0.6 Homer multitext project  (Page 8/15)

In a forthcoming online Commentary on the Homeric Iliad (Frame, Muellner, and Nagy 2010+), based on the Koine textual tradition stemming from the base text (texte de base) established by Aristarchus, all these non-Koine ancient variants will be inventoried and analyzed along with the Koine variants as they all coexist in the formulaic system that pervades Homeric poetry; a corresponding Commentary on the Homeric Iliad will follow.

When I speak of the formulaic system that pervades Homeric poetry , I am referring to a reality that was first fully understood in modern times through the internal and comparative analysis done by Parry and Lord. This reality has to do with phraseological and metrical patterns found in the text of Homeric poetry that correspond to patterns found in living oral traditional poetry. These patterns, which Parry and Lord describe as formulas, are the essence of what Lord has identified as the multiformity of oral poetry.

The fact that non-Koine as well as Koine variants fit the formulaic system of Homeric diction is the best counter-argument against the argument that non-Koine variants result from conjectures made by ancient editors (the relevant arguments and counter-arguments are assessed in Nagy 2004:25-39).

I conclude that the textual multiformity of the Homeric poems, which as I argue stems from the formulaic diction of oral poetry, was known to ancient editors like Aristarchus, even though he thought that Homer wrote down his own poetry. Although Aristarchus did not think in terms of an oral poetic heritage for Homeric poetry, his editorial work on textual variants provides evidence of such heritage (Nagy 1996:151-152):

Even though Aristarchus [...] posited a Homeric original, he nevertheless accepted and in fact respected the reality of textual variants. He respected variants because, in terms of his own working theory, it seems that any one of them could have been the very one that Homer wrote. [...]That is why he makes the effort of knowing the many different readings of so many manuscripts. He is in fact far more cautious in methodology than some contemporary investigators of Homer who may be quicker to say which is the right reading and which are the wrong ones. Aristarchus may strike us as naive in reconstructing an Athenian Homer who “wrote” around 1000 [BCE], but that kind of construct enables him to be more rigorous in making choices among variants. [...]What, then, would Aristarchus have lost, and what would we stand to lose, if it really is true that the variants of Homeric textual tradition reflect for the most part the multiforms of a performance tradition? If you accept the reality of multiforms, you forfeit the elusive certainty of finding the original composition of Homer but you gain, and I think this is an important gain, another certainty, an unexpected one but one that may turn out to be much more valuable: you recover a significant portion of the Homeric repertoire. In addition, you recover a sense of the diachrony.