few identifiable realities.
So the world of the Odyssey does not precisely reflect the Mycenaean period, in that Homer, coming at the end of 300 years without written records, knew little of this vanished way of life. Nor does the Odyssey reflect the world of the late eighth century B.C., when the epic was likely written down, since the poet introduced purposeful archaism and the poem accumulated undatable story elements during its years, decades, or even centuries of oral transmission. Rather, Homer creates a mythic past—perceptible as imaginary to us, but regarded as the authentic voice of tradition by its original audience—in order to translate the customs of his own time into a vision of universal values and eternal meaning. Homer evokes a sense of great but indefinite temporal distance in order to provide a metaphor for the idea of timelessness. Homer’s past is “always.”
Simply to attribute the poem’s intentions to Homer, though, hides another nest of complexities. While the poem circulated in oral form for some time, and at least certain elements of it reach back centuries, our Odyssey is and has long been a written text. Most scholars agree that it was first written down some time in the second half of the eighth century B.C., which makes it one of the earliest literary works to be committed to paper (or, more accurately, parchment) after the Greeks adapted the Phoenician alphabet to transcribe their own language. No manuscripts from that era survive, however; in fact, the oldest complete copies of the poem still in existence are little more than a thousand years old. These texts preserve a poem in absolutely finished form, varying only negligibly from each other; essentially, what one reads in any modern English edition of the poem, including this one, is a translation of those manuscripts. Many scholars believe the first truly authoritative text of the epic was established at the great library of Alexandria in the first few centuries A.D., giving those anonymous editors at least a small share in the identity of “Homer.” A similar editorial effort may have occurred at the behest of the Athenian ruler Peisistratus even earlier, during the sixth century B.C., but no physical evidence to confirm this supposition has survived; only a few sentences of ancient historians attest to the possibility.
On the most crucial question concerning the poem’s authorship, though, no one has any evidence of any kind: How did a poem that normally would have been orally improvised on the spot become a written manuscript in the first place? Tradition invariably identifies the author of the poem as a blind bard named Homer, but at precisely what point in the creative process might this figure enter? The poetry of the Odyssey shows clear roots in oral-formulaic composition, but it shows just as clearly that the poem is not simply the transcript of a particular oral performance or set of performances. No scribe squatted at the blind poet’s knee hurriedly copying the 12,110 lines of the poem as he chanted them. The poem uses far fewer formulaic lines and phrases than any oral composition possibly could. The simplest solution is to assume that a literate poet intimately familiar with the materials and techniques of oral-formulaic poetry composed the poem in written form to sound as if it were orally composed, in keeping with tradition; one might as well call this figure “Homer” as anything else. Many scholars, however, regard “Homer” as a purely oral poet, relegating the scribe who reworked his poem into written form to secondary status. In any case, neither these half-invented Homers nor any other imaginable author of the texts that have survived can receive full credit for the contents of the poem, since the extent of its coalescence prior to the first appearance of any written text cannot be determined. The Homer of modern scholarly imagination, the poet on the cusp between oral and written composition, would not have invented the Trojan War or created the character of Odysseus or concocted his confrontation with the Cyclops—perhaps not even crafted the smaller details of his hero’s victory. Rather, he would have inherited these incidents more or less fully imagined from his unknown predecessors. Just as the poem speaks from an indefinite time, it speaks with a composite voice.
Regarded as the authentic record of the earliest pan-Hellenic history and the repository of age-tested wisdom, the Homeric epics soon came to be regarded almost as sacred texts in the Greek city-states. Part of the appeal was political: Faced