I have two points to make about the chapter title, and these points will help situate my overall argumentation here.

Introduction

The text of the so-called Cyrus Cylinder, as well as other writings that stem from the Persian Empire founded by Cyrus the Great, is based on the idea of an archetype. When I say archetype here, I have in mind a text that is meant as a model for other texts that serve as copies of this model. As we will see, the idea of such a model text does not necessarily match the reality of an original text that is copied.

What I just said seems at first to be self-evident, since the act of copying something does not require the copying of an original. What you are copying may already be a copy. But the very idea of an archetype is not self-evident. As I will argue, this idea goes beyond the reality of some text that someone copies for the first time in order to make another text, which can then be copied again to make still another text, and so on.

When I say idea here, I will try to keep in mind the Theory of Forms as expounded in Plato's Republic and elsewhere, since the original Greek word idea is the primary term used by Plato's Socrates for what we translate as Form. In terms of this theory, what is for us the real world is a mere copy of the ideal world of Forms, and, further, whatever we find in our world that we want to represent by way of picturing it in images or in words is a mere copy of a copy. So, if we applied Plato's Theory of Forms to the idea of an archetype, we would be speaking of an ideal text existing in an ideal world. And, in terms of my argument, the text of the Cyrus Cylinder was once upon a time considered to be such an ideal text, such an archetype. Or, to say it from an anthropological point of view, the text of the Cyrus Cylinder was considered to be an archetype because it was meant to be a cosmic model that was absolutised by its ritualised meaning, lending its ritual authority to all copies made and used by the enforcers of the Persian Empire in a wide variety of situations.

Introduction

The three parts of the title are interconnected topics.

The first part, referring to oral traditions, is all-important, since oral poetry shaped not only the Epic Cycle but also the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey. The formulation I have just offered is supported by the main line of argumentation I offer here. As we will see, I argue that the oral poetic traditions of the Cycle cannot be divorced from corresponding traditions that we find in the Iliad and Odyssey.

As for the second part of the title, referring to written texts, I must note from the start: there exists no proof for saying that the technology of alphabetic writing was needed for either the composition or the performance of the Homeric poems. Further, in the case of the Cycle, the textual evidence is simply too meager in comparison with the corresponding evidence of the Iliad and Odyssey; so, again, there exists no proof for saying that the composition of epics in the Cycle was somehow dependent on the technology of writing. Quite the contrary, it can be shown that these epics, like the Iliad and Odyssey, did in fact originate from oral traditions.

And now we come to the third part of the title, referring to questions of authorship. As we will see, such questions cannot be addressed in terms of written texts until we address them in terms of oral traditions. That is because, as I will argue, the attribution of authorship to obscure figures such as Arctinus of Miletus and Lesches of Mytilene or to even more obscure figures such as Thestorides of Phocaea can be understood only in terms of oral traditions. And such attributions of authorship, as I will also argue, depended on the idea that Homer was the author of only the Iliad and the Odyssey. That idea, which took final shape only at a relatively later stage in the history of ancient Greek epic traditions, brings us back full circle to what I have already announced as the main line of my argumentation: that the oral poetic traditions of the Epic Cycle cannot be divorced from corresponding traditions that we find in the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey.

In the history of Greek literature, poets of “lyric” are conventionally associated with the archaic period. Some would go so far as to call this period a “lyric age,” to be contrasted with an earlier age represented by Homer and Hesiod, poets of “epic.” There is in fact a book about the archaic period bearing the title The Lyric Age of Greece (Burn 1960). The archaic period ended around the second half of the fifth century BCE, to be followed by the so-called classical period. The archaic period is thought to have ended with the lyric poet Pindar, while the classical period is thought to have begun with the tragic poet Aeschylus, even though these two literary figures were roughly contemporaneous.

There is a lack of precision in the general use of the term lyric. It is commonly associated with a variety of assumptions regarding the historical emergence of a “subjective I,” as represented by the individual poet of lyric, who is to be contrasted with the generic poet of epic, imagined as earlier and thus somehow less advanced. By extension, the subjective I is thought to be symptomatic of emerging notions of authorship. Such assumptions, it is argued here, cannot be sustained.

Lyric did not start in the archaic period. It is just as old as epic, which clearly pre-dates the archaic period. And the traditions of lyric, like those of epic, were rooted in oral poetry, which is a matter of performance as well as composition (Lord 1995: 22-68, “Oral Traditional Lyric Poetry”).

In the classical period of Greek literature, Homer was the primary representative of what we know as epic. The figure of Homer as a poet of epic was considered to be far older than the oldest known poets of lyric, who stemmed from the archaic period. It was thought that Homer, acknowledged as the poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey, stemmed from an earlier age. Herodotus (second half of the fifth century BCE) says outright that Homer and Hesiod were the first poets of the Greeks (2.53.1-3). It does not follow, however, that the myths conveyed by the poetry of Homer and Hesiod are consistently older than the myths conveyed by the poetry of lyric. In fact, the traditions of Greek lyric are in many ways older than the traditions of Greek epic, and the myths conveyed by epic are in many ways newer than the myths conveyed by lyric.

As we saw in the previous chapter, the traditions of Greek lyric were rooted in oral poetry. If, then, Homer as a poet of epic was thought to have lived in an even earlier era than the era of the earliest known poets of lyric, it follows that the traditions of epic as represented by Homer were likewise rooted in oral poetry.

The oral traditional basis of Homeric poetry can be demonstrated by way of comparative as well as internal analysis. The decisive impetus for comparative research comes from the evidence of living oral traditions. The two most prominent names in the history of this research are Milman Parry (collected papers published posthumously in Parry 1971) and Albert Lord (definitive books published in 1960, 1991, 1995).

Histories of criticism in early Greece are usually based on surveys of those relatively few passages where the Greek poets speak about themselves and their poetry. Although this chapter will comment on many of these passages, the publication of a new history offers an opportunity to go beyond this fragmentary evidence by considering it in the wider framework of the society or societies for which this poetry existed. In what follows, the primary evidence is not restricted to whatever the poets say about themselves and their world: rather, it embraces the context in which they say what they say. The task will be to describe the social function of early Greek poetry and to present a picture of the traditional thought-patterns that shape the very concept of poet and poetry. It is through these thought-patterns that early Greek poetry defines itself and the poet as well, making it ultimately possible for critics of later times to talk about poetry.

The very notion of ‘critics’ and ‘criticism’ can best be seen in the post-Classical context of a great period of scholarship, in Hellenistic Alexandria. The Alexandrian concept of krisis, in the sense of ‘separating’, ‘discriminating’, ‘judging’ those works and those authors that are to be preserved and those that are not, is crucial to the concept of ‘canon’ in the Classical world. Literally, kanōn means ‘rod’, ‘straight-edge rule’, then by synecdoche a ‘standard’, ‘model’. The Alexandrian scholars who were in charge of this process of separation, discrimination, judgement, were the kritikoi, while the Classical authors who were ‘judged worthy of inclusion’ within the canon were called the enkrithentes, a term that corresponds to the Roman concept of the classici, who are authors of the ‘first class’, primae classis.