The earliest known use of the Greek alphabet: the Nestor Cup or the Dipylon Inscription:
Both from the mid 8th c. BCE: around 750 years before the common era.


Now, try to imagine yourself back into a world without ANY writing. What is it like? What is missing? What is there that is not here today?

Oral Composition

In the 1920's, Milman Parry, a student of Meillet in Paris, analyzed the Homeric epics and concluded that they were the product of "oral formulaic" composition.

What does that mean?  that the language of the poems is from a time before writing, and that it uses repeated formulae to aid the memory of the bards who sang/composed it.

The idea is that the poems (perhaps many more than we have: perhaps in much shorter episodic form that could be expanded or contracted to suit the occasion) took shape in a time that lacked writing, a time when humans had only speech and memory and no writing.

It means that the poet had ready-made pieces to use to create lines of poetry on the spot: the pieces snapped into each line without much thought, because the poet had already trained his mind to know the pieces and how to use them.

To give you an idea of how that might have worked, let's consider the dactylic hexameter, the meter of Homer:
DUM dada DUM dada DUM dada DUM dada DUM dada DUM DUM
THIS is the FORest primEVal. The MURmuring PINES and the HEMlocks,
BEARded with MOSS, and in GARments GREEN, indistINCT in the TWIlight,
STAND like DRUids of ELD, with VOIces SAD and proPHETic,
STAND like HARpers HOAR, with BEARDS that REST on their BOsoms.

Of course, we are using stress to mark the DUMs but we know that Greek originally had tones, and we know that the length of the syllable marks their meter, but they also had stress: i.e. there's a lot of complexity here. But for our purposes, know that the basic meter, the rhythmic pattern, was the same pattern as is shown above.

There is a "Shave and a haircut" or a "Strawberry jampot" at the end of almost every line: DUM dada DUM DUM is the meter of "shave and a haircut" or "strawberry jampot."

The beginning changes a bit more than the end of the line: every one of the first 4 dada's can become a DUM, in Greek at least (Longfellow does other things in English), so you could get:
DUM DUM DUM DUM DUM DUM DUM DUM DUM dada DUM DUM or a version with a few fewer DUMS.

Parry noticed: that the dactylic hexameter seemed to have repetition in certain predictable ways: the epithets of the characters (that Achilles is "swift-footed Achilles," that Agamemnon is "Atreus' son, lord of men") fit certain places in the hexameter and are so often in that place when the character is mentioned that the best explanation is that that is how the poet can sustain such a long 'memorized' song.

Translations do not bring that out well, and probably should not: it makes for a much less dynamic poem: but in performance, sung with an instrument, that was probably not true.

He and his student Albert Lord then went to Yugoslavia to record and witness oral composition in action with live oral singers, which supported his hypothesis very well. A whole new area of inquiry opened up, called oral studies, or studies of orality.

For example, 'rosy-fingered dawn' is da da DUM da da DUM DUM: rhodoDAKtylos EOS:  ῥοδοδάκτυλος Ἠώς) in Greek, which is a short syllable followed by two dactyls. It fits perfectly into the Homeric dactylic hexameter, right at the end.

DUM dada DUM da da DUM da da DUM rhodoDAKtylos EOS

In fact, the poets had flexibility: of the 46 times that Ἠώς ends a line, 27 are rhodoDAKtylos EOS, but the poet had the freedom to improvise when he wanted.

What is most interesting is that there is often an economy in the system: for example, if you are going to kill someone in a line, there are several verbs which you could use in Greek conversation with your friend, but in epic, for each place in the dactylic hexameter, there is usually only one way to say it: only one of the verbs that mean "kill" will work in that position. One verb form has one shape, while the other verb's form has another shape, metrically. Thus you choose which verb to use based on what place in the line needs filling.
The same principle of economy applies to other things such as epithets, phrases of various sorts, adjectives, etc.

With later Greek hexameter poetry, the economy and formulaicness is gone: poets craft their poetry in writing and can take time to fit whatever they want in, which makes for more variety.

The idea is that with formulas and meter and enough practice, a poet could sort of go on auto-pilot for a good deal of the line, particularly the end of the line. He could innovate, but didn't need to. He could innovate at the beginning and then the rest could snap into place. Or he could prepare for an innovation at the end with stock formulae at the beginning.

It's like building a wall out of Lego: once you start with a 6 pin block, to reach the corner of the next layer of what you are building, you need a certain combination of pinned blocks: each block you choose restricts your choice for the next blocks: if you are good at building, that means you can concentrate on a few choices and just automagically fill in the other blocks.

Look at Iliad 2.24ff. and 2.55ff.: a repeated speech. There are many such repeated speeches.
Look at Iliad 2.43 a 'dressing scene': there are many very similar scenes where warriors put on armor: there are also banquet scenes, assembly of the god scenes, and many other type scenes that have a formulaic structure. They are individualized, and yet they have the same structure and order of elements.

These type scenes and repeated speeches are also part of orality: they make it easier/possible for the poet to perform.

The more we look into the language of the epics, the more clear it becomes that these poems have many different kinds of repetition and pattern that differ from the later literate literature and are most plausibly explained as arising from the bardic oral tradition.

But what does it mean for us as students reading in English: it makes it clear that "Homer" is not a singular genius writing an original text, rewriting it, and then finally publishing it.

It means that there is a vast system of artfully created metrical bits of language that are used to create each line on the spot for each performance: it's a learned skill that probably took years to master, but surely became second nature to a professional bard.

It means that a translation that makes this seem like "literature" might not be true to the repetitiveness, style, and performance of the Homeric way of saying things.

But a translator who slavishly reproduces the formulae somehow might sound stilted, goofy, repetitive, or just not "literary" to us. No translation can do justice to the original bardic versions, because we have different sensibilities, and the translator needs to suit us as well as the original.

"Homer," if there even was one particular human named "Homer," was one  of those bards, a member of a large group of bards who performed epic poetry, not an individual genius who produced a truly unique work.

There may have been one bard who was the best, or the most famous, or whose version of the rage of Achilles became all the rage, or somehow particularly influential (just in the write place when the alphabet became available?): if someone we would call "Homer" who was responsible for our Iliad and Odyssey did exist as an individual, one good hypothesis is that his version was the first to be written down. Perhaps writing it down even propelled him to fame and led him to innovate and expand, as Parry and Lord found it did with the living oral poets they worked with in Yugoslavia. Turns out that if you freeze a work in one form with writing, the next person wants to do something different, and the oral tradition is thereby capped. "The medium is the message" fits here.

But maybe no such individual existed, and later ages made him up because they simply didn't understand how oral poetry was created: they thought works of literature had individual authors, and so this great work of literature must have one too.

Here's how you should think of Homer: he is at best one particularly influential member of a large guild of oral poets who all sang songs about similar material with similar formulas.

It's like a folk song: Dylan sings it, but before him Guthrie sang it, and before Guthrie someone else sang it: they learn it one from the other, and they change it a bit. Belafonte learned from Sir Lancelot who learned from ... One version becomes the most famous and so most people think of it as a Dylan song or a Belafonte song. But is it?

Another way to think about it, perhaps a better one, is in terms of folktales: Homeric epics are like very long folktales that have been handed down over the ages in a culture with no writing. There are many versions, because the tales are spread out over a large geographic area and variation is inevitable, from person to person, but also from region to region. And it all changes slowly over time, even as the people performing it as well as their audience think it is always the same. At some point, one version comes to be the one most people think is the version, and so it actually becomes the version. Once writing comes along and records one version completely in a way that can be repeated exactly, the oral culture starts to decline. Writing drives out oral culture by replacing it. It leaves traces, but they require a philologist who can open her mind to a different mindset.

Nothing that relies on writing can happen in quite the same way in an oral culture. History is not frozen in documentation. Generally speaking, in oral cultures, many of our genres of writing and ways of thinking about the world don't work. And transporting yourself mentally into an "oral" culture involves a lot more than just thinking simply and quickly about what couldn't happen without writing: there are many consequences of writing. For instance, ownership, philosophy, banking, literature, and history cannot exist without writing.

Without writing, knowledge is confined to what someone remembers. Consider how plastic memory is as well as how vivid and accurate and real it seems.