Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond

To understand the emergence of Homeric poetry as an actual written text, it is essential to trace the history of Homeric performance, from the very beginnings of literacy to the critical era of textual canonisations in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Professor Nagy applies the comparative evidence of oral poetic traditions, including those that survived in literate societies, such as the Provençal troubadour tradition. It appears that a song cannot be fixed as a final written text so long as the oral poetic tradition in which it was created stays alive. So also with Homeric poetry, it is argued that no single definitive text could evolve until the oral traditions in which the epic was grounded became obsolete. In the time of Aristarchus, the gradual movement from relatively fluid to more rigid stages of Homeric transmission reached a near-final point of textualisation.

• The author holds near-guru status, especially in the United States. His name should sell a very large number of copies • The book deals with epic, Homer, literacy and orality: all good topics • The book advances original theories about the composition and transmission of ancient works of literature

Introduction: a brief survey of concepts and aims; Part I. Mimesis and the Making of Identity in Poetic Performance: 1. The Homeric nightingale and the poetics of variation in the art of a troubadour; 2. Mimesis, models of singers, and the meaning of a Homeric epithet; 3. Mimesis in Homer and beyond; 4. Mimesis in lyric: Sappho’s Aphrodite and the Changing Woman of the Apache; Part II. Fixed Text in Theory, Shifting Words in Performance: 5. Multiform epic and Aristarchus’ quest for the real Homer; 6. Homer as script; 7. Homer as ‘scripture’; Epilogue: dead poets and recomposed performers; Appendix; Bibliography; Index.