Quoting the Iliad

Let me start by saying that I can take no credit for finding someone to interview.  After my best efforts, I had found a few people who qualified as people I could interview, but for various reasons, I was unable to set any kind of appointment with them.  Wednesday morning, discouraged, I asked in my morning prayer for help finding someone to interview.  My first class that morning was Book of Mormon with Doctor Seely, and during our class, that discussion ended up (somehow) on oral functions in the Book of Mormon, and Brother Seely actually recited the introduction to the Iliad in Greek.  Talk about answers to prayers, right?

(This is a reconstruction; Minoan palaces don't look like this anymore.)

So, I’m not exactly sure what the best way to convey this interview is.  I liked Alex Burton's idea of transcribing the whole interview, but I'm afraid I don't have the notes I would need to reproduce our discussion.  Instead, I am going to expand a little bit on the discussion that we had, drawing from a few of the sources that he and I discussed to add a few facts and details that I found pertinent.  So, this is a mixed commentary and transcription, and I will try to distinguish between the two as best I can.

We started our discussion talking about the Minoans and the surviving texts we have.  “The problem with the Minoans,” he explained, “is that we can’t read their writing.  ‘Linear A’ (their primary written language) remains undeciphered, and we aren’t even sure to which language family it ought to belong.” No texts of any length have been discovered; the best we have are lists that we think are inventories or lists of orders of some commodities, which date towards the end of the Minoan era.  Without texts, we know very little directly about their oral culture.

Having said that, it is possible to go at the subject from a sort of side-angle.  Euripides and, especially, Homer were largely influenced by oral traditions; whatever knowledge they had and used to write the Iliad, Bacchae, etc. came from oral traditions.  “They didn’t have history books about the Minoans, they got it all from oral traditions; it’s just how things were remembered and passed down back then.” Professor Seely said.  Although neither one of them wrote in detail about the Minoan culture (they were telling stories, after all), “They did mention things that sort of lead us to believe that they knew of the same oral traditions (as the Minoans).”    

So, we have archaeology finds, and here’s what’s interesting, and also why we tend to take these Greeks seriously: the archaeology matches the stories they told.  Homer especially dwells on the armors of several different nations in his Iliad, and his description of Minoan armor is unique and almost perfect, judging from the archaeological record. 

But, even then, these things can only be trusted so far.  In actuality, while his armor is very correct, his temporality is off; the armors he describes for the different nations come from completely different time periods, separated by centuries.  In the end, we have to remember that both the people who kept the stories alive orally and those who would later write them down were much more interested in drama and story-telling than in relating historical fact, and so it is with caution that scholars and archaeologists take hints and cues from the ancient Greek ‘histories’. 

From there, our discussion turned towards orality itself.  Doctor Seely explained to me briefly the work of Milman Parry and Albert Lord, and the oral-formulaic composition theory, and I subsequently looked into it a little more in depth.  Milman and Lord travelled to Yugoslavia in the 1930s and found places where the literacy was the poorest, and, as they put it, the orality was ‘purest’.  There, they studied people who had literally memorized epic poems and songs from their culture that were the length of the Iliad.  They noticed something remarkable that has changed our understanding of many oral cultures, which they formalized in the theory of oral-formulaic composition. 

I know, those sound like big words, but they actually describe something we discussed in class.  Essentially, Parry and Lord discovered that in these feats of oral knowledge, there were very set patterns, almost like a formula was being followed while reciting the poem.  As Professor Burton mentioned, ‘rosy-fingered dawn’ or ‘swift-footed Achilles’, from the Iliad, are repeated frequently throughout the story, and they fit into the meter of the piece.  These formulas, sort of like the mnemonics we often employ today, helped them memorize the sequence of events, but unlike mnemonics, they still allowed enough flexibility that a part of the story could be embellished by a bard who was getting a particularly good reaction from his audience.  Indeed, by following these formulas, the orator had significant liberty to improvise. 

We concluded our discussion there.  It was very interesting and enlightening, it’s very interesting to see how much has been inferred, and how much there is still to learn about a culture that seems to have been rather important in their time.

Thanks again to Doctor Seely for all of his help and for the great conversation.  It was interesting, as always!