It is now generally agreed that, in broad terms, Parry and Lord were right. Many features of the Homeric poems are indeed formulaic (such as those standard “epithets” and those formulaic “type-scenes” of arming or eating), and must have originated from an oral tradition. But there is still a very wide range of opinion about how, exactly, the words of many generations of illiterate and semiliterate bards turned into the written texts of Homer that we have. Several essential factors need to be accounted for by any viable theory. Most obviously, the Homeric poems are written texts, not oral performances. Writing must have played a central part in the process of composition, so it is very misleading to describe The Odyssey simply as an “oral” poem, as is far too often done. It is a written text based on an oral tradition, which is not at all the same as being an actual oral composition. Moreover, these texts are far too long for any singer to perform them on a single occasion, and far too long for any individual to hold in memory without the use of writing. Songs that had an influence on the Homeric poems were sung for hundreds of years in preliterate Greece; but none of them was The Odyssey.
These are written texts that display the legacy of a long oral tradition. In important ways the poems are a patchwork. The language is a mishmash of several different dialects, which marks the fact that the Greek singers and storytellers lived and developed their legends in multiple different locations across the Greek-speaking world. Moreover, there are small inconsistencies in the narrative itself, which usually pass unnoticed by the casual reader (such as a slight confusion about how many cloaks Eumaeus possesses, and an apparent switch in who sets up the axes for the contest in which the suitors and Odysseus compete for Penelope’s hand). The inconsistencies could mark the text’s emergence from multiple different earlier versions of the story of Odysseus, or they might suggest multiple stages of composition and revision, by one poet or by many. Yet despite their mixed language, and despite the few inconsistencies, both The Iliad and The Odyssey display striking structural coherence. There is a grand architecture to the storytelling, which might seem to imply the careful planning of a single architect, or architects.
It is possible, as Albert Lord argued, that an oral poet worked closely with a literate scribe or scribes over the course of many days, weeks, or months. On this model, the composition of The Odyssey may have been not so different from that of Paradise Lost, composed by a blind poet who dictated his work over a long period to a number of amanuenses. Lord and Parry thought that the composer of the poem could not have been literate, because in the Yugoslavian context, singers who acquired literacy tended to lose their ability to compose oral poetry. But it has now been shown that oral traditions, or “orature,” can interact with literacy in a number of different ways, and they are not necessarily driven out as soon as literacy arrives; in Somalia, for example, oral poets have been able to continue their oral compositions even after acquiring literacy. Oral literature is more diverse than Parry, with a single point of cultural comparison, could discern.
Some scholars argue that The Odyssey was composed by a single person who was well acquainted with the oral tradition but had become literate. This is certainly possible, but there is really no evidence one way or the other. Alternatively, perhaps the poem was composed when one particularly talented illiterate or semiliterate poet (or several) teamed up with a scribe or a group of scribes. Perhaps the scribe or scribes were entirely passive in the process of writing down what the poet composed; or perhaps there was an ongoing collaboration between two or more members of a group. Again, it is difficult to adjudicate between these various possibilities, in the absence of any solid evidence, or a time machine.
The same person could, in theory, have composed The Iliad and The Odyssey, though many scholars believe that different individuals wrote the two poems, because they are notably different in terms of language as well as narrative content. It certainly seems likely that the person or people who composed The Odyssey were aware of The Iliad, since The Odyssey supplements but does not repeat any incidents from The Iliad—which is unlikely to have happened by chance.
Scholars who claim that The Odyssey was composed by a single person acknowledge that this poet drew on a long and complex set of earlier poetic and folkloric traditions, and that the initial composition underwent considerable alteration in subsequent years, decades, and centuries. Homer—whoever he, she, or they may have been—composed this definitive version of the homecoming of Odysseus with a deep awareness of multiple different versions of the story, as well as a deep knowledge of multiple other parallel folk traditions and myths. For instance, there were probably versions of the story in which Penelope was aware of Odysseus’ plans to slaughter the suitors at a much earlier stage, and thus proposed the Contest of the Bow in full knowledge that it would help further her husband’s plot. The Odyssey is also influenced by other related archaic legends, originating both around the Mediterranean and the Near East; for instance, the ancient myth of Jason and the Argonauts seems to hover behind the story of Odysseus and his wanderings.
Maybe an individual genius, a “Homer,” had a particularly important role in the creation of The Odyssey. But we should question the notion that a unified structure and coherent creative product must necessarily be seen as the result of an individual’s work. Scholars have tended to assume so, because many long-form narrative genres that we are familiar with, like novels, are produced that way. However, we are also familiar with long narratives that do not have single authors. Many movies, for example, are the product of a team. Most contemporary long-form television drama series are put together by multiple people, even if there is a single creator who came up with the show’s initial premise. It may be helpful to think in these terms when considering the authorship of The Odyssey. Perhaps we are more prepared than readers of the past to approach The Odyssey as a poem that exists as a mostly unified whole, but which was created by multiple different people, over a long period of time.
When Was The Odyssey Composed?
The date of the poem, no less than its authorship, is a matter of serious disagreement. In the middle of the eighth century BCE, the inhabitants of Greece began to adopt a modified version of the Phoenician alphabet to write down their language. The Homeric poems may have been one of the earliest products of this new literacy. If so, they would have been composed some time in the late eighth century. But some scholars have suggested a significantly later date, in the early, middle, or late seventh century BCE; others, less plausibly, have suggested even later dates of composition. The near consensus is that, at some point between the late eighth and late seventh century, a hundred-year-long window, The Odyssey was composed.
It is frustratingly difficult to be any more precise. Arguments about dating the Homeric poems usually involve an appeal to material evidence. Objects can often be dated with some precision, especially since the advent of carbon dating and other technological advances in archaeology. People use different artifacts as time goes by, or behave differently in ways that leave a material record: for instance, we know that people in the Mediterranean world switched from using bronze weapons to using, primarily, iron, once new metallurgical techniques developed. Ceramics survive well over thousands of years and are useful for tracking cultural change, since pottery fashions often change fairly rapidly. But it is extremely difficult to use any such evidence to date The Odyssey. For example, inscribed on a clay drinking cup that was found on the Italian island of Ischia there is the fragment “Nestor’s cup, good to drink from.” Some scholars, citing an extensive description of King Nestor’s magnificent golden cup in The Iliad, have claimed that this inscription must be an allusion to the poem. It is nice to imagine that the words are a kind of joke: this simple, ordinary piece of crockery is identifying itself as a magnificent, heroic item. The cup can be dated to 750–700 BCE, so if this really is an allusion, The Iliad cannot be later than that date. But it is also quite possible that there were other poems and traditions about Nestor; the cup does not actually quote The Iliad, so it is not conclusive evidence that its maker knew the Homeric poem as such, rather than a set of associated Trojan legends—which we know also circulated in non-Homeric versions throughout the archaic period.