Have We Homer’s Iliad?

The great historian of Greek literature, Albin Lesky, singles out as the Homeric Question of our time, the relation of the orally composed song to our texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey. ¹ Since the original assertion of Milman Parry, in the early 1930s, that modern improvised narrative poetry (such as that of Yugoslavia) is in fundamental respects similar to Homer, almost every Homeric scholar has discussed the validity of the analogy, and taken up a position in regard to it. The names of Sir Maurice Bowra, T. B. L. Webster, Cedric H. Whitman, Denys Page, A. B. Lord, and G. S. Kirk come immediately to mind. The last-named scholar in particular has directly confronted the question, first in two articles, “Homer and Modern Oral Poetry: Some Confusions” (CQ,, NS 10 (1960), 271–81) and “Dark Age and Oral Poet” (Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, NS 7 (1961), 34–48) and then in his comprehensive book on Homer, The Songs of Homer (Cambridge 1962), esp. pp. 55–101.