Homeric Scholarship - The 18th and 19th Centuries

The 18th and 19th Centuries

The 18th century saw major developments in Homeric scholarship, and also saw the opening phase of the discussion which was to dominate the 19th century (and, for some scholars, the 20th): the so-called "Homeric question". Homer was first seen as the product of his primitive time by the Scottish scholar Thomas Blackwell, in An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (1735).

Another major development was the enormous growth of linguistic study on Homer and the Homeric dialect. In 1732, Bentley published his discovery of the traces left in the text of Homer by the digamma, an archaic Greek consonant that was omitted in later, classical, Greek orthography. Bentley showed conclusively that the vast majority of metrical anomalies in Homeric verse could be attributed to the presence of digamma (though the idea was not well received at the time: Alexander Pope, for one, satirised Bentley). Important linguistic studies continued throughout the next two centuries alongside the endless arguments over the Homeric question, and the work by figures such as Buttmann and Monro is still worth reading today; and it was the linguistic work of Parry that set in motion a major paradigm shift in the mid-20th century. Another major 18th century development was Villoison's 1788 publication of the A and B scholia on the Iliad.

The Homeric question is essentially the question of the identity of the poet(s) of the Homeric epics, and the nature of the relationship between "Homer" and the epics. In the 19th century it came to be the fulcrum between two opposed schools of thought, the Analysts and the Unitarians. The issue came about in the context of 18th-century Romantic interest in popular lays and folktale, and the growing recognition that the Homeric epics must have been transmitted orally before being written down, possibly much later than "Homer" himself. The Italian philosopher Vico argued that the epics were the products not of an individual genius poet but rather the cultural products of an entire people; and Wood’s 1769 Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer argued emphatically that Homer had been illiterate and the epics had been transmitted orally. (Less fortunately, Wood drew parallels between Homer and the poetry of the supposed Scottish oral poet Ossian, published by James Macpherson in 1765; Ossian turned out later to have been wholly invented by Macpherson.)

The scholar Friedrich August Wolf brought matters to a head. His review of Villoison's edition of the scholia acknowledged that they proved conclusively the oral transmission of the poems. In 1795, he published his Prolegomena ad Homerum, in which he argued that the poems were composed in the mid-10th century BCE; that they were transmitted orally; that they changed considerably after that time in the hands of bards performing them orally and editors adapting written versions to contemporary tastes; and that the poems' apparent artistic unity came about after their transcription. Wolf posed the perplexing question of what it would mean to restore the poems to their original, pristine, form.

In the wake of Wolf, two schools of thought coalesced to oppose one another: Analysts and Unitarians.