the constitution of oral texts” (Barber
2007: 67) through processes of entextualization. This chapter explores the
Homeric poems’ representation of these kinds of texts and what that
representation suggests about our Homeric poets’ vision of their projects.
Section 1.1 surveys scholarship on mechanisms of entextualization—what

performers do when they create an utterance capable of outliving the moment—
in modern oral traditions and scholarship that, although it does not use the word
entextualization, nevertheless sheds light on the subject. Endorsing Karin
Barber’s statement that when it comes to entextualization “the questions that
arise—the things to look for—can…be profitably drawn from one body of
material and applied to another” (2007: 74), section 1.2 applies to the Homeric
poems the findings on entextualization in modern oral traditions covered in
section 1.1. The section unfolds in four subsections.
(p.16) Subsection 1.2.1 observes that songs and tales seem to have an
independent preexistence in the world constructed in the Homeric poems and
circulate from presenter to presenter. What is more, these and other utterances
possess an object-like status. These two phenomena suggest that our Homeric
poets depict a world in which oral pronouncements endure and prompt an
investigation into the creation of oral texts in the poems and the strategies of
entextualization represented therein. Speeches meant to be repeated showcase
the production of oral texts and bring out the importance of boundaries,
cohesion, and coherence in entextualization (subsection 1.2.2). Other speeches
by characters exhibit additional means of entextualization (subsection 1.2.3). I
investigate the attaching of utterances to objects, the phenomenon of evaluating
and explicating (paradigmatic) stories, and the practices of quoting previous
utterances and of introducing generically distinct segments. Finally, the
rendering of personal laments in the Iliad reveals non-discursive ways to place
boundaries around and provide coherence to an utterance.
Subsection 1.2.4 begins by noting that stretches of verse in the narrator text (the
portions between the characters’ speeches, themselves designated the
“character text”) achieve entextualization in part due to their shifting to another
generic mode distinct from that of the surrounding text and that the glossing of
Page 2 of 69
difficult words in both the narrator text and the character text makes the poetry
an object of commentary, another entextualizing move. Setting aside the
distinction between character text and narrator text, one observes the
positioning of the poetry as existing prior to its presentation and the
objectification of the poetry: both argue for its endurance. Fittingly, the poet’s
use of formal devices, such as parallelism and ring composition, across the
entirety of his poem and his representing himself as one who quotes the Muse(s)
reveal how he goes about the process of entextualization. The constitution of
oral texts within the poem and references to the constitution of oral texts within
the poem, the efforts to endow the entire poem with textuality—these moves
encourage one to picture our Homeric poets as performers who entextualize,
who fashion an oral text, as they perform. Building on the previous sections’
results, the concluding section 1.3 critiques how Homerists talk about texts.
1.1. Performance, Oral Texts, and Entextualization

The study of oral performance made great strides in the 1970s. First, Richard
Bauman offered what would prove to be an enduring definition of performance:
“performance as a mode of spoken verbal communication consists in the
assumption of responsibility to an audience for a display of communicative
competence” (1977: 11, cf. 2004: 9).1 (p.17) I will rely on this definition
throughout this book. Second, scholars reacted against the excision of an oral
performer’s words from the real-world context of their utterance. It would no
longer do merely to study a written transcript of what a performer had said. As
Richard Martin reviews, these scholars argued that “meaning emerges only
through performance,” that “it is the performance, not the text, which
counts” (1989: 7; cf. Scheub 1977: 349; A.-L. Siikala 1990: 9; Bakker 2005: 55;
Finnegan 2007: 192, 2015: 92; Tangherlini 2013b: 218, 220; Edmunds 2016a:
33).
Not ready to dispose of text, other students of oral performance have sought to
clarify this second point, dubbed the “performance is king” model by Lauri
Honko (2000b: 13; cf. Finnegan 2007: 192). One may conceive of performance as
an interpretable event and so as a text (Titon 2003: 79–80). I attend to another
response—the oft-quoted manifesto (Finnegan 2007: 193; Jensen 2011: 119–20)
penned by the anthropologist Karin Barber (2005: 265–6, emphasis in original ≈
2003: 325):
In oral traditions, the co-presence of performance and text is of course

more difficult to see, because there is no visible, tangible document to
contrast with the evanescent utterance. Nonetheless, it is clear that what
happens in most oral performances is not pure instantaneity, pure
evanescence, pure emergence and disappearance into the vanishing
moment. The exact contrary is usually the case. There is a performance—
but it is a performance of something. Something identifiable is understood
to have pre-existed the moment of utterance. Or, alternatively, something is
Page 3 of 69
understood to be constituted in utterance that can be abstracted or

detached from the immediate context and re-embodied in a future
performance. Even if the only place this “something” can be held to exist is
in people’s minds or memories, still it is surely distinguishable from
immediate, and immediately-disappearing, actual utterance. It can be
referred to. People may speak of “the story of Sunjata” or “the praises of
Dingaan” rather than speaking of a particular narrator’s or praise-singer’s
performance on a particular occasion. And this capacity to be abstracted,
to transcend the moment, and to be identified independently of particular
instantiations, is the whole point of oral traditions. They are “traditions”
because they are known to be shared and to have been handed down; they
can be shared and handed down because they have been constituted
precisely in order to be detachable from the immediate context, and
capable of being transmitted in time and disseminated in space. Creators
and transmitters of oral genres use every resource at their disposal to
consolidate utterance into quasi-autonomous texts.
Two points stand out. First, a tale is felt to exist independently of any one
enunciation (cf. Finnegan 2011: 162, 2015: 102–3; Frog 2011b: 10–11). This
formulation updates Peter Bogatyrëv and Roman Jakobson’s assertion in their
classic 1929 article “Folklore as a Special Form of Creativity”: “From the
folklore-performer’s standpoint, the work is a fact of langue, i.e., an extra-
personal, given fact, independent of this performer” (1982: 38). We do not
hereby return to the discredited superorganic theory of folklore, which
“misinterpreted tradition as a static, superorganic entity that has a stable life of
its own and is able to survive outside the minds of the people who create and
perpetuate it” (Tangherlini 2013a: 4; cf. Shuman 1986: 139–40). Instead, and
this is the second point, this phenomenon—the perception that a tale exists
independently of any one enunciation—arises when oral performers craft
something “that is woven together in (p.18) order to attract attention and
outlast the moment” (Barber 2007: 2). Barber joins scholars from a range of
disciplines in calling that something “an oral text” (2007: 1–2; cf. Doane 1991:
78; Sears and Flueckiger 1991: 1–2; Elman 1999: 76–7, 92–3; Ramanujan 1999:
535; Joubert 2004: 6 n. 5, 89–90; Blackburn 2005; Assmann 2006: 42, 121;
Horsley 2010: 96; Thatcher 2011: 38–41; Müller 2012: 298 n. 8; Reichl 2015: 28,
34–5; pace Ong 1990: 7, 10). One need not speak, as Pietro Pucci does (1987: 27,
30; cf. Tsagalis 2004: 11), of oral performers “writing” in Jacques Derrida’s
sense or, as Haun Saussy does (1996: e.g. 307), of “oral writing” to be able to
say that oral performers produce texts. “Writing,” Barber avers, “is not what
confers textuality” (2007: 1; cf. 101; Tsagalis 2011: 211). Oral performers
produce oral texts.2 Observe that this use of the term “oral text” differs from the
use of the term to refer to a written document that results from the
textualization of an oral performance (Finnegan 2007: 10 with n. 9; Niles
2013b).
Page 4 of 69
So performers make an oral text: they impart textuality, the attributes of an

utterance capable of outliving the moment, to a verbal act. They make this oral
text, they endow an utterance with textuality, through strategies of what
linguistic anthropologists call “entextualization.” Entextualization is “the process
of rendering a given instance of discourse a text, detachable from its local
context” (Urban 1996: 21; cf. Bauman and Briggs 1990: 73; Wilce 2009a: 32–3).
Entextualization is what performers engage in when they give an utterance the
ability to endure. Entextualization differs from textualization: the latter refers to
the recording of the verbal component of an oral text in written form (see
Chapter 3). Although, as Barber observes (2005: 267), some scholars conflate
the terms (e.g. A.-L. Siikala 2000b; McCall 2011: 23), the production of an oral
text merits its own label.3 From among the numerous and varied strategies of
entextualization (cf. Bauman and Briggs 1990: 74; Barber 2005: 268), I highlight
a select few.
In Bauman’s succinct formulation, entextualization requires fashioning an

utterance that is “bounded off to a degree from its discursive surround (its co-
text), internally cohesive (tied together by various formal devices), and coherent
(semantically intelligible)” (2004: 4). In this case, to put boundaries around an
utterance means to demarcate its beginning and ending. The famous keys to
performance—special codes; figurative language; parallelism; special
paralinguistic features; special formulas; appeal to tradition; and disclaimer of
performance (Bauman 1977: 16)—are perhaps the most obvious ways to signal a
beginning because they by definition herald the beginning of a performance.
Falling silent is an obvious way to signal the end (cf. Bauman 2004: 148), but
performers can do so with any number of verbal cues: Packy Jim McGrath, a
northern Irish storyteller, signs off with “Aye” (Cashman 2016: 170, 177); we
have all signed off with “happily ever after” (cf. Zipes 2017: 8–9).
(p.19) For heuristic purposes, I take cohesion to mean that the utterance holds
together and has a discrete identity (cf. Scheub 2002: 95) and I take coherence
to mean that the utterance is understandable. This distinction between cohesion
and coherence is useful even if cohesion, that which holds an utterance together
and gives it a distinct identity, helps provide coherence—in other words, helps
make an utterance understandable—and even if formal devices, the mechanisms
of cohesion, help provide coherence (cf. Bauman 1986: 68).
Page 5 of 69
Investigating cohesion “from a formal perspective,” as Bauman and Charles

Briggs note, “takes us into familiar territory”: they point, for instance, to
parallelism as one frequently used device (1990: 74; cf. Wilce 2009a: 34; Tarkka
2017). As an example of how formal devices enable cohesion and so
entextualization, consider a portion of a tale told by Howard Bush whom
Bauman recorded in Nova Scotia (Bauman 2004: 121, suspension points in
original):
He went hóme,
he went to béd,
and he had nó rést the whóle níght.
He coúldn’t gét asléep, he sáid.
He was pláying cárds with the dévil all níght.
He had nó rést at áll, he sáid.
He was…like it séemed he wás in a bláze of fíre.
“That séttled the cárd playing thére,” he sáid.
It séttled hím and it séttled it thére.
Bauman comments,
The passage is marked, first of all, by parallel syntactic constructions in

the first six lines and the last two lines of the above excerpt, making for
two parallel sets. This is not the hesitant, repetitive, insecure parallelism of
the earlier examples; beginning with “He went home,” Bush’s voice
becomes louder, more forceful, and higher in pitch, and in the seventh line
the quoted speech of the uncle’s statement takes on a shift in voice,
reenacting his emphatic delivery. Moreover, the lines display perceptible
patterns of rhythmic stress, with a single beat in the first two lines and
four in each of the remaining lines (in the sixth line, the four beats occur
after the false start):…This is a breakthrough into performance, signaled,
or keyed, by this confidently rendered, mutually reinforcing set of formal
devices: syntactic, prosodic, and paralinguistic.
Bush breaks through into performance and moves to entextualize: “full

performance seems to be associated with the most marked
entextualization” (Bauman and Briggs 1990: 74). In Bush’s telling, formal
devices give shape to the utterance and endow it with textuality.
Although he does not speak of entextualization, David Rubin’s work on how

“patterns of sound” aid the recall of oral traditional material offers a useful
analogue here (1995: 70). He attends to rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and
rhythm (72–88), stressing the last one above the others (177), but arguing that
these factors best enable recall when they work in tandem: he notes the need for
“multiple constraints” (176). Viewing them through the lens of entextualization
theory, one would say that the (p.20) formal features Rubin analyzes provide
cohesion to an utterance. Rubin’s book remains popular (cf. Eve 2014: 100–2;
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Fabb 2015: 186), and Saussy’s application of his findings enhances an

appreciation of the formal devices that contribute to cohesion. Saussy defends
the claim that “oral tradition is an inscription on human minds” (2016: 159, cf.
59). He asks, “How have humans performed acts of inscription on the minds of
their fellows?” (157). By way of illustration, he follows Rubin in reviewing the
formal components of a children’s ditty—“rhythmic pattern…alliteration…
rhyme” (157–8)—as well as the physical movements that accompany the
utterance “to reinforce the patterning of the words” (158). “A highly organized
whole” results (158). Saussy concludes, “The more densely the text is packed
with pattern, the more securely it takes up residence in the prepared
mind” (158). He restates this point in a slightly more expansive form a moment
later (160):
Meaningful text with a maximal organization of linguistic and thematic

features keyed to the habits of the audience (patterning of phonemes,
syllabic regularities, melody, rhymes, stanzas, formulae, topoi, analogies,
antitheses, coherence of action, and the like) should then have a much
higher rate of retention,…
Saussy enumerates the formal features that impart cohesion to an utterance.
His discussion intersects with Jan-Dirk Müller’s consideration in an article on

medieval German literature of how verse structure, rhyme, assonance, and the
use of formulas make “oral texts more permanent” (2012: 298–301, quotation
from 300; cf. Assmann 2002: 241; Fabb 2015: 185–7). Harold Scheub’s analysis
of oral performers in South Africa also abounds in observations of this sort: for
example, “a certain sound will dominate in a line, then give way to another that
will dominate in a succeeding line, with a suggestion of this imbedded in the
preceding line. This also provides internal linkages” (2002: 13, cf. 62).4 At the
same time, Scheub adds another factor to the list of mechanisms for generating
cohesion: “thematic parallelism is a major device, unifying the poem” (75, cf.
77).
Oral performers entextualize by making their utterance coherent as well. At

bottom, coherence means clarity, as Bauman’s gloss of “intelligible” illustrates.
An article on oral textuality by Peter Seitel is useful for thinking about one
specific way a performer achieves clarity.
Seitel begins by alluding to reader response criticism’s argument that a printed

literary text is “dependent on a reader’s interpretion to achieve coherent
meaning” (2012: 75; see e.g. Iser 1974; Eco 1979). With that model in mind,
Seitel turns to oral texts and discusses “coherence that is created through
understandings shared by performer and audience. These shared
understandings consist of, among other things, indexical grounding, or
references to the local cultural universe, and intertextuality, or references to
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related texts in that universe” (2012: 83). He illustrates these two (p.21)
principles in an analysis of a story, “Crested Crane and Dove,” told among the
Haya in northwestern Tanzania. A Haya audience member would know that
women were not supposed to eat the edible grasshoppers that descended on
Hayaland during the rainy season (78–80). When Crested Crane, one of the tale’s
two co-wives, eats grasshoppers, she violates that prohibition. This knowledge is
“crucial” to making sense of the story (80). A Haya audience member would also
evaluate Crested Crane intertextually: they would recognize in her depiction “a
familiar character in the canon of Haya stories—the gluttonous bride” (81) and
as a result believe that her “behavior makes sense because it has a familiar feel
to it.”
Because coherence plays an important part in entextualization, Seitel’s

discussion of coherence can, with one minor alteration, aid an understanding of
entextualization. For Seitel, the audience establishes a text’s coherence by filling
in gaps. They provide the “references to the local cultural universe” and
intertextual “references to related texts.” He argues that “non-autonomy” marks
oral texts: they depend on their audience. I shift to the perspective of the
performers. Performers make an utterance coherent by only offering gaps that
they assume their audience can fill in (cf. Shuman 1986: 52, 72–3, 153, 170–2) or
will not be bothered by if they remain (cf. Scheub 2002: 18; Scodel 2002: 64).
Otherwise they flesh out their utterance as needed (cf. Azuonye 1994: 156–8;
subsection 3.4.1 (pp. 133–4)). Writers work in the same way (cf. Shuman 1986:
115, 120). For instance, Persian dāstāns—“fictional prose narratives with
branching plots, which relate the heroic-romantic adventures of their
eponymous heroes”—“appear perfectly coherent to the insider steeped in
tradition” (Rubanovich 2012: 653, 675). For these insiders are capable of “filling
up lacunae and deciphering allusions” on account of their knowledge of the
“traditional reservoir of epic themes” and “acquaintance with the epic
tradition” (672–3, emphasis in original).
In her own discussions of entextualization, Barber begins by finding evidence for

the desire to fix words in the practice of attaching oral texts to objects (2007:
75–6):
Oral texts in Africa are often actually attached to or secreted in material

objects. The Luba lukasa board, Zulu bead messages, Dahomeyan récades
or message-staffs, Asante adinkra symbols, gold weights and umbrella
finials, and a host of other material repositories and memory-prompts
operate in different ways to transcend time, to fix or trap text in a material
form.
More than just additional witnesses to the practice of linking oral texts to
objects (e.g. Cruikshank 1999: 109), such efforts are “the most vivid indication
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of the desire to consolidate fleeting speech” (Barber 2005: 268), to make an

enduring oral text.
From here, Barber draws attention to two other steps performers take when
entextualizing beyond the sort Bauman and Briggs study: quotation and
exegesis. She focuses on how speakers frame and interact with their utterances
so as to highlight how they have endured through time and/or to position them
as capable of doing so in the future.
Speakers can cast a verbal act as a quotation. For instance, they may introduce
a statement with “As the elders say” or “Listen/how this hero must be
lamented,” (Barber 2007: 77). One can introduce a proverb in this fashion, but
“new texts are not excluded” (p.22) (1999: 19; cf. 2007: 77–8). Barber
illuminates the impact of this framing. One has to reckon simultaneously with a
spatial dimension and a temporal dimension. To approach it in spatial terms:
“presenting text as a quotation means insisting that it has an independent
identity outside the context of utterance…Quotation implies that what is quoted
was already there before the present speaker used it” (1999: 19, my emphasis).
Quotation portrays the utterance as existing in some space other than that
occupied by the present speaker but also as portable, as able to be introduced
into any number of settings. To approach it in temporal terms: quotation
“foreground[s] the perception that these words pre-existed their present
moment of utterance and could also continue to exist after it” (Barber 2005:
268). Quotation affirms the utterance’s existence in the past and presages its
survival into the future. By assigning these spatial and temporal attributes to the
utterance, the speaker depicts it as capable of outlasting the moment. I add that
presenting the utterance as capable of enduring is one way to make it capable of
enduring: claiming something is so is one way to make it so.
Barber also places in the category of quotation moments in which performers

use preexisting material from different genres in their texts (cf. Tarkka 2016:
184). She thus builds on scholarship on one type of generic dialogue: how a text
belonging to one genre can include material belonging to another genre or other
genres (Tarkka 2013: 93–100). Barber writes (2007: 78–9, emphasis in original):
Quotation also takes place between genres, when one genre incorporates
chunks of other genres and subsumes them to its own project—but in such
a way that they retain recognisable features. In this way the performer
highlights them as a resource that already existed and was available for
use when he/she undertook the performance. Yoruba praise poetry—oríkì—
incorporates divination verses, riddles and proverbs, in each case
displaying them as recognisable genres while using them to redound to the
honour of the person being praised. Strongly marked, immediately
recognisable genre characteristics are retained.…The open weave of oríkì
allows great chunks of other genres to be incorporated with their genre
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markers intact.…These strategies underline and consolidate the “text-

ness” of the materials incorporated. By being recontextualised within
another genre, their characteristic features are thrown into relief and their
pre-existence as text is affirmed.
The incorporated utterance keeps the generic features it had prior to its
incorporation, and the generic shift from the surrounding co-text highlights
those features. This retention brings out the preexistence of the incorporated
material. In such cases, the speaker points up the utterance’s endurance and
anticipates its continued existence.
Barber delves into the impact of exegesis as well. Exegesis can take place within
the space of a given utterance, as happens in Asante (Ghana) praise poetry
(2007: 97):
For example, Okoro-man-so-fone (“The one who goes to a town and causes
everyone to [become] emaciate[d]”) is elaborated with A wo ne no twe
manso wofon (“If you have a legal battle with him, you [become]
emaciate[d]”). The second line explains the context—litigation—in which
the subject’s devastating impact on other people is felt; without this
elaboration, the praise epithet would be completely baffling.
(p.23) Exegesis can also take the form of explaining a previous statement and
doing so in a different genre. For instance (80):
The most common form of obscurity, however, and the hallmark of African
praise poetry, is the laconic formulation that can only be interpreted in the
light of a narrative or a highly specific circumstance that is not implicit in
the words themselves, but has to be supplied by an interpreter drawing on
a separate parallel tradition.…The performer has to learn two repertoires,
two genres, not one.
By subjecting a brief utterance or stretch of discourse to scrutiny—by making it

“the focus of sustained attention and discussion” (77)—the exegete “reinforces
its consolidation as text” (Barber 2005: 272).5 Like quotation, exegesis suggests
that the utterance persists on its own out in the world as an object for
contemplation and analysis (cf. Barber 2007: 100), and I add that, as is the case
with quotation, the implication of that characterization—that the utterance is
capable of enduring—has an effect: it helps make the utterance capable of
enduring. Quotation and exegesis, then, contribute to the project of
entextualization, of making an oral text, an utterance capable of outlasting the
moment.
Finally, one can go beyond words proper. After linking his analysis of lament to
Bauman and Briggs’s 1990 discussion of entextualization, James Wilce turns to
“non-discursive forms of textuality” (2009a: 35, emphasis in original) evident in
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lament: melody and embodied features (“uses of the voice, throat, face, limbs,
etc.” (36)). Both items are themselves extractable and repeatable: “melodies are
also textual insofar as they too are a coherent and repeatable set of musical
signs” (35, emphasis in original); “embodied features…are conventionalized and
salient enough to ‘quote’” (40). At the same time, both aid the entextualization,
and so the portability, of a lament: “laments are rendered singable across
contexts by virtue of their memorable and repeatable melodic structures.…
Melody as well as lyrics can make laments memorable” (35–6); “a series of
gestures” can bolster “the coherence of a performance” (40).
Even if not explicitly deploying the paradigm of entextualization, the work of two
other scholars on the body in performance affirms the connection between
bodily movement and entextualization because, like Wilce’s study, they return us
to boundaries, coherence, and cohesion. Anna-Leena Siikala observes of singers
of Kalevala-meter poetry that “the use of body language keyed the
performance” (2000a: 275).6 She quotes Elias Lönnrot’s (subsection 3.3.1 (p.
115)) description of singers of epic (270):
two singers…will sit either facing each other or beside each other, clasp
each other’s hands either with one or both hands and commence their
song. For the duration of the song, the (p.24) body rocks back and forth,
so that it appears that the two of them are taking turns pulling each other
closer.
From the perspective of entextualization theory, the singer’s bodily position and
movement “for the duration of the song” sets a boundary around the
performance that contributes to the boundedness of the utterance.
Simultaneously, this traditional bodily activity signals in which sort of poetic
activity the singer will engage and is engaging. By evoking the genre of epic, the
bodily activity can be said to “unleash a set of expectations regarding narrative
form and content” and thereby to help make the utterance understandable, that
is, coherent (Briggs and Bauman 1992: 147; cf. Bauman 2004: 4). When one
knows what sorts of things a speaker will say and why he says what he says, one
processes the utterance with greater ease (cf. Fabb 2017: 366). The
phenomenon that contributes to the bounded nature of the performer’s
utterance contributes to its coherence as well.
Scheub’s discussions of the embodied nature of storytelling in his work on South

African, especially Xhosa, storytellers reveal how bodily movement enhances an
utterance’s coherence and cohesion. Scheub investigates two kinds of gestures
but hastens to add that “many movements fit into both categories” (1977: 357,
cf. 2002: 66). The first category, “the mimed nonverbal gesture and body
movement” (1977: 348), “include[s] movements which reflect somewhat
directly…the verbally summoned images of a performance” (354). (Scheub labels
these “complementary” gestures (2002: 66, 145).) The second category
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comprises “the purely abstracted” (1977: 348), “the pure gestures and
movement, those with no obvious ties on the level of meaning and image to the
spoken word” (355). (Scheub labels these “supplementary” gestures (2002: 66,
145).) Irrespective of category, gestures contribute to the “breaking down of the
narrative into its constituent parts” (1977: 348; cf. 349, 2002: 224). By clearly
demarcating the parts of the tale, the teller helps the audience to see how the
parts fit together and to understand the tale (cf. 349–50). One should expect
performers of verbal art to turn gestures to their advantage in this way. For they
put to work a practice found in everyday conversation. In a discussion of four
gestures used in Southern Italian conversation, Adam Kendon notes of two of
them that they help divide a stretch of discourse into units (1995: 264):
They appear to serve as if they are labels for segments or units within a
discourse, thereby indicating the part these units play within the discourse
structure. Thus the first gesture discussed here serves to distinguish topic
from comment in a discourse. The second specifies that a given piece of
discourse has a particular kind of privileged status in respect to other
pieces.
Both kinds of gestures discussed by Scheub hold the narrative together and
make it cohesive: they do the “work of ordering” (1977: 349) and so unifying.
For their part, abstract gestures “provide the patterning of the narrative” (355):
“the arms and hands shap[e] the narrative without direct reference to the
spoken word” (356; cf. 2002: 94, 208). Scheub’s more detailed excurses also
reveal how gestures help with cohesion (1977: 361, cf. 2002: 208–9):
(p.25)
The artist’s hands form a miming gesture; then, the hands still miming, the
gesture-word union ends, but the hands remain in the gesturing position—
and continue to gesticulate. Now they move about as abstract gestures,
with no mimed narrative content (no content that is obvious, anyway). This
may continue for a time; then the hands, still moving abstractly, revert to
the complementary, to the direct miming that originated this complex
interplay of gestures and body movements. The miming may have lost its
verbal association for a time, as abstract gestures take over during the
introduction of new verbal material. But the gestures do not at this stage
complement the new material: they remain instead a vestige of the earlier
complementary gesturing, still sculpturing the earlier pattern, abstracted
to pure movement. These abstracted patterns are vital, because they retain
echoes nonverbally of the verbally expressed materials now ended. Thus,
one part of the narrative is solidly linked to the other through nonverbal
gesture…
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I unpack this description as follows. Gesturing keeps one in mind of what the
teller said as the telling progresses. Scheub observes that the principle “what
has come before is not forgotten” (1977: 361) applies to gestures: “when mimed
gesture becomes abstracted (or vice versa), the earlier mimed gesture from
which abstraction developed remains in the imaginations of the members of the
audiences” (361). That the mimed gesture stays in the mind’s eye of an audience
member should also help the verbal material linked with the mimed gesture stay
in the audience member’s mind. Add, now, the possibility of continuity between
the mimed and abstract gestures. Scheub constructs the following scenario
(362, cf. 2002: 67):
An artist picks up a stick as a complementary gesture (the villain is being

beaten, for example). Then she keeps the stick when the verbal (mimed)
image has passed, and her activities with the stick now evolve into an
abstract gesture. When the weapon returns in the narrative, there may be
a reversal, from the abstracted to a complementary use of the stick. But it
is likely that the abstracted movement will be a movement related to
beating, even though it does not now directly relate to the beating, the
verbal images having dissolved.
That the mimed movement and the abstract movement both relate to beating
may keep the verbalization of the villain’s beating accessible to the audience.
Again, Kendon’s examinations of gesture in everyday talk provide a point of
comparison: “Gesture can be useful as a way of exhibiting overarching units of
meaning, as a way of keeping visible an aspect of meaning throughout the
course of a spoken utterance” (2000: 61).7
(p.26) I take stock of the material presented in this section. On the one hand,
one can speak of an oral text when encountering a repeated stretch of discourse.
To limit the phrase to this application would be to follow Albert Lord’s discussion
of textuality. Lord turns to the topic in an examination of “Serbo Croatian
women’s songs” from the nineteenth century found in Vuk Karadžić’s collections
and in Živomir Mladenović and Vladan Nedić’s supplement to that collection
(1995: 33–58). For Lord, only a stretch of verse repeated in different
performances with more or less the same words possesses textuality. He writes
of one song: “the stable part of the song is the beginning. A sense of textuality
belongs to that part but not the rest of the song” (35). He writes of another,
“There can be no doubt about a sense of textuality in these sections of the five
variants” (39); “if the questions and answers display textuality, that cannot be
said for the beginnings of the songs” (41); “this song has in the riddle section, as
we saw, a more or less stable core, which exhibits a clear sense of
textuality” (44); and, in sum, “We can speak here of the textuality of certain
parts of the song” (44). Lord also finds songs “whose textuality embraces the
whole song” (56). If a text requires textuality and textuality only emerges where
one finds repetition or something close to repetition, only a repeated utterance
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qualifies as an oral text. One can compare Jan Assmann’s linking “the quality of
textuality to the act of retrieval” (2006: 105). For Assmann, text “is a retrieved
communication, the recourse to a linguistic utterance through the hiatus of a
temporal or a spatial distance” (106). What is usually retrieved is not a set of
words but “the stored deep meaning that is reproduced and filled out through
improvisation,” the “deep structure” (108). From this vantage point too, one can
speak of an oral text when dealing with efforts to reproduce a previous
utterance.
On the other hand, the work of linguistic anthropologists suggests that the
speaker’s ambition matters as well. One can also refer to an oral text when
encountering a stretch of discourse that, whether it ends up repeated or not, is
made to be the object of replication—to be “potentially
decontextualizable” (Wilce 2009a: 34, my emphasis)—or the object of attention,
reflection, or commentary (cf. Barber 2007: 33). The Homerist and comparatist
Georg Danek gets it right in stating, “‘Authors’ generate ‘texts’, even if these
texts change with every performance” (2016: 145).
Either way, several strategies, both discursive and non-discursive, employed

both before, during, and after the relevant stretch of discourse, entextualize it:
they endow it with textuality. Research into entextualization provides concrete
ways to think about how oral discourse is, to borrow Saussy’s words from his
article on the Odyssey cited in this chapter’s introduction, “made to be
remembered and repeated” (1996: 322). This research enables one to build on
the investigations of earlier generations of (p.27) scholars, such as Eric
Havelock and Walter Ong, into the features of oral narrative “that facilitate
recall in performance,” such as “heroic larger-than-life characters that assist
recollection; an episodic rather than a climactic plot that is easier to remember
in performance; an additive and copious style that facilitates recitation; and the
use of formulaic images through which story segments can easily be retrieved in
performance” (Hofmeyr 1994: 106).
In section 1.2, I use the model of entextualization to illuminate the

representation of oral texts and textuality in the Homeric epics. I spend the bulk
of my time investigating the existence and creation of oral texts in the world of
the Homeric characters. I then bring the narrator text into the discussion before
drawing some inferences about our poets’ desire to entextualize.
I am encouraged in this endeavor by the observation that the scholars who have
promulgated and applied the concept of entextualization work with a variety of
genres. Many of Bauman’s essays look at storytellers. In his book on the oral
literature, ranging from proverbs to praise poems to epic ballads, of the Haya in
northwestern Tanzania, Seitel deploys the concept of entextualization, defining it
as “the generic finalization of style” (1999: 18; cf. Tarkka 2017: 267). (By
finalization, Seitel means “the sense of completion achieved in an artistic
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work” (1999: 17), and by style, he means “concrete verbal patternings” (29).)
Barber writes a lot on praise poetry but also uses the model of entextualization
to think about African epic (2007: 147, 214). As we just saw, Wilce studies
lament. Lotte Tarkka explores the presence of entextualized proverbs in
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Kalevala-meter poetry, including some
epic, from the Viena Karelian parish of Vuokkiniemi near the Finnish-Russian
border (2016). In a book devoted to the Siri epic of the Tulu people of Karnataka
(South India), Honko speaks like those who utilize the model of entextualization,
even though he criticizes one of Bauman and Briggs’s discussions of
entextualization (1990) for “burning the bridges to the very arena where the
folkloric act is taking place and finding acclaim” (1998: 149–51, quotation from
150). Honko, for instance, observes, “Without boundaries there is no text, and
without coherence there is no textuality” (141); points to “the source of
textuality: the coherence which gives interpretability to the text” (143; cf. 146);
and asks after “the textuality of the segments [in Gopala Naika’s performance of
the Siri epic].…Are they cohesive entities within the epic…?” (318). He considers
oral epics in general to be “clearly bounded even if flexibly used textual
products…” (143).
The performance paradigm has proven productive for scholars working with a
host of genres and in a host of cultures, and Homerists have profited from it as
well. So too has the model of entextualization, a refinement of our understanding
of performance (Barber 2005: 268, 2007: 79, 86), proven useful for scholars
investigating a range of genres, including epic, in a range of cultures, and the
Homerist should benefit from it as well. That some colleagues in classical studies
have begun to see the value of this concept further supports this application (cf.
Thomas 2012: 230; Karanika 2014: 18–19, 179), and that one finds talk of “the
temporally unique, impermanent performance” in a study devoted to the
Boeotian poet Pindar suggests the work yet to be done (T. Phillips 2016: 13).
(p.28) 1.2. Application to the Homeric Epics

In subsection 1.2.1, I begin applying to the Homeric epics the findings of the
linguistic anthropological research presented in the previous section. I
demonstrate that in the world constructed in the Homeric poems something
preexists a performance and can be passed along to others who can themselves
pass it along to others. I then show that utterances in that world can acquire an
object-like status. That preparatory survey allows me, in subsections 1.2.2 and
1.2.3, to start querying the production of oral texts by the Homeric epics’
characters and the mechanisms of entextualization foregrounded therein.
Subsection 1.2.4 broadens the scope of the inquiry, looking to the narrator text
as well as the character text—and to the poet himself.
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1.2.1. The Preexistence of Tales and Songs and the Object-Like Status of Utterances in
the Homeric Epics
In the Homeric poems, non-bardic tellers perform tales and bards and non-
professional singers perform songs of varying lengths and genres (cf. Scodel
2002: 74, 77). Homeric characters think of these tales and songs as
independently preexisting entities that performers and audience members know
or know of and that can be re-presented as needed: tales and songs exist even
when no one is telling or singing them. Whereas scholars have brought out the
extent to which the Iliad poet and the Odyssey poet allude to other stories, be
they real or imagined (Sammons 2010: 33–4, 68, 209; M. L. West 2011a: 28;
Tsagalis 2014a: 240–4; Currie 2016: 140–3), and whereas the characters relay
many stories about the past, often for paradigmatic purposes, I assemble here
some passages that do not just refer to other stories but suggest a vision of the
preexistence of tales and songs on specific subjects. What follows overlaps with
Andrew Ford’s discussion of Homer and Hesiod’s sense that “behind the telling
of each story exists one divinely superintended tale, one connected whole that
never alters, though parts of it may be performed in this or that time and
place” (1992: 41). It also overlaps with the idea that for Pindar and Bacchylides
“a ὕμνος [song] is conceived of as something initially independent of and prior to
the poet’s own creation” (Foster, forthcoming, building on Maslov 2015: 303–5).
Achilles speaks of a tale that Thetis often (pollaki) told about how she saved
Zeus from the gods’ attempt to bind him, and he urges her to tell it again to
Zeus (Il. 1.396–407). Aeneas refers to any number of well-known stories—“famed
words” (proklut’…epea)—about Achilles’s ancestors and his own as well (Il.
20.203–4). The phrase may even refer to “poetic words” (Nagy 1999: 271; cf.
Kozak 2017: 189).
Penelope claims that Phemius has a repertoire of enchanting songs from which
he can pick and choose (cf. González 2013: 193, 269). She then asks him to stop
singing that (tautēs) particular song that always (aiei) makes her upset (Od.
1.337–42). In his rejoinder, Telemachus cites that song by name: “the evil fate of
the Danaans” (Od. 1.350; cf. Od. 1.326–7, 8.75 with S. Richardson 1990: 84 and
Ford 1992: 20–1, 107). As Jukka (p.29) Siikala observes, “The names of
narratives essentialise them as something, which can be lifted up from one
context and replicated in another” (2003: 32). The disguised Athena expects
Telemachus to have heard (aieis) the story about Orestes’s killing of Aegisthus
(Od. 1.298–300), as does Nestor (akouete, Od. 3.193). When Nestor urges
Telemachus to emulate Orestes, Telemachus states, “The Achaeans / will carry
his glory far and wide and a song for those to come” (καὶ οἱ Ἀχαιοὶ / οἴσουσι
κλέος εὐρὺ καὶ ἐσσομένοισιν ἀοιδήν, Od. 3.203–4).8 Tellers and singers alike
know and audiences are able to request the tale or song about Orestes (cf. Ford
1992: 107; Spelman 2018: 167). Odysseus asks Demodocus to sing “the song
(kosmon) of the wooden horse” (Od. 8.492, tr. González 2013: 198), and, in
introducing himself to Polyphemus, Odysseus assumes the preexistence of a
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story about Agamemnon’s sack of Troy and destruction of a great army (Od.
9.263–6: see kleos “renown” at 264). Odysseus even alludes to the preexistence
of stories about his own stratagems and tricks (doloisin) when he identifies
himself to the Phaeacians: “I am Odysseus the son of Laertes, known [or, an
object of concern] to men / for all my stratagems (doloisin), and my fame goes up
to heaven” (εἴμ’ Ὀδυσεὺς Λαερτιάδης, ὃς πᾶσι δόλοισιν / ἀνθρώποισι μέλω, καί
μευ κλέος οὐρανὸν ἵκει, Od. 9.19–20). Calypso evokes the story of the Argonauts’
expedition when she speaks of the Argo as pasi melousa (Od. 12.70), which
means something like “sung by all poets” or “taken up by everyone in
stories” (see Dräger 1993: 14–18). Agamemnon foresees a famous song about
Penelope’s virtue (aretēs) and an equally well-known song about Clytemnestra’s
“evil deeds,” above all, his own murder (Od. 24.196–201).
Characters point to the existence of familiar stories with the phrase “they
say” (phasi) (cf. O’Maley forthcoming: section 1.2). Agamemnon positions his
review of Tydeus’s victories over the Cadmeians in games and battle as a
recollection of stories focused on Tydeus: “men say (phasi) that he was better
than the others” (Il. 4.375; cf. Od. 4.201). Tlepolemus declares to Sarpedon,
“They lie when they say (phasi) you are the offspring of Zeus…Of another sort
(alloion), men say (phasi), mighty Heracles was, my father” (Il. 5.635–6, 638–9,
following the editors (e.g. M. L. West 1998a) who read alloion not all’ hoion.). He
signals the preexistence of an account relating Sarpedon’s birth and of stories
about Heracles’s feats. Aeneas suggests the preexistence of a narrative about
the birth of Achilles to Peleus and Thetis: “Men say (phasi) that you are the son
of blameless Peleus / and that your mother is Thetis of the beautiful locks, a
daughter of the sea” (Il. 20.206–7). Telemachus alludes to stories about
Odysseus’s exceptional cunning (mētis): “for they say (phas’) your cunning
(mētin) is unparalleled among men” (Od. 23.124–5).
Beyond these explicit references to preexisting tales and songs, the characters’
presentations of “abbreviated narratives” also suggest the preexistence of
stories: “The narrator leaves gaps and shortens stories so much that they are not
fully comprehensible without prior knowledge. Such abbreviation implies that
the story already exists and that the listener has heard it before” (Scodel 2002:
125). For instance, (p.30) the obscurities in Glaucus’s account of his ancestry
(Il. 6.144–211) stem in part from the likelihood that his addressee, Diomedes,
“knows the story of his grandfather’s guestfriend and his children” (131).
S. Douglas Olson traces the “network of gossip, rumor and reputation” so

prominent in the society envisioned by the Odyssey (1995: 1–23). Building on his
discussion of the transmission of stories and information, I note that, as entities
that ostensibly preexist independently, songs and tales can be passed around
and down. The poet references non-heroic, occasional songs (Danielewicz 1990;
N. Richardson 2011; cf. Karanika 2014: 22–3, 52–67, 117–32). Twenty or so
Achaeans sing a paean (aeidontes paiēona) to propitiate Apollo (Il. 1.472–4).
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Weddings take place in one of the cities depicted on Achilles’s shield, and “loud
rose the bridal song (humenaios)” (Il. 18.493; cf. Hesiodic Shield of Heracles
274). Odysseus’s household puts on a fake wedding celebration, complete with
singing (molpē) and dancing (Od. 23.133–6, 143–52 (with Grandolini 1996: 165;
N. Richardson 2011: 15–16)). Wherever these songs fall on a spectrum ranging
from “simply a matter of refrains or cries (such as ὑμὴν ὦ ὑμέναιε, ἰὴ παιῆον,
etc.)” to “a more elaborate form of choral song” (N. Richardson 2011: 27),
individuals will have learned these traditional standards from someone else. Just
so, someone taught the Linus song to the boy (pais) singing it on Achilles’s
shield (λίνον δ’ ὑπὸ καλὸν ἄειδε), and the harvesters, if they sing the song’s
refrain (N. Richardson 2011: 28), learned it from others (Il. 18.569–72).9
Someone taught the sons of Autolycus the “incantation” or charm (epaoidēi) that
they sing while tending to the wounded Odysseus (Od. 19.457). Achilles tells the
Achaeans to sing a paean, “a processional song” (N. Richardson 2011: 25), to
celebrate his slaying of Hector: “But come now, singing our song of victory
(aeidontes paiēona), sons of the Achaeans, / let us return to the hollow ships and
carry back this one” (Il. 22.391–2). Achilles may assume that the soldiers know
what to sing—a scenario that again attests to a song’s transmission, however
informal, through time and space—but the more tantalizing possibility is that he
teaches them the song in the next two verses: “We won great glory; we slayed
brilliant Hector, / to whom the Trojans prayed throughout their city as to a
god” (22.393–4) (cf. N. Richardson 2011: 26). If so, these verses offer a precious
example of the creation and diffusion of an occasional song. Odysseus passes on
to (p.31) the Phaeacians a song (aoidēn) performed by the Sirens (Od. 12.183–
92), even if it is not the song they promise to sing, the one that traps their
audience (Karanika 2014: 50; Schur 2014). Achilles sings “the glorious deeds of
men” (klea andrōn, Il. 9.189), songs that he presumably picked up from listening
to a bard, such as Demodocus, who sings klea andrōn (Od. 8.73). Patroclus
perhaps waits to continue the singing once Achilles leaves off (Il. 9.190–1) (Nagy
2003: 43–4; González 2013: 371–7; differently, Hunter 2018: 220–1): he has
learned what to sing too.
To be sure, “not only do poets not learn from other poets, they do not learn from
anyone except the gods” (Scodel 2002: 78; cf. Ford 1992: 90–2, 95). The epics
mystify the process by which professional singers of heroic song master their
craft. Yet when Phemius claims that he is autodidaktos (“self-taught”) (Od.
22.347), he contrasts himself with singers who learn from others (Ready and
Tsagalis 2018b: 9). Two additional passages offer a peek behind the curtain as
well, the second even more so than the first: Telemachus says that a song
“circulates” (amphipelētai, Od. 1.352) and opines that men will carry the song of
Orestes far and wide (oisousi…aoidēn, Od. 3.204). Both statements indicate a
process of transmission from singer to singer.
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As for tale telling, Odysseus complements Demodocus for singing “the Achaeans’
fate, / as many things as they did and experienced and as many things as the
Achaeans suffered, / as if either you were there yourself or heard it from one
who was” (Od. 8.489–91). With that final addition, he acknowledges that non-
bardic tellers transmit stories to other tellers. Phoenix speaks of how “we learn
the stories about men of old” (τῶν πρόσθεν ἐπευθόμεθα κλέα ἀνδρῶν, Il. 9.524)
(cf. Scodel 1998: 174, 2002: 74–5). Telemachus speculates that Nestor or
Menelaus may have heard an account (muthon akousas) from another traveler
(Od. 3.94–5 = 4.324–5). In reporting to Telemachus on the returns of the
Achaeans from Troy, Nestor points to a process of transmission: “As many things
as I, sitting in my palace, / learn by inquiry (peuthomai), this you will know
(daēseai)” (Od. 3.186–7) (cf. Ford 1992: 105–6; Olson 1995: 13).
Mortals handle and hand over songs and tales. As represented in archaic Greek
hexameter poetry, the gods provide a telling contrast. They simply know songs
and never learn them. The Muses instruct the singer; one never hears of their
being instructed. Similarly, having interacted, as far as one can tell, with neither
man nor god, the baby Hermes can sing about Zeus and his mother Maia and
about his mother’s fine home (Homeric Hymn to Hermes 54–61).
The second part of my preparation for a study of the production of oral texts in
the Homeric epics starts from anthropologists’ discussions of the alignment of
utterance and object. In an essay on Gbaya taletellers in Cameroon, Philip Noss
draws attention to a formulaic introduction, “Here it comes with a crash!,” and
conclusion, “My tale is set right under the kolo tree gbat!” (1970: 42). The
introductory phrase
“Here it comes with a crash!” is expressed by two ideophones, rrrrr and

kpingim. The first, or its full form hirrr, describes moving a heavy weight.
The latter, kpingim, describes the thud of something heavy crashing to the
ground. The tale is weighty, it is a burden, it is meaningful, and therefore
at the end of the performance, the artist sets his burden under a kolo tree,
…
(p.32) Sophie McCall traces how “many First Nations [in the Americas] view
their songs as cultural property that can be exchanged and traded as a form of
wealth” (2011: 26). The idea common to these reports—an utterance can acquire
an object-like status—crops up repeatedly in the Homeric poems. One can build
on Nancy Worman’s comments on the Homeric epics’ interest in a “locution’s
look, taste, or texture” (2002: 44–5, quotation from 44).
The utterances of performers are objectified. The noun aoidē “is an action noun
and therefore describes poetry not as something completed and stable, but as
something in progress,…It consequently refers to something that is closer to
activity and performance than to a text or an aesthetic object” (Tsagalis 2004: 4;
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cf. Ford 1992: 15; Bakker 2013: 2; González 2013: 190). Yet one cannot help but
translate the noun as “song,” not “singing” (Nagy 1999: 37–8; Ford 1992: 108;
Tsagalis 2004: 3; Currie 2016: 19). This slippage occurs in part because the
language used with the noun aoidē aligns it with objects. Penelope asks Phemius
to cease from “this sad song” (aoidēs / lugrēs) (Od. 1.340–1). The adjective
(lugros) sums up the list “wars and well-polished javelins and arrows” (Od.
14.225–6) and describes the clothes (heimata) with which Odysseus disguises
himself as a beggar (e.g. Od. 16.457). The suitors turn to “dance and delightful
song (himeroessan aoidēn)” (Od. 1.421 = 18.304): Celeus’s daughters “held up
the folds of their lovely dresses (heanōn…himeroentōn)” (Homeric Hymn to
Demeter 176).10 Agamemnon predicts, “The immortals will make a graceful song
for prudent Penelope for earthly beings” (τεύξουσι δ’ ἐπιχθονίοισιν ἀοιδὴν /
ἀθάνατοι χαρίεσσαν ἐχέφρονι Πηνελοπείῃ, Od. 24.197–8). The verb (teukhō)
places the song in the realm of craft (Ford 1992: 38; Grandolini 1996: 167 at
197): Hephaestus makes (teuxe) armor for Achilles (e.g. Il. 18.609–13); Arete
and her maids make (teuxe) clothes (Od. 7.235). The adjective (kharies) aligns
the song with clothes (Il. 5.905, 6.90, 22.511; Od. 5.231, 10.544), temples (Il.
1.39), and gifts (dōra) (Il. 8.204, 9.599), as well as with the works of a smith (Od.
6.234 = 23.161) and a weaver (Od. 10.223). Demodocus “made his song to
appear” (phaine d’ aiodēn, Od. 8.499). The verb (phainō) also comes up in the
context of the revelation of actual things that one can see (cf. Nagy 2009: 318;
Jensen 2011: 255): Odysseus’s strong limbs (Od. 18.67, 74), Penelope’s beauty
(Od. 18.160), lightning (Il. 2.353, 9.236), the snake and birds omen at Aulis (Il.
2.308, 318, 324), and the eagle and goose omen in Sparta (Od. 15.168) (cf.
González 2013: 224 n. 19). The mourners at Hector’s tomb sing a “sorrowful
song” (stonoessan aoidēn, Il. 24.721). The adjective (stonoeis) also describes
spears, arrows, and other missiles hurled in battle (Il. 8.159, 15.590, 17.374; Od.
21.12, 24.180); Penelope labels her bed “sorrowful” (eunēn…stonoessa, Od.
17.102 = 19.595).
Going beyond aoidē, I cite other relevant passages. Alcinous wants Odysseus to
“rejoice in the feast and in listening to the tale (humnon) of the song” (Od.
8.429) (or, more technically, the “‘weaving’” of the song (Nagy 2009: 231)). The
Homeric use of humnos depicts “the performance of epic song…as a product
manufactured by tying (p.33) or sewing” (González 2013: 397; cf. Nagy 2009:
322–3) or depicts “epic song…as something ‘bound’ or ‘linked’ together, fitting
very well…with the metaphorical image of οἴμη” (Duffy and Short 2016: 66).11
Men transport tales and songs (oisousi kleos…aoidēn, Od. 3.204) just as they
transport gold from a sacked city (oisei, Il. 2.229), a sacrificial animal (oisete…
oisomen, Il. 3.103–4), or a lyre (oisetō, Od. 8.255) (cf. Olson 1995: 12 n. 25).
Antenor recollects that Odysseus and Menelaus “wove speeches” (muthous…
huphainon, Il. 3.212), and various characters “weave a spoken counsel,” such as
Nestor (huphainein…mētin, Il. 7.324) and the suitors (mētin huphainon, Od.
4.678): Helen weaves a robe (huphaine, Il. 3.125) (cf. Scheid and Svenbro 1996:
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112–14; González 2013: 364–5; Karanika 2014: 40). According to Odysseus, one
can “lead” a “speech” (muthon…agoito, Il. 14.91): Nestor brought (ēg’) a
drinking cup from home (Il. 11.632); Meges wears a corselet his father brought
(ēgagen) from Ephyre (Il. 15.531); Athena, disguised as Mentes, claims to be
transporting (agō) iron (Od. 1.184). When Alcinous declares that Odysseus’s tale
exhibits “a shapeliness” (morphē, Od. 11.367), he assigns it a degree of
materiality, or at least “a visible quality” (Bassi 2016: 65, cf. 95). Alcinous also
asks Odysseus to “tell me the wondrous deeds (theskela erga)” (Od. 11.374), and
a bit later we hear of Heracles’s belt with its depictions of “wondrous
deeds” (theskela erga, Od. 11.610): “The compositional ring…establishes an
equivalence between Odysseus’s narration and the crafted artifact” (Elmer
2005: 24–5). Eumaeus speculates that the disguised Odysseus may “fashion a
tale” (epos paratektēnaio) to get a cloak (Od. 14.131): Tecton “built” (tektēnato)
ships for Paris (Il. 5.62) (cf. Worman 2002: 80). Aeneas describes reproaches
(oneidea) as a cargo that would overwhelm a ship with one hundred benches (Il.
20.246–7) (cf. Martin 1989: 17). Lastly, epos and epea, both used by characters
and narrators alike to label the speech of characters, “have a reference not
shared by muthos, to speech as utterance, as thing heard and transmitted, as an
item of exchange that is at the same time a physical object, like a
weapon” (Martin 1989: 30). Speeches labeled with the more precise phrase
pukinon epos, used by characters, are to be understood as “enduring through
time, unassailable in the way of well-constructed, solid, or dense-packed objects
in the poem that are called pukinon” (36, cf. 18).
Andromache Karanika notes that in the Odyssey “female speech acts are voiced
in the context of work,” such as textile making, and argues that this “careful
emphasis on the female setting prepares the narrative to entextualize the speech
act” (2014: 30, 41, cf. 75). I have traced in a more concrete fashion how our
Homeric poets—“arguably the first materialist[s] in the West” (Porter 2010: 127)
—depict many utterances as object-like, akin to Pindar’s aligning his poetry with
objects (Svenbro 1976: 188–92; (p.34) Steiner 1994: 91–9; Scheid and Svenbro
1996: 117–18; Dougherty 2001: 41; Porter 2010: 462–3; T. Phillips 2016: 2). That
an utterance can be like an object does not mean that it lasts forever—as
Homeric characters are well aware, things decay (Il. 2.135, 23.326–33) or can be
broken (Il. 13.507, 14.55–6, 15.469; Od. 12.409) (cf. Ford 1992: 144–5, 152, 171;
Garcia 2013: 52–4, 115, 150)—but does suggest its durability: after all,
characters give one another gifts as mementos of their interaction in the belief
that the objects will last (Il. 23.615–19; Od. 15.123–8, 21.40). I connect the
objectification of utterances with the fact that characters envision songs and
tales as preexisting entities that can be passed around and down. Both
phenomena suggest the Homeric characters live in a world of enduring oral
texts.
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As I will now show, the Homeric poems depict characters fashioning oral texts
and using the mechanisms of entextualization reviewed in section 1.1 to do so. I
should make clear that, whereas the depiction of poets and poetry has figured
prominently in the analysis so far, in the next subsections I concentrate on the
non-bardic characters’ performances (cf. Martin 1989). I find it helpful to quote
Barber once again: “The process of entextualisation is ubiquitous in everyday
life. It is not reserved for the production of monumental works of art” (2007:
209; cf. Karanika 2014: 114).
1.2.2. Entextualization in the Character Text I

My present task is to trace the representation of oral texts in the world of the
characters. In that world, the most explicit flagging of the production of an oral
text, an utterance capable of outlasting the moment, comes when one character
tells another to pass along what he says to a third party. Irene de Jong lists
twenty-two “repeated messenger-speeches” (2004: 180) in the Iliad (241–3);
Antonio Aloni finds thirty “scene di annuncio” in the Iliad and one in the Odyssey
(1998: 81–2); and Adrian Kelly discusses twenty-two “relay instructions” scenes
in the Iliad (2007a: 325–9; cf. Eide 1999; Cesca 2017: 31 n. 2). Not all the scenes
they catalogue have the explicit signal that draws attention to the first speaker’s
wish that his utterance endure to be repeated. For instance, Hera urges Athena
to stop the Achaeans from fleeing to their ships (Il. 2.156–65). Athena repeats to
Odysseus most of what Hera had said (2.158–65 = 2.174–81, but 159 ≈ 175 and
163 ≈ 179). Yet Hera did not tell Athena to pass along her words, neither to
Odysseus nor to anyone else. Just so, Paris formulates a plan to fight Menelaus
in single combat and settle their dispute once and for all (Il. 3.68–75). Hector
repeats to all the Trojan and Achaean soldiers much of what Paris proposed
(3.86–94), even going so far as to position himself as a mediator passing on
Paris’s muthos (3.87). But Paris did not task Hector with transmitting his words.
Agamemnon sends Talthybius to summon Machaon (kalesson) (Il. 4.192–7), and
Talthybius repeats three of the verses found in Agamemnon’s order (4.195–7 =
4.205–7), but Agamemnon did not tell him to pass on a specific message (cf. Il.
12.342–63; Od. 17.507–59). I look at speeches that begin with an explicit signal
wherein the speaker tasks another with relaying his words.
(p.35) To be fair, these speeches do not reveal any more of an effort to

entextualize than one could find in other passages. Richard Martin considers
“every speech within the poem a composition in its own right, a poem within
epic” (1989: 197). Stylization marks all of Homeric discourse (Martin 1989: 45,
225; Bakker 1997a: 17; Minchin 2007: 8, 10, 12, 51, 84, 141; Karanika 2014:
24), and one could detect, for instance, cohesion and coherence in many
stretches of verse from either the narrator text or the character text (cf.
Friedrich 2000: 14; Minchin 2007: 61; Graziosi and Haubold 2015: 14). But in
the world of the characters these speeches stand out as moments of
entextualization because they foreground the goal of entextualization: “making
words stick” (Barber 2007: 67). I propose to use these passages to explore how a
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performer entextualizes by putting boundaries around the utterance and striving

after cohesion and coherence.
Scholarship labels the kind of event under investigation here a “mediational

routine”: a source generates an oral text for a mediator to pass on to a target, be
it an individual or a group (Bauman 2004: 132–3; cf. de Jong 2004: 180–1). Two
contextually distinct texts result: the source utterance or text produced by the
source in a source dialogue (involving the source and the mediator) and the
target utterance or text produced by the mediator in a target dialogue (involving
the mediator and the target). In this subsection (and in subsection 2.2.1), I
analyze the source text. In subsection 2.2.2, my attention will shift to the target
text. Konrad Ehlich finds the work of a messenger useful for thinking about what
constitutes a text (2005; cf. Assmann 2006: 103, 106–7), but I take my
inspiration for the following evaluations of Homeric mediational routines from
Richard Bauman’s study of mediational routines in medieval Irish poetry, Fijian
epic, and Akan chiefly discourse (Ghana) (2004: 128–58). In looking outside the
field of classical studies for help with these passages, I stand on the shoulders of
Johannes Th. Kakridis who juxtaposed the repetitions of messages in the
Homeric epics with the same phenomenon in modern Greek folksongs (1971:
76–88; cf. M. L. West 1997: 190–3).
In a mediational routine, the source makes his utterance ready for reproduction.
To preface my study of source texts in the Homeric epics, I quote from Bauman’s
description (2004: 147–8):
By the conventionalization of the mediational structure of the routines, the

source utterance anticipates repetition—detachment from the source
dialogue, the source speaker, the context and circumstances of production,
and recontextualization in the target dialogue. Moreover, the shaping of
the source utterance prepares it for this decontextualization and
recontextualization.
One of the principal operations in this preconditioning process is the

entextualization of the source utterance, endowing it with sufficient formal
and functional boundedness and internal cohesion to allow it to be lifted
out of its context of production and recontextualized in the target dialogue.
In the examples we have surveyed, the entextualizing devices employed
range from the minimal functional boundedness of a turn at talk to highly
complex poetic structuring. In addition to entextualization, the repetition
of the source text may be prepared for by such further devices as explicit
directives to the mediator, such as “Tell X he is pardoned,”…
(p.36) Homeric scholarship has not considered the source text in Homeric
mediational routines from this perspective. Homeric characters who operate as
the source in a mediational routine prepare in three ways for the reproduction of
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the source text—that is, of the message proper. First—(B) in what follows—they
announce that what they are about to say is what the mediator should pass on.
This announcement also serves as an initial entextualizing move because it
signals a clear starting point for their source text: the next verse.
Correspondingly, they signal the end of their source text by falling silent. In
these ways, they place boundaries around their text. Second—(C) in what follows
—they entextualize their source text by making it coherent. I concentrate here
on my earlier Seitel-inspired discussion of coherence. The source text not only
does not clash with the target’s “underlying cultural knowledge” (Seitel 2012:
81) but in fact relies on the target’s ability to fill in implicit gaps. Third—(D) in
what follows—they entextualize their source text by endowing it with “internal
cohesion.” All three moves potentiate the reproduction of the source text in the
target dialogue (Bauman 2004: 131). To be understood as speaking in
hexameters because that is how they always talk (Nagy 1996b: 61), the
characters create textual packages in hexameters.
At the same time, the external narrator, and sometimes the source himself,
points to the production of an entextualized oral utterance by marking the entire
speech that includes the source text as a performance: (A) in what follows. For,
as I stressed earlier, performers work to entextualize, and I cite again Bauman
and Charles Briggs’s reminder that “performance as a frame intensifies
entextualization” (1990: 74). As James Wilce explains, “The very act of
performing entails making oneself accountable for the very sort of structuring,
coherence, and memorability we have been calling entextualization” (2009a: 34).
The sort of nuts and bolts close reading that follows has always been and
remains a good starting point for analysis of the Homeric epics (cf. Martin 1989:
e.g. 65, 101–2, 121–3, 135, 221–2; van Thiel 1991: p. vii; Tsagalis 2001), and in
this case it gets at much of what entextualization involves (cf. Bauman 2004:
121). I aim to chart how these scenes reveal the crafting of an oral text, an
utterance built to last. In order to interrogate a number of different speeches, I
pass over perhaps the most well-known mediational routines in the epics, those
in Iliad 9 in which Odysseus relays messages to and from Achilles (Bassi 1997:
330–2; Ready 2014: 35). I scrutinize six scenes in the Iliad and one scene in the
Odyssey.
Iliad 2
Zeus sends Dream to deliver a message to Agamemnon (2.7–16):
καί μιν φωνήσας ἔπεα πτερόεντα προσηύδα·

“βάσκ’ ἴθι, οὖλε Ὄνειρε, θοὰς ἐπὶ νῆας Ἀχαιῶν·
ἐλθὼν ἐς κλισίην Ἀγαμέμνονος Ἀτρείδαο
πάντα μάλ’ ἀτρεκέως ἀγορευέμεν, ὡς ἐπιτέλλω·
θωρῆξαί ἑ κέλευε κάρη κομόωντας Ἀχαιοὺς
(p.37) πανσυδίῃ· νῦν γάρ κεν ἕλοι πόλιν εὐρυάγυιαν
Τρώων· οὐ γὰρ ἔτ’ ἀμφὶς Ὀλύμπια δώματ’ ἔχοντες
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ἀθάνατοι φράζονται· ἐπέγναμψεν γὰρ ἅπαντας

Ἥρη λισσομένη, Τρώεσσι δὲ κήδε’ ἐφῆπται.”12
ὣς φάτο· βῆ δ’ ἂρ Ὄνειρος, ἐπεὶ τὸν μῦθον ἄκουσε,
And he spoke and addressed him with winged words:
“Up, go, destructive Dream, to the swift ships of the Achaeans;
when you get to the hut of Agamemnon, son of Atreus,
tell him everything exactly as I charge you:
order him to arm the long-haired Achaeans
with all speed: for now he may take the city of the wide ways
of the Trojans; for the immortals who have their homes on Olympus
are no longer divided in counsel: for Hera has bent the minds of all
with her entreating, and sorrows have been fastened on the Trojans.”
So he spoke; and Dream set out, when he had heard the command,
(A) Verses 7 and 16 mark Zeus’s speech as a performance. Martin shows that the
phrase epea pteroenta (“winged words”), as found in verse 7, is “a synonymous
phrase for muthos” (1989: 30, cf. 69), and verse 16, wherein muthos looks back
to epea pteroenta, reminds one of that fact. The term muthos labels a
performance (Martin 1989: e.g. 12, 47, 54, 88–9, 231) in the sense outlined by
Bauman, which I quote again for ease of reference: “performance as a mode of
spoken verbal communication consists in the assumption of responsibility to an
audience for a display of communicative competence” (1977: 11). The phrase
“winged words” also alerts one to the nature of Zeus’s performance: he performs
a directive (Martin 1989: 31–2, 46). The content of the speech from its beginning
makes clear that the directive takes the form of a command (Martin 1989: 51; cf.
Minchin 2007: 196–203, 211–15), as it always does when Zeus utters “winged
words” (cf. Il. 4.69, 15.48, 15.157 (discussed later), 19.341). In turn, one
observes that commands constitute one of the genres in which Homeric
characters perform (Martin 1989: 47–66). So even if one disagrees with Martin’s
interpretations of “winged words” (D. Beck 2005: 43, 57 n. 20), one can still
understand Zeus to be performing a command. Zeus doubles down on
performing commands insofar as his command to Dream includes a command
that Dream is to pass on to Agamemnon (cf. D. Beck 2012: 15).
(B) Verse 10 announces the coming of a source text intended for reproduction as
does keleue (“order”) of verse 11, but the phrase bask’ ithi (“Up, go”) in verse 8
hints in that direction: five of the six appearances of this phrase initiate a
mediational routine (Kelly 2007a: 61, 324–5). I discuss the other four relevant
passages over the course of this subsection.
Verse 10 signals that the source text begins in verse 11. Verse 16 indicates that
Zeus has put an end to his text by falling silent. Dream’s immediate departure
confirms the source text’s clear endpoint.
(p.38) (C) Zeus crafts a coherent utterance by offering gaps that he assumes
his target can fill in. He relies on his target’s knowledge that the gods are a
Page 25 of 69
fractious lot—so it is significant that they “are no longer divided in counsel” (13–
14)—and that Hera detests the Trojans (14–15).
(D) The repetition in sound engendered by the double consonant ξ followed by

the palatals κ and χ holds verse 11 together: θωρῆξαί ἑ κέλευε κάρη κομόωντας
Ἀχαιοὺς. The first component of a textual package emerges as a textual
package. The threefold repetition of gar points up the textuality of Zeus’s source
text (cf. Martin 1989: 51). Each sentence explains the previous one: Agamemnon
should arm the Achaeans because he will now take Troy because the gods have
settled their dispute over the city because they acceded to Hera’s supplication
and suffering awaits the Trojans. As a result, deploying a technique common in
the Homeric epics—that of epic regression wherein events are presented in the
reverse of their actual chronological order (Krischer 1971: 136–40)—Zeus
progresses ever backward in time: Agamemnon will in the (not-too-distant)
future take the city because of the current arrangement among the gods that is
due to what has recently transpired in the past (cf. Brügger et al. 2010: 14 at 11–
15). The final clause—Τρώεσσι δὲ κήδε’ ἐφῆπται (lit. “and on the Trojans sorrows
have been and so are fastened”)—partially rehearses this sequence: that the
Trojans will in the future suffer pains has been determined in the recent past. In
recapitulating in shorter compass the temporal dynamic of verses 12 through
the first half of 15, this final clause provides a suitable ending for this stretch of
the text.
Enjambment, as a means of connecting successive verses (cf. Baldick 2008 s.v.

enjambment), becomes relevant too, but the topic requires a brief
bibliographical digression. Egbert Bakker focuses on the intonation units evident
in each verse of the Homeric epics (1997a: 44–53, 2005: 46–52; cf. M. W.
Edwards 2002: 18–35), intonation units having become a popular way to
approach Ancient Greek discourse (Scheppers 2011: 18–35, 38–42; de Kreij
2016: sections 16–20). One can define an intonation unit from a number of
perspectives, looking to phonology, cognition, grammar, or pragmatics
(Scheppers 2011: 21–35). I quote here Bakker’s succinct definition (1997a: 48–
9):
The intonation unit is the linguistic equivalent of the focus of

consciousness, the amount of information that is active at any one time in a
speaker’s consciousness. The intonation unit is the largest linguistic unit
that is still available in its entirety to consciousness, the typical sequence
of speech sounds that is within the grasp of the speaker’s, and listener’s,
echoic memory: any stretch of discourse that is longer will have to be
processed as more than one of these basic chunks.…In terms of syntax,
intonation units can be anything from complete clauses to all kinds of
nonclausal elements: prepositional phrases…, phrases involving
Page 26 of 69
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Orality Textuality and The Homeric Epics An Interdisciplinary Study of Oral Texts Dictated Texts and Wild Texts Jonathan L Ready Full Chapter

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Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric

Epics: An Interdisciplinary Study of

Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An

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Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An

Print publication date: 2019

That ain’t no storm, Captain.

That’s just my hammer in the air, Lord, Lord.

That’s just my hammer in the air.

(Ballad of John Henry, traditional)

Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An

Print publication date: 2019

Early on in The Homeric Simile in Comparative Perspectives, I establish a

Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An

Print publication date: 2019

I thank the University of Texas Press for permission to reuse in Chapter 1

Ready, J. L. 2018b. “Performance, Oral Texts, and Entextualization in Homeric

Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An

Print publication date: 2019

Abstract and Keywords

Investigators from various fields define or employ these words—orality and

To this nuanced understanding of orality can be added a nuanced understanding

English poetry, distinguishes the textuality of texts in various media. The

This interdisciplinary and comparative approach enables an investigation into

Part I, made up of Chapters 1 and 2, explores the oral composition in

Chapter 2 returns to episodes involving messengers in the epics. I touch on the

As an example of one of the texts I investigate, I quote from papyrus 5 (TM

[εἰ δέ τινα φρεσὶν ἧισι θεοπροπίην] ἀλείνει

[καί τινά οἱ πὰρ Ζηνὸσ ἐπέφ]ρ̣α̣δε πότνια μήτηρ

εἰ δέ τινα φρεσὶν ᾗσι θεοπροπίην ἀλεείνει

καί τινά οἱ πὰρ Ζηνὸς ἐπέφραδε πότνια μήτηρ,

Deploying scholarship on performance, especially that of linguistic

In summarizing my project design and the contours of my argument and

To begin with, students of oral traditions continue to explore how oral

If we hypothesize that written texts were accessible to the rhapsodes and

Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An

Print publication date: 2019

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric

Abstract and Keywords

Section 1.1 surveys scholarship on mechanisms of entextualization—what

1.1. Performance, Oral Texts, and Entextualization

In oral traditions, the co-presence of performance and text is of course

understood to be constituted in utterance that can be abstracted or

So performers make an oral text: they impart textuality, the attributes of an

In Bauman’s succinct formulation, entextualization requires fashioning an

Investigating cohesion “from a formal perspective,” as Bauman and Charles

The passage is marked, first of all, by parallel syntactic constructions in