Homer speaks to us in a bizarre dialect. Such vocalisms as and such formations as and are philological impossibilities; such a word as combines the peculiarities of both Aeolic and Ionic speakers of Greek, and could have been heard from the lips of neither; long words such as scan only by arbitrary licence, phrases such as seem not to scan at all. Yet commentators praise the euphony and onomatopoeia of the verses, and warn us severely that ‘unless readers of Homer are careful to sound every line (for the “inner ear” at least) many very beautiful effects of euphony will be missed’. What reason have we for supposing we hear the authentic voice of Homer ? Bound within the chaste, dark covers of the Clarendon Press, introduced by a solid, unread, praefatio, the regular columns of Greek, unsullied by lacunae or cruces, make Homer appear an unusually undisputed text. Indeed, the major editions likely to come into the hands of readers today differ little. It will be. candid to confess that such credit-worthiness is illusory. The foundations of the Homeric text are among the shakiest of any that have come down to us. I do not suggest that the text was ever the playground of dull redactors or carefree interpolators; I refer to the known or inferable facts of its transmission.

Casual judgements on Homer, and even those less casual, are often in a sense comparative, because the mind is illumined, or fogged, by contemporary prejudices. Blind ourselves, we laugh at Xenophanes who denounced the theologian Homer, and Plato who found fault with the moralist. The disease was diagnosed and the cure prescribed over 80 years ago by the Russian, A. N. Veselovsky: ‘The scholars of the West, who know very little about modern epic poetry, involuntarily transfer problems of purely literary criticism to the folk-poetry of the ancients. This is the usual fault of all the criticism of the Nibelungenlied and part of that of Homer. ... It is absolutely necessary to take as a starting-point the living epos, whose structure and stages of development must be carefully investigated.’ The comparison of one literature with another sheds light on both in various ways. It may be simply a matter of bringing a better balance to the judgement. Thus the long tradition of Homeric scholarship has made us well aware of the flaws in the Homeric plots. A whole school of criticism has rested on the assumption that the construction is incompetent. For such an attitude I know no better remedy than a reading of the paratactic, anticlimactic Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius. Both Homeric epics are intensely dramatic and very cunningly put together.

The conventions of an art have never yet confined genius and mediocrity in equal chains.’ To our minds, insensible as they are to the conventions of our own thinking, the Homeric fetters of tradition appear conspicuously onerous. Greek epic thought and expression is typical, generic, stylized, and repetitive. Despite the frequency with which its implications are ignored, this statement does not need to be argued: it is plain to every reader of the Greek, without the confirmation of Schmidt’s Parallel-Homer, the lexica, and the concordances.

This description of current theories of oral composition is no more than a short account of something that is still being argued. Oral composition seems, however, the best working hypothesis, and the impact it has had on critics in Western Europe and America—and which it must eventually have on those of Italy and Germany—has been revolutionary. But the revolution is still, especially in the field of appreciation, in its destructive phase. The description of so much traditional material ‘has taken from Homeric critics a considerable body of phenomena which literary critics normally consider a legitimate and significant part of their study’. We seem to be denied the beauties of the mot juste, because the mots are not employed for their appropriateness to a specific context.