Homeric scholarship over the past century has in many ways advanced our understanding of the Homeric poems. Schliemann’s excavations gave rise to modern archaeology, which has demonstrated the many connections between material culture and the objects described in the poems (see Chapter 9, by Sherratt). Linguists have analyzed the dialect layers present in the language of the poems, and have shown that some phrases and poetic concepts have traveled across geographical boundaries and go back at least as far as the Bronze Age. In the 1930s an American classicist named Milman Parry and his assistant, Albert Lord, went to Yugoslavia, where they collected 12,544 songs, stories, and conversations from 169 singers of the still flourishing South Slavic epic song tradition. These singers composed extremely long epic poems in performance. To do this they drew on a vast storehouse of traditional themes and phrases that worked within the meter or rhythm of the poetry. They used what are called formulae, instead of individual words, to build each verse as they went along. Parry and Lord applied this discovery to the Homeric epics, and formulated the thesis that the language of the Homeric poems had evolved over time within an oral epic song tradition, and that the Iliad and Odyssey were generated in performance. (For more on Parry and Lord and the South Slavic heroic song tradition, see Chapters 13, by J. Foley and Chapter 4, by Jensen.)
The developments of archaeology, linguistics, philology, comparative literature, anthropology, and literary theory have not solved the Homeric questions, however (see Nagy 1996b). Debates about the historicity of the Trojan War persist as excavations at the site of Troy continue to take place, and eminent Homerists still debate whether or not a man named Homer ever existed, and if he did, what his role was in the creation of the Iliad and Odyssey. Nevertheless, the centrality of the poems in western literature remains unquestioned. The Trojan War is an archetypal conflict that in greater and lesser degrees infuses modern war epics, tales of betrayed love, and depictions of wartime suffering, while the Odyssey provides a paradigm for physical and spiritual journeys and tales of homecoming. James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), set in Dublin in 1904 and regarded as one of the greatest novels of all time, is constructed around powerful thematic and structural allusions to the Odyssey; other important literary adaptations and transformations include Derek Walcott’s Omeros and Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel. In addition to these works, many works of modern popular fiction explore the story of Troy from new angles. A good example is Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, which chronicles a soldier’s long and tumultuous journey home after being injured in the Civil War. Increasingly, the tale of Troy is being told from the point of view of women in such novels as Cassandra, by Christa Wolf, Daughter of Troy, by Sarah Franklin, and According to Helen by Florence Wallin. These developments in fiction reflect as well the feminist scholarship of the last three decades of the twentieth century, which focuses on such characters as Penelope, Helen, Andromache, and Briseis as well as the song traditions of women that are featured in the poems (Due 2002 and Chapter 8, by H. Foley). Finally, ever since the invention of cinema the Iliad, Odyssey, and other tales from Greek myth have been adapted for the big screen, including most recently the Coen brothers’ striking adaptation of the Odyssey, O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), and the epic blockbuster Troy (2004), which narrates the Trojan War from the theft of Helen to the sack of Troy.
World History
