Homer Removed From School Curriculum

Those Massachusetts Puritans. Yeah, just lately a ninth-grade teacher in Lawrence, Massachusetts succeeded in removing Homer's Odyssey from the curriculum of the school where she teaches, [PS: It seems the Odyssey may have been removed from a single class, not from use by the entire school. I was taken in by right-wing sources who deliberately exaggerated the affair to suit their agenda and stir up fears of cancel culture. I'll try to be more careful. Amusingly, however, because this post contained that error, a link to it was removed from a sub-Reddit.] but 330 years ago they were executing people they believed to be witches, so in a way this is progress. I bet those witch-burners didn't read Homer either.

 

In an online discussion of this curriculum change, someone said that in the case of this school in Massachusetts, no one was being told not to read Homer, because he was not being removed from the curriculum of a Classics department. 

Of course people are being told here not to read Homer. That is literally no more and no less than what this little news item is about. The ninth-grade students of this teacher, who is being paid by some public or private entity to tell them what to think of this or that author, are being told not to read Homer. Now how will these kids understand the jokes in O Brother, Where Art Thou?

And if this particular school ever had a Classics department, I'm pretty sure it was removed from the school some time ago. As have many other Classics departments in the US and elsewhere. Don't tell me that there's no connection between removing Homer from an English or comparative lit curriculum and removing an entire Classics department from the face of the Earth, cause I ain't quite that stupid, cause I've read a lot of good books including some stuff by Homer! So just, don't!

It's true that there has been a lot of sexism, racism, classism and other forms of bigotry in the teaching of the Classics over the course of the centuries. I think the thing to do is to remove the sexism, racism, classism and other forms of bigotry from the teaching of the Classics, rather than removing the Classics themselves. When Homer is removed from curricula, when Classics department are done away with, although it's usually done in the name of the Left, all that is accomplished is that all of that good stuff once again becomes the preserve of the bigots. This is not an advance, it's a retreat.

The same holds true with those among Catholic Leftists who identify Latin masses, and the study of Latin (and therefore also Greek because they're really not wholly separable) in general with the Right. The Left needs to go into, much further into the study of the Classics. 

Buy some copies of Homer and smuggle them into the benighted town of Lawrence. Help those kids out.

Translations from Greek to Latin

In the Roman Republic and the Western, Latin-speaking Western Roman Empire, many people were bilingual and could speak Greek as well as Latin. How many? I don't know, but I do know that some Classical Latin authors such as Cato the Elder and Juvenal complained that it was too many. Many other ancient Latin authors saw Greek very positively: from its beginnings in the third century BC, Latin literature very often copies Greek literature very directly. Many Roman young men were sent to Athens to be educated; some of them liked Greek culture and literature so much that they became poets, instead of lawyers as their families had intended (some things never change), some of them strew many Greek quotations among the Latin texts of their books. The Emperor Marcus Aurelius, although a native of the Latin West, wrote an entire book in Greek.

This all changed very quickly when the Western Empire declined and ceased to be in the 5th century AD.

Jerome's Latin version of the Bible, the Vulgate, dominated Western literature for 1000 years.

Although scholarly types in the West never ceased to read the Latin Classics, the ability to read Greek became very rare. The philosopher Boethius (ca480 -- 524), made some of the first translations of Aristotle into Latin. He had planned to translate all of Aristotle and Plato into Latin, but was imprisoned and executed on suspicion of treason before he could complete this project. Apparently already at this time there was a need, even among those inclined to philosophy, for translations of Greek works.

Another illustration of the lack of reading comprehension of Greek in the West is the popularity of the poem known as the Ilias Latina. PK Marshall (in: LD Reynolds (ed), Tests and Transmission, Oxford: 1983, p 191), with refreshing frankness, refers to the Ilias Latina as an "unatractive compendium." Written probably during the reign of Nero, it reduces the 15,693 verses of Homer's Iliad to just 1070, and those remaining lines often resemble Vergil's style much more than Homer's. Nevertheless, in the absence of either knowledge of Greek or fuller translations of Homer, the Ilias Latina enjoyed great popularity from the 9th century onward.

Many translations from Greek into Latin, most notably of the very numerous works of Aristotle, began to cause a great sensation when they appeared at the University of Paris and in other Western centers of learning in the 12th century, coming from the great school of translation in Muslim-controlled Toledo, Spain.

I suppose that this is as good a time as any to point out that, apparently contrary to widespread beliefs, most of the Latin translations of Aristotle and other Greeks which appeared in 12th-century Europe were not, in fact, first translated from Greek into Arabic, and then from Arabic into Greek. Most have survived in Greek, and in the 12th century in Toledo, most of the Latin translations which were to be so popular among Western scholars were made directly from Greek. Even in the 12th century, people knew the hazards of what we now call the game of Telephone. There have been a few cases in which the original versions of Greek Classics have vanished, and an Arabic or Hebrew version has survived, so that all further translation must come from them, and these few cases make for interesting stories. But they are atypical stories.

In the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries, as the Eastern Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, declined and finally fell, many Greek scholars who fled from that decline and fall chose to migrate to Italy, and they taught Greek to those scholars who re-introduced Greek literature to the West in the Italian Renaissance. Numerous full-length Latin translations of both the Iliad and the Odyssey began to circulate in the West, replacing Professor Marshall's "unattractive compendium," along with Latin translations of many other Greek works, as the scholarly Western world, or at least wide swaths of it, became bilingual again, mastering both Latin and Greek, as it had done 1000 years before.

Forged Ancient Literary Works

Many of the best-known ancient literary works in Greek and Latin, scholars now agree, have long been presented as the work of authors who did not write them.

Gradually, the findings of scholarship about ancient literature make their way toward the consciousness of the general public in the West. The findings about one ancient compilation, about which the West is particularly obsessed, make their way more quickly than all others to the public, and to wider circles of the public: those having to do with the Greek New Testament. If someone believes that all 13 of the books of the New Testament traditionally attributed to St Paul were actually written by Paul, it may come as a shock to learn that scholars now believe that Ephesians, First and Second Timothy and Titus were written by someone else, and that the authorship of Colossians and Second Thessalonians is debated.

This is less shocking for those who have a broad knowledge of ancient Greek and Latin literature, because, among the ancient "pagan" authors, such forgeries are quite common. Take the case of Homer -- well, Homer is a special case to begin with, because there is absolutely no agreement among scholars about whether a writer named Homer ever existed, or whether, if this writer did exist, he wrote the Iliad or the Odyssey or both -- however, it is almost universally agreed now that, whoever wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey, the works known as the Homeric Hymns, and attributed to Homer by the time of Thucydides at the latest, were written by someone else.

No one doubts that Plato existed, or that he wrote many philosophical works centering around Socrates -- but he didn't write all of the dialogues he was once thought to have written. In the collection traditionally thought of as the work of Plato, First Alcibiades, Clitophon, Menexenus and the Epistles are now controversial as to whether or not Plato wrote them, while Second Alcibiades, Epinomis, Hipparchus, Minos, Amatores and Theages are all now generally agreed to have been written by someone else. That's a total ten of the thirty-six works traditionally attributed to Plato, and this does not count nine more works attributed to Plato which were already seen in antiquity to have been spurious: Axiochus, Definitions, Demodocus, Epigrams, Eryxias, Halcyon, On Justice, On Virtue and Sisyphus.

Vergil, on the strength of his works the Aeneid, the Georgics and the Eclogues, is considered by many to be the finest poet ever to have written in Latin. For a long time, an additional collection of poems, the Appendix Vergiliana, were thought to have been poems Vergil wrote in his youth. Now almost no-one believes that Vergil wrote them.

Julius Caesar wrote commentaries about his experiences leading Roman troops in the Gallic and Civil wars. Many editions of Caesar's work have also included commentaries on the Alexandrine, African and Iberian wars, originally presented as works by Caesars, now considered not to have been written by him.

Sallust, an historian and contemporary of Caesar's, is known for works on the Catiline and the Jugurthan War. Editions of his work also contain letters which he ostensibly wrote to Caesar, and a speech against Cicero and one by Cicero against him, which are considered to be forgeries.

An enormous amount of prose survives which was written by Cicero, whom many have called the greatest of all Latin authors. Collections of his works have also included Rhetorica ad Herennium and Commentariolum Petitionis, both almost certainly written by someone other than him.

Ovid is one of the most beloved ancient Latin authors, known for several humorous volumes of what today might be called dating advice, as well as for the Metamorphoses, an extraordinary re-telling of many traditional myths, and the Fasti, a book on Roman holidays which is better than you might think a book on Roman holidays could possibly be, and for other works. Additionally, several works not written by him have circulated along with his works: Consolatio ad Liviam, Halieutica, Nux and Somnium.

There are many, many further examples. Many of these works continue to be of great interest to Classical or biblical scholars, for one reason and another, even after they have been shown to be fakes. One is almost tempted to say that no Classical author can be considered truly great before a spurious work has attached itself to his or her oeuvre.

The authors of such spurious works are often referred to by putting the prefix "pseudo-" in front of the name of the author who is being imitated. More and more, separate editions are dedicated to the work of the forgers, rather than including them in the editions of the forged authors as a sort of afterthought.

Perhaps, as these widespread, and often well-respected forgeries become better-known, the shock of the layman at things like pseudo-Pauline epistles will become somewhat less.

The Homeric Question: West vs the Oralists

In a blog post I published in February entitled Papyri of the Iliad; Also: Academic Conventions, I mentioned the late M L West (1937-2015) and the 1569 papyri of the Iliad which he consulted for his Teubner edition, which was published in two volumes in 1998 and 2000.

Back in February, I knew scarcely anything about West. Before this, he was, to me, above all one of the two editors of the selected fragments in my 1990 OCT edition of Hesiod. Since then, I've learned that West was involved in a debate over the authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey which is very spirited, to say the least, and which has been going on for decades. (I know that you academics who are reading this know much more about this debate than I do. As I keep repeating, my blog posts about Classical studies are written by a layman for other laypeople.) West said that both poems were composed in the 7th century BC, first the Iliad and then the Odyssey, by two different individuals; on the other hand, scholars known as oralists, or proponents of oralism, assert that... let's see -- what exactly do they assert? I believe they're saying that no one person can be regarded as the author of either or both poems: that they were the products of oral composition and performance up until the moment, in the 6th century, when one version of each poem was written down. The oral performances continued for some time after this first written version, and account for the many of the discrepancies among the manuscripts. I believe that's more or less what the oralists are saying.

I know that I don't know anywhere near enough Greek to take an intelligent position on this controversy. To do so, I would have to be able to evaluate the textual variants in Homer, and decide whether I beleive that West or the oralists account for them more convincingly. All I can tell you is that I like the things which West wrote about it in English. Beginning with the first I ever heard about West's disagreement with the oralists: in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2001.09.06, answering reviews of his volumes of the Iliad by Gregory Nagy and Jean-Fabrice Nardelli, West writes:

"My critics are both (though it takes them in different ways) devotees of the Oralist faith, and they reproach me for not paying sufficient regard to the Good News."

That made me smile. West has had me from the moment I read that. Furthermore, unfortunately, Nagy, Nardelli and others representing the oralist standpoint actually do write, at least when they're writing in opposition to West's answers to the Homeric question, in a strident, dismissive, unpleasant manner reminiscent of religious fanatics answering the views of those who disagree with them.

I'm not saying that West is right and that the oralists are wrong. I am saying that West states his case much more persuasively in English than the oralists do. But, of course, English is ultimately not what this is about.

The Continuity of the Classical Tradition

Joel and Ethan Coen have famously said that neither of them has ever read Homer's Odyssey, and implied that the credits to their film O Brother Where Art Thou?, which say that their screenplay is "based on Homer's Odyssey," should be taken with a chuckle. And yet, even if the credits had not mentioned Homer, anyone with a passing familiarity with the plot of the Odyssey could've seen the big obvious parallels, from the protagonist being named Ulysses, to the many adventures suffered by Ulysses and his companions on their way home, to the characters clearly based on the Sirens and the Cyclops, to Ulysses' having to to defeat a suitor to win back his bride once he's home, to name but a few.

Some might see it as a sign of the collapse of Western civilization that Joel and Ethan Coen, two of the most well-respected artists in contemporary culture, have not read Homer -- but look at it another way: Homer is still so much a part of our culture that they didn't need to read the Odyssey in order to make a great film based upon it.

In 1997 Charles Frazier published his first novel, Cold Mountain, the story of a man who deserts the Confederate Army near the end of the American Civil War and embarks on a long and hazardous journey to return to the love of his life -- a novel based on the Odyssey, and perhaps the best-reviewed American novel of the past 25 years. Since then, many books based on the Odyssey have been published, notably Margaret Atwood's novel The Penelopiad, which re-tells the story from the point of view of Odysseus' Penelope. In 1922 James Joyce published Ulysses, one of the most highly-regarded novels of the 20th century, and one very self-consciously and minutely following the plot of the Odyssey.

And those are just a few of the most prominent imitations of the poem. Just to name every well-received novel, poem, film, play, ballet and other work of art made in the 20th or 21st century based on the Odyssey would fill up a longish blog post, even if I stuck to just the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Germany, Austria and Switzerland, whose 20th- and 21st-century culture I happen to know somewhat better than that of the rest of the world. I'm not well-acquainted with the literature of the Caribbean, but I do know that the Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, of Saint Lucia, wrote a book-length poem, Omeros, which is based on the Iliad.

Looking at the cream of recent Western culture, it would seem that the continuity of the Classical tradition is mightily strong indeed. (And by the way: in the abundance of re-tellings of Homer, recent Western civilization resembles every single earlier epoch.) But some might say that it has declined drastically, and point to academia, always closely related to ambitious fiction and poetry, but never identical to them, to make that case. But I am not so sure. It's a matter of how you look.

Up until about a century ago, Western academia was with very few exceptions the preserve of affluent white men, a fairly small club which saw itself as the inheritors and preservers of, among other things, ancient Greek and Latin literature. Since then, much greater numbers of people have been going to college, primarily from groups which had been mostly excluded from it before: women, ethnic minorities and people who aren't quite so rich. Understandably, not everyone in these groups new to academia shares all of the same opinions about what is important as the traditional core of rich white guys. Some lament a decline of the study of the Classics, and compared to academia as a whole, there's no doubt that Classics have a smaller place than they had a century ago. But in terms of the actual numbers of people studying ancient Greek and Latin, writing books about it, teaching it to others and editing Classical texts -- well, there, I don't know how the actual total numbers today compared to those of a century ago, and I don't know whether anyone else knows either. If you know, please tell me! If you think you know, well, don't feel compelled to share your opinions. I have my opinions and am familiar with those of some other people. What I don't have are actual numbers.

It may well be that there is one huge advantage enjoyed by Classical Studies today compared to a century ago: it may be that the general level of enthusiasm in Classical departments is much higher today -- when no study of the Classics is required in most universities, meaning that the Classics departments are filled with students who have chosen to be there -- than a century ago, when a certain amount of Classical study was required of every single rich white guy, in college and before college, and to many of them, perhaps most, the Classics were a loathsome chore, to be endured and then, if possible, forgotten.

Papyri of the Iliad; Also: Academic Conventions

In my recent blog post entitled Manuscripts, I wrote:

"[...]several months ago, I sent a email to a distinguished scholar, asking him whether he could round out some areas of my knowledge of the Oxyrhynchus papyri project: Are any of the papyri still in the boxes Grenfell and Hunt put them into between 1897 and 1904? Are we approaching the state of things where all that is left are tiny little pieces of papyrus? Questions like that.

"He hasn't gotten back to me. That hurts my feelings, but it's entirely his prerogative, of course. Finally today I sent an email to the general guestions-and-suggestions-etc address of the Oxyrhynchus project, which is perhaps where I should've inquired to begin with."

In Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad, Munich & Leipzig, 2000, p 87, M L West writes that, as the Egypt Exploration Society wished, he did not give any details of the 850 unpublished Oxyrhynchus papyri (Correction: 827 unpublished papyri used by West in his edition, plus 23 first published in Manfrdi et al, Papiri dell'Iliade, Florence, 2000. I think. Much of what I write in CI and about Classics on my blog should be proofread by experts before anyone thinks of taking it seriously, because of things I don't know and full-time academics do know.) used in his edition of the Iliad, 1998--2000, and he thanks them for their permission to now include their inventory numbers and summary details in his catalog of papyri of the Iliad, which contains a total of 1569 items.

Because of those details, I can see that those 850 papyri which in 2000 were either unpublished or published for the first time, are certainly not inconsequential little scraps. They seem generally to be about as big as most of the Homeric papyri already published. This does not give the impression that the Oxyrhynchus project is almost all out of significant papyri. I need to try to find out how many more have been published in the last 18 years, and discovered in that time, if the existence of those latter have been made known to the public.

To judge from West's pointed expression of thanks to the Egypt Exploration Society for their permission to divulge details about unpublished papyri, maybe the reason that neither the above-mentioned distinguished scholar nor anyone else from the EES has yet gotten back to me with details about unpublished papyri is that such details are conventionally thought of as proprietary secret knowledge of the EES, only rarely made public in extraordinary circumstances, such as when a scholar of West's stature is involved. I'm ignorant of the ways in which things are usually done in Classical Studies and papyrology, Perhaps I've been making making requests for information which are generally considered impolite at best. Consultation with some Classicists and papyrologists about mores and conventions, learning a little about the way things are usually done, certainly would do me no harm, and might save both myself and some scholars a great deal of future embarrassment.

Alexander Pope's Translation of The Iliad

In the War of Troy, the Greeks having sack'd some of the neighbouring Towns, and taken from thence two beautiful Captives, Chruseïs and Briseïs, allotted the first to Agagamemnon, and the last to Achilles. Chryses, the Father of Chruseïs and Priest of Apollo, comes to the Grecian Camp to ransome her; with which the Action of the Poem opens, in the Tenth Year of the Siege. The Priest being refus'd and insolently dismiss'd by Agamemnon, intreats for Vengeance from his God, who inflicts a Pestilence on the Greeks. Achilles calls a Council, and encourages Chalcas to declare the Cause of it, who attributes it to the Refusal of Chruseïs. The King being obliged to send back his Captive, enters into a furious Contest with Achilles, which Nestor pacifies; however as he had the absolute Command of the Army, he seizes on Briseïs in revenge. Achilles in discontent withdraws himself and his Forces from the rest of the Greeks; and complaining to Thetis, she supplicates Jupiter to render them sensible of the Wrong done to her Son, by giving Victory to the Trojans. Jupiter granting her Suit incenses Juno, between whom the Debate runs high, 'till they are reconciled by the Address of Vulcan.

The Time of two and twenty Days is taken up in this Book; nine during the Plague, one in the Council and Quarrel of the Princes, and twelve for Jupiter's Stay with the Æthiopians, at whose Return Thetis prefers her Petition. The Scene lies in the Grecian Camp, then changes to Chrysa, and lastly to the Gods on Olympus.

That's Alexander Pope's summary of Book 1 of Homer's Iliad -- the "argument," as such literary summaries used to be called. Pope's translation of the Iliad appeared between 1715 and 1720, during which time Pope was between 27 and 32 years old. Many poets have translated the Iliad into many languages (and some non-poets, let's face it). Hundreds of translations into English have been made. Once a decade or so someone will declare that the latest English translation is so magnificent that there's no need for another one, ever. Or at least for a very, very long time. At least once during the 20th century, a paperback edition carried a line from a review declaring that this translation was so good that another one wouldn't be needed for at least a century, and then the reviewer published his own translation, less than a century later.

I'm not a poet -- I'm a very, very, very, very good writer of prose, but with verse, not so much. I can't see myself holding my own in a debate with great poets about the relative merits of various translations of the Iliad. But I like Pope's very much. This is the way Pope begins the poem:

The Wrath of Peleus' Son, the direful Spring
Of all the Grecian Woes, O Goddess, sing!
That Wrath which hurl'd to Pluto's gloomy Reign
The Souls of mighty Chiefs untimely slain;
Whose Limbs unbury'd on the naked Shore
Devouring Dogs and hungry Vultures tore.
Since Great Achilles and Atrides strove,
Such was the Sov'reign Doom, and such the Will of Jove.

Declare, O Muse! in what ill-fated Hour
Sprung the fierce Strife, from what offended Pow'r?
Latona's Son a dire Contagion spread,
And heap'd the Camp with Mountains of the Dead;
The King of Men his Rev'rend Priest defy'd,
And, for the King's Offence, the People dy'd.

For Chryses sought with costly Gifts to gain
His Captive Daughter from the Victor's Chain.
Suppliant the Venerable Father stands,
Apollo's awful Ensigns grace his Hands:
By these he begs; and lowly bending down,
Extends the Sceptre and the Laurel Crown.
He su'd to All, but chief implor'd for Grace
The Brother-Kings, of Atreus' Royal Race.

What can I say, that works for me. Does this mean that Richmond Lattimore's version is no longer my favorite? No, it means that I love them both and don't feel that I have to choose one.

It's very strange that it has not occurred to me until just now to try translations of the Iliad into other languages, other than Latin. (Generally speaking, Latin translations of the Iliad are notorious for being not so good. Unless there are a lot of outstanding Latin translation of the Iliad of which I've never heard. That's certainly possible.) When things like that suddenly occur to me I get very happy.

The earliest English tranlsation of the Iliad of which I am aware is that of Arthur Hall, published in 1581, which begins:

I Thée beséech, O Goddesse milde, the hatefull hate to plaine,
Whereby Achilles was so wroong, and grewe in suche disdaine,
That thousandes of the Gréekish Dukes, in hard and heauie plight,
To Plutoes Courte did yéelde their soules, and gaping lay upright,
Those sencelesse trunckes of buriall voide, by them erst gaily borne,
By rauening curres, and carreine foules, in peeces to be torne.

Founders Of National Literatures

In some cases it's very easy to spot the first great figure in the literature of a nation -- "great" not in the sense that they were bettter writers than others, that's a subjective call, but in the sense that they formed a reference point for the literature that followed, great in the sense that the writers and readers of that nation looked at each of them as a kind of founder of their culture.

In some cases that figure is very easy to spot: in Greece it's Homer, in post-Roman Italy it's Dante, in Spain it's Cervantes, in England it's Shakespeare, in Russia it's Pushkin.

In ancient Rome, some would say, it's Vergil. Others would say it's Cicero. I, and perhaps a few others, would say that Horace and Sallust and Ovid write rings around those two. (Then again, by my own criteria, that's not the point.)

The situation is quite murky in Amurrka, because after the mediocrity of Irving and the so-so melodramatic novels of Cooper came Melville, the most accomplished writer in our nation's history, but dishonored in his own time, and always an outsider. He even founded an Amurrkin tradition of outsider-writers: Emerson, Faulkner, Gaddis, the Beats. The fucked-upness of our literature is world-famous.

Who's the first great German writer? Luther, Grimmelshausen, and Goethe, the top 3 choices, are about as different from one another as 3 writers can be. Is that bad for Germany, or nice for Germany?

(Or is this all incredibly meaningless and beautiful?)

France just simply doesn't have one. Maybe because the field is more crowded with geniuses that the literature of any other nation.

And when I think that there must be similar sitchy-ashuns in the literature of Portugal and Lithuania and Mexico and hundreds of other nations, discussions including thousands of writers whose names I have never heard, my mind reels at how much bigger the world is than my mind.

Numbers Of Manuscripts Of Some Classical Authors

This in no way resembles any sort of comprehensive list of all known Classical manuscripts. I wish such a list had been gathered conveniently between book covers, and I could just refer you to the title and ISBN.

Maybe such a list exists. I haven't found it yet. What I have found is some running totals of the numbers of manuscripts known for this or that author. I've found some of these figures in volumes I've had for a while. They've often been hiding in plain sight in the footnotes, where I only recently thought to look.

In A Companion to Homer, ed by Wace and Stubbings, London: MacMillan, 1962, on p 229, in the footnotes to JA Davison's chapter "The Transmission of the Text," we learn that TW Allen had listed 190 medieval and post-medieval manuscripts of the Iliad in his 1931 edition, including 7 which also include the Odyssey, that Allen had listed 75 manuscripts of the Odyssey in volume V of the Papers of the British School at Rome, including those 7 already mentioned, for a total of 258 medieval and post-medieval manuscripts of Homer. Davison' notes also mention ancient manuscripts of Homer listed in RA Pack, Greek and Latin Litrerary Texts from Graeco-Roman Egypt, published in 1952: 381 manuscripts of the Iliad and 111 for the Odyssey. That adds up to a nice round total of 750 manuscripts of Homer. Davison points out that these figures do not include quotations of Homer in the works of other authors, nor indirect sources.

And remember, this was in 1962. I would imagine that more Homeric manuscripts have come to light since then. How many more? I dunno. Can I provide an example of even one specific discovery made since 1962? Strangely, I cannot. There's a ton of stuff online about Homeric manuscripts in general and Homeric papyri in particular, and from my personal point of view, none of it is user-friendly.



In Die Platonhandschriften Und Ihre Gegenseitigen Beziehungen by Martin Wohlrab, published in 1887 in Leipzig by Teubner, page 643, Wohlrab says that his survey includes 147 manuscripts. (This Teubner volume is a reprint from an academic journal, and begins on page 643.) Also on p 643 Wohlrab said that surely many more manuscripts of Plato would be found. This was before the Oxyrhynchus excavations began. How many papyrii of Plato have been found at Oxyrhynchus? And down the road at Fayum? I dunno. Lots, I would imagine. But Wohlrab was talking about manuscripts laying around in libraries which hadn't yet been catalogued. Was he right, in the 1880, when he predicted that many more manuscripts of Plato would be found in libraries? I dunno. I would guess he was right.



In Texts and Transmission, ed by LD Reynolds, Oxford, 1983, on page xxvii, Reynolds counts up some surviving manuscripts of Sallust: 2 from the 9th century, 4 from the 10th, 33 from the 11th, 58 from the 12th, 39 from the 13th, 46 from the 14th and 330 from the 15th, for a total of 482, and adds in a footnote: "The figures are incomplete, especially for the later period." In addition to these medieval manuscripts of Sallust, there are 4 ancient papyrii. 486, but "the figures are incomplete."

On p 36 of Texts and Transmission, Michael Winterbottom mentions 162 recent and unimportant manuscripts of Caesar. I was unable to find a figure which included both the unimportant and the important manuscripts.

On p 412 of Texts and Transmission, Michael Reeve informs us that we have over 650 manuscripts of Terence and adds, "Published estimates stop at 450. I owe the new figure to Claudia Villa."

On p 394, Reeve mentions "over 160 manuscripts" of Statius' Thebiad. Just of the Thebiad. The total number of manuscripts of Statius is more. How many more? I dunno.



I don't know how many manuscripts there are of Cicero. I don't want to know. I'm not a fan. (There are lots and lots.)

And one more time for Reeve: on p 107 of Studies in Latin Literature and its Tradition: in Honour of C O Brink, Cambridge, 1989, he counts up 154 of the 3rd decade of Livy. That's just for the 3rd decade (books 21-30). The total number of Livy manuscripts is somewhat more. How many more? I dunno.



On p vi of his 2004 Oxford edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses, RJ Tarrant informs us that we have over 400 manuscripts of that poem. How many manuscripts do we have of all of Ovid's works? I dunno. Very many, I would imagine.

Why Aren't Homer And The Pentateuch Mentioned More Often In The Same Breath?

They come from the same part of the world. Greece and the Western coast of Turkey aren't so far from Egypt and Israel. They each occupy a central, dominating place in a culture, first the Greek culture in the one case and through it the Graeco-Roman and its heirs; and in the other case the Jewish culture, and then through it Christendom and Islam and very many of the same cultural inheritors. The events portrayed by each of them occurred, if they occurred, in the 13th century BC or thereabout. They each existed as oral epic passed down for some time before they took written form. Each one took roughly the written form with which we're familiar no later than the 6th century BC.

In hindsight, we can see both Greece and Israel for the first time after what is called the Ancient Near East Dark Age or the Late Bronze Age Collapse: a period of chaos and destruction in Egypt and the Hittite and Canaanite civilisations in the 13th and 12th centuries, from which we have very few written documents. As with the European Dark Ages between AD 476 and 800, this period in the ancient Near East is sometimes called a Dark Age because very little contemporary writing sheds light on what happened, and also because what we do know about the era seems to have been very desolate and bleak and bloody. After this gap in the historical record, we can see Greece in what had been the territory of the Mycenaeans, and Israel in what had been Canaan. It's unclear to what extent the Greeks were descended from the Mycenaeans, and to what extent the Israelites were descended from the Canaanites. The Mycenaeans and the Canaanites had written with a syllabic script, and the Greek and Israelites both wrote with alphabets which both came from some original alphabet. We don't know exactly when or how the Greeks and the Israelites began to write.

Homer and the Pentateuch both describe events which may or may not have actually happened -- the Trojan War and its aftermath, and the Exodus -- but which if they did were no doubt significantly altered in the written versions. It's debatable whether there ever really was a Moses or Joshua, or an Achilles or Helen. Or a Homer. The parallels just don't stop.

Can it really be that these parallels are not often remarked upon and investigated?

Well, they should be mentioned in the same breath, for countless reasons, and if it's really the case that nobody before me has done so, then it's high time someone did and I'm someone and I'm mentioning them, so there!

Does Homer Make A Better Comparison To The Bible Than Harry Potter?

Homer makes THE BEST literary comparison to the Pentateuch (first five books of the Bible), period, hands down, game over, what's for lunch. Neither the Iliad nor the Odyssey nor the Pentateuch was considered fiction when it was written. People believed that Adam, Eve, Abraham, Achilles, Jehovah and Zeus were real. In the case of Harry Potter right from the start everyone understood that Harry was a fictional character, and that J K Rowling didn't really believe in witches. (Which is only one of the reasons why the claim that 2000 years from now people will believe that Harry was real, a claim often made by these New Atheist idiots comparing Harry Potter to the Bible, is so teeth-grindingly, head-spinningly stupid. It would require a catastrophic decline in our civilization, a huge breakdown, a Mad Max-type situation, in order for people to believe Harry was real. [4 years of President Ted Cruz might do it.] Fiction was written 2000 years ago. Everybody today knows that nobody 2000 years ago thought that Plautus' plays or Petronius' novel Satyricon [Yes, I said novel. There were novels before Tom Jones and before Don Quixote and before Gargantua and of Pantagruel, and yes I mean novels written in prose and everything.] were meant to be taken as non-fictional depictions of anything.) Also, the Exodus, if it happened (if so it was much smaller than described in the Bible) happened right around the same time as the Trojan War, if that war happened, and of course if it happened the Greek deities didn't participate, because they're not any more real than Jehovah or Satan. The time period of the Exodus is the same as that of the Trojan War, somewhere between 1400 and 1200 BC, a time of general chaos throughout the Middle East, when some civilizations vanished and some others arose, a time from which relatively few records survive. With both Homer and the Pentateuch, we don't know who originally wrote them (there's a legendary author in each case, Homer and Moses), or when they first began to be written down. Both were in something resembling their current written form by the 6th century BC. Both laid the cornerstone for a whole society, Greece in the one case and the Hebrews in the other. The resemblances are just remarkable.

Debating Whether the Exodus Happened

A: The story of Moses and Pharaoh is fictional. You might as well debate the historicity of The Lord of the Rings.

ME: Talking to a religious believer lately, you correctly pointed out that the burden of proof lies upon him who makes a positive statement. And yet here you yourself make a positive statement for which evidence is lacking. We don't know how much of the story of Exodus might be true.
Concerning the numbers of Israelites described in the OT as comprising the Exodus, since so many point to that as evidence that the story is fictional: 600,000 men, plus women, children, non-Israel­ites and livestock. It amazes me that people get so hung up on this number. It would seem that that many people wandering in the desert for 40 years probably would've left some evidence which archaeolog­ists or other scholars, searching for so long, would've come across by now. But often people of other cultures in other eras had nothing resembling our accuracy when counting large numbers of people or other objects. (Cf Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, vol I, pp 336-341, for a good discussion of how Medieval Europeans tended to use large numbers.) Combine an inexactnes­s in counting to begin with, with the centuries of oral transmissi­on which may have occurred before the story of the Exodus took fixed form, (now THIS would be an example of a game of Elephant) and it's easy to imagine that a migration of 60,000 families, or 6,000, or much fewer still, could've provided the basis for the OT stories.

B: How about six families? Would that be enought to save the story? Maybe God killed every firstborn Egyptian kids and drowned all those soldiesr for the sake of six families.

ME: You can have that argument with someone who believes in God. For me, all theologica­l discussion­s were over a long time ago. They don't interest me. The same way that what I was talking about, how the story of Exodus actually came to be, doesn't seem to interest you. It's an historical interest for me. In the same way, I'm curious about where the story of the Iliad came from. Both stories come from that era of upheaval in the second half of the second millenium BC which started with a sharp decline of old empires around the eastern Mediterran­ean, and ended with the emergence of some newly-lite­rate cultures such as those of the Greeks and the Jews. I would reject the flat statement: "the Iliad is fictional,­" for the same reason I rejected A's statement above.

B: How about the whole damn story is just so much BS made up hundreds of years after the fact by a group of people that had begun to solidify around one religion and needed a myth of where they came from?

ME: Again: I'm not saying the Exodus story is historical­. I'm not saying it's fictional. I'm disagreein­g with anyone who claims to know, one way or another, how the story arose.

B: Just because a story may have some element of truth in it does not mean that, on a whole, it is not fictional.

ME: Again, I'm interested in finding out which elements might have an historical basis.

A: What's lacking is any evidence it is true. However, we do know the Israelites were not slaves in Egypt. Since there were no people to free there was no need for someone to free them. The Moses depicted in Exodus did not exist.

ME: We don't know that none of them were. That is to say: we don't whether there actually were a people that long ago which could properly be called Israelites -- although the Merneptah stele makes it seem likely that there were -- and if there were we don't know whether some of them were enslaved in Egypt. As to Moses, if you mean that either every detail in Exodus about Moses is true, or Moses didn't exist, well, that's absurd.

A: If anything, the Exodus story is possibly a garbled account of the Hyksos being expelled from Egypt by Ahmose at the beginning of the New Kingdom.

ME: Is the Hyksos-Exo­dus hypothosis actually supported by any prominent people other than Simcha Jacobovici -- who, of course, is prominent for things like not actually being an archaeolog­ist but pretending to be one on TV, and preferring the Jerusalem antiquitie­s market to legitimate archaeolog­ical digs, and denouncing archaeolog­ists en masse -- and vice versa, such as when he claimed that a bunch of archaeolog­ists and epigrapher­s supported his views on what he -- and very few scholars -- call the Jesus family tomb, prompting them to take the extraordin­ary step of signing an open letter saying that they all disagreed with him?

C: There is no evidence of a significan­t number of Israelites being held in bondage in Egypt. There is no evidence of any of the event described in Exodus. Therefore, we have no option but to reject any claim that it's a historical account and it can be safely assumed that it's fiction.

ME: That's a perfect example of a premature "therefore." We have other options. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and the entire Sinai peninsula actually hasn't been gone over with a fine-tooth­ed archaeolog­ical comb just yet. There's no reason to conclude that there never was an Exodus. It's simply premature. Let me underscore once again, in case it wasn't already obvious from my previous remarks, that I think that if there was an Exodus it would have been much smaller than 600,000 families, and also that it may have consisted of some of the ancestors of the Israelites at a time before there actually were Israelites­, and that if it did happen it probably constitute­d a minority of the Israelites -- or of their ancestors, as the case may be -- and that the majority probably were from the less powerful classes in Canaan.

D: Archaeolog­ists have been looking for evidence of the Exodus for decades, nigh on a hundred years. Nothing's been found. In fact the evidence for the early Israelites points to a local origin.

ME: I know. Mostly likely, many or most Israelites were originally lower-clas­s Canaanites or slaves of Canaanites who, when the Canaanite elite went into decline, took over the region which would eventually form the core of Israel. However, it seems possible to me that in addition to that indigenous core there was another group, maybe Canaanite, maybe not, which was part of the founding of Israel, who had been slaves in Egypt. That story came from somewhere.

D: Origin myths are tricky things. If you look at the "Historia Britonum" for example, it claims that the Brits were descended from Trojans (via Italy) fleeing the fall of that city. When you look at Irish myth in "The Book of Invasions" Greece, Spain, even Egypt etc get a mention. yet apart from Spain there seems no real link of the Irish to any of these places, and even that seems more a coincidenc­­e than a remembered truth. The point is that it need not necessaril­­y be true that an origin myth is a reflection of a one time literal truth, not only do stories change over time but real places can become metaphors for something and somewhere else and stories merge together to create something completely new with the actual historical truths "edited out" (or not) over time. It gets even more messy when differing oral versions are frozen into a written form by people with their own biases. Not saying it can't be true, just that after all that archaeolog­­y I'd have thought something would have turned up by now if it were. Unless Zawi's sitting on the evidence that is.

ME: A lot of people claim to be descended from the Trojans. Check out whether the stories of Trojan ancestry can be traced back farther in time than the people's first contact with the works of Homer or one of the myriad neo-Homeri­c authors. Of course Exodus need not necessaril­y be true. Who's saying that it definitely has an historical core? All I've been saying here is that I think it's premature to rule out any historical basis. The lack of archaeological attestation of the Exodus would indeed be suspicious if it consisted of 600,000 families wandering for 40 years. If 3,000 families crossed the desert in 3 months, and it FELT like 40 years because it was so uncomforta­ble, and several centuries of oral tradition inflated the numbers before the story took a fixed written form, then it's an entirely different matter, and it's unreasonab­le to assume that some archaeolog­ical trace of the crossing MUST have turned up by now. I'm not claiming that Exodus is as accurate in all its numbers and little details as, say, Robert A Caro.

I'm very skeptical -- to put mildly -- of British claims of descent from the Trojans, as you seem to be, and like me, you probably wouldn't put much stock in the legends which have some of the 12 Apostles journeying all the way the British Isles, which if true would make the British church about as old as that of Rome or Jerusalem. But let's look at some other myths, the Nibelungen­lied and the chanson de Roland. In the case of the former it's quite likely that several of the characters originated as actual leaders of Germanic tribespeop­le and Huns, and in the case of the latter there's no doubt at all that there was a Charlemagn­e. The historical interest of the chanson de Roland is greatly mitigated by the amount of historical accounts of Charlemagn­e written in and soon after his reign. Much less historical writing from late-Class­ical and Dark Age Europe has survived, and the historical interest of the Nibelungen­lied is correspond­ingly greater. Now imagine that, other than those two poems, there were NO known written accounts of Attila and Charlemagn­e, just as currently the Pentateuch is the only known account of Moses. How much sense would it make to just say "they're fictional" and dismiss them as having no historical worth?

Ancient Literary -- No, I Won't Call Them Forgeries. Plenty of Others Will -- Misattributions

Dr Bart Ehrman and some other Biblical scholars have caused a lot of agitation in the general public lately with the news -- news more to the general public than to specialists in New Testament studies -- that some passages in Paul's letters, and some entire letters, some of the shorter books in the New Testament, were not actually written by Paul.

Ehrman is extremely popular in some segments of the "militant" atheist population -- excuse me, but I have to stop the essay for a moment. This use of the word "militant" is really ridiculous. We do not brandish Kalashnikovs. We do not bomb buildings. We do not kidnaps heiresses. We post sharply-worded opinions in Internet social venues. No-one is in danger of physical harm -- and within that segment and the segment of the pious who do the Itchy & Scratchywith us, Ehrman has created quite a ruckus with this news that not all of what we've traditionally thought of as Paul's writings are by Paul. As often happens in these sorts of discussions -- Really. We're discussing things. "Militant." sheesh! -- I feel a bit off to the side, because what interests me in the immediate topic at hand is not the theological implications which are exciting most of the discutants, but the textual transmission.

And just this morning it occurred to me -- aside from the theological implications which, yes, no doubt, are immense. I just can't get excited about it. I find theology to be excruciatingly boring -- that Paul was hardly unique among prominent ancient authors in having spurious works attached to his name. On the contrary. Take Homer. The Homeric Question,that is, whether there really was a poet or singer named Homer who wrote or sang the Iliad and the Odyssey, and if so the details of his biography and the degree of similarity of his creation to the Iliad and Odyssey we know today, is still debated today, but even those, a dwindling minority for the moment, it seems, who are convinced that Homer existed and that he made both poems very much as we know them, tend to agree that he had nothing to do with the creation of the so-called Homeric Hymns, so-called because for a very long time people assumed that he had written them. Take the Appendix Vergiliana, so-called because they were erroneously taken for the juvenalia of Vergil. The poem Halieutica is now generally agreed not to have been written by Ovid, but it's still included in this volumeof Ovid's works, along with a few other bits and pieces, because they were associated with Ovid for so long that this is the natural place to put them. And because they're short. For similar reasons, a lot of fragments probably not of Hesiod's writings, and some surely not by him, are included in this collection of his actual works, while this collection of the works of Sallust include an oration supposedly by Sallust against Cicero which he probably never made, and Cicero's equally-ficticious replay, and short commentaries on Caesar's Alexandrian, African and Spanish Wars, commentaries traditionally attributed to Caesar but now nobody knows for sure who wrote them, are thrown in with this edition of Caesar's account of the Civil War.

And also some of Plato'sdialogues were not really written by Plato. And on and on. And these are not unusual cases. They're typical: if you were a famous ancient author in Latin or Greek, some stories not by you would get attached to your actual work, sometimes by someone deliberately perpetrating a fraud for nefarious or pecuniary purposes, sometimes by accident, sometimes deliberately but with no malicious intent, because some admirer of the famous author thought it would be a nice tribute to write something and sign the famous guy's name to it. Yes, some simpletons back then really wouldn't have seen the harm. Or maybe not even such simple guys, which may strain your credulity unless you realize that customs and attitudes change greatly over time, and that was a long time ago. And then typically a century or two or three ago some scholar would say Hey wait a minute and compare style and content and comments by contemporaries of the ancient authors and other considerations and prove, either that this or that piece is not really by who we thought it all was, or that we must now gravely doubt that it is. This is typical. In a way, if it hadn't also happened to Paul, it would've been embarrassing for him, it would've made him stick out like a sore thumb from all the other literary bigshots.

So that's the textual-critical skinny on that. I know, I know, the theological implications of Paul's not actually having written that short letter to Titus are -- yawn Oh, excuse me! -- are huge. We now return you to your regularly-scheduled, excruciately-boring theological uproar.

What Origins?

In the introductory essay, "Homer and his Influence," to the anthology A Companion to Homerpublished by Macmillan in 1962, J.A.K. Thomson remarks that Homer, while standing at the head and beginning of the Western tradition of literature of which we know, may in turn have been the culmination of a whole other literary tradition. This remark barely caught my attention the first time I read it, but later it sort of blew my mind.

An entire literature known to us only through Homer. How far into the past before Homer may this literature have stretched? For how long was it written if, before Homer, it was written at all? The experts say that it is clear that Homer is very close to oral storytelling. But that does not tell us how long, if at all, written and oral Greek literature may have existed side by side before Homer. And what does that mean, "before Homer" ? Was there ever an individual poet named Homer? If so, when did he live? Could he write? (Could he see?) Are the Illiadand Odysseyin any meaningful sense the work of an individual (Or two individuals?) or are they the result of a long communal process of storytelling?

As far as I know, the answer of leading scholarship to all of these questions and many related ones remains a resounding "We don't know." There are certainly strong opinions on all these questions, but not much certainty. The Iliad and Odyssey were probably in written form by the 6th century BC in Athens. Some scholars would argue that this was their first written form, others that they were written in Linear B several centuries earlier, and plenty of others for all sorts of dates for the first written version in between.

In some respects -- the dates postulated, the variety and vehemence of opinions about the dates, the cultural implications of the current state of knowledge and possible future discoveries -- the debate about the composition of the Homeric epics resembles that over the composition of the Bible. The Exodus, if it ever happened, is supposed to have occurred in roughly the same era as the Trojan War, it it ever happened. 1200-1400 BC in each case, give or take a few centuries. Traditionally it was believed that Moses wrote the first books of the Bible, now it's not all certain whether he existed, and if he did, if he or any other of his people were literate at all. Did the Greek alphabet originally come from the Hebrew? Or vice versa? Who knows? Not me. They appear to be rather closely related, and both to have come from hieroglyphs and cuneiform, which appeared in Egypt and Mesopotamia sometime before 3000 BC. "Appeared," that is: that's when the experts date the earliest known writing. Probably older in Mesopotamia, it probably spread to Egypt from there. Nobody knows for certain.

In any case, it seems clear that neither Homer nor the Old Testament can lay claim to being the oldest written literature of all, for the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgameshis preserved on clay tablets some of which date to the 3rd millenium BC, making it the oldest longer literary text. Of which we know. So far. Maybe Gilgamesh represents the culmination of a literature which stretches thousands of years further back into the past...

All I know is that older and older human artifacts are being discovered all the time. Artworks from more than 30,000 years ago. Stone weapons and tools made by humanoids millions of years ago. Long, mysterious, tantalizing gaps between the ages of the artifacts discovered so far. We're a long way from figuring out how we got to be the way we are.