Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics

Jonathan L. Ready is a professor of classical studies at Indiana University. He is the author of Character, Narrator, and Simile in the Iliad (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and The Homeric Simile in Comparative Perspectives: Oral Traditions from Saudi Arabia to Indonesia (Oxford University Press, 2018), as well as numerous articles on Homeric poetry. He is also the co-editor of Homer in Performance: Rhapsodes, Narrators, and Characters (University of Texas Press, 2018) with Christos C. Tsagalis and serves as the co-editor of the annual Yearbook of Ancient Greek Epic (Brill).

• 0: Introduction Part I: Oral Texts and Oral Intertextuality 1: Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics Introduction 1.1: Performance, Oral Texts, and Entextualization 1.2: Application to the Homeric Epics 1.2.1: The Preexistence of Tales and Songs and the Object-Like Status of Utterances in the Homeric Epics 1.2.2: Entextualization in the Character Text I 1.2.3: Entextualization in the Character Text II 1.2.4: The Poet and Entextualization 1.3: Homerists on Texts 2: Oral Intertextuality and Mediational Routines in the Homeric Epics Introduction 2.1: Oral Intertextuality and Mediational Routines 2.2: Mediational Routines in the Homeric Epics 2.2.1: The Source Text 2.2.2: The Target Text 2.3: Metapoetic Implications Part II: The Emergence of Written Texts 3: Textualization: Dictation and Written Versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey Introduction 3.1: The Dictation Model 3.2: A Comparative Approach 3.3: The Process of Recording by Hand 3.3.1: The Challenges of Manual Transcription 3.3.2: Steps to Work around These Challenges and Their Effects 3.3.3: The Rare Exceptions 3.3.4: Dictated Texts versus Sung Texts 3.3.5: What Was Written Down 3.3.5.1: The Collector as Gatekeeper 3.3.5.2: The Scribal Process 3.4: The Collector's Impact on the Oral Text 3.4.1: Unwitting Interference (or the Collector's Presence) 3.4.2: Purposeful Interference 3.5: Editing 3.5.1: Field Notes 3.5.2: Editorial Work in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries 3.5.3: Editorial Work from the Second Half of the Twentieth Century until Today 3.6: Best Practices 3.7: The Collector's Text versus the Performer's Oral Performance 3.8: The Formulations in Section 3.1 Reevaluated 3.9: The Evolutionary Model's Transcript Excursus: The Interventionist Textmaker and Herodotus's Histories Part III: Copying Written Texts 4: The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics Introduction 4.1: The Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics 4.2: The Nature of the Variation: Not Scribal Error 4.3: Accounting for This Variation 4.4: The Scribe as Performer 4.5: The Scribe as Performer and the Wild Homeric Papyri 4.5.1: The Wild Papyri and the Comparanda 4.5.2: When? 4.5.3: Who? 5: Scribal Performance in the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics Introduction 5.1: Juxtaposing the Wild Papyri and Helmut van Thiel's Text 5.2: Competence and Entextualization 5.2.1: Cohesion 5.2.2: Coherence 5.3: Competence and Completeness 5.3.1: Characters Do More Things 5.3.2: Nothing Is Assumed 5.4: Competence and "Affecting Power" 5.4.1: The Emotions 5.4.2: The Fulfillment of Expectations and the Groove 5.5: Tradition, Traditionalization, and the Intertextual Gap 5.6: The Bookroll 5.7: The Performing Scribe 5.8: Scribal Performance and the Alternatives 6: Conclusion Endmatter Works Cited Index

Through readings of Homeric passages, examination of variant readings of "wild" papyri, and, above all, wide-ranging comparative evidence, Ready expands our understanding of "text" and retrieves versions of textuality that take place within oral performance.