Homer and West Asia

Scholars have demonstrated impressively in how many ways Homer is connected not only with a distant Indoeuropean past (Nagy 1990a) but also with west Asian texts and ideas.9 The importance of such connections can and will not be doubted. But doubts may be expressed about the consequences some scholars are willing to draw from them. Forty years ago, Martin West declared (1966: 31): “Greek literature is near eastern literature.” More recently, Johannes Haubold (2002) made a similar argument. Both authors adduce strong evidence. Yet their conclusions seem too global. Rather, one might say with Walter Burkert (1991: 174; 1992: 128-9) that we can no longer study Greek literature in isolation from its wider context. All this raises important questions which I can only mention briefly here. Is the evidence adduced able to support such general and far-reaching conclusions? How does it affect the question of the creativity of Greek poets? And how do we imagine the transmission of motifs and ideas to Greece? After all, most of the evidence we have for Mesopotamian, Hurrite, and Hittite myths and epics that suggest close correspondences with Greek epic, dates centuries earlier than Homer (and Hesiod, below). In Mesopotamia, such texts were transmitted in scribal schools far into the first millennium but Greeks (or, more likely, their eastern informers) would not have had access to such specialized texts. Scholars disagree about whether versions of these texts were transmitted orally as well, and how such oral and written strands of transmission might have interacted with each other.10 Moreover, we mostly read these eastern texts in much earlier versions. They may have been preserved in the scribal schools quite faithfully over centuries, although there too, as the Babylonian creation epic demonstrates (Cohen 1993: 406-53), adaptations to changing conditions were inevitable. In orally transmitted songs or tales, such adjustments would have been more frequent, rapid, and fundamental (above). But this oral tradition is, with few exceptions (e. g., Sanchuniathon and Philo of Byblos: M. West 1997: 283-6; Baumgarten 1981), not accessible to us. Whether we are thinking of a “cultural bridge” in the Bronze Age or in the “Orientalizing Period,” or both, we are thus forced to “compare apples and oranges.”

At any rate, the mere fact that Greek epic reflects much eastern influence seems to prove widespread oral tradition - but of texts unknown to us and perhaps rather different from those preserved on Hittite or Mesopotamian tablets. While the transmission of motifs and ideas is easily demonstrable, this is more difficult for more complex issues, such as the structure of epic composition (but see Burkert 1992: ch. 3). And finally, as Hesiod shows (below), when being integrated into Greek contexts, such cultural borrowings were, whenever necessary, thoroughly adapted to Greek conditions and needs. I would suggest tentatively that all three areas of Homer’s “intellectual achievement” sketched above would largely have risen above the sphere of eastern influence. To my knowledge, west Asian epic did not reach the complexity and sophistication of Homer’s epic composition. Nor do present, past, and future there interact in the conscious and elaborate ways characteristic of Homer. In political thought, one would a priori expect the poet to focus on issues that were of concern to his audiences and thus to adjust to such specific uses whatever foreign motifs he integrated.